“Everything that can be counted does not necessarily count; everything that counts cannot necessarily be counted.”
Source:
Albert Einstein, as quoted in Koch, Charles G. The Science of Success: How Market-Based Management Built the World’s Largest Private Company. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2007.
(p. 152) The early market is driven by the demands of visionaries for offerings that create dramatic competitive advantages of the sort that would allow them to leapfrog over the other players in their industry.
Source:
Moore, Geoffrey A. Living on the Fault Line: Managing for Shareholder Value in the Age of the Internet. 1st ed. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, Inc., 2000.
“Steven J. Sasson, an electrical engineer, created the first digital camera.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.
Kodak’s problems in detailed in the article below, fit very well Christensen’s account about how difficult it is for incumbent firms to embrace major disruptive technologies.
(p. C1) ROCHESTER — Steven J. Sasson, an electrical engineer who invented the first digital camera at Eastman Kodak in the 1970s, remembers well management’s dismay at his feat.
“My prototype was big as a toaster, but the technical people loved it,” Mr. Sasson said. “But it was filmless photography, so management’s reaction was, ‘that’s cute — but don’t tell anyone about it.’ ”
. . .
(p. C2) The company now has digital techniques that can remove scratches and otherwise enhance old movies. It has found more efficient ways to make O.L.E.D.’s — organic light-emitting diodes — for displays in cameras, cellphones and televisions.
This month, Kodak will introduce Stream, a continuous inkjet printer that can churn out customized items like bill inserts at extremely high speeds. It is working on ways to capture and project three-dimensional movies.
. . .
Paradoxically, many of the new products are based on work Kodak began, but abandoned, years ago. The precursor technology to Stream, for example, pushed ink through a single nozzle. Stream has thousands of holes and uses a method called air deflection to separate drops of ink and control the speed and order in which they are deposited on a page.
“I remember wandering through the labs in 2003, and seeing the theoretical model that could become Stream,” said Philip J. Faraci, Kodak’s president. “The technology was half-baked, but it was a real breakthrough.”
Other digital technologies languished as well, said Bill Lloyd, the chief technology officer. “I’ve been here five years, and I’m still learning about all the things they already have,” he said. “It seems Kodak had developed antibodies against anything that might compete with film.”
It took what many analysts say was a near-death experience to change that. Kodak, a film titan in the 20th century, entered the next one in danger of being mowed down by the digital juggernaut. Electronics companies like Sony were siphoning away the photography market, while giants like Hewlett-Packard and Xerox had a lock on printers.
“This was a supertanker that came close to capsizing,” said Timothy M. Ghriskey, chief investment officer at Solaris Asset Management, which long ago sold its Kodak shares.
For the full story, see:
CLAUDIA H. DEUTSCH. “At Kodak, Some Old Things Are New Again.” The New York Times (Fri., May 2, 2008): C1-C2.
(Note: ellipses added.)
“Allan Camp, a technician at Kodak’s inkjet development center in Rochester, works on the development of print heads for printers.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited above.
Source of book image: http://press.princeton.edu/images/k8618.gif
(p. A13) The space shuttle Discovery arrived safely home over the weekend, and I suppose we are all rather relieved – that is, those of us who were aware that the shuttle had blasted off a couple of weeks ago on yet another mission. Space exploration is attracting a lot of excitement these days, but the excitement seems to have less to do with the shuttle and more to do with private space ventures, like Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic or Robert Bigelow’s plans for space hotels or Space Adventures Ltd., whose latest customer for a private space trip is Google co-founder Sergey Brin. He bought a ticket only last week.
Robert Zimmerman’s “The Universe in the Mirror” serves to remind us that NASA, too, can do exciting things in space. Yet the career of the Hubble Space Telescope has been both triumphant and troubled, bringing into focus the strengths and the weaknesses of doing things the NASA way.
. . .
In addition to telling a thrilling tale, Mr. Zimmerman provides a number of lessons. One, he says, is the importance of having human beings in space: Had Hubble not been designed for servicing by astronauts, it would have been an epic failure and a disaster for a generation of astronomers and astrophysicists. Though robots have their uses, he notes, “humans can fix things, something no unmanned probe can do.” . . .
