Neat Ideas

Details matter. Take a look at the grill off of a new John Deere tractor. Notice how it is beveled in and out to give it a better look? It's touches like these that give a product a cache.

Compliance and Commitment

This morning I was thinking about how to bridge the gap between a team's compliance and a team's commitment. The bridge to get there gets built when there is a shared vision that people willingly enroll themselves in. Leaders are responsible for offering the team the vision.

The trick therefore is in presenting a credible vision to the team. Presenting is actually the wrong word because the vision starts out as a seed, planted by the leader, and grows only when fully worked by the team.

This vision part is extremly important because most research shows that vision is a critical component to success.

Innovators are Trustworthy

I’ve been re-reading portions of Kouzes and Posner’s book The Leadership Challenge and this passage really struck me.

For example, in a PricewaterhouseCoopers study on corporate innovation in companies listed in the Financial Times 100, trust was “the number one differentiator” between the top 20 percent of companies surveyed nd the bottom 20 percent. The top performers’ trust empowered individuals to turn strategic aim into reality. The more trusted we feel, the better we innovate.

The takeaway here is that any innovation initiative, to reach its full potential, needs to address interpersonal relationships. Period. Yet few, in fact any, innovation pundits focus on trust as the cornerstone to innovation that it is.

There are several reasons for this. First, trust can not be kitted up and sold as an innovation process. The absence of profit motive removes a lot of people from the discussion. Second, creating trust is a simple and difficult process. The difficulty lies in talking through emotions in a workplace setting. Very few people are comfortable doing this with loved ones at home let alone acquaintances at work. So, the fact that people are less inclined to have these discussions reduces the audience base and therefore the pundit focus.

Regardless, if you want innovation, which is really product development viewed through a continuous improvement lens, you have to address issues of trust.

One Man's Stupid Idea Is Another's Innovation

I've pondered a couple of times about what the definition of innovation really is. My current thinking is that if the idea solves a problem better than a previous solution, and it is profitable, then it counts as being innovative.

Which brings us to the pictures of the Jim Beam syrup and the Coleman campsight lights. Personally Jim Beam syrup doesn't solve any of my problems as I haven't wished that my pancakes taste more like whiskey. So, is the Jim Beam syrup innovative? On the other hand I think that Coleman lights are a great idea because I've made the midnight trip to the lieu and had to play the "Which campsite is mine?" game. The lights solve a problem that I'd had in the past and is a novel solution when compared to other solutions. To me the lights are innovative.

So what we find is that innovation is very subjective. One man's stupid idea really is another's perfect innovation and the subjectivity of the definition of innovation forces us to look towards a broader definition.

Will Innovation Save Ford?

I’ve been interested in watching Ford ever since they declared that Innovation was their mission. So it was with great interest that I read the July 16th article in the New York Times in which Micheline Maynard interviews Bill Ford, Ford’s Chairman, CEO and COO.

I read the article using Jim Collin’s book Good to Great as a framework for evaluating the likelihood of Bill Ford’s chances. Collin’s criteria is the best available checklist of behaviors that companies have engaged in to produce great results.

What follows are the specific behaviors listed in Collin’s book followed by a quote from the article.

Collins: “Every good-to-great company had Level 5 leadership during the pivotal transition years….Level 5 leaders display a compelling modesty, are self effacing and understated.”

NYTimes: “A fish tank as big as a flat-screen television dominates one wall of Bill Ford’s office….a closet has a hidden espresso machine…In the executive dining room, the last of its kind at Detroit’s big automakers, waitresses take orders for a multi-course menu and bring silver finger bowls between the main course and dessert.”

Collins: “Level 5 leaders look out the window to attribute success factors other than themselves. When things go poorly, however, they look in the mirror and blame themselves, taking full responsibility.”

NYTimes: “Mr. Ford bluntly contends that managers stymied him, as both chairman and chief executive by getting in the way of project…’I’m just a lot more comfortable in this job’ he [Ford] said. ‘I mean, you know, to use a cliché I think I’ve really grown in this job; but I think that it’s also because my instincts were right…’I can’t delegate to anybody.”

Collins: “The good-to-great leaders began the transformation by first getting the right people on the bus (and the wrong people off the bus) and then figured out where to drive it.”

