Detail Matter II

Remember that China Airlines Boeing 737 that burst into flames after landing last week?

According to the 8/28 addition of the Wall Street Journal "Investigators believe that mechanics may have failed to replace a washer during a routine inspection of the bolt assembly just weeks earlier, permitting the bolt to come loose, punch through the front edge of the plane's fuel tank and create a major leak."

A washer. Responsible for a major airline fire.

Details matter. Someone in the organization has to have done the pedantic verification of each and every possible aspect, in order to know that the product will work as intended.

Now the level of performance necessary to win in the marketplace depends on the product and the current business conditions; translation, the affects of product failure in the marketplace depend. So, if the product doesn't work as intended it may or may not matter.

Obviously designing airplanes is much different than designing decorative pots. But, if you want to know every aspect of product performance, that is the details, then you need to do the work.

Details Matter

For instance, take a look at this control panel for a Clausing CNC Mill

Note how there are no stray anythings. Everything is ordered, numbered, and logical. It takes an extra couple of hours to make a panel look like this, but it demonstrates that they care about the details.

If the control panel, the part of the machine you should rarely see, is this nice it speaks to the quality of the rest of the unit.

It's easy to mail it in. Heck for most of the custom equipment I ordered we never had control panels that looked this nice. But, why? Taking the extra effort distinguishes you from the crowd.

They're Better, That's Our Advantage

Not that anyone will admit it, but there was a time when the smart money was on Playstation 3. "Wii" was something that you desperately wanted your three year old to do in the toilet.

This last June, Wii outsold Playstation six to one.

How they did it is a classic study in disruption.

Sony at the time focused all of their time on the power of the chip and most of the news stories at this up. But the question that nobody was seriously asking was "So What?"

While everyone was focused on graphic performance, it turns out that there was additional criteria that people used decide which video game counsel to use. When Wii came on the scence touting interactiveness as a feature, with graphics that were good enough as judged by the average consumer, their offering was more attractive than the super graphics of Playstation 3.

In hindsight, it is easy to see that Playstation overshot the consumers need for graphic performance, yet they continued to commit their tremendous talent, time, and money on that very endeavour. This left the door wide open for Wii to step in with a different product and win the pot.

The moral of the story isn't that Sony should have come up with an interactive system or that company's need to keep a constant vigil against disruption. The moral of the story is that it is possible to take on the big guy and win.

Being in a big company is a lot spending time with a bunch hungry monkeys in a large concrete room. The cacophony of sounds is amazing. There is an amazing energy with all the limbs bouncing, dodging, and weaving. Just getting everything in syncopated motion is an act of Congress. In a big company survival take a tremendous energy so much so that they have little, if anything, left, with which to pay attention to you.

So get encouraged when you are up against someone bigger than you. As long as you are not playing the same game they are you are bound to win because they can't adapt like you.

Stand and Deliver

Bad news. Who wants it? It's a bear to have to say that the project is late, or expensive, or doesn't work. Everyone has made plans on your ability to deliver so your failure (Hey it's your project, so it's your failure. Fair or not.) hurts them too. So they don't like it.

But, how you handle it predicts a lot about your ability to succeed.

I have a friend who is a high level player at a major firm and the first thing that he looks for when there is a crisis, and he's been through plenty, is to see "who hides under the rocks and who stands up to fix the problem." In his words you "get rid of the ones who crawl under the rocks."

Think about that. The message here is not that you are going to get shot for having problems (Repeated problems? Then yes. First time problems? Then No.) but you are going to get shot for not fixing them.

So, when things are going poorly the advice is clear. One, admit things are going poorly. This usually requires a public presentation. Two, propose a solution. Three, deliver on the solution. Be prepared that steps one through three will entail long hours, high stress, and sniping from your peers but it will be worth it because at the end of the day those who stand and deliver are more admired than those who only critique.

When late summer rolls around I usually get asked to participate in a survey or two by the current students in the Master's of Product Development program at RIT. They are trying to generate data for their thesis and I am an easy mark, having once been a student trying to deliver on deadline myself.

This particular survey was about the transfer of knowledge within an organization. What the survey seemed to be hinting at was that companies don't explicity take time to ensure that information is transferred in an orderly fashion.

This isn't exactly an overwhelming intuition. As Mike Tyson says "Plans are what you have before you get hit."

Regardless, here is my response in the open comment section:

There are two main issues with the tranfer of tacit knowledge. The first thing to address is body count; is there anyone in the organization who knows how the product/process/machine/whatever is supposed to work? It's important to determine this because writing stuff down such as specifications and BOM's will document the what, but will never document the why. Since the "why" is rarely documented (too hard, too much time, etc...) it will reside in a resident expert. If you don't have the person, you don't have the "why." So forget all the fancy prgrams and management mandates to share informatioin. It doesn't happen that way. What's imperative is that the organization kept the key contributors happy so they can retain them and also retain their knowledge. It is extremly expensive to have to pay the labor/capital/research expense to learn it all over again.

