What I Read – McKinsey Quarterly, April 2015 Issue.

Tags

essentials of innovation, innovation, McKinsey Quarterly, organization, technology

Here is what I noted from the article “The eight essentials of innovation” by Marc de Jong, Nathan Marston, and Eric Roth:

The first four are strategic and creative in nature, help set and prioritize the terms and conditions under which innovation is more likely to thrive. The next four essentials deal with how to deliver and organize for innovation repeatedly over time and with enough value to contribute meaningfully to overall performance.

1. Aspire – a far-reaching vision can be a compelling catalyst, provided it’s realistic enough to stimulate action today.
2. Choose – many companies run into difficulty less from a scarcity of new ideas than from the struggle to determine which ideas to support and scale.
3. Discover – look for insights by methodically scrutinizing three areas: a valuable problem to solve, a technology that enables a solution, and a business model that generates money from it. You could argue that nearly every successful innovation occurs at the intersection of these three elements.
4. Evolve – most big companies are reluctant to risk tampering with their core business model until it’s visibly under threat. At that point, they can only hope it’s not too late.
5. Accelerate – cautious governance processes make it easy for stifling bureaucracies in marketing, legal, IT, and other functions to find reasons to halt or slow approvals. Too often, companies get in the way of their own attempts to innovate.
6. Scale – explicitly considering the appropriate magnitude and reach of a given idea is important to ensuring that the right resources and risks are involved in pursuing it.
7. Extend – companies in nearly every sector have conceded that innovation requires external collaborators. Flows of talent and knowledge increasingly transcend company and geographic boundaries.
8. Mobilize – the best companies find ways to embed innovation into the fibres of their culture, from the core to the periphery.

And how this is applicable? I personally have enough of all kinds of lists and consider them not helpful at all. Practice of innovation thrown at that model would mean (in my opinion) that you should be doing points 1, 3 and 4 at once – evolution of your existing business model is part of discovery, aspiration helps you evolve or jump somewhere, and if you are lucky you will have something to choose from. After you have chosen, you move to the other four essentials – cut the red tape, and see it work. All easier said that done.

What I Read – “A Whack on the Side of the Head: How You Can Be More Creative” by Roger von Oech

Tags

A whack on the side of the head, book, creativity, experience, innovation, Roger von Oech

I’ve finished that book some time ago already (four years, to be exact) and here is what I noted:

Knowledge is the stuff from which new ideas are made. Nonetheless, knowledge alone won’t make a person creative.

The real key to being creative lies in what we do with our knowledge.

We have a situation where people know more and more about less and less.

Innovation is usually the result of connections of past experience. But if you have the same experiences as everybody else, you’re unlikely to look in a different direction.

The truth contained in those short four sentences above is already widely known, but worth repeating over and over again. It is highly unlikely, especially now, that one person alone will make a groundbreaking innovation. At any rate, it is very difficult. Easier is to build on each other’s ideas. For that, you need to keep an open mind and respect experience of others. This, in part, is also what the below quote says:

Luciano de Crescenzo: “We are all angels with just one wing – we can only fly while embracing one another.”

 

What I Read – “Anticipate: The Architecture of Small Team Innovation and Product Success” by Ronald Brown

Tags

Anticipate: The Architecture of Small Team Innovation and Product Success, ideas, innovation, marketplace, product development, Ronald Brown, scrum, teams

I read somewhere, that I should make notes of what I read and review them from time to time. I decided to give it a try, since I read a lot and I think making such notes will be for me a way of remembering best ideas, quotes, or whatever from my books and magazines. I also decided to share those notes with you, in edited form as some have gotten pretty long. In many cases I copied whole passages without noting the page numbers, which is against good reference practices, but of course I will list title and author of a book (or article) where I got the notes from.

