Monday, March 18, 2024

Value in an Age of Endless Innovation

By Pascal Dennis (bio)

Enterprise, in all its glorious variety, cacophony & unpredictability begins and ends with value.

We seek to create products, services, experiences…that elevates our fellow human beings, that make their lives easier or more enjoyable, that reduce hassle and free up their time & energy.

Otherwise, why bother? We are human to the degree we are connected, and Value is an excellent measure of connectivity, no?

In John Donne’s timeless words:

No man is an island entire of itself; every man
is a piece of the continent, a part of the main…

So what is Value? You all know the standard definitions:

  1. What the customer is willing to pay for
  2. Quality/Cost

I’m partial to Kano’s model.

I grew up professionally at Toyota manufacturing at the superb TMMC site in Cambridge Ontario. Value was our guiding light, our North Star.

Value was expressed in Toyota’s famous logo, the intertwined ovals representing:

  • Something for the customer
  • Something for the team member
  • Something for the company

Moreover, we further translated Value into our four strategic focus areas: People, Quality, Delivery and Cost. To be sure, our targets changed year by year, as we changed models and customer desires changed. Nonetheless, Value was more or less constant.

Fast forward a couple of decades to 2024. Today Value is an endlessly moving target. Digital is indeed eating the world, and neither we, nor our customers can always define Value.

Indeed, in industries like Banking and Insurance, we can say with some confidence that there’s a good chance we do not understand value.

What to do?

For a start, let’s recognize that Value is no longer a fixed star, but a constantly moving & evolving entity.

Secondly, let’s accept that we have to iterate ourselves to value through continuous experimentation.

Thirdly, let’s commit to radical collaboration, across silos, and partnering with customers & stakeholders.

Lastly, let’s recognize the qualities that will help us untangle the Gordian Knot: humility, openness, humor and a big-picture consciousness.

It all adds up to a bracing challenge and new way of working.

Best regards,

Pascal



In case you missed our last few blogs... please feel free to have another look…

The Power of One Page
Strategy in a Time of Explosive Change
The Function of Leaders is to Produce More Leaders
Complexity is a Crude State, Simplicity Marks the End of a Process of Refinement


Monday, March 4, 2024

The Power of One Page

By Pascal Dennis (bio)

In times of tumultuous change brevity is king.

Blah, blah, blah…doesn’t cut it when revenue is non-existent and investors are jittery.

Endless PowerPoint decks, no matter how slick, are tiresome and wasteful. The four-hour meeting that goes nowhere is downright irritating.

Less is more remains the cardinal rule in music, art, theater, and the world of business.

Lean masters of the past understood ‘less is more’ in their bones. Toyota in the early 1950’s, for example, was facing bankruptcy, union warfare and public condemnation.

They were a tenth as productive as the American juggernaut car companies, and had little capital with which to buy desperately needed machines.


They created the one-page storyboard, also known as the ‘A3’ (after the paper size), to enable quick effective & communication.

I have a number of friends who are retired Marine corps officers. They tell me that Marine Doctrine also emphasizes clear & simple communication – short stand-up meetings around a board (1-page) are the norm.

Our friends and colleagues in the start-up communities have absorbed this concept and now communicate with various ‘canvases’.

These address broad strategic issues such as Business Model and Value Proposition, as well as, tactical elements like Personas, Empathy Maps and Customer Journeys.

I’m heartened by such cross-fertilization. Both the giver and receiver profit, and develop empathy.

Quality is paramount, of course. A page full of garbage is just that. Clearly expressing a hypothesis and plan of action around a complex business problem or industry takes great skill and understanding.

You have to think deeply, and then get the hell out of the building. (Go see, as the Japanese like to say).

One page takes much longer, therefore, than ten. (You all know the famous Winston Churchill story by now…)

The power of one page emerges in all its glory when use it to tell stories.

Story-telling, narrative, is perhaps our most human quality. “Tell me a story, grandpa…”

“Well, once upon there was a little girl who lived with her family in a town by the sea. And one night she looked out her window and saw a beautiful white horse and the horse had wings…”

Will AI ever be able to make up an enchanting story, on demand (from a loved one)?

That’s the real Turing test, no?

In any event, I tip my hat to our digital & start-up friends. It's fun working with you & I encourage you to continue poaching ‘traditional’ Lean.

Best regards,

Pascal



In case you missed our last few blogs... please feel free to have another look…

Strategy in a Time of Explosive Change
The Function of Leaders is to Produce More Leaders
Complexity is a Crude State, Simplicity Marks the End of a Process of Refinement
Can Lean & Agile Help to Fix Our Courts? Part 4


Monday, February 19, 2024

Strategy in a Time of Explosive Change

By Pascal Dennis (bio)

May you live in interesting times – Chinese Curse

Interesting times indeed, no? The reasons are too long to recite here – changing technology, customer expectations, internationalization, rapid cultural shifts, the explosion of information…

Technological change, for example, is so rapid and severe that in many industries we can no longer confidently define value.

The ‘Eight Essential’ technologies – Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality, AI, Blockchain, Robotics, Drones, Internet of Things, and 3-D Printing have exploded the ‘design space’.

Only by developing deep empathy with our customers & their customer journeys can we begin to understand what’s important to them. And even then, value is a moving target.