Second, if the resident expert does exist then you need to make sure that cross pollination and learning occur. The default here is to say that Senior Management should do this or that, but really it is encumbent on the project manager to get the same people in the same room at the time and work off of a checklist of what needs to be transferred where. If they don't do this their projects suffer. People often chafe at the pedanticism of the exercise, but THERE IS NO OTHER WAY TO DO IT. If you don't pay attention to the nitty gritty details than you crash Mars orbiters or end up with aircraft cable wiring that is too short.

Innovation Zen

Clayton Christensen wrote the Innovator's Dilemma 10 years ago. Wow. The book is the Holy Grail of Innovation but I get the sense that it has only enabled a better industry watching experience. I don't get the sense that executives as a rule are operating differently.

Speaking of Christensen, here's how to know when you have overshot the needs of your customers: Leveno, the new IBM, is willing to pass on Microsoft's Vista software for the 2008 Olympics. If Vista had represented a performance improvement that still didn't satiate need Leveno would have snapped the new version of Vista up.

Speaking of satiate, can't we come up with a better dictionary than dictionary.com? It took me a while to go from "saietiat" to "satiate".

You may have noticed a new link on the right hand side of the tool bar. I had intentionally capped the number of recommended links to represent only those links that I thought added value to the world. My friend Mark Rosenthal's new blog, "The Lean Thinker" caused me to break that paradigm. Mark has vastly undersold himself on his site. An ex Army Captain and Tank Commander who has vast experience in the corporate world, Mark has embarked on a mission of manufacutring lean and his blog is a rare combination of insight, value, and simplicitiy. Please take a look.

90% of open innovation will go nowhere. There are two reasons for this. First, despite the tendency for big corporations to over think things, there is still a tremendous advantage of context for those in the market. Sure, those off the wall ideas can sometimes shake thing up, but odds are the people that live and breath the market will come up with a better idea. Which leads me to the next point. Having a good idea from open innovation is much different than commercializing a good idea. 10% Inspiration, 90% Perspiration.

From The Bad Design Files

A what storm? A FLVRSTRM. Now that's what I'm talking about!

Most, OK all, of the pictures taken by our staff photographer are taken via camera phone. It would be nice to have one made with a lens cover so it doesn't look like all the pictures were taken in either San Fransico or Seattle.

I actually had to use my oil changing wrench to get the laundry detergent open the other day. This time I am chalking it up to the bottle, if it happens again I am signing up for the gym.

Innovation Rule #1: Do Not Screw The Customer

I spent about 45 minutes on the phone with Capital One (Link, I mean link) today. I was trying to find out why I had a finance charge on my account for two months in a row. The first month I figured it was my bad so I just paid it. But no way I make the same mistake two months in a row so I called to investigate.

I turns out that Captial One had shortened the amount of time that my revolving credit is allowed to float finance free from 30 days to 25 days. They said a notice was sent to this effect and I believe them. I am one of the few people who do read those notices, but I don't remember this one, and I know for a fact it did not say, "Hey by the way, unless you give us this amount of money by this date we are gonna charge you ass!"

But that is exactly what happened.

Because of the change in dates of the float they changed the dates that the monthly billing cycle closed, which is important because this also changed the dates that the bill is printed, received by me, and subsequently paid. But, what they neglected to tell me is that while they where changing the date that they were sending me a bill they were not changing the date I needed to get them money in order to avoid a fine.

Long story short; It was not explicitly clear that I needed to send them a certain amount of money by a certain date to avoid a fine. (I consider a finance charge a fine because I always pay my bill in full every month. I just like the frequent flier miles of a credit card.)

What is clear is that Capital One was clearly trying to make more money for themselves. A point, by the way, that I am all for. Where Capital One and I disagree is that I want them to make more money by offering solutions that consumers will willingly pay for versus tricking them out of more money.

Capital One is the antithesis of innovation. When you sink to the point of relying on confusing letters to prove in a court of law that you aren't screwing consumers you you've already sold you soul.

To often companies get caught up in making more money for the sake of more money, and start to flirt with dishonesty as a result. What they don't get is that making more money is a reward for providing new an novel solutions to the consumer.

To Capital One's credit, everyone I talked with was very helpful and agreed that the charges should be refunded. But, I had to spend 45 minutes on a Saturday getting my money back so it's too late.

Innovation is about helping people with problems that they don't even know they have. When you start to view the customer as a mark rather than a client you have left the realm of Innovation and entered a space of organized crime.

