Competititon
Better Late Than Never, or Better Never Than Late?
Labor Day weekend is upon us as is also the statistical peak of the hurricane season. Somehow the coincidence befits the times as it may well be a different type of statistical peak for labor. The Labor Department defined the day as “Labor Day, the first Monday in September, is a creation of the labor movement and is dedicated to the social and economic achievements of American workers. It constitutes a yearly national tribute to the contributions workers have made to the strength, prosperity, and well-being of our country.” It provokes an interesting question as to who is the chicken and who is the egg? Are “strength, prosperity, and well-being of our country” a consequence of the labor movement or the cause? What does the experience of our current situation say?
Much of the political rhetoric (pick any party) defines our most important objective is to “get Americans back to work.” It sounds like it is possible to return to where we’ve been. But time’s arrow is much like a one way street and the future does not appear to look much like the past. My growing concern is that many actually believe we can go “back to work” when “back” is not there anymore.
Much has to do with the nature of value creation and what happens as conditions change and value gets redefined. At the expense of sounding simplistic, three dimensions for value have always been “faster, better, and cheaper” and in a multipolar world, value creation is mercurial and hard to hold on to. It means that if we’re not faster, better, and cheaper now, and someone else is and continuing to improve, catch up becomes improbable.
“The faster I go, the behinder I get … You have to run as fast as you can just to stay where you are. If you want to get anywhere, you’ll have to run much faster … Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.” “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass” Lewis Carroll.
The question is do we know how fast we’re going and how fast the ones ahead are running? Who’s measuring? How fast is faster changing? How fast is better getting better? How fast is cheaper getting cheaper? Many can demonstrate that they are in fact improving, year after year, and yet the business is in dire straits.
Today we can only reap what we sowed yesterday, and the cycle repeats every day. As Labor Day approaches, what should our strategy for value creation become? How in tune are the ways we get faster, better, and cheaper with the real races being run, perhaps across the globe or across the street? How long has the race been running and are we gaining or sliding? What do the laws of physics say?
Fitness precedes performance. Jump starting a poorly maintained car or one with outdated capabilities doesn’t win races. Restarting economies mean restarting individual enterprises with specific markets and challenges. Each has their own race to run and each must take responsibility for fitness. If our enterprise is obese, then we must become lean. The rules and requirements for performance tomorrow will change in the middle of the race, so we may need sufficient agility to change on-the-run. We may discover that what worked well yesterday is currently our greatest constraint.
“I can’t go back to yesterday – because I was a different person then.” Lewis Carroll
Who’s Not on Board?
Not that long ago, a major mobile phone carrier had an effective advertising campaign with a catchy slogan. Yet, I found their slogan troubling. It was troubling in that their banner, “We have fewer lost calls” left with me an impression that “we’re not as bad as the other guys” was written with the intent to establish a positive differentiator of quality and reliability. My reaction then was that the goal was to be the best of the bad, or cream of the crap. Upon reflection, I realized that the problem was with me, and in fact, the carrier’s message was the right one. This carrier was actually speaking the language of quality, not of spin (as I confess was my reaction). Quality is measured by the likelihood of failure against a specification. In their case, our case, it was a message that what mattered to the customer was continuity of service and there is a probability that that service will be interrupted, and the best do it fewer times. The carrier must have studied Dr. Noriaki Kano and realized that in some cases, the best can mean fewer defects, and failures against a basic requirement can only bring dissatisfaction. For the basic requirement of service availability, a service unavailability measure is the right metric and satisfaction is not achievable, that is, zero defects can bring only zero dissatisfaction.
This last week, we witnessed what appeared as truly bizarre behavior from Apple. The new flagship, the iPhone 4, has a troublesome performance problem with the reception. The very beautiful phone integrated the antenna into a smooth metal casing, creating a problem when the phone was held in a particular, albeit very normal, way. Some would argue that the decision process for the product launch suffered from an unhealthy bias wherein form trumped substance and engineering warnings. It’s saddening, coming from an exciting and innovative producer of form and substance. What was befuddling was the chairman’s response to the defects. It began with hubris with what appeared a dismissive tone that trivialized the problem …. Customers don’t know how to hold our phone properly, what’s all the fuss about; it’s the bad media at play. As the evidence mounted of the reception calamity and the web took over, sharing the data, the next stage of responsiveness focused on an attack on the competition, asserting that other smart phones shared the same problem. From here it sounds like it’s about “my” product and brand, not the customer pain. That strategy was a big boo-boo. Motorola, HTC, and RIM did not remain silent, each stating that their designs did obey the laws of physics and sound engineering, after all, customers wanted continuity of service.