So it goes…

How to manage one’s business (and one’s life) in such times?

Let’s focus on the most important things first: How do we develop and deploy strategy in ‘interesting’ times?

Quick & ‘Easy’ Strategy

Keep it simple – if you can’t tell the story with one-page, do you understand it?

Accept that when it comes to strategy, perfection is impossible - and not even desirable! Remember, there is no right answer in strategy – only a right process!

Ensure, therefore, that purpose & logic are clear so that when you inevitably ‘pivot’, you’ll know what parts of your hypothesis were sound or not, and why.

Choose!

Strategy is not about deciding what’s important. All the ideas your team proposes are likely ‘important’. But you can’t do them all – you have to choose.

Too often, leaders try to hedge their bets by choosing too much, with predictable results. Choose the critical few, check frequently, and be prepared to pivot.

Please don’t misunderstand the great Henry Mintzberg’s ‘emergent’ strategies concept. Just because you’re prepared to pivot, doesn’t mean you needn’t articulate a hypothesis!

Failing to do so, of course, condemns you to the limbo of endless reaction & limited learning.

Avoid Boring Strategy Docs

The typical corporate strategy comprises a ‘Mission’, ‘Initiatives’, and in effect, a ‘Budget with Prose’. (Tip of the hat to another great, Dr. Roger Martin, for this.)

These are deadly dull and have a soporific effect on your team. ZZZZZZZZZZZZ…..

Keep your strategy to one page, tell your story, and answer the Big Questions as simply and clearly as you can:

  1. Who are we and what do we believe in?
  2. Where are we going?
  3. How do we get there? (What’s our underlying logic?)
  4. What’s preventing us?
  5. What capabilities do we need to develop?
  6. What management systems do we need to develop?

These are difficult questions, of course, which require deep experience and reflection. To develop a good strategy we need to bounce between the worlds of action and thought.

As the saying goes, get out of the building.

And finally, even though we live in times of explosive change, remember that some things are eternal.

Reflection, experience and the intuition gained thereby are innately human, and unlikely to be replaced by technology.

More likely, in my view, technology will enable the strategist, just as a horse enables the rider.

But that’s the topic of another blog.

Here’s to interesting strategic journeys.

Best regards,

Pascal



In case you missed our last few blogs... please feel free to have another look…

The Function of Leaders is to Produce More Leaders
Complexity is a Crude State, Simplicity Marks the End of a Process of Refinement
Can Lean & Agile Help to Fix Our Courts? Part 4
Can Lean & Agile Help to Fix Our Courts? Part 3


Monday, February 5, 2024

The Function of Leaders is to Produce More Leaders

By Pascal Dennis (bio)

In an era of breath-taking innovation, is there anything more important?

The ‘Essential Eight Technologies’ – Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, Drones, 3-D Printing, Big Data Analytics, and Distributed Ledger Technology (‘Blockchain’) – make disruption almost inevitable.

Prosperity, and in some industries, survival, depends on an organization’s ability to continuously solve complex problems.

And that entails leadership at each level. The internet, our era’s central metaphor, is in my view, an appropriate model of the successful organization.


There is no ‘center’ directing the actions of the myriad nodes. Instead, there is intelligence everywhere solving the relevant problems.

To be sure, Strategy development and deployment, remain core responsibilities of senior leaders. The core questions have to be answered:

Where are we going? How do we get there? What’s preventing us? And the deeper questions: Who are we? What do we believe in?

What is the purpose of the Human Resources function?
  1. To grow more leaders
  2. To create flexible, capable team members always looking for a better way
Let me suggest that core HR processes – Recruitment, Training & Development, Compensation, Performance and Succession Planning – must evolve accordingly. And so must corresponding methods.

It has to be easy, for example, to measure capability, so we can answer the core problem solving questions: What should be happening? What is actually happening?

A big challenge, given the secondary role HR plays in many organizations!

Deepening & extending the mindset of senior leaders is another big challenge. Most have grown up in a very different world, where developing more leaders was rarely recognized or rewarded.

Much of our LPI practice entails coaching senior leaders. The very best are those who have internalized these ideas. A salient quote: “My job is to develop capability – of people, processes and machinery.”

So what to do? A good start would be to explicitly include ‘Growing Other Leaders’ in performance contracts, and succession planning. (If I may suggest, providing capable coaches also makes sense.)

At our old Toyota plant, if you hadn’t ‘left a footprint’, promotion was out of the question. And so, we focused on creating capability – of people, processes and machinery. It’s how you got promoted.

Toyota’s superb internal senseis helped immeasurably. As did Toyota’s HR processes and policies. It was easy, for example, to measure capability of people, processes and machinery.

Thus, we could apply the Plan-Do-Check-Adjust cycle and practice root cause problem solving. We could run experiments and learn what worked and what did not.

Building the capability of people, interestingly, is not that different from building process capability.

All for now. More to come on this juicy topic.

Best regards,

Pascal



In case you missed our last few blogs... please feel free to have another look…

Complexity is a Crude State, Simplicity Marks the End of a Process of Refinement
Can Lean & Agile Help to Fix Our Courts? Part 4
Can Lean & Agile Help to Fix Our Courts? Part 3
The Role of Senior Leaders (Part 1)