AFZ (Acronym Free Zone)

I've missed the entire texting phase. For those of you who are in the same boat as me, texting is a shorthand that people started in order to make it faster to type on the tiny cell phone keypads. So this is where "lol" (laugh out loud), "gr8t" (great), and "2nite" (tonight) came from.

There's a lot of creativity happening with this new language. Lauren Myracle has written a couple of young adult novels completely in text language and the words are starting to cross over in spoken conversation. For instance, at the car wash the other day the young gal at the register called her cp-worker a "BFF" (best friend forever) as in "How can I help you Mike? My BFF."

First time I've missed an entire generational thing, but I seem to be doing ok, except that I'm wearing my pants a bit higher than before and I don't mind wearing black dress socks with my shorts.

Neat Idea

Saw this in a hotel that we stayed at a couple weekends ago. It's an Internet Kiosk at the front desk so you can do an on line check in for your air line and print your boarding pass.


I love this because they solved a problem that I didn't even know I had. It's no thing for me to use the airport kiosk, but why bother with something as convenient as this?





Some on at Gerber is paying attention. The small text on the lower left says, "Lid is interchangeable with ...." (Sorry I can't read the rest.) Regardless, one of the pain in the neck thing about sippy cups is that after washing them you are left with the menagerie of parts that aren't necessarily interchangeable, but will still go together. This results in some sort of fluid on the child and or floor. If you made everything fit and work together I would be a slave to your architecture.


The package on the "Wet Bone Water To Go" package turns into a bowl that Fido can drink out of. Cute website too.

Innovation Zen

A Tribute to American Resolve

Of the 19 ships sunk in the attack on Pearl Harbor, 18 of the ships were refloated. 16 of the ships returned to battle before the war was over.

Talent Matters

When the Dallas Cowboys has Troy Aikman, Emmitt Smith, and Michael Irvin in the line up they won about 70% of their games. If one of them was missing, they lost more than half.

The Buffalo Bills Have Something Special Going On
From the 13Wham website: Link

"In a world of self absorbed ego maniacs, Dick Juron [Head Coach of the Buffalo Bills] doesn't act like he has reinvented the wheel... He actually listens. Pauses. And then gives a more thought out answer than most of us expect (or in some cases deserve.)"

You heard it heard first, the Buffalo Bills will win the Super Bowl by 2010. I will be in attendence at both the game and the celebration in Buffalo. I will cry at both.

Saying "No" To The Boss

Let's face it, no one wants to say "No" to the boss. Especially when research proves that people you disagree with tend to think you are a jerk. The last thing that we need is the boss to think we are a problem.

Problem employees don't get a seat at the table. They don't get to influence budgets, they get told what there budget it. They don't get to pick their team, the team is chosen for them. Put bluntly, when you are on the outside you have little influence on the hand that you are dealt. And trying to turn your banana of a project into apple pie is hard work.

So, more often than not we silently agree that trying to go over Niagara Falls in a barrel made of Popsicle sticks is a good idea, rather than risk alienating the boss. But why do people agree to do this if they know it will hurt them down the line? The answer is that they don't.

The problem is that you often don't that you are being asked to go over the falls in a barrel. In reality you are not really sure what is being asked of you, because you haven't done it before. You don't know what you don't know and since you want the company to be successful, and therefore want the project to be successful - and by the way you can make the boss not think you are a jerk - you agree to give it a shot.

So, what to do?

1. Admit Your Ignorance and Buy Some Time
Admit your ignorance, delicately of course. If you don't know you don't know. Say so, but say that you will be back by a certain date with more information and a set of recommended next steps. If accepted, fulfill your commitment.

2. What To Do When Step 1 Doesn't Work
You need to have some strong internal fortitude because the next part is hard. You need to push back to the boss by explaining why you think this is the right thing to do. Body language and voice inflection is important, you need to come across as knowledgeable, helpful, and non-threatinging while you explain that step 1 is in the best interest of the business.

3. Mayday Mayday, Step 2 Didn't Work Either
You now need to say that maybe you don't fully appreciate the full context of this situation they way that the boss does, but you are willing to give it a try. Next negotiate what success looks like in case things do go South and you need to do something about it. Set up a regular review schedule so that the boss can help track progress.

4. OMG, None of That Worked
Often times you end up in situations that you can't control. You are being challenged. When this happens remember that your value as a person is not related to your status, or lack of status, at work. Do your best to right the ship anywayt; don't let your paradigms restrain the potential solutions. When you do crash, smile through it. Why make a bad situation worse by being gloomy? Your experiance will help you in the future so you should be thankful for it. Immediately plan your next step.