Category Archives: Strategy

Playscripts? PLAYSCRIPTS? Are we going back to Kindergarten?!?

I was a little annoyed with the chosen focus of a recent article by Mr. Michael G. Jacobides and very annoyed with the terminology chosen in “Strategy Tools for a Shifting Landscape” (subscription required), a recent article in the Harvard Business Review. While I agree that some companies need to reinvent the way they develop strategy, I’m not sure that strategy should be “defined” by narrative plots, subplots, and characters and definitely convinced that the last thing we want defining corporate strategy is a “playscript”.

Business is, well, business. Not playtime. And while it shouldn’t be duller than necessary, it shouldn’t be all fun and games either. Businesses exist to benefit shareholders. And unless you’re a production house generating content for web, TV, and Movie studios, writing scripts is not going to benefit your shareholders in any way. And while I agree that plots, subplots, and characters might be the best way to describe your strategy to all of the members of your organization, who might otherwise speak different languages (mechanical, programmatic, sales, etc.), a strategy should still be backed up by some research, which is typically expressed in the “maps, graphs, and numbers” the author is telling us to avoid.

And while I also agree that the typical frameworks used by industry analysts (five forces and maps) and blue ocean thinking (value maps and value curves) are better at managing the strategy process than enabling the creative and critical thinking required for success, the last thing we want to do is replace one insufficient framework with another, less sufficient framework. While a story might make a great vision, you can’t execute a story. You can only execute a plan, and that requires more than plots and subplots — it requires processes, steps, and success metrics, captured in traditional maps, graphs, and number formats. So while anything that encourages creativity is great, if all we do is focus on the production of play scripts (instead of including them as another tool in our creativity toolbox to get people brainstorming), our strategies will never progress beyond the imaginative vision of a kindergartener.

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Three Answers Every Supply Chain Executive Should Give Themselves This Year

A recent post over on the Harvard Business Review Blogs pointed out “Three Questions Executives Should Ask for the New Year” based upon eight characteristics of top performers and four characteristics of under-achievers identified by Melissa Raffoni of Raffoni Ceo Consulting and author of “Managing Time” in the HBR Pocket Mentor Series.

According to Raffoni, who identified the following eight characteristics of top performers:

  • they set clear measurable goals
  • they seek feedback
  • they communicate thoughtfully
  • they act thoughtfully
  • they are decisive
  • they have integrity
  • they have ego-less confidence
  • they study to make themselves smarter

and the following four characteristics of underachievers:

  • they don’t set goals with leverage in mind
  • they don’t get enough out of the people around them
  • they don’t listen well
  • they lack the energy and boldness to try new things

executives should ask themselves the following three questions before setting their goals for 2010:

  • If there was only one thing I could do to improve my business, what would it be and how would I make it happen?
  • If there was only one thing I could focus on to improve my personal performance, what would that be and how would I make it happen?
  • What messages am I not listening to or refusing to confront in my business and personal performance and how am I going to overcome that this year?

I agree. But even more importantly, I think supply chain executives (CPOs, CSCOs, etc.) should start with these three answers:

  • I’m going to improve my organization’s technology platform.
    Supply management is too complex, and the opportunity costs associated with continuing to use antiquated spreadsheet technology (which never fit in the first place), are too great not to have the right tools. I’m going to get the right platform for the job, make my people more productive, and watch the savings go Straight to the Bottom Line as efficiency soars and my people are able to strategically source more categories than they were able to in the past.
  • I’m going to get training.
    I’m going to learn what I’m missing, fill the holes in my vision, understand what my team needs to be the best they can be, and then get them the right training.
  • I’m going to say “uncertainty be damned”.
    “I’m not one of the lemmings“. “If my brethren want to jump off the cliff into the ocean, that’s their choice”. “I’m going to forge ahead and be successful, economy be damned”. “I’ll make the tough choices”. “And I’ll win”.

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Want to Get Your Message Out There? Avoid the Social Butterflies!

The MIT Technology Review just published a great post on “the physics arXiv blog” that covered some recent research from Maksim Kitsak et. al. that found that the best connected individuals are NOT the most influential spreaders in social networks.

In a social network, most of the nodes (people) are not linked to each other, but most can still be reached by a small number of steps, according to the small worlds network theory. (In fact, recent research indicates that the average separation is now less than 5, and not 6.) In these networks, some nodes are much better connected than others. Traditional thinking is that these so-called hubs play a correspondingly greater role in the way information and viruses spread through a society. But traditional thinking has just been proved wrong!

Kitsak et. al have found that in contrast to common belief, the most influential spreaders in a social network do not correspond to the best connected people or to the most central people. This might seem counterintuitive, but, on reflection, it does make perfect sense. For example, many of the “best connected” people typically exist on the edge of the network, and, as a result, have minimal impact on the spreading process through the core of the network. In contrast, “a less connected person who is strategically placed in the core of the network will have a significant effect that leads to dissemination through a large fraction of the population“. Or, in other words, it’s not how many hits a site gets, it’s who hits the site. There are influencers and followers. If most of the readers hitting a site are followers, the message will not get spread beyond those readers. But if most of the readers are hitting a site are influencers, the message will spread far and wide with only a fraction of the hits!

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HBR’s Breakthrough Ideas for 2010 are Good for Your Supply Chain, Part III

The Harvard Business Review recently ran a great article on “Breakthrough Ideas for 2010”. While many of the ideas aren’t new (as a few can easily be traced backed decades), for many, their application would be. But more importantly, their application could fix a lot of problems in the world today.