Today’s connected world is a dangerous place to forget that respect for the customer and respect for the competition are essential for sustainability of brand value and economic goodwill, just ask Toyota. I’ve always loved Apple’s creativity in form and substance. I also believed that Toyota put the customer first. Funny how often bigger does not beget better. It’s called entropy, another engineering insight often forgotten.
On reflection, I wonder how much of the problem had to do with poor engineering and how much with a culture of “enforced optimism” or some variant of the “emperor’s new clothes?” The evidence to date on the catastrophic BP oil rig explosion and the subsequent environmental opening of Pandora’s Box seem to support the dangers of “enforced optimism” leadership behaviors.
How often does the “enforced optimism” show up in planning (pick any type), budget sessions, objectives, progress reviews and reports, investor sessions, group decision making, scheduling and commitment setting, …., other stuff?
Thoughts?
How Did You Get So Ubiquitous?
“Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.” – Winston Churchill, House of Commons, August 20, 1940. Many recognized this as the timeless phrase describing the valiant effort by the British Royal Air Force Fighter Command during August 18th, 1940. It has come to represent the Battle of Britain and lives among the legendary victories, Agincourt, Trafalgar, and Waterloo. The Battle of Britain was very different, strategically, tactically, and operationally. The Battle of Britain developed a fascinating strategic application that becomes ever more relevant, Strategic Ubiquity.
Under the genius of Air Marshall Sir Hugh Dowding, the RAF Fighter Command overcame overwhelming odds against the behemoth German air forces. Dowding did so through technology, stealth, organization, managing awareness, resource dispatching, and mostly agility. I will leave the details to those willing to invest in further reading as many hundreds of books abound. The principle of Strategic Ubiquity manifested the ability to “be everywhere” with much fewer resources than thought possible. The strategy also generated a world class pull system for delivering aircraft long before the Japanese could spell Deming or develop what we apply as Lean. Again, this is a different tickler for the curious. This strategy incorporated leveraging the agile integration of cross-functionality and achieved measurable synergy, one plus one equals three; even more for the curious …
At this time in military history, great powers (military or commercial) relied on quantity, power, and mass as a strategic hammer with which to overcome the opposition. More, everywhere as deployed resources, that could battle it out until consumption won out or size scared the opposition into submission. RAF Fighter Command under Dowding harnessed the power of more information, deployed to the right people, specific to the purpose of the specific people, and in time to act. It was “predict and prevent” rather than “detect and correct.” Downing’s resources, his “chicks”, always feigned to be too few, but were able to be where they were needed, when needed, with as close to real time data and awareness as then unimaginable. The few, through agility, were able to execute against the many. The strategy did not completely lift Clausewitz’s “fog of war”, but did much to see through it. It was not a software thing, it was a process thing. It was an agile thing…
Strategic Ubiquity is something very doable. With the right focus, discipline, and follow-though, the leverage created by technology can be game changing. There is a way to think about it, plan it, deploy it, measure it, and sustain it.
Agility is much more than an athletic term and ubiquity is more than being everywhere. Strategic Ubiquity is about being at the frontiers where and when the business battles are fought, not everywhere where battles may be fought. A few (300) agile Spartans along with a few thousand supporting Greek city-states in the Second Persian War picked the straits of Thermopylae for good reason. Agility put the right resources with the right focus, discipline, follow through and technology to achieve a strategic objective of delay. It was not Strategic Ubiquity circa 550 BC, but Dowding’s Fighter Command made it happen in the summer of 1940.
Today’s dynamic business environment demands capability on multiple fronts and challenges how to plan, build capability, and then have sufficient agility to win. It’s harder and too expensive to be big enough to be everywhere. Garrisons, be they business or military are places where waste is born and bred.
‘Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win.’ Sun Tzu
Seneca, Darwin, And The Flying Dinosaurs
“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.” Charles Darwin. It is very specific about who or what survives, yet the more significant message is the meaning that “if you are not responsive to change, you will not survive.” There is ample anthropological evidence providing insights into how the differences we see between peoples may have evolved. It becomes more fascinating when I see birds that share a common ancestor with dinosaurs. Much of the same applies to organizations, governments, cities, businesses, religions, and even management systems. Management systems contain the DNA and resources that define how an organization operates with the intent of thriving and surviving to thrive another day.
