Jan 27, 2011 | Change, Collaboration, Customers, Lean, OE, Operations
Lean is at its core a management system, a holistic way of looking at the way an enterprise manages itself through a culture tuned to improvement, group and personal responsability, while six sigma is a quantitative process of managing in quality by getting it right first time.
Six sigma quality requires 99.997% perfect, or 3.4 defects/million. When you are manufacturing and supplying to customers even simple products, this is a very high bar indeed.
Motorola was the first US company to recognise and articulate the challenge in the face of Japanese competition in the 80’s, and they boomed, becoming the gold standard for western manufacturing, and inspiring thousands of others to lift their performance, from which we have all benefited. The article that first bought Motorola to public attention is this Fortune article from 1989, and it started a revolution.
Now the revolution appears to be over as Motorola is broken up into two separate listed companies after almost 2 decades of failing to build on the foundations built in the eighties. The leadership that followed those that built the foundation did not recognise the importance of the management systems necessary to support the continued improvement and Motorola fell back into the trap of conventional management accounting where inventory is an asset, cycle time and flow ignored as core metrics, functional management over-rides bottom up innovation, and all the other stuff that makes a lean environment work, got squeezed out.
As I work with clients on improvement initiatives that usually start with marketing and strategy, my patch, the necessity to improve operational processes to support those that engage with the customer is always a major driver, and the failure of Motorola after being the icon it was simply drives home the difficulty of not just improving current performance, but in the process, building the management and leadership processes that make the performance improvement process self sustaining.
Jan 24, 2011 | Collaboration, Communication, Social Media
Linux started with a promise, one that formed the basis of what has become a major player in the server operating system market, with a current share somewhere around 45%.
Linus Torvalds back in 1991 posted the following message on a discussion board inhabited by systems engineers “I am doing a free operating system (just a hobby) and I’d like to know what features most people would want. Any suggestions are welcome, but I won’t promise to implement them”
Torvalds, knowingly or otherwise, tapped a vein that has proven on many occasions (Wikipedia.org & Meetup.com being just two), that a community has the chance to form when several conditions are met:
- The community is driven by a need, or interest, rather than profit for the initiator
- Participation is welcome, and encouraged, but a transparent “peer review” process dictates if the contribution will be used
- Recognition is offered to all participants.
The promise is that these conditions will be met, and when they are not, the community fails, as did the first iteration of Wikipedia. Does yours measure up?
Jan 13, 2011 | Collaboration, Innovation, Leadership, Marketing, Strategy
Pixar is amongst the great “innovation factories” of recent decades, along with PARC, 3M, Apple, and a very few others. Part of what makes Pixar so effective is a question answered in this McKinsey interview with Brad Bird, the director who won two Oscars with “Ratatouille” and “The Incredibles” after joining when Pixar had achieved enormous breakthroughs with “Toy Story”, “Finding Nemo”, and other smash hits.
The core of his success has not been just the great people, but the environment created for them to work in, the processes evolved to manage the execution of creativity, and the restless curiosity and determination to be better, every time.
Jan 3, 2011 | Collaboration, Innovation, Marketing, Social Media
The Microsoft business model has resisted all efforts to introduce open innovation practices into its markets, and many would argue, has stunted its growth and innovative potential as a result.
How rapidly things can change, even when you resist from a position of strength.
Microsoft introduced “Kinect” in the US just before Christmas, with the objective of wresting back some of the gamer/activity market into its X-Box offering which has suffered at the hands of the Wii. At the heart of Kinect is a chip with advanced capabilities, and very quickly hackers have found how to add open source access those capabilities, and are starting to explore applications that would not have occurred to Microsoft, or would have cost too much to pursue.
U-Tube is being used extensively to communicate the astonishing stuff being done, this one being the use of the Kinect chip extracted from a Kinect device bought for $150, to create 3-D images.
The message in all this is simply that open source innovation that engages the crowd outside the boundaries of your ability to harness IP is the exploding as the driver of innovation.
IP is almost unprotectable nowadays, the management task is now a question in two parts,
- “How do we create the conditions for the development of Intellectual Capital around our “patch”? ,
- ” How do we evolve our business model and monetarise it?
Nov 30, 2010 | Branding, Collaboration, Social Media
One of my consistent themes has been the power of a group to get stuff done, and the ways the web facilitates, and empowers the processes needed to get the stuff done by the group.
However, which is the chicken, and which is the egg?
There are no groups without members, and the “members” need a motivation to form, be a part of, and contribute to a group, in a way that enhances the outcomes for the group.
As a marketer, it is our task to find that motivation, and use it to build a network, group if you like, of those to whom the value proposition of the product/service being marketed adds value.
Nov 29, 2010 | Alliance management, Collaboration, Marketing, Social Media
It is pretty clear to most that the number of connections in a network grows more quickly than the number of people in the network. It is a mathematically consistent relationship captured by Metcalf’s Law, but in summary, you double the size of a network, you quadruple the number of potential connections.
This relationship between the nodes in a network, and the number of (potential) connections is the foundation of social media, as the increase of the potential connections comes at little or no cost.
This is in complete contrast to the past, where these added connections added cost at a consistent rate, each new potential connection required someone to spend the time to make the phone call, mail the brochure, meet, discover if there was a potential value in devoting the resources to nurturing the relationship. All this cost prevented the development of the relationships that creates a network.
The relationship maths is the same, but the transactions costs associated with the “old economy” ensured that many things that now can happen, simply could not because of the costs involved. Hugely successful sites like Flikr simply could not have evolved with the transaction costs of the past involved.
The new challenge is harnessing the potential energy in these connections, and leveraging it to benefit the individuals in these potential networks enabled by the removal of the transaction costs.