What really struck me was how they all had good supply chain equivalents that could help you revolutionize your supply chain. So, in this post, I’m going to tackle the last three ideas and explain how their supply chain equivalents are ideas you should strongly be considering if you haven’t implemented them already.

  1. Hack Your Way to Innovation.
    Thinking outside the box doesn’t help if what you really need is a sphere. If the current system isn’t working, you need to fix it. If you’re not sure how, then hack at it piece by piece, keeping what works and throwing away what doesn’t, until you get the results you need. After all, this kind of work-around isn’t new–your company has been hacked from the inside for ages. What is new is that the cheat codes are becoming public, and there’s nothing you can do about that. There’s only one successful strategy for a hacked world: If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em. Change the debate within your company to leverage what your hacker employees know.
  2. Apply a Bubble Model to Every Industry You Do Business In.
    As every major market has demonstrated during the last decade, there’s sustainable growth, and then there’s a bubble … and when you start treating a bubble like sustainable growth, you are headed toward a supply chain disaster. Now, while it might not be possible to predict every bubble, and definitely won’t be possible to predict with accuracy precisely when a detected bubble will burst, research coming out of the National Bureau of Economic Research and behavioural finance studies suggest that you can identify bubbles as they form with significant accuracy. Then you can take steps to increase measurement and monitoring and decrease production cycle time to allow you to quickly alter projections and plans as you approach a likely burst point. At the very least, this will prevent you from getting stuck with millions of dollars of inventory. It will also keep morale high as you’ll make more informed staffing decisions and avoid adding headcount you’ll have to lay off later.
  3. Take Business Organization Lessons From Hong Kong.
    Just like too many countries are stuck with rules that slow down inflows of technology, prevent successful urbanization, and stifle personal ambition, too many companies are stuck with processes that slow down inflows of technology, prevent successful adoption of innovative applications, and stifle professional growth.
    As the article points out, you start by launching an anonymous corporate division to act as a Center of Excellence (it could be one-in-the-same with the R&D lab in the beginning). You start with a charter that lists the rules that will prevail in the company to come and allocate space (land), employees, and resources. Assign only staff that want to be part of the COE, accept the charter, and bring with them a vision of the great company to come. They will invest not only their time, but their energy, experience, and education in the location of best-in-class technologies, processes, strategies, and paradigms that will ultimately make your organization a better place.

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HBR’s Breakthrough Ideas for 2010 are Good for Your Supply Chain, Part II

The Harvard Business Review recently ran a great article on “Breakthrough Ideas for 2010”. While many of the ideas aren’t new (as a few can easily be traced backed decades), for many, their application would be. But more importantly, their application could fix a lot of problems in the world today.

What really struck me was how they all had good supply chain equivalents that could help you revolutionize your supply chain. So, in this post, I’m going to tackle the next three ideas and explain how their supply chain equivalents are ideas you should strongly be considering if you haven’t implemented them already.

  1. Develop Industry Standards for Supply-Chain Data Exchange.
    Just like agreed upon standards for digitally representing drug assets would spur pharma innovation, common digital standards would spur supply-chain data exchange. After all, wouldn’t it be nice if your ERP talked to your EIPP which in turn talked with your CMS which in turn talked with your Sourcing Suite which in turn integrated with your CRM? And if all of these systems could output data feeds in a standardized format that made multi-feed loads into your data analysis system a breeze and let you focus on the analysis and not the mapping and cleansing which isn’t nearly as important as most of the providers make it out to be?
  2. Develop Your Own PACE program for your suppliers.
    PACE stands for Property Assessed Clean Energy bonds which are being introduced in 15 states across the US as debt instruments, backed by property-liens, that enable businesses to retrofit buildings for energy efficiency.
    A supply chain equivalent, which could take the form of a low interest loan to a supplier in your supply base, would save you money (as your supplier’s overhead costs would go down), make you money (as you could charge interest or insure you are guaranteed preferential treatment if supply is tight), and greatly improve your public image. “We not only enforce strict standards of social responsibility and sustainability in our supply base, but we help our suppliers meet those goals.” Simply put, like smart supply chain finance, it’s win-win-win.
  3. Support a Free Market for Technology Licensing.
    … and while you’re at it, vote to get rid of software and business process patents.
    Allowing an inventor, regardless of whether he’s a professor or a guy in his garage, to license as he sees fit would dramatically speed up the commercialization of new technologies and both the U.S. and the world would benefit from them much more rapidly. Forcing professors to use an antiquated model that forces them to line up in a queue at the local, understaffed licensing centre doesn’t help anyone.
    Furthermore, getting rid of stupid software patents that allow companies to patent what are arguably mathematical constructs, which are supposed to be unpatentable, and stupid business process patents that allow companies to patent the obvious, would not only open up the playing field but allow companies to freely innovate. Think about how much more innovation we’d have if every innovator didn’t have to constantly worry about getting sued by a company that succeeded in patenting an algorithm fundamentally based on 20-year-old public-domain MIT research because the clerk doesn’t know any better. (For many of you, think about how much more innovation you’d have if Ariba and Emptoris took the millions they’ve spent on lawsuits and spent it on New Product Development in an attempt to beat each other at your RFP table.) Nothing stifles innovation more than stodgy lawyers. Follow the EU’s example and you’ll be on the fast track to success.

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