NYTimes: “Although Ford has promoted it commitment to hybrids in television commercials featuring Kermit the Frog, last month it backed off plans to build 250,000 hybrid vehicles by 2010… It was the second time during Mr. Ford’s tenure in the senior ranks that the company has reneged on an environmental promise. In 2000, when he was chairman, it pledged a 25 percent improvement in the fuel efficiency of its S.U.V.’s by 2005. But the effort was set aside in 2002, because Ford did not have the technology.

Given Bill Ford’s behaviors in contrast to Collin’s list, it is no surprise that Ford lost $1.6 billion in North America and $1.2 billion worldwide in the first quarter of 2006.

What is clear to me is that Ford is not engaging in the behaviors that have been proven to be connected with success. Innovation is only one tenet of a successful company. Just because Ford has splashed fancy commercials declaring their allegiance to Innovation it doesn’t mean that they will be able to produce a slate of new products that can spur top line growth.

Stand for Something, Anything

"Encourage people to stop compromising 3,000 times a second. Spotlight the good guy who nobody else is paying attention to. Run a site with really discerning and trustworthy information contributed by people who care as much as I do about the credo of refusing to settle for mediocrity — ever" - Jim Leff, Chowhound.com co-founder.

From the Toronto Star Via Seth Godin

Innovation Strategy Vs. Execution

Yesterday Tom Peters posted that he believes that strategy is secondary to execution when trying to become excellent. My gut reaction was once of disbelief. Visions of a disciplined empowered team working on steam engine technology, while every one else was working on hydrogen, came to mind.

But then I read today’s post at the Innovation Insider which lists Paul Sloan’s ten step program for building an innovative organization. The list, which I will re-post here, is deceptively simple and accurate. The wicked hard part is actually doing them.

(1) Paint an inspiring vision.
(2) Build an open, receptive, questioning culture.
(3) Empower people at all levels.
(4) Set goals, deadlines and measurements for innovation.
(5) Use creativity techniques to generate a large number of ideas.
(6) Look outside for ideas
(7) Review, combine, filter and select ideas.
(8) Prototype promising proposals.
(9) Manage risk and accept failure.
(10) Kill off the unpromising projects and quickly roll out the successful ones.

The fact that the “strategy” in the Innovation Insider post is so spot on swung me around to Tom Peter’s way of thinking. Peter’s claim that strategy is second is valid not because it is not vitally important to the success of the company, instead it is secondary because it is rather easy to develop. Paul Sloan’s list is an example of a ready made strategy; if an organization were able to achieve excellence in ever category that is listed then they would indeed be an innovative company. The hard part, of course, is actually bringing the 10 points to reality, which is why Peter’s has execution first on his list of priorities.

From the Bad Design Files

Just because you can do it doesn't mean that you should. Laser scissors fall into the same category as cooking on your car engine. It's a novel idea, but not overly practical. But, does it count as innovative?

I've argued before that anything that is a continuous improvement and is also able to turn a profit counts as innovative. Given this definition, laser scissors are not innovative because it is doubtful that they work better than a line drawn on the fabric.

Defining Innovation Excellence

In the last two posts I have written what seems like contradictory thoughts. On Monday I wrote that it’s quite likely that the performance level of your team is capped by the amount of talent and discipline available. On Thursday I wrote that excellence takes no more energy than mediocrity. How can you be excellent if the maximum level of achievement is finite?

The answer lies in how you define excellence, or rather success. John Wooden once said, “Success is peace of mind which is the direct result of self-satisfaction in knowing that you made the effort to become the best of which you are capable.”

If you are playing for the expectations of others you are bound to fail sometimes because your maximum team potential will be below their minimum expectation. Excellence then is the enabling the team achieve its maximum potential. And the process of leading a team to excellence or mediocrity takes the same amount of effort, but an entirely different skill set.

Average Is Just As Hard As Great

Being average takes just as much effort as being great. This may seem counter intuitive because the traditional wisdom dictates that the team that works the works the hardest will win. But there’s an implicit assumption with the traditional wisdom; that both teams are working on the same things. This assumption is not valid when we talk about businesses because while they may produce the same products they don’t have to produce them in the same way. In business, a tremendous amount of energy may be wasted due to problems related to vision, alignment, and / or execution

Knowing that the path to greatness takes no more effort than the path to mediocrity is a liberating and exciting concept. Given the choice between the two, why not choose greatness?

