Shipulski On Design

Posts Tagged ‘Success’

It’s easier to spot when it’s a rut of failure – product costs too high, product function is too low, and the feeding frenzy where your competitors eat your profits for lunch. Easy, yes, but still possible to miss, especially when everyone’s super busy cranking out heaps of the same old stuff in the same old way, and demonstrating massive amounts of activity without making any real progress. It’s like treading water – lots of activity to keep your head above water, but without the realization you’re just churning in the same place.

But far more difficult to see (and far more dangerous) is the invisible rut of success, where cranking out the same old stuff in the same old way is lauded.  Simply put – there’s no visible reason to change. More strongly put, when locked in this invisible rut newness is shunned and newness makers are ostracized. In short, there’s a huge disincentive to change and immense pressure to deepen the rut.

To see the invisible run requires the help of an outsider, an experienced field guide who can interpret the telltale signs of the rut and help you see it for what it is.  For engineering, the rut looks like cranking out derivative products that reuse the tired recipes from the previous generations;  it looks like using the same old materials in the same old ways; like running the same old analyses with the same old tools; all-the-while with increasing sales and praise for improved engineering productivity.

And once your trusted engineering outsider helps you see your rut for what it is, it’s time to figure out how to pull your engineering wagon out of the deep rut of success.  And with your new plan in hand, it’s finally time to point your engineering wagon in a new direction. The good news – you’re no longer in a rut and can choose a new course heading; the bad news – you’re no longer in a rut so you must choose one.

It’s difficult to see your current success as the limiting factor to your future success, and once recognized it’s difficult to pull yourself out of your rut and set a new direction.  One bit of advice – get help from a trusted outsider.  And who can you trust?  You can trust someone who has already pulled themselves out of their invisible rut of success.

Innovation, as a word, has become too big for its own good, and, as a word, is almost useless. Sure, it can be used to enable magical reinvention of business models and revolutionary products and technologies, but it can also be used to rationalize the rehash work we were going to do anyway. The words that send angry chills down the back of the would-be-innovative company – “We’re already doing it.”

When company leaders talk about doing more innovation, there’s a lot of pressure in the organization to point to innovative things already being done. The organization misinterprets the desire for more innovation as a negative commentary on their work. The mental dialog goes like this – We’re good at our work, we’re working as hard as we can, and we’re doing all we can to meet objectives – hey, look at this innovative stuff we’re doing. Clearly this isn’t what company leaders are looking for, but the word does have that influence.

What can feel better is to describe what is meant by innovation. Wherever we are, whatever successes we’ve had, we want to change our behaviors to create new, more profitable business models; create new products and technologies that obsolete our best, most profitable ones; and change our behaviors to create new, more profitable markets. The key is to acknowledge that our existing behaviors are the very thing that has created our success (and thank them for it), and to acknowledge the desire to build on our success by obsoleting it. When we ask for more innovation, we’re asking for new behaviors to dismantle our current day success behind us to create the next level of success.

There’s a tight link to innovation and failure – risk, learning, experimentation – but there’s a missing link with success. Acknowledgement of success helps the organization retain its self worth and helps them feel good about trying new stuff. However, even still, success is huge deterrent to innovation. Company success will retain the behaviors that created it, and more strongly, as new behaviors are injected, the antibodies of success will reject them. Our strength becomes our weakness.

Strong technologies become anchors to themselves; successful, stable, long-running markets hold tightly to resources that created them; and time-tested business models are above the law. New behaviors almost don’t stand a chance.

Fear of losing what we have is the number one innovation blocker. Where failure blocks innovation narrowly in the blast zone, success smears a thick layer of inaction across the organization. What’s most insidious, since we celebrate success, since we laud customer focus, since we track and reward efficiently doing what we’ve done, we systematically thicken and stiffen the layer that gums up innovation.

Instead of starting with a call-to-arms for innovation, it’s best to define company values, mission, and strategic objectives. Then, and only then, define innovation as the way to get there. First company objectives, then innovation as the path.

Innovation, as a word, isn’t important. What’s important are the new behaviors that will wrestle success to the ground, and pin it.

Don’t worry about your biggest competitor – they’re not your biggest competitor. You’ve not met your biggest competitor. Your biggest competitor is either from another industry or it’s three guys and a dog toiling away in their basement.

Certainly it’s impossible to worry about a competitor we’ve not met, but that’s just what we’ve got to do. We’ve got to use thought-shifting mechanisms to help us see ourselves from the framework of our unknown competitor.

Our unknown competitor doesn’t have much – no fully functional products, no fully built-out product lines, and no market share. And that’s where we must shift our thinking – to a place of scarcity – so we can see ourselves from their framework. We’ve got to look down (in the S-curve sense), sit ourselves at the bottom, and look up at our successful selves. It’s the best way to move from self-cherishing to self-dismantling.

To start, we must create our logical trajectory. First, define where we are and where we came from. Then, with a ruler aligned to the points, extend a line into the future. That’s our logical trajectory – an extrapolation in the direction of our success. Along this line we will do more of what got us here, more of what we’ve done. Without giving ground on any front, we will protect market share and build more. We’ve now defined how we see ourselves. We’ve now defined the thinking that could be our undoing.

Now we must force enlightenment on ourselves. We create an illogical trajectory where we see ourselves from a success-less framework. In this framework less is more; more-of-the-same is displaced with more-of-something-else; and success is a weakness. We know we’re sitting in the rights space when the smallest slice of incremental market share looks like a big, juicy bite – like it looks to our unknown competitor.

The disruptive technology created by our unknown competitor will start innocently. Immature at first, the disruptive technology will do most things poorly but do one thing better. Viewed from our success framework we will see only limitations and dismiss it, while our unknown competitors will see opportunity. We will see the does-most-things-poorly part and they’ll see the one-thing-better part. They will sell to a small segment that values the one-thing-better part.

In another variant, an immature disruptive technology will do less with far less. From our success framework we will see “less” while from their scarcity framework they will see “more”. They will sell a simpler product that does less for a price that’s far less. (And make money.)

Here’s the one that’s most frightening: an immature technology that does all things poorly but does them without a fundamental limitation of our technology.  From our framework the limitation is so fundamental we won’t let ourselves see it. This limitation is un-seeable because we’ve built our business around it. (Think Kodak film.) This flavor of disruptive technology can put our business model out of business, yet we’ll dismiss it.

We’ll know we’ve shifted our thinking to the right place when we see our unknown competitors not as bottom-feeders but as hungry competitors who see our scraps as a smorgasbord.

We’ll know our thinking’s right when see not self-destruction, but self-disruption.

We’ll know all is right with the world we’re working on disruptive technologies to disrupt ourselves, disruptive technologies with the potential to create business models so compelling that we’ll gladly run from our success.