Team Up With Aliens
I recently met with a group of executives in a large industrial firm that has been in financial doldrums for several years. They agreed that they needed to come up with some fresh new compelling directions, but they were stumped as to what they should do. I suggested that they look towards aliens for help.
If you want to break from the pack, doesn’t it make sense to seek ideas and energies from outside the pack? One of the best ways to do that is to learn from people and organizations who have thrived outside your industry, particularly those who are doing things that would be considered unthinkable and insane in your industry. If you want to improve assembly line conversion in your factories, for example, you could benchmark fellow manufacturers in your industry and get some marginally useful, conventional ideas. Or you could do what General Mills did a few years ago, which is send a number of its factory teams to NASCAR races to benchmark pit crews in action. The teams came back and ultimately reduced the time to switch an assembly line from 5 hours to 25 minutes. If you run a cement company and want to show quantum improvement in speed and on-time delivery, you could visit fellow cement manufacturers and get a familiar lesson in accepted industry practices. Or you could do what Cemex, the most profitable cement company in the world, did a few years ago to turbo-charge speed and delivery . CEO Lorenzo Zambrano sent a number of teams to Houston, to figure out how Houston’s emergency 911 crews does it, and to Memphis, to figure out how how FedEx does it.
Even more power happens when you go beyond “observing” and you move into the realm of intimately partnering with talented groups and people outside your industry who don’t come to the table with the mindset and history that’s considered conventional in your business.
As a leader, you’ll get two big payoffs from partnering with aliens. First, you’ll be able to harness and expose your people to state-of-the-art talent and expertise that is unavailable among the players in your current value chain. Over a decade ago, CEO George Lynn teamed up with 3M to instill a quality culture and to sharply raise the quality metrics in the two Atlanticare hospitals. 3M, as a medical supplier to the hospitals, was pleased to participate in quality projects on site in Atlantic City and host hospital personnel in training workshops in St. Paul. Today, Atlanticare’s quality and resultant cost savings and patient satisfaction are well ahead of industry standards.
The second payoff is subtler, but just as important. As George Lynn found out with 3M, true partners from the outside wind up questioning the very way you do business. They're not hung up on your traditions and your sacred cows. They'll challenge them. They’ll suggest new approaches to everything, even things you didn’t bring them in for. To help its dealers manage leads, cross-sell insurance and financing, and document ongoing service faster and cheaper, Ford Canada has partnered with Dell to overhaul its enterprise information systems. That’s sensible outsourcing and partnering, but the real payoff is deeper because the relationship is deeper. When Dell aliens work with their Ford partners, they point to Ford organizational practices and business assumptions that simply make no sense. They suggest changes in operations, design, people management, customer care and corporate culture that violate conventional wisdom in the auto industry; they are suggestions that only an outsider, with an outsider's perspective and “attitude”, could make. That’s what FedEx did in helping Fujitsu to achieve a double whammy breakthrough: shrink its order turnaround time from 30 days of mass produced product to four days of built-to-order product.
Of course, the aliens benefit too. In working with Ford, Dell gains significant sales entry into a new company, gets new exposure to the massive global auto industry as a whole, and expands its opportunity to further refine its low-cost enterprise I.T. strategy. 3M gains more intimate ties with a valued hospital customer and more understanding of the entire health care industry. It's a win-win situation all around if and when the relationship is approached more in terms of collaborative learning than transactional commodity.
So here’s what I told my clients: In today’s economy, where knowledge, expertise, and technological advance expand exponentially, your company can't know it all, can't own it all. As a leader, you should seek help, but don’t limit your quest to the spuriously “safe” and familiar zone of your industry. Don't ignore the breakthroughs that are occurring elsewhere just because nobody in your industry is doing it—yet. Expand your search for superb alien teammates in other industries, and in universities, art and design studios, think tanks, research institutes, nonprofit advocacy groups, nongovernmental organizations—any source that can help you look at your business differently and do unconventional things. Encourage your people to learn from anyone, anywhere, and help expose as many of your people as possible to alien knowledge. Send them to NASCAR, send them to the Rocky Mountain Institute, send them to Interaction Design Institute Ivrea, send them to Harley Davidson “HOG” (Harley Owner Group) events, send them to any place that’ll stretch their thinking. When he was chief planner at Royal Dutch Shell, Arie de Geus said “The ability to learn faster than competitors may be the only sustainable competitive weapon.” Keep that in mind as you lead the search in other planets for the kinds of alien expertise that will propel your team to market leadership.
