“Companies pay amazing amounts of money to get answers from consultants with overdeveloped confidence in their own intuition. Managers rely on focus groups—a dozen people riffing on something they know little about—to set strategies. And yet, companies won’t experiment to find evidence of the right way forward.”
The same can be seen with fighting fires: They don’t want to try something and fail, and they don’t want to be at fault if they do fail … so hire consultants!
“if you work in tech, you should spend some time with an iPad. If it doesn’t change the way you think about what you do, you’re either a genius or an idiot.”
Bob MacNeal has a bone to pick with command & control management in Leaders Yes, Managers No:
“Are most innovations born in environments of control or inspiration? Easy question.”
Matthew E May (who wrote about Toyota’s production system in his book, In Pursuit Of Elegance) has some nice tips for innovation. My favorite is the first on his list of 10 tips for unleashing innovation:
“Let Learning Lead. Learning and innovation go hand in hand, but learning comes first. Learning is defined as the creation of new knowledge through experimentation.”
“So while [techies] trump up our skills at designing “easy to use” interfaces for our applications, millions of people are still trying to figure out how to get our beautifully designed application out of its zip file or disk image. Or where in fact the Downloads folder is. Or what, exactly, a folder is. [...] I’ve watched firsthand as people who’ve struggled to do basic computer tasks as long as I’ve known them pick up an iPhone and be cruising around within hours, if not minutes. For people who do not already thoroughly understand computers, New World devices are easier to understand and easier to use.”
monthly email
RSS 2.0