Inspired by David Letterman, here is my Top 10 Signs You Need Help With Innovation Management.

Number 10. Just like a neurotic dog chasing its tail, you seem to be caught chasing a tail. You just can’t tell whose tail you are chasing: yours or your competitor’s.

Number 9. Your managements’ version of thriving on chaos feels more like the final hours on Titanic.

Number 8. Your company wrote the book on bureaucracy: the corporate barber offers volume discounts on pointy hairdos.

Number 7. You missed so many product launch windows that you are thinking about installing garage doors.

Number 6. Your product roadmap has taken its cue from NASA. You retired your core product without a replacement in the works, leaving your customers lost in space.

Number 5. Your data sheets read like John Kerry’s campaign speeches…

Number 4. Your employees refer to your idea management system as the roach motel. Ideas check in, and nothing checks out.

Number 3. Your strategic planning process resembles contestant elimination on a reality show.

Number 2. To reduce casualties, you erect a wall with security checkpoints between your R&D and marketing departments. Remember to use the buddy system: no one crosses the line alone!

And finally, Number 1. You are reading this blog

Happy weekend everyone!

It was the best of times… It was the worst of times… No worries, not when we have strategic agility.

Just as strategy’s roots come from the military with Sun Tzu, the foundations of strategic agility are thanks to Napoleon. By incorporating mobility and flexibility (corps d’armée system) combined with strong communication channels (communication backbone of marshals), Napoleon revolutionized the war strategies of his time. He recognized time as the key strategic element for his success, and gained a competitive advantage by identifying ways to dynamically organize and structure his attacks based on the latest information from the battlefront: a classic example of marrying strategic planning with strategic agility.

I don’t need to point out that our business environment has changed. For some, it might even feel a bit like a battlefront. Every day it is increasingly competitive, with an abundance of information available instantly to everyone, where constantly evolving technologies accelerate the commoditization cycle, not to mention we may be at the brink of an economic depression. With that, every strategic plan has the opportunity to become obsolete overnight, along with what was once your competitive advantage and differentiation. As they say, never a dull moment.

How well and how fast you predict, foresee, adjust, adapt and exploit opportunities in this ever changing environment defines your strategic agility quotient. With that, strategic agility is not just a nice to have. It should be embedded into your culture, your business processes and organization, and you should make it a key core competency and capability to enable continuous value creation for your company.

To foster strategic agility, you need to invest in many facets of your organization.

• Management by Objective (MBO): Originally rooted in HP’s management philosophy, MBOs are a great way to align your workforce to the ever-changing needs of your organization.
• Change management: Your efficiency and effectiveness at mastering change initiatives and handling uncertainty will improve your speed of execution and the flexibility of your organization.
• Communication backbone: Everyone in your organization needs to understand your business and the context for its success. Through this, they can understand the key triggers to watch, to act upon and more importantly their role for making it happen.
• Organizational learning: Your culture not only needs to embrace new and different, but also learn from past experiences.
• Organizational processes and structure: Without a well understood set of processes, new information and knowledge will be lost within the organization. Without an organizational structure that can effectively act on new information and knowledge (prioritization of projects, resources, …), one would be left wishing that the information was never observed.
• Organizational talent: With your HR team, you need to grow and recruit the needed talent and experience to execute for the future.
• Environmental scanning: Build in habits and provide tools for your organization to look for future trends. But don’t stop there; encourage communication and incorporation of your findings into future plans and activities.
• Ecosystem capabilities: You need to extend beyond your organization, to your ecosystem, and build capabilities and a communication backbone for faster response: customer relationship management, supply chain, distribution chain, manufacturing, IT, …
• Maintain a healthy balance: As with everything, you need to maintain a balanced view between adaptiveness, responsiveness, speed, cost, quality, functionality, brand and customer care.

Though strategic agility is a 2-word phrase, building the capability and skills to be strategically agile is more complex. Think of it as a pyramid of capabilities that build on each other, extending beyond your organization’s boundaries. You can utilize this framework to assess your strategic agility. Does your organization and your ecosystem have the intent, the focus towards scanning the horizon and beyond, and to what degree and depth? Do you have the right behaviors to support the intention: avoidance of analysis paralysis, creative analysis, systems thinking, the curiosity to explore and understand? Does your organization and ecosystem extend beyond now to understand new patterns formulating on the horizon, and work collectively to decode the hidden messages? Does your culture welcome new ideas and thoughts at every level? Do you have the processes and structures to make the necessary adjustments and strategic course corrections efficiently and effectively?