A stroll through business publications and historical data depicts behaviors that resemble evolutionary changes. Three important observations come to mind, interestingly evolutionary and fraught with nonlinearities:
- Survival comes from responsiveness to changing requirements
- Extinction comes from decay or disruption
- Decay makes us more susceptible to disruption
Responsiveness connotes action. Something around us changes and we change to take advantage of it or don’t change quickly enough and we become victims of it. We can’t always control what may be changing, nor can we predict them all. But we can always make a safe bet, that is, change is coming, always coming. Are we going to survive the changes? Can we increase our chances of surviving?
“Luck is when preparation meets opportunity” Seneca, mid-1st century AD.
I really like the way Seneca frames change as an opportunity. We have virtual evidence that change is afoot across incalculable dimensions. How we communicate and are connected or marginalized is different and accelerating in morphing. The winners and losers as measured by financial indicators display a huge transformation from economies that harvested resources and converted them in to durables (steel, coal, wood products, and automotive) to one that delivers service and convenience on a virtual plane. Who would have dreamed 50 years ago that giants like Microsoft and Apple would be major players while some giants, perhaps too rigid to adapt, became extinct or were devoured by a competitor or another hungry species?
I’m fascinated because the emergent behemoths have figured out how to redefine how convenience is delivered and value is created. Value has always been created by creating convenience, but the virtual world redefined what is possible. The world Thomas Friedman describes in “The World is Flat” is one where the interconnected web strips away some of the advantages the big and strong hoarded. As the early giants created a generation of convenience on the shoulders of the Industrial Revolution, the rigidity of the delivery systems, consumption of materials, and business management systems evolved into big and strong. Dinosaurs were big and strong too.
The last two years certainly met the standard of being a disruption, a mini ice age from a cataclysmic event. But the decay that preceded and followed it may likely claim more for the museums. Are we going to be lucky? If we’re good, how long does good last?
“There is opportunity in every storm”
It’s All Greek to Me
One of my postings last year, <“The Summer of 69″>, reflected on the incredible capacity we have to accomplish, particularly when we face tough challenges rather than each other. There is incalculable capability available when people endeavor to put the objective in front of them and view it from the same side of the table. By now, most of us have benefited from the negotiating strategy of focusing on issues versus positions and to be tough on issues, but softer on people. I’ve never been more disappointed or sadder than today, as I observe the reprehensible behavior of elected officials in facing the monumental challenges of our economy, health and welfare, the common good. We may not have complete control over the forces, dark ones at times, at play at the political playground, but we have almost infinite control over how we can face our own organizational challenges, challenges that may require fundamental changes in practices, behaviors, entitlements, and expectations. Today and yesterday are already gone, irretrievable forever, and a very poor place to try to live in, for they cannot create value.
There are few histories that can better illustrate the potential that we, as a society or organization, have to turn opportunity into destructive conflict, than looking to the Hellenic (Greek) city-states 2500 years ago. By now there have been countless stories, tales, legends, books, movies and plays that retell:
- The Greco-Persian Wars (the Persian Wars), two sets of conflicts between the Persian Empire and the Hellenic city-states from 499 BC until 449 BC. Athenians and Spartans facing the Persians with a bias to what they had in common.
- The Peloponnesian War, a series of conflicts between the Athenian Empire and the Peloponnesian League (led by Sparta) from 431 to 404 B.C. Athenians and Spartans facing each other with a bias to what made them different.
In the first series of wars, the Greek city-states, fierce competitors face a challenge that threatened to reshape life as they knew it, if conquered and integrated into the Persian Empire. In fact, much of what we consider western society, shaped by Greco-Roman thought, may have never existed at all. The wars are a rich area for study, insight and sheer dramatic entertainment. They demonstrate just how much competitors can find common ground, focus on interests, and come together to solve what appeared to be unsolvable challenges. Sadly, once success was reached, the darker side of their self interests, rather than the greater good, returned with a vengeance in less than 20 years, the Peloponnesian Wars.
During the Peloponnesian War, the competing parties nearly destroyed each other. Athens was so devastated that it never recovered. The levels of horror and barbarism each party perpetuated upon each other redefined how the city states would resolve differences in the future. Poverty and societal changes led to a poorer, more devastating and dark future. What had been competing parties unleashed levels of unproductive incivility, a harbinger of civil wars then and, subsequently, in the modern world.
