Posts

Sense of Urgency (Part 1)

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In conversations with some of our customers, we are seeing an increased emphasis about meeting compliance objectives and less about new products and making money.  We all know of companies where the brilliant team of product development experts were slowly transformed into Quality people.

More and more places that I visit I find bureaucracy slowly crowding out the creative types.

This is serious stuff.

This is not happening everywhere.  There are companies as well as nations that understand the importance of hard work and time to market.  Creative destruction is still happening, but it might be you who is being deconstructed.

We need to look no further than our own government and returning to the moon.  To paraphrase Pence – “It is not like we have not done it before.”

I suggest a heightened sense of urgency is in-order.  At your company are the really important things getting proper attention?

Good Books (Part 2)

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About fifteen years ago I was chatting with Michael Porter author of the classic —Competitive Strategy at a field hockey game where our daughters were playing. I could not resist asking him if he had read Clay Christensen’s The Innovator’s Dilemma, and if so, what he thought about it. He said (with a big grin), besides his own books most business books were not worth the paper they were printed on. He went on however to praise Christensen’s work.
innovatorsdilemmaThe Innovator’s Dilemma is about how unexpected technologies come along and beat the daylights out of existing business. Often these technologies appear crude, imperfect and unlikely to be transformative. Technologies that are barely “good enough”. Examples might be the cell phone or the personal computer. No one recognized the impact of these inventions. No one saw them coming — ask AT&T, Data General and DEC.

Highly recommended addition to your reading list, but keep in mind that it is a bit dated. It is the beginning of the stream of thought which is now represented by Anti-Fragile.

Porter’s Competitive Strategy is also recommended — but it is focused on business strategy.

Good Books (Part 1)

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There are very few decent business books in general, and a rare one indeed relevant to product development. If I read one business-related book every few years it is remarkable. Time would be better spent re-reading Shakespeare, history or the Bible. Think about it: If Don Quixote is still in print after hundreds of years, might this be a more valuable read than Who Moved My Cheese?

One important contemporary book is Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Anti-Fragile.  This is the upgrade to his prior work, The Black Swan.

While some might argue that this is a book about finance, it has much broader impact.

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The book has over five hundred pages, almost all of which have to be read to understand the entire tome.

One cannot easily summarize it in a paragraph – but here goes:

Major events, while in retrospect obvious, cannot be predicted. Examples might be 9/11, the invention of the micro-computer, and the Great Depression. No matter how carefully one plans, these kinds of events are missed. We need to understand that these unpredictable events (Black Swans) happen, and we need to be prepared for the unexpected.

So why is this important for product development? Readers of this blog have probably noted references to luck or chance. A Black Swan does not have to be something bad. It can well be an unexpected good event.  Anti-Fragile is how to be robust in a world where we cannot predict the future.

Taking advantage of unexpected outcomes is at the core of invention.

Methodology Gives Those With No Ideas Something to Do

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The title above was taken from Mason Cooley’s “City Aphorisms”. You have got to love it.

In brief – here is how large corporations approach product development. It begins with idea generation. This is the brain storming – the hard-to-define process aptly called “The Fuzzy Front End”. While there are scholarly works dedicated to just this portion of new product development, this is probably the least well-understood part of the process.

Ideas that successfully exit the “front end” will then go through a series of stage/gates before finally being commercialized as a new product. These stages are relatively easy to define and are usually well-understood by the host company.

As much has been written about The Fuzzy Front End as well as Stage/Gate, I recommend other sources for a more detailed explanation.

Despite the existence of this conceptual framework, companies have a very difficult time innovating successfully.

This blog will explore why this is and what can be done about it.