“Companies should devote R&D to new business models just as they do to new products. A new CEO today will need to preside over a changed business model three or four times in his career, but no one really knows how to do it. It’s not taught in business schools, and there is much to learn about how to manage a workforce that is no longer just within the four walls of an organization”.
AMEN!…and AMEN! This quote by Saul Kaplan, executive director of the Rhode Island Economic Development Corporation, from CFO magazine’s “Gaming the System” article, is fascinating because of …read more

Think of a business model where a firm provides services with a global freelance resource base: is it writing? editing? software development? CFO magazine’s article on “Gaming the System” introduces TopCoder, not only as a global freelance software development operation, but one that has participants compete on providing the best code for it’s application work. This is business competition where you have to finish before knowing whether you will be paid or not, because you have to win.
It seems that TopCoder’s success and growth is based on the fact that they were more of a non-business community in the first …read more

A great article in Strategy+Business, “A Blueprint for Strategic Leadership”, concentrates on how to lead innovation. In it the authors emphasize that the best leaders pay a great deal of attention to the design of the elements around them. Seemingly basic, but powerful, things to do are:
1. Articulate purpose,
2. Create effective teams,
3. Prioritize and sequence initiatives, and
4. Redesign the organization to make execution easier.
Apart from revealing the importance of doing the right projects, the article is full of fascinating examples of the deployment of these principles by the best executives; two from the experiences of A.G. Lafley, chief executive of …read more

A Booz Allen Hamilton survey and report in Strategy+Business (register for free) found NO correlation existed between R&D spend and innovation. It turns out that higher innovation performers spent less but made sure that innovation projects aligned with corporate strategy and paid careful attention to customers. This idea that a company can spend less and innovate more makes sense. Throwing money at innovation processes that are not well organized and/or measured and not serving the customer doesn’t work.
Black and Decker revealed the two key factors related to their innovation success:
1. Strategy alignment- align innovation strategies to corporate strategy.
2. Customer focus- …read more

Sometimes you get unexpected insights. My post “What’s Harder? Project Management or Management” elicited a wonderfully simple “boxes” analogy from Ren Garcia at Accounting Solver. In it he said:
“In a standard hierarchical corporate organization, you have specializations through boxes (i.e., departments, divisions, sections, etc) identifying finance, marketing, production, human resources, etc. Frequently, the specializations become rigid over time and the boxes neglect to communicate with each other (The managers or heads of boxes are supposed to be doing this, but often neglect).
Consequently, integration of all the functions / tasks / responsibilities within the corporation becomes a difficult process. The entire …read more

 
Fascinating conversation with an executive of an agile software development firm about transformation projects as they compare to lean manufacturing initiatives. Lean transformations have settled into starting with training heavily laced with practical activities. The reason that this is so important is that the approach is NOT intuitive.
Lean requires a person to experience how the concepts can change and increase the value of a process, whether it be software development or manufacturing products. One of the most valuable exercises is the traditional lean manufacturing simulation consisting of 4-5 iterations of improvement to clearly reveal how each lean concept influences results. Many times …read more

A recent September 2007 Gartner study titled “Building Agile Manufacturing That Enables Transformation” made several great points:
1. Changing forces in market, customer expectations and technology demand more agility and quickness in business processes.
2.  Using a ”myths” leading to “misses” discussion they challenge people to look outside their environment for innovations saying that people and companies tend to “lock in” to solutions because of tradition and inability to search outside their four walls.
3. ”Chaos-tolerant” business processes are what is needed in the future. Using a technique called capable-to-promise as an example of chaos-tolerant business processes, they say that future technology will enable them.
Capable-to-promise is basically the ability to quickly …read more

 
Excellent “Strategy+Business” article (free registration required) on “See For Yourself” advice for executives wanting to short circuit innovation cycles; it is a great history on lean/”go and see” origins of Toyota, Wal-Mart and others who have adopted these techniques. The idea of short-circuiting the cycles created by the barriers of multi-level organizations, approval and budgeting processes exists in agile software development and any kind of project environment.
Most projects surface innovations as they drive to satisfy their original intent. Many of these innovations are simply canned because they don’t fit with the original specification. Key projects require an executive level approval to stray …read more

Rueben Slone, Executive VP of Supply Chain for Office Max looks outside his company for innovations. His quote in APICS magazine’s article (sorry, membership required), “Career Essentials: Adept Supply Chain Professionals Help Companies Thrive” caught my attention:
“The difference between a groove and a grave is only the depth.”
He’s speaking about comfort levels and the ability to see beyond the walls of your groove. If you become comfortable in what you are doing to the point of NOT considering new ways of doing it you can lose – your job, your company, and your career. The idea of looking outside your …read more

I had one of those “you’re messing up” conversations with a person who I have given permission to tell me such things. Miki, who writes Leadership Turn, said that my PMO emphasis seems forced and only for a big company audience. I agreed. The “Office” in PMO seems to conjure up a large group of people running projects. While that may be true, my emphasis has always been how to best set up business processes to execute strategies and bring innovative business processes into a company- any company.
The mechanism to do strategy execution and innovation is what we should be …read more