The challenges we face will not perpetuate civil wars. Yet, big challenges can perpetuate incivility. When there is a lot a stake and change is on the table, win-lose can create polarization perpetuating sinister and unprincipled misrepresentation that demonizes opponents. It is that demonization that unraveled parts of ancient Greek society into a shredded tapestry, still threadbare today.
Among my favorite quotes (author unknown) is “When faced with two choices, always take the third one.” Walking away with our marbles, as a once noble patrician is urging others to do, can create Peloponnesian Polarity.
There is a tide in the affairs of men which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; Omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries. On such a full sea are we now afloat, and we must take the current when it serves, or lose our ventures. William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar Act 4
Thoughts?
Virtual Value and Space-Time
Wow, the future was yesterday. The shopping data for Black Friday and Cyber Monday 2009 is eye-popping. In the never-ending race for shopper’s wallets, the agile have taken the day. Below are some data released by Coremetrics’ second annual Cyber Monday Benchmark Report:
- Cyber Monday continued the momentum set by Black Friday. Sales were up 24.1 percent compared to Black Friday 2009.
- Consumers spent more per online order ($180.03 versus $170.19 for an increase of 5.8 percent) compared to Black Friday 2009.Sales were up 13.7 percent compared to Cyber Monday 2008.
- The average dollar amount consumers spent per online order rose 38.2 percent from Cyber Monday 2008 ($180.03 versus $130.24), led by apparel retailers.
- Consumers bought nearly 10 percent more items per order on Cyber Monday 2009 compared to Black Friday 2009 and nearly 30 percent more compared to Cyber Monday 2008.
- Consumer shopping hit its peak from 9-10 a.m. PST, but maintained stronger momentum throughout the day than on Cyber Monday 2008.
More people chose convenience over crowds, comfort over queues, time over traffic, delivery over bundles and bags, price over pain ….. wow … the virtual marketplace is past gaining ground for holiday shoppers, it holds the hill. Cyber Monday brings evidence that some figured out the value is not only about price… it comprises much more.
So how virtual are we?
How do our customers find us?
Are we convenient to do business with? How do we know?
Do we have a handle on what value means and, more importantly, how to measure it?
Are we delivering more or less value today than yesterday?
How much are we dependent on structure, place, headcount, brick and mortar?
Is our value sustainable, decaying or being disrupted?
Have we learned about how to achieve business ubiquity?
Do we have ubiquity in our strategy?
Space-time is not just for physicists, is it?
Thinka Linka Do
“Divide et impera”, or in English, Divide and Conquer is a phrase that we’ve all heard, many have experienced, and the clever have overcome. Forms of it have been attributed to Philip of Macedon and Julius Caesar and some incorrectly to Machiavelli, who in fact was denouncing it. It speaks to the power of effecting fragmentation, disintegration and dissolution of unity as a means to overcome adversaries or as a means to break down tough problems. Many problem solvers apply the technique, sometimes inappropriately to systems issues.
As a business practice, divide and conquer has been the effective stick that clever folks have applied to groups of competitors. The tool has been effective across almost any competitive environment, be it military, political, intellectual, athletic… endless arenas. It has been very effective when leveraging the shortcomings of traditional communications and transparency to events. But in the world of business, not so anymore. In fact, the world today may often give the advantage to the apparently fragmented, but virtually networked. Yes, the strength can be invisible and the responsiveness astounding. I would pose that a new adage might follow Sun Tzu’s logic and proclaim “Appear Divided, then Conquer.”
Here’s why … the big are always fighting entropy, the tendency towards disorder (it’s a rule of the universe). To those not anally retentive, entropy can be cool, it can be a tool. But to the big, entropy creates variability and variability looks bad. To the big, fighting entropy requires policies, controls, standards, inspections, oversight, hierarchies of non value adding resources, in other words, stuff that adds costs, time, and conservatism. Lots of that is necessary for many processes, but it is never free and mostly builds rigidity. Change comes hard and slow. The rigid can find that they are dead before they learn that they are sick.
