Innovation and Product Architecture

It is interesting to me that in all of this talk of innovation there is not a lot of mention of product architecture.

I like Clayton Christensen’s definition from his book “The Innovator’s Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth”

A product’s architecture determines its constituent components and subsystems and defines how they must interact – fit and work together – in order to achieve the targeted functionality.

The reason that product architectures are so important to the world of innovation is that they are responsible for some of the greatest innovations the world has ever send. For example, Dell’s business model innovation was possible because a computer’s product architecture became modular.

The kicker is that the right product architecture depends on the basis of competition of the industry that you are in.

Neat Idea

What Chad Boehly is doing is innovation. His lightweight sprinter's snowshow is his solution to a problem he encountered while snowshow racing. Every organization needs to act like Chad: see a problem, think of a solution, and try it. Everything else that gets in the way of this plan-do-check-act cycle is waste.

Here is an excerpt (2/19/06 by Gary Fallesen) from my local paper The Democrat and Chronicle about Chad and a link to his website.

"I fabricated my own," he says about his snowshoes. "I set out to make snowshoes that would be faster than run-of-the-mill Tubbs or Atlas."

He watched snowshoe sprinters kicking themselves with the duck-tail point on the back of their shoes. He decided that running snowshoes are really designed for distance events, not sprints.

"Nothing's really made for sprinting," says Boehly, who enlisted his tool-and-die-maker father and went to work on an innovative design. "We took two pieces of (flat) aluminum and fitted it with crampons. We were trying to figure out how to build a better mousetrap."

Boehly's shoes come with the sneakers bolted to the decks.

"They weigh almost nothing," he says about the two-pound shoes, which needed to be approved by the U.S. Snowshoe Association. "It was a lot of fun trying to design something and make it better than the big boys."

Boehly, who owns his own recruiting company, will put his odd-looking snowshoes to the test at the Winter Games. But he says he already has heard from Greg Hexum, a Minnesotan who is on the Atlas team and recently was the top American finisher in the European snowshoe championships.

"I didn't expect my snowshoes to get any interest," he says, though he has posted them on the Internet at www.mondaysolutions.com

Image courtesy of mondaysolutions.com

Three Questions

I remember having a discussion once where I was emphatically arguing that cell phone cameras would really chew into disposable camera sales.

The response was, “Who wants a camera in a phone? Remember when watches came out with the calculators in them? Who wanted that?”

This raises an interesting question. When does grouping product functionalities (camera phone) make sense and when does it not (watch calculators)?

The answer depends on what problem is being solved. Camera phones solved a convenience problem for people that already had a cell phone with them. Now they could take a picture anytime anywhere without having to remember to bring the camera. With the calculator watches people were able to do math anytime, anywhere. As we now know, the anytime anywhere picture market is bigger than the anytime anywhere math market. The take away here is that commercial success is in part a function of the problem being solved and the number of people who have that problem.

Earlier I had written that there are three crucial questions that a company needs to answer: What products do we make? Who do we sell them to? And, how do we create them? I was wrong.

The three questions that companies have to answer are: What problems do we solve? Who has these problems? How do we deliver the solution? In determining strategy the focus has to be on the customer, not the company.

Neat Idea

Used to be that a grocer made money selling food. I saw something the other day that makes me wonder if that’s changing.

My wife received a package the other day co-branded with a Crest Toothpaste logo and a Wegmans logo, our local supermarket. Obviously our data, which the grocer dutifully collects every time we use our Shopper’s Club card, identified us as likely users of Crest’s new brand of toothpaste.

The package went out of the way to tell us that Wegmans does not sell personal information. What it seems that they do sell is a list of users likely to buy something based on past purchasing performance.

This is genius. It is often said that half the marketing budget is wasted, the problem being that no one knew which half. Selling to a pre-screened client list changes all this. Now you can find people more likely to buy your product and talk with them. At the same time you can go back to the grocer and determine the efficacy of your promotion.

It will be interesting to see where else this will go

Neat Idea

Here’s a neat idea from the folks at Garmin.

With the GPS / Heart Rate Monitor not only can you track the intensity of your workout, but you are able to tell distance, speed, elevation, and how to get home.

On another note: with “directions” being incorporated into everything, how long before the excuse “Sorry I’m late, I got lost” becomes as passé as “the dog ate my homework?”

