Steve Neiderhauser

Leaning on Product Development

Last week, for the second time this year, I listened to Mike Kennedy speak about Product Development for the Lean Enterprise. Instead of speaking about his book, he shared some stories and explained why World War II is relevant to manufacturing, today.

After the second World War, the Japanese were so amazed by the pace and power of US manufacturing that they came to America to study our methods. You see, before entering the war, American industry created a document called "Training Within Industry" (TWI). This manual taught the replacement factory workers how to perform their jobs -- the manual's emphasis, however, was not on procedures and processes.

During the visit, the Japanese acquired one of the manuals and took it back to Japan where it remains under lock and key. Considering that the highly successful WW II p-51 fighter plane was designed and built in six months, you can see why a country might want to study and apply the manual's guiding principles. Obviously, American manufacturing has lost something that it once had. For now it may take ten years to design a fighter plane.

On the other hand, Toyota has embraced these principles. While Toyota's employees are measured and rewarded for sharing information, employees of American companies are rewarded for hoarding knowledge. And while American companies are tripping over themselves in the rush to move manufacturing to China, Toyota wouldn't think of moving manufacturing away from its designers in Japan. Because manufacturing is design.

Mike also talked about the "language of knowledge." I wasn't sure what this phrase meant, and learned that he developed this new concept after his book was published. Mike took the time to explain the “language of knowledge” in an email:

An important capability from Toyota is their ability to design sets of solutions, carry them far into the design process, and reuse the sets easily, even the ones discarded, for future projects. In other words, they fundamentally are continually designing an overall product space rather than discrete products. To do this, they had to find a way to actually communicate at a fundamental knowledge level. That is what I call the "language of knowledge."

Back to the presentation -- The Wright Brothers, Mike explained, revolutionized aircraft design. Before the Wright Brothers, a pilot would design, then test his plane. Pilots using this approach died -- and so died their design knowledge. How were the Wright Brothers different?

They used performance trade-offs -- first test, then design. The same approach drives design at Toyota, today.

Mike finished his presentation with three keys to design:

Keep it simple

Drive actions and decisions to the place where people perform the job

Communicate using visuals

Pictures first, words second

Have you ever tried to create a presentation and discovered that the words had a hard time flowing from your pen to the page?

This past week, I experienced that feeling... until two pictures I needed for a presentation popped into my head. After I had the visuals, it was easy to produce the words. Being curious, I wondered if there was a concept that would help me understand the relationship between pictures and words.

Later in the day, as I was reading Stealing Fire from the Gods by James Bonnet, several paragraphs grabbed me and spoke to me.

All the units of action you create can be treated artistically in the same way as the visual images. They can be taken apart, shifted around, conjured, and reassembled someplace else. You can take an ordinary sentence and work with it in this way until it becomes a line of great poetry.

This is of course what rewriting is all about -- conjuring until the words are equal to the visual images you are trying to describe.

So you see, you get the visual images first and then the words flow with the visuals. Shakespeare, Mr. Bonnet points out, eloquently states the same.

The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And, as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name

--Shakespeare, A midsummer Night’s Dream

Breakthrough Principles

This week, a friend asked me how to become a better guitar player; he wanted a breakthrough to the next level. Off the top of my head, I gave three suggestions:

1. Ask yourself the question, "How do I become a better guitar player?" This may seem like a silly thought, however, when you realize that your mind is a goal-oriented mechanism you become very careful about the questions you ask yourself. Because questions draw people and events into your life that guide you toward your goal -- negative or positive.

2. Because what you focus on expands, I suggested that this would-be Hendrix focus on the success he experiences as he stretches toward his guitar goal. And then be thankful for any progress.

3. Picture yourself playing guitar at the level you desire. Find a calm place, close your eyes, and direct the movies of your mind to realize the desires of your heart. Creating and holding vivid visuals in your mind's eye is a proven performance enhancer.

And finally, if you're thrilled by break-out performances, read Dr. Herbert Benson's brilliant book -- The Beak-Out Principle.

Adaptive Enterprise

In Adaptive Enterprise, author Stephan Haeckel tells us how to create an organization that responds to change. He describes the sense-and-respond business model -- A sense-and-respond organization is a collection of capabilities and assets managed as an adaptive system.

Are you a bus or a taxi?

Using a bus versus taxi analogy, Haeckel provides us with the clues to grasp this model. Bus companies are make-and-sell businesses. They create strategic plans, product schedules, and market strategies. The dutiful bus driver carries out the planner's master schedule as efficiently as possible -- even if passengers don't show. Heck, drivers can hit all their stops, not pick up one passenger, and still do a fine job.

