Ninja Innovation: The Ten Killer Strategies of the World's Most Successful Businesses

Innovate or die

For thirty years, Gary Shapiro has observed the world's most innovative businesses from his front-row seat as leader of the Consumer Electronics Association. Now he reveals the ten secrets of "ninja innovators" like Apple, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and many others.

What does it take to succeed? Discipline. Mission-oriented strategy. Adaptability. Decisiveness. And a will for victory. In short, today's most successful businesses are "ninja innovators." Drawn from Gary Shapiro's three decades of experience leading the consumer electronics industry, Ninja Innovation takes readers behind the scenes of today's top enterprises, uncovering their ten essential strategies for success.

As head of the Consumer Electronics Association and its influential annual trade show, the International CES, Shapiro has worked with the most innovative companies in history—Intel, IBM, and Samsung, to name a few—focusing on creating policies and events that produce revolutionary products year after year. He has learned the key strategies that have guided these businesses to record-breaking profits, as well as the traps that have led so many others to crushing failure.

In order to stay in front of the pace of innovation, Shapiro observes, top companies must operate as an elite strike force—just like the legendary medieval warriors known as ninjas. Ninjas weren't called upon to do the ordinary; they had to perform truly extraordinary tasks, while risking everything. As a highly trained martial-arts black belt himself, Shapiro mines the valuable insights of these centuries-old warriors to spotlight the secrets of agility, creativity, decisiveness, and reinvention that are essential for twenty-first-century leaders seeking breakthrough success.

Taking readers inside the most cutting-edge businesses, Ninja Innovation is the ultimate guide to achieving victory in today's innovate-or-die economy.

“Gary Shapiro’s ‘ninja’ approach to business success is exactly what the American spirit is all about-impatient, bold, and agile. It’s what propels the most innovative companies, keeping us around for the long haul, as we continue to transform and make meaningful progress in the world.” (URSULA BURNS, Chairman and CEO of Xerox Corporation)

“Ninja Innovation is a must read for anyone who wants to understand the secrets to successful entrepreneurship in a world of rapid innovation. Pandora is popular because we are agile, and have always remained intensely focused on what’s best for listeners, and artists.” (TIM WESTERGREN, Co-Founder of Pandora radio)

“With Ninja Innovation, Gary Shapiro has boiled down the mystery of business success to its foundational precepts: Risk, passion, failure, and, above all, innovation. Having spent 30 years at the Consumer Electronics Association, Gary knows what it takes to create a successful business and change the world.” (NOEL LEE, Founder and CEO, Monster Cable Products, Inc.)

“Top-notch. … Shapiro argues that companies should demonstrate the same agility, laser-like focus, and strength as ninjas.” (Publishers Weekly)

Gary Shapiro is president and CEO of the Consumer Technology Association (CTA)™ the U.S. trade association representing more than 2,200 consumer technology companies and which owns and produces CES^®  – The Global Stage for Innovation. As head of CTA for more than three decades, he has effectively ushered the consumer technology industry through major periods of technological upheaval and transformation.

Shapiro is the New York Times best-selling author of Ninja Innovation: The Ten Killer Strategies of the World’s Most Successful Businesses (Harper Collins, 2013) and The Comeback: How Innovation will Restore the American Dream (Beaufort, 2011). Through these books and through television appearances, and as a columnist whose more than 1,000 opinion pieces have appeared in publications such as The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and The Washington Post, Shapiro has helped direct policymakers and business leaders on the importance of innovation in the U.S. economy.