Category Archives: Knowledge Management

Elements of Leadership

A recent post over on ChiefExecutive.net on The Four Elements of Leadership had four great tips for helping you manage your top talent. In brief, they were:

  • Understand Your Role
    You’re a leader, not a manager. As a result, you direct, you don’t control.
  • Unify the Team
    Don’t divide the team, don’t add members that will divide the team, and if the team begins to divide, align them against you if need be (on a temporary basis).
  • Deference is for Managers
    If you get too accustomed to having people defer to you, you stop growing as a leader. The team should be empowered to make their own decisions, should know that you’re not the only expert, and should know that you don’t have all the answers and don’t expect that you do.
  • Deal with Differences
    Learn how to identify them, respect them, use them appropriately, and find a common language when not everyone thinks the same.

In other words, leaders lead, they don’t micromanage; they build a team, they don’t just put bodies in seats; they empower the team and acknolwledge their own limitations, they don’t see themselves as superior; and they understand.

It’s a good article with good advice.

A Streamlined Supply Chain Is Integrated

I was pleased to see this recent piece on “Making It Right” over on Stores.org that quoted Brandon Arbiter, the Business Intelligence Manager for FreshDirect LLC, who said that we are operating three businesses simultaneously and that to execute each of these on a daily basis, every department needs to use the most up-to-date information and have that information at their fingertips.

Just like FreshDirect is simultaneously a grocer, an online merchant, and a transportation company, an average CPG supply chain is a manufacturer, a broker, a transportation company, and a bank that has massive amounts of data that needs to be managed in the physical, financial, and information flows. The business operations of manufacturing, brokering, transporatation, and finance cannot be conducted independently if the supply chain is to be successful. Otherwise, goods will be produced too fast or too slow, or they will get held up in customs somewhere, or they will sit in a warehouse for too long, or they won’t ever leave the factory because the last order wasn’t paid for on-time. That’s why a successful supply chain has to be integrated, and also why it’s the only way to arrive at a streamlined supply chain that has to simultaneously minimize the physical, financial, and information flows that need to be in lock-step for success.

Furthermore, not only are the operations and data flows integrated, but so are the metrics. Instead of metrics like shipped complete and on-time delivery, you have metrics like perfect order that say right product at the right time at the right price that integrate all of the operations. So take a lesson from FreshDirect and integrate your supply chain operations.

IP Good, Knowledge Better

I enjoyed this post over on the HBR Blogs that said you should “stop obsessing over intellectual property rights” because what inevitably happens when companies obsess over IP rights is patent frenzy, and that just results in patent pirates plundering. And if that isn’t bad enough, since the full text of your patent is only a click away on the USPTO site, your secret sauce can easily be copied by any set of eyes with interest, and if their country isn’t very protective of IP rights, and they don’t try to sell into your home country, they can profit off of your IP royalty free and you have no recourse.

That’s one reason I’m not a big fan of patents in general, and think that North America should follow the EU and ban software patents specifically. There’s not much value in patenting “processes” that have existed since the dawn of civilization (and we have records of “auctions” going back thousands of years) as the patent can be easily knocked down, and there’s no value patenting a technology “invention” that is based almost entirely on open source, as a simple substitution of a few pieces, a few changes to the integration strategy, and a few new steps makes it a different invention — which means that someone else can use your publicly available blueprint to create their own “invention” with very little effort. Plus, the process is very time consuming and expensive in terms of dollars (as patent lawyers aren’t cheap) and time (as the documentation and questions from the lawyers and USPTO will take up a lot of time). And you can’t defend them unless you’re cash-rich, making them weak defenses if you’re cash poor.

I’m not saying IP isn’t important, it is, and, fortunately, it is protected under copyright law and other laws if you keep it trade secret. I’m just saying that IP isn’t everything. As the post points out, it’s what you do with the IP that matters. And effective use requires effective knowledge management. As the post points out, pursuing IPR (IP Rights) entails structuring and documenting knowledge, and the irony is that this very structuring allows diffusion to other firms who get access to it and either work around the IPR or eventually imitate it — so if you don’t effectively manage your knowledge, you lose it, or at least the benefits of it.

