Noise Between Stations

Author: Victor

  • European School of Management and Technology

    In Berlin over the holidays, we walked passed this beautiful building with a classical center and modern wings. It’s the former Staatsratsgebäude (East German government center), the portal from a pre-war city palace which the East Germans built around. It was recently restored and only days away from the becoming the Berlin campus of the European School of Management and Technology.

    This is a curious thing, as the Germans embrace a greater sense of class equality than, say, the United States. Private schools are rare, and the absence of a world-class management or economics school is conspicious when the Brits, Swiss, and French sport such institutions. My wife explained the formation of this school was controversial, and when laws govern whom a university may hire as a professor, I’ll be interested to see how entrepreneurially they can function.

    I will say the spirit of the place, based on the language on their website, strikes a chord with a progressive, creative type like myself. Listen to this:

    Our school is inspired by the Bauhaus vision. Our commitment to this tradition places us in direct line with the principles of the founding members of the Weimar Bauhaus around the person of Walter Gropius. The latter gave substance to the daring idea to make creativity in architecture and design subject to the mastery of technical craftsmanship, and in this manner, to eliminate the boundary between free and applied arts. In the same way that the Bauhaus elevated the role of craftsmanship at the time, the application of managerial knowledge is intended to attain a radically new status at esmt…

    This means engineers and scientists who can turn technology into profitable business, financial professionals who can go beyond analysis, architects and lawyers who can develop and lead new business…

  • Full-on cocktails, plus panel discussion, Feb 28 in NYC

    If you’ll be in New York at the end of February you should consider attending the Design 2.0 day of presentations and panel discussion on strategy, design, brand, product, service, customer experience, and all things innovation. Also, full-on cocktails. Among the speakers will be Andrew Zolli, of whom I’ve written, “If you ever get a chance to hear Andrew Zolli make sure you do.” So really, no reason not to go. See you there!

  • Periodic process renewal

    There’s a funny (or cruel, depending) dilemma to improving your work over time. If you don’t do it, your organization becomes less and less valuable over time, gradually failing, and dying an unfortunate death. If you do all the time, you never get to benefit from each change very long and probably suffer from change fatigue. We’ve even labeled these positions in our worldviews: conservatives want to keep things just the way they are – thank you very much – and progressives always want to embrace the something better that’s just around the corner.

    My fix for this is simple: Instead of never changing or constantly changing, set a regular period when you revisit your process. And just so you’re pretty sure the change is leading to improvement, have a simple way to keep track of what you did, why, and what happened as result. Not every change will result in improvement, but at least you’ll know that and not repeat your mistakes.

    We can look at this in evolutionary terms using the example of sharks. A shark doesn’t evolve constantly, it evolves by having baby sharks (which are amusingly called pups) that have unique DNA that make them more or less successful than their parents. While each shark is alive, her life is a time of trying out her DNA and either succeeding or failing to have her own pups. Reproduction is a time of trying slight variations (aka gene mutation) on what worked before and only passing on the DNA of successful sharks. Over time, sharks become more and more successful at being sharks.

    I’ve started developing a simple model of the nature and frequency of process change in companies based on what I’ve seen in the dozens of companies I’ve worked for or with. The model boils it down to three types:

    1. Deteriorating: When the company was young they designed and established productive methods, but over time the methods gradually lose value as the environment changes. We see this trend in the Management Practices across Firms & Nations survey.
    2. Chaos: Change is constant, usually reactionary, and there’s little history of past changes to help judge the effectiveness of future changes.
    3. Periodic Renewal: The company designs and establishes some methods and measures the results, periodically revisiting them and making improvements.

    I might draw them like this:

    And I might track the change over time like this:
    (diagram coming soon)

    Periodic renewal requires the organizational discipline to stick with what works as well as the resolve to occasionally improve it, a careful balance. For many companies, the closest analog is periodic performance reviews. We don’t formally judge our colleague’s performance and award raises every day, we do it periodically (or suffer the wrath of seriously pissed off colleagues). How good is your performance review process? Judging your ability to improve this process over successive versions may indicate your current ability to institute periodic renewal of other processes.