If you want to break from the pack, doesn’t it make sense to seek ideas and energies from outside the pack? One of the best ways to do that is to learn from people and organizations who have thrived outside your industry, particularly those who are doing things that would be considered unthinkable and insane in your industry. If you want to improve assembly line conversion in your factories, for example, you could benchmark fellow manufacturers in your industry and get some marginally useful, conventional ideas. Or you could do what General Mills did a few years ago, which is send a number of its factory teams to NASCAR races to benchmark pit crews in action. The teams came back and ultimately reduced the time to switch an assembly line from 5 hours to 25 minutes. If you run a cement company and want to show quantum improvement in speed and on-time delivery, you could visit fellow cement manufacturers and get a familiar lesson in accepted industry practices. Or you could do what Cemex, the most profitable cement company in the world, did a few years ago to turbo-charge speed and delivery . CEO Lorenzo Zambrano sent a number of teams to Houston, to figure out how Houston’s emergency 911 crews does it, and to Memphis, to figure out how how FedEx does it.
Even more power happens when you go beyond “observing” and you move into the realm of intimately partnering with talented groups and people outside your industry who don’t come to the table with the mindset and history that’s considered conventional in your business.
As a leader, you’ll get two big payoffs from partnering with aliens. First, you’ll be able to harness and expose your people to state-of-the-art talent and expertise that is unavailable among the players in your current value chain. Over a decade ago, CEO George Lynn teamed up with 3M to instill a quality culture and to sharply raise the quality metrics in the two Atlanticare hospitals. 3M, as a medical supplier to the hospitals, was pleased to participate in quality projects on site in Atlantic City and host hospital personnel in training workshops in St. Paul. Today, Atlanticare’s quality and resultant cost savings and patient satisfaction are well ahead of industry standards.
The second payoff is subtler, but just as important. As George Lynn found out with 3M, true partners from the outside wind up questioning the very way you do business. They're not hung up on your traditions and your sacred cows. They'll challenge them. They’ll suggest new approaches to everything, even things you didn’t bring them in for. To help its dealers manage leads, cross-sell insurance and financing, and document ongoing service faster and cheaper, Ford Canada has partnered with Dell to overhaul its enterprise information systems. That’s sensible outsourcing and partnering, but the real payoff is deeper because the relationship is deeper. When Dell aliens work with their Ford partners, they point to Ford organizational practices and business assumptions that simply make no sense. They suggest changes in operations, design, people management, customer care and corporate culture that violate conventional wisdom in the auto industry; they are suggestions that only an outsider, with an outsider's perspective and “attitude”, could make. That’s what FedEx did in helping Fujitsu to achieve a double whammy breakthrough: shrink its order turnaround time from 30 days of mass produced product to four days of built-to-order product.
Of course, the aliens benefit too. In working with Ford, Dell gains significant sales entry into a new company, gets new exposure to the massive global auto industry as a whole, and expands its opportunity to further refine its low-cost enterprise I.T. strategy. 3M gains more intimate ties with a valued hospital customer and more understanding of the entire health care industry. It's a win-win situation all around if and when the relationship is approached more in terms of collaborative learning than transactional commodity.
So here’s what I told my clients: In today’s economy, where knowledge, expertise, and technological advance expand exponentially, your company can't know it all, can't own it all. As a leader, you should seek help, but don’t limit your quest to the spuriously “safe” and familiar zone of your industry. Don't ignore the breakthroughs that are occurring elsewhere just because nobody in your industry is doing it—yet. Expand your search for superb alien teammates in other industries, and in universities, art and design studios, think tanks, research institutes, nonprofit advocacy groups, nongovernmental organizations—any source that can help you look at your business differently and do unconventional things. Encourage your people to learn from anyone, anywhere, and help expose as many of your people as possible to alien knowledge. Send them to NASCAR, send them to the Rocky Mountain Institute, send them to Interaction Design Institute Ivrea, send them to Harley Davidson “HOG” (Harley Owner Group) events, send them to any place that’ll stretch their thinking. When he was chief planner at Royal Dutch Shell, Arie de Geus said “The ability to learn faster than competitors may be the only sustainable competitive weapon.” Keep that in mind as you lead the search in other planets for the kinds of alien expertise that will propel your team to market leadership.
posted by Oren Harari at 7:11 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home