However, since a powerful strategic opportunity lies in binding your tacit knowledge assets to your structured knowledge, proper knowledge management can lead to significant market advantages and revenues, and make you a thought leader, like it did for Adobe, McKinsey, and Bloomberg.

So how do you create a knowledge management strategy? The authors suggest that you start by mapping your knowledge assets against a codification/diffusion grid that separates them into core compentencies, patents & copyrights, industry wide principles, and industry conventional wisdom, using the process described in this post on “are you wasting money”. Each type of asset requires a different strategy where protection and revenue generation are concerned.

In the end, legally owning your knowledge pays off only if you’re cash-rich enough to monitor and enforce the IPR. For most organizations, what ultimately drives performance is the organization’s possession of deep, tacit knowledge and its ability to identify, construct, and exploit knowledge networks using that knowledge to generate continual revenue streams.

McKinsey’s Seven Steps to Better Brainstorming

How do you generate better and more creative ideas for innovation, CI (Continuous Improvement), and BPR (Business Process Re-Engineering)? According to the McKinsey Quarterly, you need “better brainstorming” instead of the familiar brainstorming process where the company brings in an outside moderator who knows little about the business and offers little motivation to the employees who do not think that the session is a good use of time.

This process, that the authors call “brainsteering”, is a more advanced form of brainstorming that requires more preparation, the ability to leverage how people typically think, and the leadership to steer the energy wasted in a typical brainstorming session into a productive direction. The preparation starts with the following seven steps:

  1. Know Your Organization’s Decision Making Criteria
    It’s useless to think outside the box if the organizational policies create boxes that cannot be escaped. Make sure any absolute criteria are known and outlined in advance. This allows participants to avoid wasting time on ideas that will not be accepted and makes for a more productive session.
  2. Ask the Right Questions
    Decades of research has shown that traditional, loosely structured brainstorming techniques, are inferior to approaches that provide (some) structure. One of the best techniques is to use (well-designed) questions as the platform for idea generation. The “right” questions, of which there should be about one per person, are those that force participants to take a new, unfamiliar perspective while still limiting the conceptual space the team will explore (to the organizational box of the first step).
  3. Choose the Right People
    Specifically, pick people, with “in the trenches” knowledge, who can likely answer the questions you’re asking. Don’t bring an MBA to help you with CI on the NPD process for electronic component design.
  4. Divide and Conquer
    Conduct multiple, discreet, highly-focused idea generation sessions among subgroups of 3-5 people that focus on a single question, or a small set of related questions, being sure to isolate “idea crushers” in their own subgroup. This will ensure that everyone speaks up and contributes.
  5. On Your Mark, Get Set, Go!
    Before you break the participants into subgroups and set them off, take the time to clearly explain your expectations, which revolve around a deeper consideration of key questions than traditional brainstorming sessions. Explain that, given the restrictions, a group may only generate two or three worthy ideas and that any ideas outside the scope of the current discussion should be written down and saved for the appropriate time.
  6. Wrap it Up
    While each subgroup should share all of its leading ideas with the entire group to motivate and inspire participants, the group shouldn’t pick a winner. Since the participants won’t always have the executive-level or subject matter expert understanding of the criteria and considerations that must go into prioritizing ideas, picking winners is not a fruitful exercise. Instead, describe what steps the organization will use to pick the winners and how, and when, the winning ideas will be announced.
  7. Follow Up Quickly
    Decisions and announcements should be quick and thorough. Team members won’t be demoralized if their idea wasn’t chosen, instead, their morale will be increased when they get feedback as to why the winner was picked that they can use to generate better ideas next time.

