Feb 13, 2011 | Collaboration, Leadership
These terms are often used as synonyms, as managers seek to evolve a culture of inclusion and shared responsibility, but they are markedly different.
Collaboration is essential, and now so much easier given digital the tools to hand, and increased understanding of what motivates and engages individuals, but does not necessarily lead to consensus. Successful enterprises are rarely democracies, but they are very good at nurturing diversity, and hearing all points of view before making decisions, then gaining support for action, even from dissenters, by ensuring “due process” has been followed, which requires an understanding of the purpose of the collaboration, and a buy in to the outcomes.
Feb 10, 2011 | Innovation, Leadership
Real, lasting learning comes when you get stuff wrong, then seek to understand why you got it wrong. The obvious paradox is that by doing nothing new, or different, by staying inside the accepted practice, you get nothing wrong, and often receive accolades as a result. However, by working at the edge, of the process, or your own capabilities, and getting things wrong, you learn, often whilst suffering the bruises from others because you “stuffed up”.
As George Bernard Shaw said “all great things start as blasphemies”, so to learn, go out and blaspheme!
Feb 9, 2011 | Innovation, Leadership
The verb “to Google” took only a few years to emerge as Google changed the world around us.
Peter Norvig was Google’s research director from its early days, playing a key role in building the phenomenon that is Google.
His basic thesis is that you must be prepared to experiment extensively, and be wrong often, indeed, celebrate being wrong, as that is the way to learn.
However, mistake tolerance can be a two edged sword if the same mistakes keep getting made, and no-one pays the piper. An acceptance of repeated similar mistakes, clearly where no learning has taken place is hugely counter-productive, but not far removed from the desired culture of mistake tolerance so valued by successful innovators like Google.
Feb 8, 2011 | Change, Innovation, Management, Strategy
When one of the giants of industry, in this case, General Electric, takes a position on a topic, and supports that position not just with money and commitment, but sets out to persuade anyone who will listen to adjust their own perspective for everyone’s good, we should all listen.
GE undertook a business transformation driven by the 6 sigma developments of Motorola, and made 6 sigma the management fad of the 90’s, and more recently has embraced an enterprise wide search for “eco-friendly” products and services, termed “ecomagination” which has spawned new business that turned over $US 5 Billion in 2010. They have now turned their attention to the innovation process, publicly embracing an open model across their business units, and have just published a credible survey they have termed the “Innovation Barometer” , which sets out to interpret the views of 1000 very senior executives across 12 countries about the way they see the innovation process evolving. There are some standout conclusions.
- Successful innovation will come from a whole of society benefit, not just a bottom line benefit for the innovator.
- The role of SME’s will increase substantially
- So called “green” innovation will play a pivotal role
- Collaboration across enterprise, geographic, scientific and cultural barriers will become pre-eminent.
Our Prime Minister prattled on last week picking up some of these themes, but failed in my view to provide what every innovation thinker knows is fundamental to success, an objective, (perhaps a BHAG) best exampled by JFK’s 1961 national BHAG of reaching the moon by 1969, providing a driving vision of the end point.
Feb 8, 2011 | Change, Collaboration, Lean, Operations
Typically, we see things in an “either/or” context, you can do one thing at the expense of another, take your choice!. You can have line efficiency, or line flexibility, not both, advertising reach or frequency against a narrow target, but not both in the advertising budget, covering inventory requirements of A, or B by the end of the week , but not both. Happens very day.
This trade-off is programmed into us, but has the unintended consequence of “allowing” shallow problem analysis, facilitating our “jump” to a conclusion, rather than going through the hard work of real problem articulation, consideration of many possible solution options, and the testing and recalibration of hypotheses that should occur and re-iterate to identify where more data is needed, more ambiguity dissolved, and more responsibility taken.
When was the last time you acted too soon, and laid all your bets on a single obvious solution being the right one, only to find the siren song of “easy and obvious” led you astray?
I first came across this phenomena in the late 80’s (to my younger readers, some of us were working then) when my then employer was running “Ski” yoghurt down a new form/fill/seal machine designed for long runs to meet the demand in France, where the machinery was made. Run raspberry yoghurt for a few days, and it worked wonderfully, great in France, but for us it would have been a years stock, so we had to change flavors after little more than what would have been a changeover run in France, in many cases, less than an hour, with the attendant changeover times and start-up/finish-run inefficiencies, which the French engineers assured us were “absolutement” unavoidable.
Over a period of time, in a structured and progressive way, our fitters and operators who ran this piece of French engineering revenge on the rest of the world, using what would now be described as a PDCA continuous improvement cycle, made that machine do what its makers said was impossible, and we got both efficiency and flexibility out of it.
Either/or was not good enough, progressively, with many small steps, a great deal of experimentation, and recognition that the operators often had a better view of the intricacies than an engineer working off a plan, it evolved it into a “both/and” machine.
As a result, we made pots of money, because we had very low inventory levels, almost 100% order fulfillment , and an increasing market share because our customer service to big retailers was better than our opposition, and the consumers loved the product. Truly a lean virtuous circle!