When the fragmented could not connect, they became easy pickings. Not a hard one to figure out. In the business world firms typically have what the Japanese call an either “product out” or “customer in” philosophy and practice. Simply, it means that a business has a bias for promoting and selling who and what they have by persuading a customer that it is the best solution, or the business can configure and fit a solution specifically to the customers’ needs and circumstances. A big factor in this game has been bandwidth or resources, capabilities and talent. So there are factors of strategy, solutions and resources at play. Hard to make all the calls right, but historically the bigger had the larger catalog to show. The show of force and one stop shop can be a powerful tool to instill an image of reliability and capacity to a prospective client. But the bandwidth, capacity, catalog and resources have a cost. It’s a trade-off and balance issue. Balance is the operating word. We think of balance on a scale of weights, a static view. Today’s challenges call for dynamic balance, the kind you might see in an agile athlete or a top gun in a fighter jet.
Now … this is not about big is bad or sinister, and little is good. Good and bad have little to do with size, but rather principles and values. This is about agile is good and rigid is bad. Big or small, rigid is bad for the business and the customer. Here is how the game can change!
Never before has the capability to build and operate as a virtual enterprise been greater. The advent of technology is a tsunami of possibilities. The calamities of the recent economic failures have precipitated the freeing up (some call it unemployment) of armies of talent. Those that connect that talent virtually and create networked configuration of solutions can win the game with superior customer in.
Think then link, then think linked!
Lots to think about on this one …. Because agility is within reach to the big or the small. It’s less about size and more about paradigms and practices.
What do you think? How are you linked?
Throwing the Flag
Those who follow sports know that the quality of officiating is receiving much needed and overdue attention. In fact, there is one officiating team in NCAA Football that is currently sitting on the bench for terrible calls in very important games. In fact, the poor officiating may have determined the winners and losers. Sports are a great place to talk about poor measurement because we’ve all seen it. With the advent of better technology and high definition instant replays some of the boo-boos are much more evident. Competent people in the business of evaluating performance of any type are very aware of the impacts of measurement and very skeptical of any decisions people make …. Measurement issues surround us …. I used the word competent intentionally because those that don’t pay serious attention to the quality of measurement and render opinions, advice, or recommendations on data or information are dangerous people to have on board.
Let’s stay with college football for a little longer. Bad calls lead to new conditions that redefine all of the subsequent plays. Some calls don’t end up having terrible consequences, but others do. (Apply these points to everything else … work, play, health, safety, purchases, promotions, politics, war ….) Let’s take the bad call that changed the outcome of the game.
- Rankings changed among the competing teams
- Who played at bowls changed along with the commensurate compensation and attention? Also, all of the people who went to bowls changed, … , the travel, vacations, and lots of other secondary and tertiary order effects.
- Coaches got fired, hired or moved. Lots of the press chimed in labeling winners and losers. Life changing events took place ….
- Different kids got recruited by different coaches….. And on and on and on….. the dominoes keep falling …
- This was due to just one bad call (measurement) that changed the game, just one game.
Apply that to any professional sport, the gambling industry, and the lives of the happy and despondent whose lives revolve around the sport … it continues. There is good and bad from all of this …but it is different. So the better team doesn’t always win, and it wasn’t from poor performance….
Now, how about business performance? Have we considered just how much is impacted by poor measurement? How many big and small decisions alike were made on the shoulders of a bad call? Was the bad call on the shoulders of bad information or data? How about performance appraisals, promotions, demotions and the like? Any capital spending decisions made on poor data? Did we ever spend bundles fixing something that wasn’t broken beacuse our data was crap?
Sports are changing and some for the better as our measurements improve.
How about what we do?
“One Thing …”
It’s really great to be surprised, particularly when it’s a good one. For close to two decades I’ve been ranting about three rules, the only three rules we need to execute, improve, or accomplish close to everything. There are many attributes that contribute to success, brains for example, but those are not what this is about. The three rules are focus, discipline, and follow-through. They are applicable to better golf, getting a prom date, getting through school, and an endless list of goals to meet or ends to achieve. I have found that trying to get “there” and stay “there” without following all three is unlikely, geniuses included. What most of us call luck in the successes of others may have the hand of randomness, but more likely you’ll find the rules behind the “luck.” I’m pretty sure that by now some have figured out that “luck is when preparation meets opportunity.”
My surprise came at a conference this past week, one dedicated to performance improvement. These conferences almost always have gems and nuggets of insight and success stories, and this last one had a real humdinger. My first inkling that this was going to be good came when the presenter turned out to be the President and CEO of the organization. You typically don’t see folks from the C-suite presenting a story about performance improvement to a room full of professionals, consultants, gurus and geeks. With his story, Robert Weiner of PAS Technologies need never fear. I will leave the details out, but available to those with enough initiative to hunt him down and request a copy of the presentation. Those in the aerospace industry should jump on this, like now! It has ample examples of the three rules and lots of brains to boot. The three rules were evident and brilliantly executed. I can’t say that often, sadly.
