”All is in a man’s hands and he lets it slip from cowardice, that’s an axiom. It would be interesting to know what it is men are most afraid of. Taking a new step, uttering a new word is what they fear most…”
Category Archives: management innovation
Are your business silos working for you – or bringing your company down?
Have you ever wondered about the effectiveness of business silos? Most of us have seen them or worked in them.
The metrics, the P&L and certainly the culture, do not encourage co-operation between divisions, capabilities or regions. The results can look good from silo to silo – maybe – but the global result for the business may not be so strong.Resources are often duplicated, efforts may be directed silo against silo, and there is frequently internal competition between executives.
From inside it is often impossible to discern what would be the greater good, and the pressure to protect the near-in is too great to resist.
The Economist tells the story of how this culture changed at Ford, and how this change is credited with its recent massive financial turnaround. Here is an excerpt from that story:
Soon after Alan Mulally arrived as Ford’s chief executive in September 2006 he organized a weekly meeting of his senior managers and asked them how things were going. Fine, fine, fine, came the answers from around the table.
“We are forecasting a $17 billion loss and no one has any problems!” an incredulous Mr Mulally exclaimed.
When he asked the same question the next week, Mark Fields, head of Ford’s operations in the Americas, raised his hand, and – in what once would have been a moment of career suicide – admitted that a defective part threatened to delay the launch of an important new car. The room fell silent, until Mr Mulally began to clap his hands. “Great visibility,” the new boss added.
Four years on, Ford is making record profits. Its revival began with this new willingness to recognize its faults. In the old days management at Ford was preoccupied with executive rivalry, recalls Mr Fields. “Now it is about who’s helping whom,” he says. When Mr Fields stuck his hand up at that meeting and won Mr Mulally’s approval, colleagues soon began chipping in with helpful suggestions to overcome the problem with the new car. It was more than a symbolic moment for a business which used to be run like a collection of principalities rather than a global enterprise. As far as Mr Mulally is concerned, demolishing those management divisions has been the most important factor in turning Ford around.
How to Develop a Happier, More Productive Creative Team
There are people in your company who don’t know what your company does. Sometimes people who sit right next to each other have no idea what their colleagues do, and they don’t have any way of understanding what it all adds up to. Are the designers talking to the tech people? Do the creative directors talk to each other? Does the receptionist know what the company does? Do they know where their part fits into the overall vision? Do they know what the overall vision is? If each understands what the other can do, they can use it and learn from it. If people know where their part fits in and what the company as a whole is trying to do, they can help to support and grow it, and the organization will get stronger.
There are people on your team who aren’t on your team. You might have a hard time believing this (or not), but I have actually met someone in a company whose personal agenda is working against the greater good. (“Say it’s not so,” I hear you cry!) The creative business encourages individualism and outside-the-box thinking, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have some common goals and work together. There are creatives who go to their workstation, put on their headphones and don’t resurface all day. You know who I mean. Get in there and talk to them. Find out what they want. Find out how you can help them, and how they can help others in the organization: and in so doing make a better product and build their career and the business together.
These things could never happen in your company …right? But I’ve seen it happen all around. Take a look and see. Maybe there are some simple ways to engage and involve your team so you can build a stronger, happier, more cohesive and more productive creative operation.
Goofing off can be good for business
I can’t stress enough the importance of downtime. And this is the time of year when you can practice taking some and remember how good it is. Turn off your internet (but not until after you’ve read this article). Put away your smartphone. Tell people you have gone away and can’t be reached. Go away and be unreachable. Read a novel. Catch a fish. Build a wall. Cut the grass. Go to a concert. Invite your friends for a bbq.
And do these things whole heartedly. Don’t be checking in. Don’t be planning next week’s to-do list.
And here is an interesting idea I got from a commencement address given by David Foster Wallace shortly before his death – don’t be the center of your own universe. Or at least consider the universe that you inhabit – whether its your family or your job or your town – and look at it afresh and consider your position in it and where it fits with everything else and what everyone else in it is doing and feeling and what the opportunities are and what your dreams are and close your eyes and let them fly.
DFW tells the following story: “There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, “Morning, boys, how’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, “What the hell is water?”
So go think about your water. What is your water? And where can it take you. Go read the inside of your eyelids and see what they tell you.
It is summer. Give yourself a break. All the stuff you have been thinking about and fretting about and staying awake about will still be in there, but it will be sorting itself out in your unconscious. It will be making connections you couldn’t make if you were trying. Let it simmer and percolate.
Put on the calendar the days you will be taking off and go camping. Or hiking. Go on, challenge yourself. There is nothing like some serious walking to keep you concentrated, focused. You think about your feet and your water bottle. You think about your food and the awesomeness of nature, or you think about how waterproof is your poncho and where you will pitch your tent. It is completely engrossing and it is a wonderful way to put the cares of the workaday world aside and sort themselves out without your conscious interference.
Give it a try.
Could you be stifling innovation instead of encouraging it?
Change is a pre-requisite for survival – whether as an individual or as part of an organization.
How are you going to get the people in your team to think and act innovatively so that you can change and improve the services or products you offer to keep up with demand and with the competition.
The challenge is nicely laid out by Prof John Bessant in his eminently readable book “High Involvement Innovation” (see below).
When you start to look at whether your organization supports innovation or whether it actually inhibits it, a good way is to ask people to tell you their favorite “killer phrases”. This will quickly show the ways that ideas are getting killed – and how this can work to prevent the kind of effective innovations that we perhaps thought we were encouraging.
They often take for form of “Great idea…BUT…” BUT: now that’s how to stop an idea in its tracks. If people get used being told “no” in these ways they will soon stop even trying to propose new ideas.
Here are some “killer phrases” running inside people’s heads:
I’ve got a good idea – BUT
No-one will listen to me
It’s not my job to offer ideas
Someone else must already have thought of it
I’ll look stupid if I say anything
At the group or organization level they might look like this:
That’s a great idea – BUT
We’ve already tried it
We’ve never tried it
We don’t have time / money/people/other resources
X wouldn’t like it
X would like it (!)
It’s not the way we do things around here
We did that last year and look what happened.
So start by asking yourself or your teams what are their killer phrases. Then you will begin to see what has to be done to alter the climate so that the ideas, some of which will mean the difference between success and failure, can come to the surface and be taken seriously, tested and implemented.
If your culture has evolved to stifle innovation – then innovation you will not get.