In Washington DC, at a metro station, on a cold January morning in 2007, a man with a violin played for 43 minutes whilst approximately 1,100 people passed through the station, most of them on their way to work. Continue reading
transformation
Simplicity is the love child of two of the most powerful forces in business : Brains and Common Sense.
For a concept that’s supposed to be obvious, Simplicity can be difficult to describe. It can be a choice, a feeling, or a guiding light. Continue reading
Former Apple ad man Ken Segall talks Steve Jobs, simplicity in Time interview
In an interview with Time on Tuesday, Ken Segall, a former creative director of Apple ad agency TBWA/Chiat/Day who worked with the late Steve Jobs at Apple and NeXT, discussed a wide range of topics including his time collaborating on the Cupertino tech giant’s ad campaigns….
….Segall is in a unique position to offer insight into the inner workings of Apple’s advertising process after being involved in the company’s ad campaigns for 12 years. Among his team’s accomplishments are the naming of the “iMac” and the “Think Different” campaign, the latter kickstarting Apple’s initial rise following the return of cofounder Steve Jobs. Segall has done subsequent work for large tech companies Dell and IBM.
Structural flexibility (2) : You have to build adaptability into your company’s DNA.
A. Embrace a grand challenge. You can’t build an adaptable organization without adaptable people—and individuals change only when they have to, or when they want to. In most companies, deep change is crisis-driven. People are pushed into the icy waters of change by circumstances outside of their control. But every day human beings all over the world rush out to embrace change—because they are seduced by an opportunity to do something big, exciting or noble. So if you want people to change ahead of the curve, you have to give them something worth changing for. Continue reading
Structural flexibility (1) – Surrender your freedoms reluctantly; guard your liberties diligently.
A. Avoid irreversible commitments. Major capital investments. Multi-year labor contracts. Specialized facilities. High fixed costs. All these things are dangerous in a world where the future is unlikely to mirror the past. Historically, managers have often traded away future flexibility for short-term economic advantage (like temporary labor peace, better long-term lease rates, or larger scale production lines). Going forward, executives will need to ask themselves, “How might this decision reduce our degree of freedom in the years to come?” Continue reading
Strategic flexibility – Nimble and quick beats big and beefy.
A. Disaggregate the organization. Big things aren’t nimble. That’s why there aren’t any 200-pound gymnasts or jumbo-sized fighter jets. It’s also why Gore & Associates, the manufacturer of Gore-Tex and 1,000 other high-tech products, limits its operating units to no more than 200 individuals. In a company comprised of a few, large organizational units, there tends to be a lack of intellectual diversity—since people within the same unit tend to think alike. Continue reading
New meaning is gradually born….
I think there are good reasons for suggesting that the modern age has ended. Today, many things indicate that we are going thorough a transitional period, when it seems that something is on the way out and something else is painfully being born. It is as if something were crumbling, decaying, and exhausting itself, while something else, still indistinct, were arising from the rubble. Continue reading
Strategic Variety – To give up the bird in the hand you must first see a flock in the bush
A. Build a portfolio of new strategic options. Without a lot of exciting new options, managers will inevitably opt for more of the same. That’s why renewal depends on a company’s ability to generate and test hundreds of new strategic options. There’s a power law here: Out of 1,000 crazy ideas, only 100 will merit serious consideration. Of those, only 10 will be worth a serious investment, and out of that modest bundle, only 1 or 2 will have the power to transform a business or spawn a new one. Google gets this. Within its core search business, the company tests more than 5,000 software changes a year, and implements around 500—this according to BusinessWeek. The fact that Google has thus far managed to maintain its overwhelming lead in online search is in large part the result of this blistering pace of innovation. In the end, the pace at which Google, or any other company, is able to adapt and evolve is a function of the number of new strategic options that it is able to generate and test. Continue reading
Anticipation – It’s hard to out-run the future if you don’t see it coming
A. Face up to strategy decay. Like people, strategies get old and die—and in recent years, strategy life cycles have been shrinking. Great strategies get copied (“strategic convergence”); they reach their natural limits (as markets saturate and inefficiencies become harder to find); they get supplanted by better strategies (that are more effective at delivering customer value); or they get eviscerated, when well-informed customers use their knowledge to slash away at margins. Sooner or later, every strategy dies, and the signs of advancing age are always visible—if you’re looking for them. Continue reading
Intellectual Flexibility – To change an organization you must first change minds.
A. Regard every belief as a hypothesis. The biggest barriers to strategic renewal are almost always top management’s unexamined beliefs. Music can only be sold on shiny discs? Don’t bet on it. The news has to be delivered on a big piece of flimsy paper? Not necessarily. You have to load programs onto your computer before you can use them? Maybe not. In an age of unprecedented change, it’s important to regard everything you believe about your company’s business model, its competitors and its customers as mere hypotheses, forever open to disconfirmation. Continue reading
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