  • Employee-Customer mashups

    For the sake of innovation, it’s tempting to mash up people internal and external to a company. We’ve seen how important it is that employees be customers, like JetBlue’s employee-centered priorities, and how customers can contribute to companies. This could be one of the most important changes in culture we can bring to companies, but not one of the easiest. Beside the discomfort it will arouse in traditional corporate cultures, we’re still figuring out how to do it.

    For example, I’ve realized lately in working to co-create with clients that it needs to be gradual process, because the party you’re creating with doesn’t share the same content or process and needs time to learn. Rather than strive for immediate immersion in creation, I’ve taken a hint from surgeons who say, “watch one, do one, teach one.” Spreading these steps over whole projects may be necessary for both learning and change to happen.

    Two more examples come from friends who have recently launched exciting projects that mash up “internal” and “external” resources. Christina Wodtke — a co-founder of MIG — has launched Public Square, software that recognizes the importance of reader-contributed content by allowing quality rankings of people and content to better balance editorial direction and reader input.

    And Lou Rosenfeld just launched Rosenfeld Media, a publishing venture in which readers play a vital role in everything from deciding which topics get covered to influencing the actual authoring decisions.

  • Consumer control and grocery shopping

    Another way to illustrate the evolution of consumer control…


    Shopping in 1920, photo courtesy Theodor Horydczak


    Shopping in 1960, photo courtesy Country Joe


    Shopping in 2005, photo courtesy Nicole Gesmondi

  • Tell the Truth, part II

    So how do we tell the truth? Here are a few ways I found work:

    Inform the uniformed: Challenging the accepted situation by citing reality may get you sent to Siberia. But it depends on whom you’re talking to. Over time executives become ill informed – ironically – because timid employees avoid giving them bad news. For the executives, the truth becomes a rare and valuable revelation, and you a valuable messenger if you relay the truth in a way that isn’t tied to your personal agenda.

    Collectively decide to be honest: Being honest is much harder than it sounds. Much of the mediocrity in companies is a result of superficial niceties that make it impossible to productively critique ideas. Being honest means praising ideas worthy of praise, and criticizing ideas worthy of criticism. Before doing it on an individual level, everyone in a group should agree that honest interaction is necessary to improve the organization, and that honest expression is not personal condemnation.

    Reframe ideas: Any current business issue stands on an implicit context of ideas that are part of the company’s culture. This collected wisdom is the frame through which new information is interpreted, even if the freshness date of those ideas is long past, such as growing for years but thinking, “We’re only a small company.” You can reframe the issues by presenting an alternate idea supported by a different context. “Now that we have 2000 employees and four offices, we have the capacity to consider exporting our products.”

    Appeal to science: Disinformation is rare among scientists and engineers because their livelihood depends on working within the physical constraints of reality. You’re not likely to hear, “That’s right, Victor, we’ll have that Internet bandwidth commodity exchange done by Tuesday afternoon.” When I work closely with engineers and programmers, they ruthlessly critique business ideas because they know exactly what it takes to implement them (and know they’ll later be responsible if they don’t speak up now). Citing scientific reality – or aligning yourself with scientists – becomes a useful sieve to filter out disinformation.

  • Tell the Truth

    Over time a company’s official history becomes ideology and people need the truth of reality to help them grow.

    On my first trip to Berlin I toured the former Deutsche Demokratische Republik including a number of museums and memorials describing the former communist state, the Berlin Wall, and life within its boundaries. We’re now well aware of the reasons the totalitarian state collapsed. Central planning failed to provide for the needs of citizens. Official “full employment” resulted in idleness and dissatisfying jobs. And the need to further a core ideology made experimentation – and therefore innovation – highly unlikely. Nothing remarkable was possible, the human spirit suffered, and eventually the whole system collapsed.

    It reminded me of some companies I’ve worked for.