Basketball Coach John Wooden on Project Management

I’m reading John Wooden’s book, “Wooden on Leadership” and I didn’t realize how successful a basketball coach he was. He won ten national championships, ran a string of 88 consecutive victories, had four perfect seasons, and the only year he had a losing season was the first one of his 41-year career.

What was even more surprising to me was the following:

In all my years of coaching I rarely, if ever, even uttered the word win, talked about “beating” an opponent, or exhorted a team to be number one…Instead my words and actions always reflected Joshua Hugh Wooden’s [his father] early advice – “Never cease trying to be the best that you can become.

If there is a secret alchemy to success I think that adopting this position is a big part of it. I’m convinced that this is one of the main reasons for Toyota’s success. They never stop trying to improve each part of the system.

Kouzes and Posner, authors of “The Leadership Challenge”, have shown through research that workers want the following four qualities from their leadership: Honesty, Forward Thinking, Competence, and Inspiration. I believe that eliciting and enabling a commitment of personal excellence from each team member is one of the significant components of Inspiration. It’s much easier to be great if your team wants to be rather than to try and force them to be great if they don’t want to be.

This of course is easier said than done, and to add a degree of difficultly the answers are always situational; dependent on the individuals involved, and the status of the business. As a project manager you need to experiment with different techniques to find out what seems to work and what doesn’t.

Accountability and Respect

Here’s a great quote from the book, “Crucial Confrontations” by Patterson, Grenny, McMillan, and Switzler.

It’s easy to find a leader who creates warm and lasting relationships but who struggles to get things done. It’s not much harder to find a no-nonsense, hard-hitting leader who you might send in to put out a fire but who creates hard feelings. Consequently, when you find someone who can manage both people and production, you’ve got a real gem.

As a project manager this is your goal: to be able to hold people accountable for results, in a manner that maintains a respectful relationship.

The book “Crucial Confrontations” is a great guide as to how to do this.

So, how's the project going?

I have been reading Bob Schieffer’s book “This Just In: What I Couldn’t’ Tell You On TV.” It's a great read because Bob started out in the business as a beat reporter, so the writing is crisp and succinct. Also, since Bob covered every Presidential campaign since McGovern it’s a fascinating account of recent political history.

Anyway, Bob recounts a story from when he was in Vietnam and someone asks, “How can we [America] tell that we’re winning?” His reply was, “If you have to ask…..”

I couldn’t help but think the applicability of this statement to new programs. Successes should be self-evident. If you have to ask how it’s going, it’s probably not.

Innovation isn't new

There was an interesting post the other day titled, “Innovation is the new strategy,” by Jeffery Phillips of Innovate on Purpose . I’m not sure if he meant the title literally, but as I have written before, lots of other people are.

Innovation isn’t new. It’s table stakes. Just like total quality management isn’t old. It also is table stakes.

To be successful, a company must decide what customer problems they are going to solve, how they are going to solve them, and how they are going to deliver those solutions. They then have to be the best in the world at delivering the solution and they must be able to do it profitably. And to add a degree of difficulty, they need to realize that markets change over time so part today’s solution will be irrelevant in the future.

Setting Up a Project

The Authors of Radical Innovation: How Mature Companies Can Outsmart Upstarts propose four uncertainties that a radical innovation program must overcome. They are:

• Techncial Uncertainties: Can we make this work?
• Market Uncertainties: Who will buy it?
• Organizational Uncertainties: How do we defuse organizational resistance?
• Resource Uncertainties: How do we get the money and people we need?

I think that these four uncertainties are applicable to any type of innovation, radical or derivative, it's just that the amount of uncertainty varies by innovation type.

The goal of the project manager is then to make sure that each of these uncertainties is addressed during the course of the project.

Each company is different, but it has been my experience that when you mention "planning" or "project scoping" everyone's eyes roll to the back of their heads. "We don't have time for that", they say. "We're busy doing the real work." The ideal situation is to hold a project start-up meeting where the team and stakeholders agree on the pertinant topics.

Regardless of what your stakeholders say these uncertainties must be managed in order for the project to be successfull.

Here's what has worked for me in the past when there is not a formal project start-up process.

