Mastering the Hype Cycle: How to Choose the Right Innovation at the Right Time

Ten

Evangelize and Transfer: Making It Happen

When it comes to innovation, a company’s legacy beliefs are a much bigger liability than its legacy costs.

—Gary Hamel¹

IN THE EARLY 1990s, executives at CEMEX, a cement company headquartered in Monterrey, Mexico, started receiving puzzling phone calls from their CEO. “Have you looked at your email?” he asked.² Unable to ignore the prompt from their boss, they took a look at this new way of communicating. Initial reactions from the executives were mixed: some asked him why he was wasting his time typing in messages when he had a secretary to do it for him.³

The e-mailing CEO, Lorenzo Zambrano, was spearheading the early stages of what would become known as “the CEMEX Way,” a set of pioneering ...