    “Comrade Lombardi, I think you are mistaken in your effort to respond to these so-called customers, as the Party Leader has already informed us, there are no customers. There are only distribution end points. I am sure that lowering your bread rations will help you understand this.”

    This management-knows-all behavior creates fear that quickly overcomes the simple desire to tell the truth. When official disinformation is possible in entire countries, it easily happens in companies.

    Central planning. Unnecessarily large teams. Official ideology. Poor moral. Are you working in a totalitarian company?

  • The Bells remind Google who runs the Internet

    From the Wall Street Journal today:

    Phone Companies Set Off A Battle Over Internet Fees

    Large phone companies, setting the stage for a big battle ahead, hope to start charging Google Inc., Vonage Holdings Corp. and other Internet content providers for high-quality delivery of music, movies and the like over their telecommunications networks.

    Ah, the value chain. Expect to see Google buy the rest of it.

  • The Anti-Trend

    Springwise offers a handy heuristic for forecasting…

    Talk about conflicting trends: domestic outsourcing is more popular than ever, yet at the same time consumers are DIY-ing like there’s no tomorrow: as a hobby or to save money. For every trend, there’s an anti-trend!

  • Govindarajan on the new innovation

    William J. Holstein interviews Dartmouth professor Vijay Govindarajan for the New York Times. Here’s an excerpt:

    Q. So would you say the chief executive has an important role in making breakthrough innovation possible?

    A. A tremendously important role. I consider the C.E.O.’s role in the modern corporation to be building the capacity to continuously innovate in a breakthrough way (emphasis mine). The C.E.O. doesn’t create the strategy, but should be listening to the voices of people who are able to see the future. It is the role of the C.E.O. to spot and encourage them. Then, once an idea has promise, you must help build a separate organization around that person.

  • Work with a partner

    There are times when working with a single other person – pair management – is better than working alone or with a team.

    Some professions such as police have a long tradition of working in pairs. Recently software programmers have started to practice pair programming where two people sit together and alternate roles of writing and reviewing software code. The resulting quality improvements can make this process more productive overall.

    Pair management has some of the benefits of teams. A pair will generate more ideas than one person working alone. A pair generates a greater diversity of ideas, increasing the chances of having better ideas. A pair can work in parallel, going faster by simultaneously working on two related tasks. A pair can improve quality by working together on the same task. A pair of people can morally support each other, and people feel more satisfaction and learn more when working in pairs than alone.

    A pair can work more quickly than a team because communication and coordination between two people is easier than among a team.

    Do it now
    Begin with a defined project or task that can benefit from more than one person but doesn’t require a team to complete. Collaborate with someone who has complimentary skills and select an interaction style from the list below.

    Work with a partner who has complimentary skills, such as:

    • Different skills with the same perspective, such as a more creative person to compliment a more analytical person
    • Similar skills with a different perspective, such as knowledge from inside the organization to compliment knowledge from outside the organization
    • Broader or deeper skills, such a range of relevant experience to compliment deep expertise in a particular area

    When working with a partner, choose an interaction style suited to the activity at hand, for example:

    • In continuous review one person does the work and the partner continuously reviews the quality of the work. The pair periodically switches roles.
    • In problem solving both partners work together to solve a problem through tasks like generating ideas and building an analytical model.
    • In complimentary tasks each partner does a different task that benefits from real-time communication with the other partner. For example, if you’re testing a prototype one person can run the test and the other person records the results.

    The main pitfall to avoid when working in a pair is groupthink. Partners need to feel comfortable showing healthy skepticism toward each other’s ideas. Careful matching of personalities is important in forming effective pairs. For example, it can be difficult for someone to provide honest feedback to another person higher up in the organizational hierarchy.

    There are times when working alone or with a proper team is better, see Work Alone and Work as a Team.

  • Work as a team

    A group of people working as a team is often the best way to complete a project because teams can generate more work of higher quality than individuals or large groups.

    Do it now
    Form a team of people for a project requiring new ideas and more work than one or two people can do. Keep the team small (seven or fewer people). Include complimentary skill sets and knowledge in the people you choose. Establish a goal for the team and establish a way the team should work together. Ensure everyone knows the whole team is responsible for the team’s performance; no one person can succeed without the whole team succeeding.

