Happy Holidays

Best wishes to you and your loved ones this Holiday Season and Happy New Year!

- Greg Eisenbach

"More Innovation Please" - Marketing

Innovation is nothing more than unique solutions to problems. The catch is that in order to develop the solution you must understand the problem.

Not understanding the problem can lead to Innovating for Innovation’s sake; and that is simply an exercise in corporate entertainment. For example, a friend of mine is being asked to head an Innovation team at a Fortune 500 company. It seems that marketing has come to product development and asked for some more Innovative products. Not a novel approach to ship the product. Not a novel way to use the product differently. Just a simply request for more Innovative products. The problem, as marketing is defining it, is that there are not enough Innovative products to sell.

By failing to identify a specific customer problem to solve what marketing is really doing is asking for hirer margin products to sell to the existing client base. They ask for this because they are responsible for generating more profit and they think that the best (easiest?) way to do this is to sell higher margin products to the folks that they already know.

There is only one flaw in this line of reasoning and it’s that the customer does not care about marketing not having enough cool products to sell. The customer cares about their own problems.

By ignoring the customer what you end up generating is a bunch of me too products that best meet the needs of the company – higher margin, existing supply chain, existing client base, existing manufacturing base – but not the customer. And by ignoring the customer you ensure that the customer will ignore you, leaving you with nothing to show for the Innovation effort.

Neat Idea

Each year Reese, Lower, Patrick, & Scott, a local architectural firm create a gingerbread landscape and invtite the public to view it.

Details Matter

Details matter. Details are why the USS San Francisco ran aground, why NASA’s 125 million dollar Mars Orbiter crashed and why Airbus’ made A380 wire harnesses that were too short.

The crew of the USS San Francisco had two non-congruent maps of the ocean floor. One that showed the mountain and one that didn’t. The fact that this wasn’t noticed and accounted for help contribute to the crash. NASA had one team working in Metric and another in English on the same project and it was this incompatibility that led to the orbiter loss. Airbus had two design teams working in incompatible software packages so that when it came time to lay the wiring harnesses they didn’t layout the way they were supposed to; rendering them too short.

Taken in isolation it seems incredible that these items were missed. How can you make a wiring harness that is too short? It is common to mistake missing “easy” stuff for incompetence. But that doesn’t make sense because in each of the cases the staff involved in the project was a highly trained and highly motivated group of people. Rather, mistakes occur when there isn’t a rigorous discipline of detailed review and candor.

It would be irresponsible for me to say that review and candor would have been a cure-all for the USS San Francisco, the Mars Orbiter, and the Airbus A380. But, I do know that a culture that encourages, enables, and takes seriously, the people who stand up and say, “Hey I found something that’s not right” will beat the pants off of an organization that hides issues. The teams that find, admit, and defeat problems move forward to solve more problems while the other guys simply develop coping skills and hope that nothing really bad happens.

Neat Idea

Now here is my idea of an adult size juice box. When you can’t sit around a linen tablecloth with soft candle light – think two kids, two Grandparents, and an Aunt two hundred miles from home – this is a neat way to still enjoy a bit of relaxation. What you see pictured is a bottle of wine in an aspetic package (think juicebox) instead of a glass bottle.

What's neat about this package is that it solves a portability problem that a glass bottle can't This container fit easily into our baggage and we were less afaid of it breaking during travel.

From the Bad Design Files

Have you noticed how popular the inflatable Holiday characters are? The only problem is that when they aren’t inflated it looks like a Christmas drive-by. Instead of requiring a fan to keep them upright how about a simple inner tube plug? That way they could be inflated once and then left to slowly leak air in the coming weeks of Christmas.

Innovation Process: 117,000,000 Google Hits Can't Be Wrong

There are a lot of people currently selling Innovation Process 2.0; the sell being that if you only had the right program in place in your organization then everything else would fix itself. To some extent this is true, teaching an organization a new skill set is good, but the skill will only be utilized only if you have the right fundamental business operating software to start with.

Think of it like this. Assume that you are currently balancing your checkbook by hand. This takes about an hour a month, mostly because you keep making math errors and it takes a while to trace them down. Now say that someone comes along and offers you Quicken. It will save you an hour a month they say. Sweetness, you think as you sign the credit card receipt. Excited to change the world you rush home to install it and find out that the program requires the Microsoft Vista operating software and you are running a Commodore 64. The program that you bought means nothing because you cannot enable it.

The exact same thing happens in business. People sell 6-Sigma, Quality Circles, Innovation Classes, etc., etc., etc... but none of them will function unless the business operating system allows it.

And what is the best business operating system? It’s Trust 1.0. Once there is trust between individuals in an organization then you can install Truth 1.0, which then allows all other programs to run properly.

That Stupid Consumer

What does a local pizza shop and retailers who insist on clamshell packaging have in common? They both are ignoring their customers.

In the first case the local pizza shop had a sign in the window that said, “Tables are for paying customers only.” Obviously, people are stopping into the restaurant, hanging out, and not buying much. I can see why the owner would put up the sign; the shop is in a strip mall that has no place to linger. So, it is conceivable that people would go into the shop and not order a full meal.

As for retailers, they insist on clamshell packaging because of its low cost and effectiveness. It works because you can see the product, it prevents pilferage, and it is relatively low cost. Yet the retailer’s insistence on clamshell packaging is responsible for 6,400 visits to the emergency room according to the Consumer Product Safety Commission. So prevalent is the consumer sentiment about clamshell packaging that the industry calls it “wrap rage.”

In both instances, business is refusing to recognize the unmet consumer need that consumers would be willing to pay for. Is their something the pizza shop owner could do to capitalize on all the food traffic? How about offering a $4.00 cup of coffee? And the clamshell; couldn’t there be a way to easily open the product once it is out of the retail environment?

Having consumers interact with you product in unintended ways is a good thing because it opens doors to new ways of making money.

In fact that is exactly how Stanley came up with the Fubar. They noticed that the only thing that contractors were using hammers for was demolition because nail guns had made nailing obsolete.

Small Innovation Footsteps

Every month I try and write down something that I learned. I do this partly to try and keep my self disciplined about keeping my skills current and partly because I can never think of anything when I have to hand in something at Performance Appraisal time.

This month I learned two things. First, I re-learned about Military Standards for Lot Acceptance because I needed to come up with some way of testing the lot that wouldn’t take me weeks. Second, I learned The Wilcoxon Signed Rank Test, a method of comparing non-normal data sets for statistical relativity, to determine if my data actually showed different populations or it was luck.

By themselves, these two things are not that significant, but when compiled with the things that I have learned in the other eleven months, it becomes an impressive year.

Organizations are like this too. A step forward toward the right direction doesn’t bring cause for celebration. It’s the coupling of steps forward in the right direction over the course of years that yields the results worthy of celebration.

The trick as an organization is to start yielding small wins quickly and then leverage them into the next small win. The neat thing about this approach is that anyone can implement it because small wins are easy.