But the biggest lesson of “The Universe in a Mirror” comes from the utterly dysfunctional funding and management system that Mr. Zimmerman portrays. Hubble was a triumph, but a system that requires people to sacrifice careers and personal lives, and to engage in “courageous and illegal” acts, in order to see it succeed is a system that is badly in need of repair. Alas, fixing Hubble turned out to be easier than fixing the system that lay behind its problems.
For the full review, see:
GLENN HARLAN REYNOLDS. “Bookshelf; We Can See Clearly Now.” The Wall Street Journal (Mon., June 16, 2008): A13.
(Note: ellipses added.)
The revised edition of the book under review (including an afterword added by the author) is:
Zimmerman, Robert. The Universe in a Mirror: The Saga of the Hubble Space Telescope and the Visionaries Who Built It. revised pb ed. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010.
Caricature of Glenn Britt. Source of caricature: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.
(p. B2) WSJ: You invested $550 million in Clearwire Corp., which is building a wireless broadband network. Why?
Mr. Britt: We saw that as a defensive move. The business today is largely about making voice telephone calls, text messaging, and some data.
This venture is about very fast broadband delivery, but the technologies and the products are as yet not fully defined. It’s a bit of a start-up, leap-of-faith kind of thing.
WSJ: What uses could this wireless network be put to?
Mr. Britt: An obvious one is using your laptop in a portable way just as you might today with WiFi hot spots. Another is going to be the PDA, the smallest device you can use to access the Internet. If you have an iPhone you can start seeing what that might look like with a more robust network.
Out in the future, people are talking about machine-to-machine communication, the idea of heart monitors talking to hospitals, your camera automatically uploading photos to Shutterfly or whatever printing service you might use.
WSJ: What about the idea of mobile video delivered to portable devices?
Mr. Britt: I know people talk a lot about mobile video, and I certainly think there is some application for it. But I quite honestly haven’t seen it as a big deal. People do want to get video wherever they are. We already have a robust over-the-air television system which, as it goes digital, will be able to have a mobile component to it. But I don’t know how big the ultimate market is in this country. I’m skeptical.
For the full story, see:
VISHESH KUMAR. “BOSS TALK; Cable Boss Airs Growth Plans; Time Warner Cable CEO Sees New Freedoms, Threats After Its Spinoff.” The Wall Street Journal (Mon., June 2, 2008): B1-B2.
(Note: the title of the online version of the article is “BOSS TALK; Grappling With Cable’s Future; Time Warner’s Glenn Britt Sees Freedoms, Threats As Unit Readies for Spinoff.”)
Bossidy and Charan’s advice below on hiring managers fits with Christensen and Raynor’s advice to hire managers who have had the right experiences, in preference to those who have the ‘right stuff’ (aka ‘charisma’).
(p. 119) In our experience, there’s very little correlation between those who talk a good game and those who get things done come hell or high water. Too often the second kind are given short shrift. But if you want to build a company that has excellent discipline of execution, you have to select the doer.
Source:
Bossidy, Larry, Ram Charan, and Charles Burck. Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done. New York: Crown Business, 2002.
Source of book image: http://ramz-thoughts.blogspot.com/2007/12/new-addition-to-my-book-shelf.html
I have had Direct from Dell on my ‘to-read’ list for years, and it finally made it to the top. The book has some interesting anecdotes, and some useful generalizations, but not as many as I had hoped.
In fairness, if I had read the book closer to its publication year, in 1999, maybe some of the observations would have seemed fresher, that today seem like stale clichés.
For example, it is clever to quote (p. 209) the hockey player Wayne Gretzky as saying that he doesn’t skate to where the puck is; he skates to where it will be. And then apply the saying to business by advising that managers skate, not to where the profits currently are, but to where the profits will be in the future. Reading this in Dell’s book did not excite me, because I had already read it in Christensen and Raynor. But Dell’s book came out before Christensen and Raynor, and it’s not a failing of the Dell book that I had read the Christensen and Raynor book first.
But some of what Dell writes, was a cliché even back in 1999. For example, it is a cliché that customers should matter; but simply saying ‘listen to your customers’ is not very useful. Sometimes customers are not very articulate about what they would value, and sometimes they need to be educated, and sometimes your current customers might not buy an innovation that other potential customers might love.