People, by default, want to create. It is a hardwired desire in all of us. Therefore businesses that are not creative have built processes that disable creativity. These processes are the undocumented rules regarding interpersonal interactions within the organization. These rules are not tangible and exist only as constructs in people’s minds. This fact is what makes it so hard for companies to change.

Not All Project Teams Are Equal

Not all project teams are equal; each has a different maximum output based on their composition and the context within which they operate. As a project manager it’s important to understand the team’s potential because it will provide a realistic expectation of what the team’s performance will be.

The success, or performance, of a project team is a result of a complex function of talent and discipline. Talent refers to all of the characteristics (both IQ and EQ) of a person, or a collection of people, associated with high performance and discipline is defined as a system of rules of conduct or method of practice rather than the act of punishment.

The level of talent and discipline that a particular project team has will determine which performance curve it is on. Notice that in this model there are distinct and finite differences between the levels of performances possible for different talent and discipline combinations. For example, a team of shop floor engineers who use Scientific Method and a well understood meeting structure can outperform a bunch of MBA’s who communicate only be e-mail.



Several factors determine which S-Curve the project team is on. In order to know what trajectory to expect an understanding of the limiting factors is needed. The first limitation is project team selection. Often times the team is made up by supervision based on how important the project is in relation to other current projects. For a super important project a way will be found to staff it with the best talent. For other types of projects staffing will be determined by the best available talent. Remember that the team includes not only the core individuals who will be working on the project day to day, but also the other departments and suppliers that are needed to complete the project.

The second limiting factor is the amount of discipline that the team has. Note that there are many levels of discipline and that corporate and business unit discipline trump project discipline. For example, if the business unit allows design reviews to pass without data than there is only so much that an individual project manager can do to collect data. This is because the people that the project manager needs to get the analysis don’t won’t prioritize the work because it’s not deemed as important.

Understanding how discipline and talent impact performance has two important takeaways. First it allows the project manager to understand if the level of talent and discipline that the project team has is above the corporate expectation or not. If not, then the project manager has a change to try and change the odds in their favor. Second, if the project team is on pace to deliver at or above the corporate expectation then it is unlikely that they level of performance will jump an S-Curve. This is because jumping performance curves requires changing the talent makeup of the team and/or the corporate discipline and both of these are often difficult for a project manager to change. Knowing that the project has a realistic performance cap, the project manager can then manage to that potential rather than the theoretical maximum, saving themselves much frustration.

“Success is 10 percent inspiration and 90 percent perspiration.” Thomas Alva Edison

No matter what company you work for, what country you work in, or what industry you work in, if you are a pro-active, “get ‘er done” type of person you will encounter organizational slog.

Organizational slog is the Lilliputian anchors that organizations place on their systems in order to better manage them. For example, say you want to order a set of tools through your regional office. This should take about a day, max. In order to place the PO the regional office must submit an invoice for the work. When the invoice comes in you find that it is from a new company who is not in the database. This requires another form in order to place them into the database, which requires you going back to the regional office for information. The total time to place order ends up being days.

It’s these types of time burglars that are the hidden costs on innovation speed. One way to speed up the time to market is to reduce the organizational slog.

Flushing out emergent requirements

I was pulling some things out of a storage when I came across this nail and cardboard solution. The problem was that the doors without locks on them tended to swing into the aisle and block traffic. The simple, and cost effective solution was to slide a nail, placed through a piece of cardboard, through the clasp where the cardboard keeps the nail from falling through. It’s a great fix.

Only one question, why do the doors open up into the aisle in the first place?

You’ll find that this type of band-aid happens to firms quite often. At the beginning of the project you don’t know what you don’t know yet. There are a tremendous number of latent requirements that no one is able to predict at the beginning and they only become apparent as the product develops. Going back writing back to the storage unit example it is doubtful the requirements document called out the fact that the doors needed to swing in. That need didn’t become apparent until after the thing was built and by that time it was too late to rip the whole thing down and build it right; hence the nail and cardboard solution.

The solution is to build crappy prototypes fast. Like first week of the project fast. Build them out of cardboard, wood, papier-mâché, whatever it takes to get the point across. Spend the big bucks to prototype the areas where you haven’t figured out the physics yet. Within the first or second prototype the team would have found the open door problem and could have fixed it before it was too late.

Happy 4th of July