|
Reprinted from Keep the Joint Running.
|
ManagementSpeak: We want world-class best practices, people, and processes here.
Translation: We want world-class brown-nosers here.
This week's anonymous contributor is a world-class translator. |
If it isn't a miracle, it's close.
A full-page ad from General Motors displayed an appealing-looking
(except for Chevy's hokey bow-tie logo) Malibu. The ad's tag-line: "May
the best car win."
Other than its Cadillac brand, General Motors hasn't sold the
desirability of its cars in decades. It's finally pursuing a
seldom-stated business panacea: Sell products people want to buy.
This seems to be the year for business panaceas. Not a few recent books have presented the formula for business success.
Adam Hartung's Create Marketplace Disruption
insists that sustainable success can only come from "white spaces"
where you create or redefine marketplaces rather than competing in
existing ones.
Meanwhile, Michael Hugos figures the secret is Business Agility
-- the ability to rapidly respond to opportunity, supported by IT
that's integrated into the business and ready to support the "good
enough now beats perfect too late" principle.
And, as mentioned last week, Steven Spear has joined the fray with Chasing the Rabbits, which concludes that success comes from understanding your operation more deeply than your competitors.
Every one of these books contains excellent ideas and advice. Except ... they disagree, with each other and with earlier the-answer books like Jim Collins's Good to Great.
What's going on? The authors used differing criteria to select their organizational models, that's what.
Good to Great relied on long-term growth of shareholder value. Create Marketplace Disruption
found companies that succeeded by doing what the title implies, and
others that failed by apparently failing to do so, with Apple as the
exemplar of success and General Motors as the exemplar of failure.
Business Agility was based on the author's first-hand experience, and Chasing the Rabbits started with Toyota and followed with other organizations that pursued similar approaches and achieved success by doing so.
Choose different role models; reach different conclusions.
I'm rarely certain, but I'm certain of this: Chasing the Rabbits
in particular will meet with lots of lip service and little
follow-through. To understand why, first consider a very different
realm.
Imagine you wanted to contribute to the fund of human knowledge with
respect to, say, string theory. Here's what you don't do: Post your
resume on Monster.com, get hired, go through orientation and a bit of
on-the-job training, find your cubicle, and start running experiments
at the Large Hadron Collider.
To make new contributions to a scientific field you first have to learn what is already known.
In Spear's high-velocity organizations, new employees face a similar
if less brilliance-demanding situation. Because these organizations are
designed from top to bottom to gain deep knowledge of how things work,
new employees first have to acquire the relevant parts of that
knowledge before they can be productive. Even line workers receive
weeks of training before they are allowed to participate in the
building of real products for sale. For managers, the time is measured
in months ... essential if they are to make positive contributions
instead of doing damage.
Everything about Spear's book is convincing. And it completely fails
to account for Apple Computer, whose success Hartung explains rather
well. Apple has been a spectacular success in portable electronics and
entertainment distribution. Its success is due to its ability to
reinvent marketplaces, even though it's the anti-Toyota of quality (the
first several iPod generations sported defect rates of 20% and more,
which Steve Jobs defended as normal ... not to mention the reports of
spontaneous iPod combustion.)
Spear's "rabbits" are high velocity in very deliberate ways that
have an entirely different tone from Hugos's differently-successful
agile businesses. The rabbits get better and better at what they choose
to do. Agile businesses get better and better at responding to novel
situations.
It sure would be nice if, instead of presenting the answer, authors would present an answer and describe the circumstances for which their answer is suited.
But since they don't, I will.
Start with an old formulation -- that business strategies fall into
three categories: Product innovation, customer relationships, and
operational excellence.
Hartung's "Phoenix Principle" provides strong guidance for companies
that depend on product innovation. Hugos's agility is for those that
live and die on strong customer relationships, and the individually
tailored services they depend on. Operational excellence is where
Spear's high-velocity rabbits hold sway.
You need to integrate IT into the rest of the business,
collaborating throughout to help it achieve and maintain success. And
as the plethora of convincing panaceas makes clear, while many formulas
work somewhere, none work everywhere.
Your challenge: Figuring out which will work at your "where," and what IT has to do to support it.
It's KJR's business panacea: Form follows function.
Robert
Lewis is president of IT Catalysts, Inc., a consultancy focused on
improving IT organizational effectiveness and integration with the
enterprise. Contact him at
This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it
.
Copyright 2009, IS Survivor Publishing, all rights reserved.
Only registered users can write comments.
Please login or register. |
