Chet Richards

Interesting article on the subject in today’s WSJ, “In Search of Innovation,” by three European researchers.

Innovation was a subject near and dear to Boyd’s heart.  His last major briefing, Conceptual Spiral, addresses progress in science and technology, and innovation is, of course, required for building snowmobiles.

The research reported upon in this article confirms several of Boyd’s suggestions.  Boyd’s strategy, for example, relies on stoking up and focusing initiative throughout the organization.  Bessant, Moslein, and von Stamm report that:

By engaging more of its own workers in the search for innovation, a company can broaden its vision. For example, the duties of procurement, sales or finance groups can be expanded to include learning about trends they encounter that ordinarily might be considered not of primary interest to the company.

Another Boyd bug-a-boo is locked orientation, which often reflects an internal focus from an internal perspective.  The WSJ research concluded:

Close, long-term relationships–depending too much on the same customers, partners or suppliers for innovation ideas–can reinforce old ways of doing things and make changing a frame of reference difficult.

Finally, Boyd proposed an active concept of learning involving trial-and-error and probing and testing the opponent.  Here’s the WSJ take:

Some companies design probe-and-learn strategies that study opportunities in segments of markets the company isn’t active or strong in. This strategy goes further than deep diving by actively experimenting with new ideas in a new context. The experiments might not always work, but they will give valuable insight about future directions of markets.

You have to be careful with the approach I just took:  If you set out to discover evidence that fits into your orientation, you’ll undoubtedly find it (thanks to that implicit guidance and control link from orientation to observation).  Still, it’s interesting to see some of John’s ideas confirmed in an arena — business — that he didn’t address in his own research.

The head of our Exec MBA program at Kennesaw St, Joe Astrachan, made an interesting observation in yesterday’s Wall St. J.:

But an advantage that small companies have over larger counterparts with myriad management layers is the ability to tailor tactics to individual customers and make decisions faster. “Their size makes them more flexible,” says Joseph Astrachan, executive director of the Cox Family Enterprise Center at Kennesaw State University in Georgia.

Continue reading »

Don’t survive first contact with reality any better than their military cousins.  The solution isn’t necessarily developing the plan in more detail — that may be necessary, but often planners outrun the available data long before they run out of statistical procedures — but always having a suitable Plan B in the wings.

Continue reading »

My dad loved Chryslers.  He appreciated good engineering and for years, that was Chrysler’s strong suite.  The 1967 New Yorker he owned was one of the best cars we ever had.  Unfortunately it was destroyed in a wreck on the New Jersey Turnpike (I was there — nobody was hurt).  The 1969 New Yorker that replaced it was a noticeably cheaper (but not less expensive) car.  By the early 1980s, New Yorkers could best, giving them the benefits of all doubts, be described as “junk.”

Continue reading »

As I wrote in “Riding the Tiger“:

A belief that you have any type of unique capability is the siren song of complacency. In fact, a belief that you have some kind of difficult-to-emulate ability to know the customer is simply arrogance, which is even a faster-acting poison than mere complacency, and this tends to be true of all high-level business (as opposed to technical or physical) functions. You must assume that your competitors are just as good at the business basics as you are, and you would be better served to assume they are already ahead.

Former Intel CEO Andy Grove was right: Only the paranoid do survive. It is so tempting to believe that “we have these facilities” or “we have these great capabilities”, and therefore we are safe. You are never safe, and the first hint of a belief that you are safe marks the start of your decline.

Truer words were never written, if I do say so.

An editorial in today’s Economist (subscription may be required) provides a vivid example:

The problem in the 1970s was not really the arrival of better, smaller, lighter Japanese cars; it was GM’s failure to respond in kind. Rather than hitting back with superior products, the company hid behind politicians who appeared to help it in the short term.

The end game was entirely predictable:

The unevolved GM deserved extinction. Detroit employed so many people and figured so large in American culture that governments felt they had to protect it; but in doing so, they made it vulnerable to less-coddled competitors from abroad. (”Detroitosaurus wrecks“)

From the standpoint of evolution, however, the issue is not whether a government subsidizes its own industries, it is whether  government ownership of some competitors slows the entrance of new players, with better ideas, into the marketplace.  Because without variety, evolutionary market forces don’t have anything to work with.

As a side note, dinos are characitured as dumb, lumbering beasts who couldn’t cope with changes in their environment.  But the fact is, they are an extraordinarily successful life form:  Even the non-flying varieties span a period lasting over 130 million years.  Clearly GM didn’t have whatever it was that the dinosaurs had.