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Chasing the what?
By Bob Lewis | February 15, 2010
Topics: Industry Commentary, Leadership, Organizational Effectiveness, Strategy and Tactics | 7 Comments »
To operate a computer, you point, click, double-click, or right-click. To operate a car you push on the gas, stomp on the brake, or crank the steering wheel.
Which is why you have to feel sorry for Steven Spear.
Spear, you’ll recall, authored Chasing the Rabbit (2008) — an in-depth analysis of what makes high-performance organizations tick. It’s a fine book. Spear based much of his analysis on Toyota, though, which has managed to mess up gas, brakes and steering … pretty much the entire driving experience.
The easy conclusion is that Spear is a chump and his book a waste of time.
The correct conclusion, it appears, is that his advice is right on the money, and it’s too bad Toyota’s executive team stopped taking it.
That, at least, is what’s reported by Blaine Harden in a piece that recently ran in the Washington Post (“‘Toyota Way’ was lost on road to phenomenal worldwide growth,” 2/13/2010).
The lessons for IT:
- Weakening an organization is a risky proposition: As Harden explained, “… growth itself derailed the Toyota Way, blurring its focus on quality, thinning its stable of expert mentors and undermining its capacity to respond to consumer complaints.”
Stretch your IT staff too thin by trying to “do more with less” and in the long run you’ll face problems parallel in every respect to what Toyota faces today.
- When users report problems, they have problems: Many IT shops (and even more commercial Help Desks) have a habit of assuming problems are the result of user error.
According to Harden, Toyota’s executives were certain complaints about the Prius’s brakes were just problems with driver perception … right up until it had to recall 400,000 of them.
- You always test: The question is how much of your testing occurs after you’ve put your product into production. Shinichi Sasaki, Toyota’s vice president for quality control, ascribed much of its problems to inadequate testing of new designs … especially for varying weather conditions.
How’s your stress testing these days?
Toyota isn’t the only organization you can learn from. Take Microsoft.
Once upon a time, Microsoft was a coherent organization, focused on beating its competitors (see “Predators vs ecosystems,” Keep the Joint Running, 3/2/1998).
That’s no longer the case. Take the sad case of its tablet computer – a device that deserved to win in the marketplace, and might have done so had it not been for internal politics.
At least that’s the view of Dick Brass, the executive responsible for Microsoft’s Tablet program in the early 2000s. In an opinion piece published in the New York Times last week (“Microsoft’s Creative Destruction,” 2/4/2010) he described how the executive in charge of MS Office personally insisted on crippling its integration with tablet-style computing.
The lesson for IT is clear … at least as clear as ClearType, whose introduction internal politics delayed for a decade: When you allow internal rivalries to fester, you’ll cripple the technology you deploy. One of the most important roles any leader plays is to instill common purpose to all employees. Fail that and you won’t succeed at much of anything else.
Here’s one more lesson, provided in the interest of fairness even though it’s preliminary.
Much as I hate to be predictable, it’s taken from Apple and its new iPad. Ignore the unfortunate-but-inevitable name, its already well-publicized limitations, and the near-complete confusion as to what the iPad actually is for. Instead, look at it strategically as a potential Kindle killer.
The nature of the competition between Amazon and Apple ensures Apple might win small but Amazon will win big. That’s because the Kindle Store will happily sell eBooks to iPad users, but if Apple plans to sell … iBooks? … in its iTunes store to Kindle users, it’s a well-kept secret. Advantage Amazon.
Apple’s reported publisher-friendly pricing is, by definition, higher than the competing consumer-friendly pricing provided by the Kindle Store. Advantage Amazon again.
On Apple’s side of the ledger, for about twice the price you can change pages using gestures instead of buttons.
So expect those light-duty travelers who can live with its limitations to buy iPads, using them to buy eBooks from the Kindle Store. Those who can’t will buy Kindles, using them to buy eBooks from the Kindle Store.