I do that with hope that at least some of you will reach for mentioned magazine or book when you will find my notes interesting. Ach, one more thing: small number of notes do not mean that the book or magazine was not good…

Here is what I noted from the book “Anticipate: The Architecture of Small Team Innovation and Product Success” by Ronald Brown:

[…] The process of turning an idea into a tangible product is innovation. Innovation is a deliberate and structured form of development that is part strategy and part implementation. Product development […] is not an idea business, it’s an innovation business.

[…] Not focusing on the details of implementation is the main reason products fail in the marketplace.

[…] The biggest contributor to poor implementation is lack of appropriate knowledge.

I noted above sentence because there are developers I know which are convinced that you don’t need experience in domain to develop fully a good product. I disagree and I am happy to see that I am not the only one.

[…] What does all this knowledge tell us? There are three fundamental lessons:

1. Innovation is the main determinant of success […]
2. To promote innovation in a meaningful way, small teams must be the focal point of your strategy […] dismaying number of companies don’t give their teams the freedom or resources they need to be truly effective. Hierarchies, bureaucracies, and old habits have a way of smothering the best intentions.
3. Leading firms are pursuing a more organic form of development, which means they are trying to optimize the natural decision-making style and positioning of small groups on the edges of the organization. Additionally, they are finding new, more natural ways of bringing marketplace feedback into the development equation. These two elements – process and feedback – fuel innovation at the team level and form the essence of what we call organic product development.

Point 2 – I sign under it with both my arms and legs and whatever else I have 🙂

[…] No matter how much world around us changes, basic customer emotions and motivations determine buyer behaviour. Humans are genetically programmed to operate a certain way, and nothing will change that. When companies violate or ignore those principles, disaster is usually close at hand.

[…] Scrum attempts to address the unpredictable nature of new product development by going to the source: customer input is incorporated on a regular basis, as development progresses.

[…] Circular development is a tool for processing ongoing input efficiently and quickly, and that helps avoid the kinds of problems that lead to heavy end-of-project rework and long-delayed launch dates. Ongoing market validation helps maintain tight alignment between customers and products, and that helps ensure that products meet expectations when they’re introduced.

[…] The goal of any product team is not just to meet expectations (or rely entirely on what customers tell you), but to create meaningful differentiation and competitive advantage.

[…] almost half of all development work was being repeated, a high proportion of which was caused by firefighting or unplanned activities.

[…] We all want innovation, but we aren’t very good at getting it. Why? In large part, it’s because we concentrate so heavily on ideas.

[…] Ideas are extremely important, but when it comes to innovation, they are only the beginning of the story, not the end.

[…] We simply don’t put enough emphasis on turning ideas into products that add value.

[…] Innovation is about “selecting and executing the right ideas and bringing them to market in record time”.

[…] The structure of innovation is made of not just one component, but three: the idea, the strategic direction in which the idea should be taken, and the execution of that strategic direction. In our terminology, strategic direction and execution together make up implementation.

[…] Development is about expressing an idea properly, while manufacturing is about replicating and scaling. One is creative and unpredictable, and the other tends to be mechanical and very predictable.

[…] Too many choices – too much product proliferation – was leading to customer inaction. Even worse, the very presence of proliferation signalled a lack of customer understanding. Simplification of product lines, on the other hand, reduced costs and accelerated customer decisions.

[…] If you want to mitigate the risk associated with new product development, simplification, all by itself, is the first of three universal strategies to pursue.

[…] focusing on core behaviours is the second.

[…] concentrating heavily on market and team risk is the third.

Market risk: are there enough customers who will buy your product? Do you have your product placed where they can find it? Team risk: Does your team have the skills and experience to get its product to market? Can they do it fast enough before they run out of money?

[…] Product differentiation refers to those attributes that make your product unique compared to competitors’ product. It is a marketing variable that is fully within your control – you decide what goes into your product from feature standpoint, and you decide which features to place emphasis on when you create selling messages.

[…] Product positioning relates to how customers receive your story and size it up for themselves. If differentiation is a statement of uniqueness sent on behalf of a company’s product, positioning is a statement of relevance in which customers put your product into the context of their own lives. You can try and control how customers perceive your product by the nature of the messages you send, but customers make final decision. The value proposition is a summary of all the benefits a customer can receive if they buy and use your product.