There are two gems that stand out and can serve as benchmarks for those seeking to transform. Transform can apply from self to enterprises and everything in between. The first application has to do with understanding that fitness, typically governed by the laws of physics, is a precursor to exceptional business performance, typically governed by the laws of economics. Obese enterprises will not win races and sustain leads. Business fitness makes winning possible. The second part has to do with how to measure success and when to change focus, discipline, and follow-through. Robert Weiner got it right. As a consequence, his team was able to snatch success from the jaws of failure. If you want folks to get aligned, then they need transparency into what matters. If you want them to improve, they need the means to build capability that is measurable and scalable. If you really want this to work, focus on the essential. Then make sure all the consequences match. It’s hard to “walk the talk” when the signals “stumble the mumble.”
The coolest surprise came when he described the transformation that was executed with only one metric for fitness, then, and only after fitness was achieved, he shifted to only one metric for winning. Yep, one metric for each phase and that’s for the entire enterprise. It worked and will work. But this is not for the faint of heart or feeble in resolve. Many will moan that their metric is not there or that certain metrics belong for correctness and balance. Get the presentation from Mr. Weiner, read and weep. It is good stuff. When we pick the right one, the secondary stuff finds its place and aligns to contribute, rather than distract. Fitness requires all the systems to work in sync with clarity of purpose and outcome. It is hard and is likely to hurt, and that is good.
As Curly, the crusty cowboy in City Slickers said, “Do you know what the secret of life is? … One thing. Just one thing. You stick to that and the rest don’t mean …” we know the word …..
Fast Times with Heisenberg, Gretzky, and Carroll
Ever hear of Werner Heisenberg? Unless you are one of those people (confessed addict here) that is curious about lots of stuff, in this case quantum mechanics, you may not really care. Quantum mechanics has to do with the behaviors of the really small, what some physicists look at. What is really interesting about Heisenberg is a principle about measurement he developed, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. He says that the more you want to know about a particular attribute like position (where it is), the less precision you will have about another attribute like velocity (how fast it’s going in a particular direction). I’ve believed for a long time that it is true about bigger things than the subatomic. It is true about what we measure and evaluate in our business performance. Stay with me, this may help.
One example is akin to the example above. The overwhelming majority of business data that I’ve been exposed to focuses on where performance has been, say position. That is important since we need to know what our demonstrated capability to perform is. The more we know about position, the less we can say about how fast it is moving in a particular direction, velocity. Our performance has a velocity, and depending on what aspect of velocity, a very specific direction. The velocity going forward is not usually the trend; it can sometimes require a little more calculus than algebra.
In fact, performance has multiple directions; the most obvious are cost, time, and quality. We can say with complete certainty that they move at different velocities (it’s a safe bet). The really important point is that we seldom, if ever, look at the velocities for decision making. Agile people and entities do. They also keep that part a secret (it’s called competitive advantage). If you follow sports, you may have heard the quote by the hockey great, Wayne Gretzky, “I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it is.” Since Wayne has to manage his own velocity he needs to manage it to where he needs to be, at the puck. Applies to our businesses, doesn’t it? Performance decisions only affect the future, where stuff is going, not the past (unless you’re a good book cook).
I’ve spent the better part of the last two years on this topic and it has fundamentally changed my lenses to evaluate performance, capability, metrics, dashboards, product development, voice of the customer, innovation, competition, negotiation, human resources, … ad infinitum. Looking at the world through that different lens and feeding it through a different dashboard also changes our insight into where the ugly risks are and where to invest resources and time on improvement strategies. Additionally, the velocity lens redefines the applicability of gaming theory and network analysis in business decision making. These are really cool beans.
No reminder needed that the world of leading and managing enterprises is fraught with ever faster changes.
- Do we know how fast?
- When we execute the changes we’re deciding to make today, will we end up where the puck is going?
- Do our project controls and toll gates enable or constrain our ability to respond to an ever moving puck? Do scope creep, change orders, restarts, and rework sound more like the rule than the exception?
“The faster I go, the behinder I get”. “You have to run as fast as you can just to stay where you are. If you want to get anywhere, you’ll have to run much faster.” “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.” Lewis Carroll
So, where are we going?