    A team can generate many ideas of a greater diversity because each person contributes their own ideas. A team can work quickly by simultaneously performing several tasks. A team can improve quality be checking each other’s work. Through collaboration (see Create by designing together), teams can apply complimentary expertise to one goal.

    For small or well-defined tasks, teams can be less productive than other configurations of people. At some point the added communication and coordination required among a team results in diminishing benefits and it becomes better to work alone or in pairs.

    The biggest pitfall is a group of people working together who think they’re a team, but don’t act as one. If each individual primarily works in his or her own department and collaborates by trading emails and meeting occasionally, this is not a team. A team is a small group of people collaborating closely on a daily basis to accomplish a defined goal.

  • Work alone

    There are times when working alone is more productive than working with a partner or a team.

    Working alone is useful when you need to expand on an existing idea, to carefully synthesize information, or do imaginative thinking. Working alone can also be useful to finish a familiar task quickly without interference.

    Working alone isn’t always the most productive; particularly when you want to generate a large diversity of ideas, accomplish a team’s worth of work, or check the quality of your own work. There are times when working with a partner or with a team is better.

    Do it now
    Reserve time on your calendar for working alone. Go to a quiet place that stimulates productive work, like a library. If you have a definitive goal, start by planning how you’ll use your time.

  • Create by designing together

    Working directly with other people to design or build something – co-creation – can produce significantly more productive results when creating a product than talking only.

    Do it now
    At the next meeting of your team, set a single goal for everyone to accomplish together. Post big sheets of paper on the wall and give each person a marker to contribute. Ask everyone to express his or her thoughts on the goal in the form of writing/drawing on the wall.

    When talking, people may address the same topic but talk about it so that they further their own goals instead of the group’s goals. To align the group, set a goal that the product must produce and instruct them to work together to create a product that achieves that goal. The group can work on building the actual product, or design it on paper or electronically, though to Radiate information it’s often best to start with big sheets of paper or a whiteboard. By changing the style of work from discussion to creation the individual agendas become secondary to the shared agenda of designing the product.

    Here’s a story: A programmer and a marketer were in a meeting talking about creating a new watch for runners. “If we use satellite positioning, we can show runners where they are at any time,” said the programmer, “it’s a killer technology.”

    “So what?” replied the marketer, “it’s a novelty that will get old. Our research shows they want a watch that will make their daily run less monotonous. Maybe it plays a different melody at each 100 meter mark.”

    “That’s definitely not a novelty,” joked the programmer. “We can’t charge more money for that, but we could if we included satellite positioning.”

    Pulling out a big sheet of paper, they write down the goal: A watch that makes daily running less monotonous and can sell for $150. They brainstormed different ways of making running more fun, of using the available technology, and of which product features consumers pay a premium. Every suggestion had to make sense within those constraints. Eventually they designed a satellite positioning watch that plotted a different route for each run through the runner’s neighborhood.

  • Jeep Launches Cellphone TV Channel

    Now that’s a headline that made me stop and think…

    JEEP LAUNCHES OWN MOBILE PHONE TV CHANNEL
    Axe Deodorant Also Said to be Negotiating Similar Deal with MobiTV
    SAN FRANCISCO (AdAge.com) — In an effort to harness mobile phone TV as a major branded entertainment medium, Jeep is launching its own mobile phone channel with MobiTV. The content is available to about 500,000 subscribers using Cingular, Sprint, Alltel and other mobile networks.

    Most people I know don’t realize live TV on mobile phones is not only possible, it’s widely available. If you haven’t seen it, get a demo now. It’s a visceral demonstration of current technology, more so than video on an iPod or PSP.

    And notice that Jeep didn’t partner with a broadcast or cable channel — the traditional experts of live TV — to produce this channel; they as advertiser partnered with the technology provider directly. In essence Jeep has become a broadcaster in it’s own right. It’ll be fun to watch that value chain re-order.