Strategic agility is not for everyone, at least not to the same degree. But, recognize that globalization and the speed of change is requiring every industry to embed some aspect of strategic agility into its core in order to survive, even if your sole differentiation is based on operational excellence. So, get to know thyself. Analyze your risk profile, communicate your key boundaries for decision making (hurdle rate, % of customers impacted, resources impacted, ..) and define your key change triggers that your organization must be aware of (new technology, new entrant, shifts in the economy, customer trends, …). Whatever your solution, make sure you are not the frog slowly being brought to a boil…

Technorati Tags: strategic agility, fostering strategic agility

I love the replicator technology from Star Trek. A replicator is a machine that can create and dispose of objects. Talk about easy meals and clean-up! Aside from food, the crew also used replicators to produce spare parts and everyday things.

Looks like theReplicating Rapid-prototyper (RepRap) team, which is an open source activity, has the objective to build a printer that can replicate and update itself. In that sense, RepRap is more like the Stargate Replicators, but hopefully not as deadly :). Using polylactic acid (PLA) the RepRap can duplicate itself, its own components, and other 3D objects. Though 3D printing technologies already exists, RepRap is unique as it is completely open source and can replicate itself. Just imagine the next generations’ science fair projects, or upcoming design meetings, or … Just as any innovation, it is the small steps that creates the giant leaps. Now, only if they came up with blog-writer.

Technorati Tags: RepRap

I was recently pinged regarding to the challenges of managing geographically dispersed teams. The wisdom below is based on my experience. How about you, are your observations different?

Overall, I found the leadership and management challenges of managing geographically distributed teams similar to day-to-day leadership challenges. However, distance, cultural diversity and communication differences make it even more challenging to ensure your teams are aligned with your values, processes and are working together towards the same goal with the same level of urgency. In my experience, I learned that I can’t assume that I am understood (even if I hear “yes, I understand” from the other side). I need to make sure to take the time to educate my teams on our processes, explain the context of my decision making process, discuss my values and how we do business in general. Establishing trust and good communication is essential in managing global teams.

Managing people, regardless of location, is a great reminder that I am in the people business, and not necessarily the technology business. With that, once the processes are understood and a few glitches are dealt with, the coordination process becomes smooth. However, when you are dealing with people, you will always have misunderstandings, miscommunications, etc. These tend to cause the coordination problems, and take the most effort to iron out, since you need to solve the root of the problem and not just deal with the symptom (such as coordination issues, misunderstood expectations, etc.)

Culture and language differences are yet another challenge to deal with. It is important to be aware of cultural diversity, as it can cause unnecessary tension and problems. Language and method of communication tends to be the bigger challenge. As an example, e-mail distribution lists are a great way to convey information and can be used heavily for decision making. However, the quantity and verbosity of email can be quite difficult for non-english speakers. So, your main issue is how to structure your communication such that your audience can understand and act on it as you intended.

When dealing with distance, I think there is always an aspect of out of sight, out of mind, which applies to both sides. Distance and time zones contribute to the challenges of communication and trust. In my experience a few hours of difference (such as the case of neighboring US States) wasn’t an issue. However, when you are dealing with differences of culture, holidays, work days (M-F vs. Su-Th) as well as large time zone differences (8+ hrs), you need to be aware of potentially burning out your teams. Active management of these issues (such as rotating meeting hours, face-to-face meeting locations, establishing quiet days, etc.) certainly helps.

I am a believer in over-communicating. I use face to face meetings (crucial, especially with very diverse teams and at the beginning and the middle of projects for best coordination), phone calls for 1:1s (personal updates), conference calls (web, video, phone, …) with my management staff, conference calls with all my teams, emails and instant messaging. Agendas as well as clearly stating the context of the issue and outcomes expected (including any boundaries, etc.) are key to good communication on both sides.

Technorati Tags: global teams, distributed team management