On the other hand, taxi companies hire drivers based on demand. They establish frameworks -- geographic boundaries -- and expect drivers to work with the framework, using their own skills, knowledge, and intuition. The company deploys a customer-moving capability. Customers make requests, and drivers respond to their needs.

What's the hallmark of a sense-and-respond organization? Letting your customers drive the business.

The make-and-sell bus company emphasizes efficiency and predictability. The sense-and-respond taxi company emphasizes flexibility and response.

Interesting, isn't it? That in a world of continuous change,we use flexible, changing systems to give us a sense of stability. And it's these systems that ultimately empower our creativity. For the creative force is the one constant that is available to everyone.

How to Think like Leonardo...

Di Caprio? Nope. I'm talking about Da Vinci, of course.

In How to Think like Leonardo da Vinci, author Michael Gelb suggests that we follow Da Vinci's example and cultivate ambidexterity:

When Michelangelo was working on the Sistine Chapel, he astounded observers by switching his paintbrush from one hand to the other as he worked. Leonardo, a natural left-hander, cultivated this same ambidexterity and regularly switched hands when working on The Last Supper and other masterpieces. When I interviewed Professor Raymond Dart and asked him for his recommendations on the development of human potential, he responded, “Balance the body, balance the brain. The future lies with the ambidextrous human!”

In business, it's important to hire ambidextrous employees -- people who have business and technology skills. For they can imagine the future. If you don't employ multi-talented professionals, you lose out on business oportunities that cannot be imagined by the linear worker.

Back to Leonardo. The artist not the actor. While reading Gelb's book I chanced upon the enchanting story of Leonardo's unfinished horse.

Leonardo was commissioned to build a 24-foot bronze horse by the Duke of Sforza. Alas, the Horse was not to be. After much work, Leonardo completed a clay model, and the Horse was ready for casting. France invaded Milan, however, and French archers used the clay horse for target practice, reducing it to a clump of clay. It's said that Leonardo never got over the destruction of the Horse.

After reading an article in National Geographic entitled “The Horse That Never Was,” Charles Dent was inspired to start a foundation to finish the horse.

Ironically, Dent died when the Horse was in the same stage of production -- model completed and acclaimed, but not yet cast -- as when it was destroyed by the French archers.

Before he died, the foundation promised Dent that The Horse would be completed.

On September 10, 1999 -- 500 years from the day the original model was destroyed -- the dream became reality. Il Cavallo -- The Statue of Liberty for Creativity -- was reborn in Milan as a tribute to the da Vincian love of truth and beauty.

When a renaissance man's dream gallops through the mist of time and takes center stage in Milan, you know that ambidextrous men and women hold power in their hands.

Note: An American Horse was also cast.

CIO's Guide to Training that Counts

About a month ago I had lunch with a CIO who was grumbling about recruiters stealing his employees after his team had received extensive and expensive technical training.

As we talked, he agreed that additional technical training, at a point, brings diminished returns. In some cases, the next class on Java makes your staff more attractive to your competition and less valuable to your company. In fact, this CIO believed that over-engineered applications had become a problem at his firm.

During the next hour we produced several ways to improve training. Here's two of those suggestions.

Train staff in business or domain knowledge that will speed development of software applications. If you're a finance company, send your staff to a finance seminar. If you're a marketing company, send a team member to a marketing class. I recall a developer with a marketing background, who established instant rapport with a VP of marketing. How's that possible? Elementary. He talked about marketing concepts--positioning, not pragmas. Consider these marketing seminars from SMU's Executive Management program.

Train staff in writing and presentation skills. These skills are never obsolesced (Shakespeare used them, so can you), and give your IT department a tool to communicate the benefits of strategy or new projects. When you study Cliff Atkison’s powerful presentation techniques, you’ll learn to think visually, and skip right past scary command-and-control structures. Now, that's talent!

But I ask you, what is talent? It's the ability to generalize a concept from one environment to another--the marker that learning has occurred. A concept lost on many talent scouts.

Recruiters talk about the importance of talent, and yet, few will knock on your door to steal staff because of their soft skills. For recruiters pay lip service to talent but are really in love with technical details (same plot as Average Joe).

The love of technology fogs our brains and clouds our judgment. The love of technical trivia can twist your IT department tighter than a Twizzler stick--and limit your ability to respond to change. Another paradox that IT directors could trip on.