[…] Stories are the currency of human communications, not individual messages.

[…] Just by having a big idea and a strong value proposition, you can cut your market risk by half (remember, market risk is just one part of total risk).

[…] Tacit knowledge has two dimensions. Domain experience, the deep know-how related to one area of expertise, and broad experience, the kind that transcends any one subject area.

[…] What is customer immersion? Anything and everything that allows you to walk in your customers’ shoes.

[…] Over time, if done seriously and consistently, customer immersion will lead to the most valuable skill in all of marketing (and, in fact, all of business): You will start thinking like your customers, independent of any one product.

Note to myself: check Torrance Test of Creative Thinking, Clifton Strengths Finder, Meyers-Briggs Type Indicator, and Values in Action. I need to check those out.

[…] There are four documents that can play major roles in a larger strategic architecture: the business model, the marketing requirements document (MRD), the product requirements document (PRD), and the creative brief.

[…] The purpose of the MRD is to define a product based on market need.

[…] Business models provide development teams with a strategic framework, while offering plenty of room for problem solving and iteration along the way.

[…] Once the business model has gone through a few iterations and started to solidify, you can start capturing all the detail you need in either a PRD for engineers or a creative brief for marketers.

[…] Leading companies are pushing product decision-making to the edges of the organization as much as possible.

[…] One of the biggest obstacles in building a winning team is gaining, and then holding onto, senior management commitment.

[…] The agent that bonds team members together is not friendships, but commitment to a shared vision.

[…] Problem, fact gathering, examination, and conclusion – this is the basic architecture for solving any business problem.

Above may look like a collection of slogans, but in reality, when you had somehting to do with product development, it is not. It becomes a short list of things to pay attention to. Very smart book.

What I Read – HBR May 2016

Tags

agile, Darrell Rigby, definitions, Harvard Business Review, HBR, Hirotaka Takeuchi, innovation, Jeff Sutherland, understanding agile

Recently I read somewhere, that I should make notes of what I read and review them from time to time. I decided to give it a try, since I read a lot and I think making such notes will be for me a way of remembering best ideas, quotes, or whatever from my books and magazines. I also decided to share those notes with you, in edited form as some have gotten pretty long. Just as a note – in many cases I copied whole passages without noting the page numbers, which is against good reference practices, but of course I will list title and author of a book (or article) where I got the notes from.

I do that with hope that at least some of you will reach for mentioned magazine or book when you will find my notes interesting. Ach, one more thing: small number of notes do not mean that the book or magazine was not good…

This is what I found interesting in Harvard Business Review, May 2016 issue:

Article “Embracing Agile” by Darrell K. Rigby, Jeff Sutherland, and Hirotaka Takeuchi.

[…] By taking people out of their functional silos and putting them in self-managed and customer-focused multidisciplinary teams, the agile approach is not only accelerating profitable growth but also helping to create a new generation of skilled managers.

[…] When we ask executives what they know about agile, the response is usually an uneasy smile […] But because they haven’t gone through training, they don’t really understand the approach. Consequently, they unwittingly continue to manage in ways that run counter to agile principles and practices, undermining the effectiveness of agile teams in units that report to them. These executives launch countless initiatives with urgent deadlines rather than assign the highest priority to two or three. They spread themselves and their best people across too many projects.

[…] Innovation is what agile is all about. Although the method is less useful in routine operations and processes, these days most companies operate in highly dynamic environments.

[…] we have discerned six crucial practices that leaders should adopt if they want to capitalize on agile’s potential.

1. Learn How Agile Really Works

[…] It comes in several varieties, which have much in common but emphasize slightly different things. They include scrum, which emphasizes creative and adaptive teamwork in solving complex problems; lean development, which focuses on the continual elimination of waste; and Kanban, which concentrates on reducing lead times and amount of work in process.

Rest of this point provides a short description of what scrum is… very useful to read it in whole.