Some of these steps contain some good advice, and the McKinsey Quarterly article on “seven steps to better brainstorming” contains some great examples. Check it out.

MiniTrends: A Book Review, Part III

In Part I we began our discussion and review of Minitrends: How Innovators & Entrepreneurs Discover & Profit from Business & Technology Trends, including the seven strategies that can also be used to spot minitrends, because minitrends, which are often the leading indicators of emerging megatrends, can be very vaulable to their discoverer in the short term and, sometimes, provide the foundations for new billion dollar enterprises. In Part II, we continued our discussion of minitrends by identifying useful sources of information that you can use to begin your search for minitrends and presented three types of minitrends that are emerging now.

Today, in this third and final part, we will discuss how you select a minitrend for exploitation, develop a minitrend exploitation scheme, and put the scheme into action. Because, to profit from a minitrend, you must determine the ones that are most attractive, develop a plan for taking full advantage of them, and execute that plan effectively.

In order to select a minitrend for exploitation, you must examine the attractiveness of the minitrend to the business community and to you personally. The best minitrend will be one that is very attractive to both the business community, whom you need to buy the product or service you eventually offer, and to you, as a lot of work will be required before you recognize your first sale of a new product or service.

In order to determine the attractiveness of a minitrend to the business community, you must:

  • define the exact nature of the minitrend
    as you need to be able to define an appropriate product or service
  • define the special attractiveness of the minitrend
    as you need to define what will make the market want to buy
  • analyze the size and nature of potential markets
    as the market must be big enough to create a sustainable business in
    the short term
  • consider where the minitrend is in the emergence process
    as you cannot be too early or too late to market
  • examine the potential implications of external factors
    so that you can identify a shift before it is too late

Once you have identified the minitrends attractive to the market, you must then identify the minitrends attractive to you (or to your company). This will depend on your own enthusiasm, interest, and capability, and may require a bit of soul searching if multiple minitrends look equally attractive.

Once you have selected a minitrend for exploitation, the next thing you need to do is create a plan to exploit it. The process you start with is similar to the process of creating a business plan, which usually goes something like:

  • define your current situation
  • decide where you want to be at some future time
  • determine how you are going to get from the current situation to some future situation

but the difference is that you are not necessarily going after an established market, but an emerging market being established by a minitrend that is still taking shape. As a result, you need to build your exploitation scheme to account for a number of different scenarios. There is the base scenario, the target scenario, and a number of plausible divergent scenarios that would require you to take significantly different actions in the development of an attractive product or service.

Once the most likely scenarios have been identified, the necessary tasks for achieving success are identified, along with the individuals who will need to perform the tasks, you need to (re) define the success characteristics and keep an eye on the market. If the minitrend manifests in a way that does not match the base scenario, but matches one of the divergent scenarios, you need to alter your exploitation plans. And if the minitrend diverges in a way that does not match any of your scenarios, you need to figure out if the new scenario is one that you can effectively serve or if you have to abandon the minitrend in favor of your runner up.

You also need to identify the expected changes to the minitrend after you launch your product or service, and be sure that your plan changes accordingly. Then, when you are ready, you have to launch your product or service, convince potential customers of the value of the minitrend and your manner of addressing it, look for opportunities to take advantage of convergences, and engage your supporters. If you stay flexible, stay healthy, and remember that there are other smart people in the world, and take advantage of their knowledge, chances are that you will succeed.

So what do I think of Minitrends: How Innovators & Entrepreneurs Discover & Profit from Business & Technology Trends by John H. Vanston and Carrie Vanston? I think it’s a good book that’s definitely worth reading by anyone who wants to understand where things are going and what they have to do to get there. While it doesn’t spell out definitive actions that you can take to improve your Supply Chain, IT Department, or Strategic Planning Division, it does introduce you to a mindset that will help you unleash your creativity and perceptiveness, which will help you spot more trends and make better decisions down the road. And that alone makes the book worth it.