May 23, 2010 | Alliance management, Innovation, Leadership, Operations, Strategy
The momentum of innovation in the auto industry has picked up a notch, as a resurgent Toyota allies with Tesla to re-open the NUMMI plant closed earlier this year to produce a mass market electric car.
Toyota got the ball rolling 10 years ago with the Prius, and still leads by a mile in the eco car market, but the competition is emerging. This alliance with Tesla in the plant where Toyota allied with GM for its first plant outside Japan, demonstrating comprehensively that the quality of Japanese cars was not a function of some cultural phenomena peculiar to Japan, but simply a function of good management (a lesson GM never really got) may be just as significant.
It is reassuring to those of us who have watched Toyota transform the manufacturing mentality of the world over the last 30 years with their development and wide sharing of TPS, that after the recent stumble over quality, a stumble some predicted as the Toyota juggernaught seemed to be taking over the auto world, that they have been able to embrace the alliance, and return to the basic values that made them great.
With luck, they will be as open about the engineering and operational evolution of the JV electric car, and the lessons they learn from the alliance with Tesla, as they have been in the past. If so we will all learn a whole lot more.
May 20, 2010 | Change, Innovation, Leadership
Being successful is hard enough, sustaining that success appears even harder, as success breeds a status quo that is focused on more of the same stuff that worked last time, but not necessarily what will work in the future. Safety first, risk elimination, self interest, and hubris appear to become the norm.
This process is pretty well documented with the benefit of hindsight, but it is not always obvious as it is happening.
Microsoft was the success story of the 20th century, it transformed the way we worked and lived, it developed a virtual monopoly in a highly contested market, it remains hugely profitable, but has it dropped the ball whilst still generating those profits on the back of past success?
Microsoft missed the transformation of the music industry, tablet computing, gaming, were wiped out in search, and are losing share in their core server software markets to Linux, and now Google has a free alternative to Office, currently with microscopic share, but perhaps it is a beginning .
The slow erosion of Microsoft a business that just a decade ago was considered sufficiently powerful to attract the attention of the anti-trust laws in the US, potentially forcing a break-up as happened to previous businesses that had developed a virtual monopoly. Now, Microsoft appears to have lost all its edge, and is just trading on past success and the mountains of cash accumulated as a result.
The AT&T telephone monopoly was broken up in 1984, probably a few years before it would have happened by the mergence of new technology, Standard Oil of New Jersey broken up by the Sherman Act in 1911 would have taken a bit longer, but would certainly not have been able to maintain it monopoly after the discovery of oil in the Middle East.
Again, we see the parallels to the natural eco-systems that provide so many lessons for corporations, where sustainable success is dependent on evolution, and change at the margins, not power over the existing environment.
May 18, 2010 | Innovation, Marketing, Strategy
Digital interactivity has moved to the centre of marketing strategy. The launch of the iPad by Apple has moved it noticeably.
I have not seen one, just read the reviews, and when you sift through the hyperbole, it seems that the iPad has a pretty good chance of changing the way a large section of the market behaves. For communication centric uses, the iPad will possibly be a revelation, but to applications that require number crunching, it will not replace a computer. Now the market will segment by what sorts of applications you require, not just the size, and performance characteristics, and PC Vs Mac segmentation that has prevailed.
The other segmenting drive is the coming battle in “e-book” publishing, which will be facinating to watch. Amazons Kindle got the ball rolling, but the momentum will be built by the iPad when they get the iBook store running properly, which should not be long. It took Apple several years to get the iTunes store running, and it created a tsunami in the music world, it may be a bit harder in books because they are simply harder to digitise, but the lessons from launching iTunes will not be lost, and the current book publishing business model is clearly about to be broken apart.
May 16, 2010 | Communication, Innovation, Leadership
A while ago facilitating a two day innovation session, I became involved in two very different, but very similar conversations during various coffee breaks.
The first was with a smart young technical bloke, who expressed the view that all the nice encouraging words expressed at the session were great, but that the business was too risk averse to actually do anything daring.
The second was with the marketing director, someone with a track record of achievement, skills, and a preparedness to have a shot, to push resource allocation and strategic boundaries. He felt that those he relied on to develop the means to execute the technical end of some of the ideas were too interested in science for the sake of it, and disinterested in the commercial and market issues he had to address.
In effect, they are both seeking the same outcome, but the language of management, the functional cultural preconceptions and perceptions have got in the way of unambiguous communication.
This is not an uncommon challenge, every innovation effort must work hard to overcome the cultural and semantic barriers to be successful.
The more attention is focused on innovation, and the higher up the tree that focus emanates from, the better to turn the words into action.
May 10, 2010 | Innovation
Largely we agree that there is a problem with the production of CO2, and that we need to do something, the argument is about what, when, how much, and who is paying.
It is a bit like insurance, you pay a bit now to mitigate the risk of ruinous pain in the future.
Bill Gates is now the largest philanthropist in the history of the world, and key amongst his activities is searching for solutions to the climatic pain we will feel if nothing changes. This link is to a TED presentation, in which Gates outlines in a way accessible to a layman, a new way of utilising the power of the uranium molecule, and ignoring someone with Gates’ history of innovative success, and with the resources he can assemble would not appear to be very sensible.
May 9, 2010 | Communication, Innovation, Social Media
I suspect neither Coke or Mentos planned for the tsunami of videos on Utube and others demonstrating the effect of a Mentos in a bottle of coke. Nevertheless, it happens, and it remains to be seen if the popularity of coke-bombs impacts the brands in any way.
Blend-it has made a business by demonstrating the blending power of their appliances by blending all sorts of things, latest is an Ipad, but this by contrast is a deliberate marketing strategy that has delivered a huge brand position for little cost.
The point is that the power of the web can be harnessed, and used to your benefit, but it is a demanding, unpredictable mistress, and just as prone to turn around and bite your bum, as it is to do you a favour.
Believing you can manage the web content that impacts on your products is the first mistake, best you can do is participate, contribute, comment, and if you do it well, as Blendtec has, you can leverage the power, never control it.