2. Understanding Where Agile Does or Does Not Work

Agile is not a panacea. It is most effective and easiest to implement under conditions commonly found in software innovation: The problem to be solved is complex; solutions are initially unknown, and product requirements will most likely change; the work can be modularized; close collaboration with end users (and rapid feedback from them) is feasible; and creative teams will typically outperform command-and-control groups.

3. Start Small and Let the Word Spread
4. Allow “Master” Teams to Customize Their Practices

[…] If a team wants to modify particular practices, it should experiment and track the results to make sure that the changes are improving rather than reducing customer satisfaction, work velocity, and team morale.

5. Practice Agile at the Top

Some C-Suite activities are not suited to agile methodologies. (Routine and predictable tasks – such as performance assessments, press interviews, and visits to plants, customers, and suppliers – fall into this category.) But many, and arguably the most important, are. They include strategy development and resource allocation, cultivating breakthrough innovations, and improving organizational collaboration […]

6. Destroy the Barriers to Agile Behaviors

Research by Scrum Alliance, an independent non-profit with 400,00-plus members, has found that more than 70% of agile practitioners report tension between their teams and the rest of the organization. Little wonder: They are following different road maps and moving at different speeds […] Here are some techniques for destroying such barriers to agile:

• Get everyone on the same page (also those teams which are not working using agile methodologies – RC).
• Don’t change structures right away; change roles instead.
• Name only one boss for each decision. People can have multiple bosses, but decisions cannot […] Other senior leaders must avoid second-guessing or overturning the owner’s decisions. It’s fine to provide guidance and assistance, but if you don’t like the results, change the initiative owner – don’t incapacitate him or her.
• Focus on teams, not individuals.
• Lead with questions, not orders.

Excellent article summarizing what agile actually is and giving good examples of its application not only for software related projects, but also across all organizational levels. Well worth reading in whole – if I could, I would copy it whole here 🙂 The main take away, next to some handy definitions and explanations, is the fact that agile is proven to work in software industry or IT, and now is on the way to transform other industries or functions. As article states in last sentence: Those who learn to lead agile’s extension into broader range of business activities will accelerate profitable growth.

What I Read – McKinsey Quarterly, February 2015 Issue.

Tags

digital, innovation, Jesko Perrey, Jonathan Gordon, marketing, McKinsey, McKinsey Quarterly

Recently I read somewhere, that I should make notes of what I read and review them from time to time. I decided to give it a try, since I read a lot and I think making such notes will be for me a way of remembering best ideas, quotes, or whatever from my books and magazines. I also decided to share those notes with you, in edited form as some have gotten pretty long. In many cases I copied whole passages without noting the page numbers, which is against good reference practices, but of course I will list title and author of a book (or article) where I got the notes from.

I do that with hope that at least some of you will reach for mentioned magazine or book when you will find my notes interesting. Ach, one more thing: small number of notes do not mean that the book or magazine was not good…

Here is what I noted from the article “The dawn of marketing’s new golden age” by Jonathan Gordon and Jesko Perrey in the McKinsey Quarterly, February 2015 Issue:

“The power of today’s digital tools and the scientific approaches they make possible are not only enabling a more substantial role for marketing but also giving it opportunities for real-time impact”.

“…As you think about the implications of science, substance, story, speed and simplicity for your organisation, we suggest you ask yourself five questions:

Are we taking advantage of the science of data and research to uncover new insights, or are we working off yesterday’s facts, assertions, and heuristics?

Do we fully exploit the power of marketing to enhance the substance – that is, the products, services, and experiences – we offer our customers, or are we just selling hard with “me-too” mind-set?

Do we have a clear brand story that echoes through cyberspace, or do we feel that we aren’t quite capturing hearts and minds?

Have we created simplifiers within our organisation, or have complex matrices become a logjam?

Are we faster or slower to market than our competition?”

All of the above are valid questions. Asking them – since I have them – is now easy. I even know some of the answers. Getting the rest of them and then turning those answers in some sort of action is another thing entirely.