Posts Tagged: change

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25
Nov 11

Apple, the Low Cost Leader

Some of you still believe that Apple and their products are “nice, but over-priced”. This may have been true at one point in history, but your information is old and needs to be updated.

Let me help:

  • So Far Rivals Can’t Beat iPad’s Price (NYTimes, 3/2011)
  • “Would-be rivals to Apple’s iPad have more of a chance in Europe than they do in the United States, but they need to cut prices fast to grasp the opportunity, IT research firm Forrester said on Tuesday. [...] their prices cannot yet compete with Apple, which has far larger scale in the tablet market and an efficient supply chain.” (Reuters 8/2011)
  • “PC makers are struggling to match Apple’s prices” (Daring Fireball, DigiTimes 8/2011)
  • “Something unexpected has happened at Apple, once known as the tech industry’s high-price leader. Over the last several years it began beating rivals on price.” (NYTimes, 10/2011)
  • “The first crop of Android tablets that hit the market failed to come close to the iPad’s entry-level price of $499″ (CNET, 10/2011)

 

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31
Jul 11

The Knowing Doing Gap

I recently started reading the book, The Knowing Doing Gap, How Smart Companies Turn Knowledge into Action by Jeffrey Pfeffer (Professor of Organizational Behavior, Stanford) and Robert Sutton (Professor of Management science, Stanford).

I’ve been a long-time follower of Bob Sutton’s blog, and it was about time I picked up one of his books to read. To my way of thinking, Bob has some fairly sensible advice for working with people, and I’d suggest you take a moment to hear what he has to say.

From the Preface:

“But once something was clearly not working [while writing the book], we abandoned the path quickly, stopping just long enough to figure out what we should learn before trying something new. We never stopped to worry about how much time we had wasted and never spent one minute talking about which one of us was to blame for the last dead end. Rather we were inspired by the successful firms we studied, in which setbacks and mistakes were viewed as an inevitable, even desirable, part of being action oriented. We heeded their advice that the only true failure was to stop trying new things and to stop learning from the last effort to turn knowledge into action.”

 Great advice for being action oriented — from the preface, no less!

  1. Recognize that something isn’t working. (This is often easier said than done.)
  2. Abandon that path quickly.
  3. Figure out what to learn from the last effort, and try something new.
  4. Don’t worry about wasted time, nor assigning blame.
  5. View setbacks and mistakes as desirable.
  6. The worst thing you can do is to stop trying new things.

My questions to you are: When did you last fail in front of your whole team (maybe even your whole company)? What did you learn? What are you trying now?

Can’t wait to read the rest of the book!

- Peter

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30
Mar 11

Path Dependence

David Brooks, Tools for Thinking on the concept of path dependence:

This refers to the notion that often “something that seems normal or inevitable today began with a choice that made sense at a particular time in the past, but survived despite the eclipse of the justification for that choice.”

For instance, typewriters used to jam if people typed too fast, so the manufacturers designed a keyboard that would slow typists. We no longer have typewriters, but we are stuck with the letter arrangements of the qwerty keyboard.

When I suggest changing a technology that has been around for a while, I always argue that “it was the right decision at the time” but also that “it may no longer be the right decision”. I find this acknowledges the good work that had been done, while also giving those same people space to consider new approaches without being blamed for the old.

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5
Nov 10

Good Ideas

Worth watching: Where Good Ideas Come From by Steven Johnson. It is a “trailer” for a recently released book. Same folks did this one as Dan Pink’s The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us.

Video:

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24
Oct 10

The only constant is change

Liz Keogh in Change, and keep changing:

“There is no end-state with Agile or Lean. You’ll be improving, and continue to improve, trying new things out and discarding the ones which don’t work.”

This is what appeals to me about agile. It isn’t a destination, it is a mindset of improving continuously. I look at corporate waterfall processes, and the thing that hurts the process far more than anything else is that it is considered to be a complete and well-rounded, immutable process.

The problem is that it doesn’t work well in every situation. Facts confront the reality (yet another project delivered late and over budget!), but process isn’t blamed … the people are. “You were not following the process as closely as you should.” is the common explanation you hear. “We need better documentation!” is another. But these strike me as a rather inhumane approach. Do you really want to blame your own people (of whom you would like to remain productive, and have been added to the staff at considerable cost) when the evidence suggests that it is the process that is broken?

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