1. Take notes during the kick off meeting. Listen for answers to the three questions you want to ask. What do you want? When do you want it? Who gets to change it?
2. Either in an e-mail, or the next meeting, offer up the one page summary and ask if you catured the details correctly. You would be amazed at how often the details change once they are written down.
3. Once you have an outline of the project you can then start scoping the amount of time, money, and people you will need to do the job.
4. Share your resource needs with the right project stakeholders.

This process will not always work the first time. One time I presented a project cost of over a million dollars and was laughed out of the office. A year later we were hauled into the clients office to explain why the project cost so much. It was very handy to be able to present the e-mail that contained the original project estimate.

Freud Part II

So what does psychological safety have to do with innovation? Everything.

Have you ever been anxious about talking to management about a problem? Maybe it was because you were hauled in to explain the latest miss in the numbers. Maybe it was just a normal project update. But, why were you nervous? Isn’t management supposed to be there to remove roadblocks for you? To enable you to be you’re best.

You’re anxious because you are afraid that bad things will happen to you; that you will be blamed, or laughed at, or ridiculed. Not to your face of course, organizations are much too civilized for that. But behind the scenes you, and your career, will suffer the consequences. You won’t get the best projects, or you’ll get more work, or you’ll be shuffled off to the corner.

But why do you think bad things will happen? Because you have seen what has happened to other people in your organization when they screw up. (Screwing up is a complicated issue because rarely is there a single attributable cause to failure. But that’s another issue) You’ve seen people taken behind the woodshed, never to be seen again. You know that the situation you are about to encounter is not safe.

As a result, you go on the defensive. You shift the blame to someone else, or you start taking conservative measures. So does everyone else in the organization.

If everyone in the organization is on the defensive who is going to take the risks necessary to be innovative?

Freud and Ford

Ford has been spending a lot of money lately telling us that they are going to be more innovative. This doesn’t make sense to me. Hasn’t the company already been striving for continuous improvements along the product, process, and supply chain vectors of their business?

So what exactly is going to make them more innovative?

I’m not sure what they are going to do, but I know one thing that I would do. I would increase the psychological safety among my leadership team.

Consider this team behavior model from Patrick Lencioni, author of The Five Dysfunctions of a Team. A book that has been on The New York Times, BusinessWeek, Wall Street Journal, and USA Today best-seller lists. Successful teams have members that:

1. Trust one another
2. Engage in unfiltered conflict around idea
3. Commit to decisions and plans of actio
4. Hold one another accountable for delivering against those plan
5. Focus on achievement and collective results.

Trust is defined as “the confidence among team members that their peers’ intentions are good, and that there is no reason to be protective or careful around the group.” In other words, the team members feel psychologically safe. And psychologically safe teams produce results.

While "psychological safety" does sound pretty touchy-feely, research reinforces its value in the workplace. In addition to enabling more effective teams, it has been proven to increase creativity.

Links:

Psychological safety and team effectiveness link

Psychological safety and increased creativity .pdf link

All things in moderation. Including moderation. - Paul Stiebitz

I’ve argued in this blog that running a business is an act of exploration that requires the willing suspension of paradigms in order to learn what the right answers are. This is what allows you to find the innovations that will allow your business to get where you want it to grow.

After thinking about this some more I think that I want to add to my assertion. Business is an act of exploration, but that exploration must be done with dogmatic rigor. If you are merely wandering around smelling the flowers, someone is going to clean your clock. On the other hand, if you blindly march forward you may not end up where you want to be.

The solution is to adopt the concept of standard work to your business. That is, the business must follow the current set of paradigms and execute on them with military precision, until a better paradigm is adopted. The trick is to be continuously looking for a new paradigm, and even this should be done with rigor.

The same concept applies to your projects. There will be times when you feel can not afford the time to adopt a learning stance, but rather need to focus on execution. Sometimes you will be right and other times you will be wrong. Experience will help you tell what stage you are in. The key, though, is to always be willing to learn.

Neat Idea

There is still a lot of debate about what exactly an innovation is. (Previous post) For the purposes of this site we’ll define innovation as something that is better, an improvement. I argue that innovation = continuous improvement along all the vectors of your business: product, process, and value chain. But more about that some other time.

Here is a neat product from Hammer Schlemmer for those that still want to shovel snow but are worried about their backs.