manage well

Innovation is the survival mantra of today, chanted by everyone, but acted upon only by a few. Companies that routinely invest in innovating for the future are eventually able to putpace their competitors, everything else being equal. However, not everyone is able to kickstart, manage, sustain or nurture an innovation-led culture. Large monolithic organizations often become victims of their own processes, structures and past strengths. Smaller ones generally innovate to survive and succeed, but are they always truly innovative?

I once worked at a large European medical systems company where we worked on workflow automation software for Radiology departments in hospitals. We had not one but three #1 products in the market! We were #1 in Germany and that product had a great database system. We were #1 in Sweden and that had a great workflow. And we were #1 in the Netherlands and that product had a great GUI. However, we were #Nobody in the global market. While this was ‘achieved’ due to a very decentralized governance model in that company which allowed localized innovation to meet that market’s highest priority needs, it also created islands within a global company. Local success in those national markets was super sweet, but it impeded success in global markets. At that point, I thought this was a classic large company problem – until I worked for a small company. We were a typical bay area company with several cool products in a very niche market – the only trouble was none of them looked like they were from the same company. At one time, we counted five different GUIs for our products – all different in technology, all different in style, all different in workflow, all different in product roadmaps, and all different in egos (ok, I made this up, but not by that much!). We had a virtual in-house industry – after all, who needs competitors when you have colleagues like that.

So, I witnessed excessive innovation without any direction or coordination in these two personal experiences, but I was really shocked to learn of more advanced methods, like thwarting or sabotaging innovation in the article Microsoft’s Creative Destruction. Even if just 10% of what the article claims is true (some people might argue that it is sour grapes), it still must be extremely sad and demotivating for any bright, young, enthusiastic engineer to be on one such project, only to see fruits of his labor allowed (rather, forced) to rot.

Continue reading ‘Who is sabotaging innovation in your company ?’ »

What is worse then an anarchy ? You might say that is the absolute abyss, but I think blind allegiance is even more dangerous (and that includes following the letter but tweaking the spirit – things like ‘creative accounting‘ or its parallels in every field). Anarchy at least allows for things to become ‘better’ in order to survive – whether it is the idealogy, resistance, or even musclepower, or any other ills (and hopefully at some point, social forces of constructive destruction take over). But in a land where unquestionable compliance and blind allegiance rule the roost, IMNSHO, is like a terminal patient off the ventilator support. When people are on their deathbed, they don’t regret things that they did but much rather the things they did not do!

In project management, life is no less colorful. We have process pundits (read “prescription police”) shouting from the rooftop with a megaphone on how heavens will strike them bone dead with lighting if they ever as much as strayed from the ‘standards’. When projects are being postmortemed, we don’t often ask what or why the project did something that they did, but why they did not do things that they did not do. And quite often, you find answer in the map itself – because the map did not factor-in those conditions that were actually encountered on the terrain, the blind followers just followed the Pied Piper and danced their way into the river of death. What a terrible waste of human talent.

Why do we get stuck with methods so much that our result-orientation takes a back seat ? I think there might be many answers, but some that deserve merit:

Continue reading ‘Our methodology is 100% pure, our result is another thing!’ »

Last week, NASSCOM organized a talk on innovation by Rob Shelton, co-author of “Making Innovation Work“, followed by excellent presentations by two of the previous year’s winner of NASSCOM Innovation awards, Intel India and Sloka Telecom. It was good learning to sit in Rob’s audience and listen to his perspectives on innovation. I liked his (probably) favorite punchline (because he must have repeated it couple of times during his presentation): “How you innovate determines why you innovate“. I think this is a great way to sum up if an organization is undertaking innovation as a strategic differentiator or just to play catch-up on a tactical level.

In his view, the three building blocks of innovation are leadership, culture and process. His perspective is that innovation originates from business strategy could be either a technology innovation or a business model innovation. I think techies who spend a lot of time doing the ‘core’ tech stuff don’t easily recognize the presence or importance of a business innovation, but from a business perspective, it does make a lot of sense. What Apple did with iPhone might not be so much of a technology innovation (because neither the technology nor the MP3 player as a product were really new) but more of a business innovation, especially when you view the entire food chain of iPhone: iTunes allow a seamless integration of iPhone with the music stores and allow maintaining a music library and buying and downloading music as micropayments and choice at song-level (as opposed to the Music CD model of buying per CD even if you all you want is a single song).

When we consider these two factors as primary vehicles of delivery of an innovation, we can consider a 2×2 grid on how close is the change to its existing state. If both technology and business changes are brand-new, then we are talking of Radical Innovation. However in his view, Radical innovation is very infrequent, Breakthrough innovation leads to high growth and Incremental innovation leads to average growth. Breakthrough Innovation is when any one of the axis is new and the other factor is close to an existing one, and Incremental Innovation, as the name suggests, is very close everything exisiting.

Continue reading ‘Why do you Innovate ?’ »

We human beings love to innovate, create better ideas and solutions, achieve efficiency in operations and so on. To do so, most people ask for the latest and greatest tools, the newest of the management fads, the really costly consultants so that they could ‘innovate’. The solitary aim and hope being those ‘new silver bullets’ have the right power to fix your problems.