Apple is the corporate equivalent of some IT professionals – those used to being the smartest person in the room. Their confidence serves them well when they are the smartest person in the room.
When they’re just one smart person among many, though, their confidence becomes arrogance – a game-losing strategy.
Bob Lewis is president of 
Problem is, we have no way of knowing if Toyota is an example of what you’re talking about. We used to have regulatory agencies to deal with auto safety. Now those same agencies have become subsidiaries of a powerful competitor. We used to have a news media that would investigate these things. Now there is a press so ideologically servile that Leonid Brezhnev would have coveted it.
Maybe Toyota has a real problem with safety and maybe it doesn’t. We have absolutely no way of knowing. In the absence of information one way or the other, my wife and I are in the market for another Toyota, which we hope will give as many years of trouble-free service as our current one has.
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That case is but another classic case of squeeze and squeeze and then do nothing to correct the main issue.
I just got done complaining to a company which provides a service called “RELAYHEATH”. This “service” is supposed to supply secure communications between you and your doctor.
The issue is that (as of last count) 15 of my messages were vaporized. Thats right I sent the messages and they were never delivered to my doctor. I won’t count the 10+ that it accepted but never delivered nor the 5 that it saved but didn’t.
In healthcare how can any company claim to be a reliable system with such a poor average of deliverables? Easy they classify all errors as user errors, eg: Taking to long to fill out a form.
Hell when I was working my job would have had a new person in it 2 weeks after I started if this type of BS was allowed to happen.
I would have fired the software provider long long time ago but trying to find out who to complain to is close to impossible.
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Bob,
Something to consider for Apple’s iPad that you may not have thought about: did Apple intentionally “under-feature” the iPad? They put out something good enough while letting all the critics wail and moan about it missing this feature or that. In just a short period of time, it will become clear what the features are that everyone wants. Shortly thereafter, viola: iPad v2 will show up with all those features included.
Was this their intent? Hard to say. And only time will tell if this is how it all plays out.
There is a folklore tale about an architect that was hired to design a college campus. He put up the buildings but created no sidewalks. When the head of the school asked him where the sidewalks were, he replied, “The students will create the sidewalks.” Sure enough, a year later the architect visited the school and built paved sidewalks where the students had created well-worn paths in the grass.
I’ve never been able to confirm this tale; even Snopes doesn’t have anything on it. But I think it apropos to the Apple iPad. Apple doesn’t know what everyone wants so they build the campus without sidewalks. In short order, the worn paths will tell them the best features to add. Plus, they get revenue from the iPad v1 to help fund the v2 development. This all sounds pretty Jobish to me.
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Bob Lewis Reply:
February 16th, 2010 at 12:08 pm
It’s possible, and the opposite of what many analysts say about how Apple operates. In any event, some of the gaps won’t be easily addressed. For example, adding multitasking to an operating system is a non-trivial task, and while multitasking is a nice-to-have in a PDA or smartphone, it’s essential in a device that’s supposed to compete with laptops and netbooks (and that is priced in the same range).
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Shouldn’t Spear have seen this (Toyota issues) coming? He takes time in the book to compare Toyota to an American auto company and we know Toyota was having issues at the time the book was written. How do we know that other companies that Spear wrote about do not also have ghosts in their closets?
Bob I’m not sure on the iPad/Amazon comparison. Historically the business move was to give away the razor and make money on the blades. Well Apple has figured out how to make money on the razor with the blades being gravy. The question will be if Amazon can find a pricing models for books that makes them profitable — more so than the margins that Apple has on the iPad. Apple has turned into a very savvy manufacturing company.
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Some wise person said: “Nothing fails like success.” A corollary is that prior success also covers current failures.
True for the auto companies (Toyota is just the latest to be outed) and certainly true for your local IT operation.
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Another insightful column. I wish I could forward it. Unfortunately, the folks described, particularly in the last line (confidence which has become arrogance) wouldn’t recognize themselves.
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