Which is why you have to feel sorry for Steven Spear.
Spear, you'll recall, authored Chasing the Rabbit (2008) --
an in-depth analysis of what makes high-performance organizations tick.
It's a fine book. Spear based much of his analysis on Toyota, though,
which has managed to mess up gas, brakes and steering ... pretty much
the entire driving experience.
The easy conclusion is that Spear is a chump and his book a waste of time.
The correct conclusion, it appears, is that his advice is right on
the money, and it's too bad Toyota's executive team stopped taking it.
That, at least, is what's reported by Blaine Harden in a piece that recently ran in the Washington Post ("'Toyota Way' was lost on road to phenomenal worldwide growth," 2/13/2010).
The lessons for IT:
-
Weakening an organization is a risky proposition:As
Harden explained, "... growth itself derailed the Toyota Way, blurring
its focus on quality, thinning its stable of expert mentors and
undermining its capacity to respond to consumer complaints."
Stretch
your IT staff too thin by trying to "do more with less" and in the long
run you'll face problems parallel in every respect to what Toyota faces
today.
According
to Harden, Toyota's executives were certain complaints about the
Prius's brakes were just problems with driver perception ... right up
until it had to recall 400,000 of them.
-
You always test: The question is how much of your
testing occurs after you've put your product into production. Shinichi
Sasaki, Toyota's vice president for quality control, ascribed much of
its problems to inadequate testing of new designs ... especially for
varying weather conditions.
How's your stress testing these days?
Toyota isn't the only organization you can learn from. Take Microsoft.
Once upon a time, Microsoft was a coherent organization, focused on beating its competitors (see "Predators vs ecosystems," Keep the Joint Running, 3/2/1998).
That's no longer the case. Take the sad case of its tablet computer
- a device that deserved to win in the marketplace, and might have done
so had it not been for internal politics.
At least that's the view of Dick Brass, the executive responsible
for Microsoft's Tablet program in the early 2000s. In an opinion piece
published in the New York Times last week ("Microsoft's Creative Destruction,"
2/4/2010) he described how the executive in charge of MS Office
personally insisted on crippling its integration with tablet-style
computing.
The lesson for IT is clear ... at least as clear as ClearType, whose
introduction internal politics delayed for a decade: When you allow
internal rivalries to fester, you'll cripple the technology you deploy.
One of the most important roles any leader plays is to instill common
purpose to all employees. Fail that and you won't succeed at much of
anything else.
Here's one more lesson, provided in the interest of fairness even though it's preliminary.
Much as I hate to be predictable, it's taken from Apple and its new
iPad. Ignore the unfortunate-but-inevitable name, its already
well-publicized limitations, and the near-complete confusion as to what
the iPad actually is for. Instead, look at it strategically as a
potential Kindle killer.
The nature of the competition between Amazon and Apple ensures Apple
might win small but Amazon will win big. That's because the Kindle
Store will happily sell eBooks to iPad users, but if Apple plans to
sell ... iBooks? ... in its iTunes store to Kindle users, it's a
well-kept secret. Advantage Amazon.
Apple's reported publisher-friendly pricing is, by definition,
higher than the competing consumer-friendly pricing provided by the
Kindle Store. Advantage Amazon again.
On Apple's side of the ledger, for about twice the price you can change pages using gestures instead of buttons.
So expect those light-duty travelers who can live with its
limitations to buy iPads, using them to buy eBooks from the Kindle
Store. Those who can't will buy Kindles, using them to buy eBooks from
the Kindle Store.
Apple is the corporate equivalent of some IT professionals - those
used to being the smartest person in the room. Their confidence serves
them well when they are the smartest person in the room.
When they're just one smart person among many, though, their confidence becomes arrogance -- a game-losing strategy.