However, they could not be any further from truth – real innovation happens when there are real constraints on the system and not when you have infinte amount of resources and problem-solving tools. When you try to remove or reduce the constraints just by adding resources alone (which could be time, money, people, tools, methodology, ..whatever), you are actually making the problem worse. Without challenging the people to come up with smart solutions, you are asking them to move away from that ‘source of innovation’ and do something else. This might be ok in some cases, but invariably, it deprives the golden opportunity to find some real cool way to solve complex problems. A far more effective way would be to respect that constraint without trying to satiate the bottleneck by throwing money (or whatever you can afford to throw) at the problem.

The great Indian epic, Mahabharata, has the story of lower-caste prince Eklavya who is an expert archer and wants to become the world’s best archer ever. He goes to the guru of noble princes, Dronacharya, who refuses to teach him as he comes from lower caste, so what if he is a prince. Not to give up so easily, Eklavya makes a statue of his ‘guru’ and ‘learns’ from him and become the ace archer ! Who says you need a guru to learn something – you can even learn something without having the right tools in hands. When I was growing up, my father told me the story of a poor boy who is determined to learn typing and win the typing contest. The only problem is that he doesn’t know typewriting and has no means to attend typing classes. He comes up with a novel idea: he copies the QWERTY layout of the typewriter on a piece of paper and practices ‘hitting’ the key on that piece of paper ! After a month of practicing ‘typing’, he finally makes it !

Continue reading ‘Ability to innovate is directly proportional to constraints in the system’ »

The world of new product development is (NPD) is an extremely challenging one, and while the output of such an endeavor is never a sureshot guarantee, the journey itself is immensely fulfilling. Edison was reportedly asked by his assistant on not being successful with his electric bulb work despite two years of efforts, something that Edison could not understand… “what failure…we have discovered so many ways how an electric bulb won’t work”.  In a corporate context, however, we all must work within boundaries of finite resources (time, resources, people, etc.) to create the next telephone, the next microwave, the next LCD television, the next Windows or the next Google. It is perhaps the dream of every professional to be part of such life-altering Greenfield projects (many times also referred to as the ‘Version One’ in software world) and make a lasting impact on world around us.

However, innovation doesn’t only happen in such large doses. It also happens in small doses: small-small daily changes, enhancements, modifications, improvements done in thousands and millions of places in a product such that the final impact is as breathtaking as the version one. In fact, some might consider such ‘brownfield’ effort as much, or even more, challenging than the Greenfield because in a brownfield effort, one must work around constraints and ground realities that are not up for change. Irrespective, there are adequate challenges and learning opportunities in any endeavor that creates, or improves upon an existing product or service. This is the opportunity for a technical professional to sometimes work as an artist and make her lasting impression on the canvas, while also working as a child building grand designs of lego building blocks. As a manager, the fun is little more challenging than for others J

While a traditional project manager applies all his knowledge and skills to synthesize all tasks, inputs, resources and constraints to build a plan to execute the project, a project manager working on a new product development endeavor must recognize that the work has innate challenges, and quite often the task is a wicked problem.  There is an element of risk, a certain amount of discovery that in fact makes working on such a project worthwhile. It is not by accident that the best talent in the world gets drawn to companies that routinely engage in such work. Welcome to the world where the only objective is to create disruption ! However, traditional project management is all about applying time-tested sound principles and practices to bring a project under control and achieve all its goals. However, managing a disruptive endeavor is much more than that – to begin with, not all goals might be known. Some risks might be completely immitigable, and one must simply learn to accept them. Many of the activities in an NPD project might actually be undertaken for the first time, and hence for all practical purposes is more of research work than a mere development.  In short, one might not be able to apply all practices of traditional project management in letter and spirit and yet be able to create the right disruption that is envisaged. However, it is not an impossible problem.

Continue reading ‘How do you manage a Disruption ?’ »

I just read a nice story on the home page of Luke Watson, and was struck by its ‘simple power’. It goes like this:

A few years ago, there was story going around about a farmer who won a particular category in the Nebraska State Fair four years in a row, which is unheard of there. The local newspaper sent a reporter to interview the farmer to find out what he did to achieve such a feat.

The reporter asked, “What’s your secret? Do you have any special corn seed?”
The farmer replied, “Absolutely, I develop my very own corn seed.”
The reporter said, “Okay, so that’s your secret – you developed your very own corn seed.”
And the farmer said, “No, not particularly.”
The reporter exclaimed, “I don’t understand. What’s your secret, then?”
The farmer said, “Well, I’ll tell you. I develop my own seed, and then I give it to my neighbors.”
The reporter said, “Huh? You develop your own seed and then give it to your neighbors? Why would you do that?” The reporter was incredulous – why would anyone in his right mind develop his own award-winning seed and then just give it away??
The farmer said, “You don’t understand how corn is pollinated. It’s pollinated from neighboring fields, and if you have fields around you that don’t have top-quality corn, then your own fields are not going to grow top-quality corn. But if my neighbors’ fields have strong corn, then I’ll have awesome corn! That’s how I won the Nebraska State Fair four times in a row.”

Continue reading ‘Are you helping your competitors succeed ?’ »