Christensen and Raynor in The Innovator’s Solution, have emphasized the desirability of thinking about what job customers need to have done.
One useful bit of advice in Direct from Dell is that companies should segment themselves into different units to serve different kinds of customers. This might be a useful stratagem to make it easier to execute Christensen and Raynor’s advice. (But it goes against another common dictum in management books: achieve economies by cutting out duplication and by achieving economies of scale.)
The book has some interesting examples and observations, but the signal to noise ratio is not as high as in the very best management books by former CEOs, such as in Andy Groves’ Only the Paranoid Survive and in Jack Welch’s Jack: Straight from the Gut.
References:
Christensen, Clayton M., and Michael E. Raynor. The Innovator’s Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 2003.
Dell, Michael. Direct from Dell: Strategies That Revolutionized an Industry. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, Inc., 1999.
Grove, Andrew S. Only the Paranoid Survive: How to Exploit the Crisis Points That Challenge Every Company. New York: Bantam Books, 1999.
Welch, Jack. Jack: Straight from the Gut. New York: Warner Business Books, 2001.
Here is the latest entry in my continuing effort to document uses of the “leapfrog” concept in business and innovation. The entry below appears in a table entitled “Strategy Milestones” and is under the third of three column headings, which is entitled “Long Term (5+ Years).”
(p. 149) Become pioneers of leapfrog technology
Source:
Bossidy, Larry, Ram Charan, and Charles Burck. Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done. New York: Crown Business, 2002.
(Note: the quotation is presented as being Bossidy’s.)
(p. 129) Developing leaders begins with interviewing and assessing candidates. I’m not talking about overseeing the HR department and interviewing finalists; I’m talking about hands-on hiring. Most interview processes are deeply flawed. Some people interview well, and some people don’t. A person who doesn’t interview well may nonetheless be the best choice for the job. That’s why it’s so important to probe deeply, know what to listen for, and get supplemental data. It takes time and effort to drill down further, but it’s always worth the trouble.
Source:
Bossidy, Larry, Ram Charan, and Charles Burck. Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done. New York: Crown Business, 2002.
(Note: the quotation is presented as being Bossidy’s.)
Omaha culture puts a huge emphasis on surface politeness. (When I first arrived here, I was sometimes thought to be from New York, a thought that I took as a complement, although that was not how it was intended.)
Bossidy and Charan emphasize that harmony is an over-rated virtue–that what they call “robust dialogue” is important for getting things done.
(p. 102) You cannot have an execution culture without robust dialogue—one that brings reality to the surface through openness, candor, and informality. Robust dialogue makes an organization effective in gathering information, understanding the information, and reshaping it to produce decisions. It fosters creativity—most innovations and inventions are incubated through robust dialogue. Ultimately, it creates more competitive advantage and shareholder value.
. . .
(p. 103) . . ., harmony—sought by many leaders who wish to offend no one—can be the enemy of truth.
Source:
Bossidy, Larry, Ram Charan, and Charles Burck. Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done. New York: Crown Business, 2002.
(Note: ellipses added.)
Empirical comparisons between capitalism and socialism are in some ways unfair to capitalism, because many capitalism managers act as though they believed in socialist ideas. The difference in productivity and economic growth would be even greater, if capitalist managers consistently acted as though they believed in capitalism. Consider the following, from a portion of Execution written by Larry Bossidy:
(p. 73) Larry: When I see companies that don’t execute, the chances are that they don’t measure, don’t reward, and don’t promote people who know how to get things done. Salary increases in terms of percentage are too close between top performers and those who are not. There’s not enough differentiation in bonus, or in stock options, or in stock grants. Leaders need the confidence to explain to a direct report why he got a lower than expected reward.
A good leader ensures that the organization makes these distinctions and that they become a way of life, down throughout the organization. Otherwise people think they’re involved in socialism. That isn’t what you want when you strive for a culture of execution. You have to make it clear to everybody that rewards and respect are based on performance.
Source:
Bossidy, Larry, Ram Charan, and Charles Burck. Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done. New York: Crown Business, 2002.
(Note: in the book, the quotation is presented as being Bossidy’s.)
