Chasing the Rabbit: Official Blog by Author Steven Spear

Often confused are “continuous improvement” and “innovation,” as if one is merely the disciplined creation of order where there was chaos (e.g., by creating value streams with pull and standard work) and the other is the serendipitous inspiration of the blessed genius.

In fact, the evidence is that in the highest performing organizations, those that succeed by out racing their rivals, both CI and innovation are rooted in high speed, disciplined, consistent curiosity, inquiry, and problem solving.

The differences between the two may have more to do with time frame and scope and less to do with approach. In either case, the key issue is deliberating converting ignorance into useful knowledge.

Firms have to accelerate their speed of innovation to keep ahead of rivals, particularly as globalization whittles down in number and size the places free from intense rivalry. Innovation increasingly has to be a ‘team sport,’ engaging the brains of many, as the complexity and sophistication of systems increase beyond what small groups can manage on their own.

The result? Firms have to develop broad based, deep rooted innovative capacity at all levels and across all disciplines. My new article, “Innovation and Workforce Engagement in a High-Velocity World,” explores how.

I hope it, and the examples in my book, prove helpful in achieving success.

Best wishes,
Steve Spear

• “Innovation and Workforce Engagement in a High-Velocity World,” in Quality Magazine.

• “Leadership and Innovation in a Commoditized World,” e article on HarvardBusiness.Org

• Interview with Dr. Robert Wachter of Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality

Dear Friends and Colleagues…

I’m pleased to share with you the news that Chasing the Rabbit: How Market Leaders Outdistance the Competition was winner of a National Best Books 2009 Award, sponsored by USA Book News, in the management and leadership category.

Chasing the Rabbit shows how market leaders generate and sustain high speed, broad based innovation their rivals cannot match, thereby racing to and staying in front of the pack, even in the most competitive industries.

The book contains examples spanning high tech and heavy industry, design and production, manufacturing and services like healthcare and advertising, and commercial and military situations.

They illustrate the disciplines of system design and operation, problem solving, knowledge sharing, and discovery based leadership that set apart these superlative high velocity organizations.

I hope you find Chasing the Rabbit and the ideas in it useful in your work.

With best wishes,
Steve Spear

• National Best Books 2009 Award

• “Leadership and Innovation in a Commoditized World,” e article on HarvardBusiness.Org

• Interview with Dr. Robert Wachter of Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality

Incident Reporting Systems (IRSs) have been energetically engaged by hospitals seeking to emulate the aviation industry’s record of safety.  According to safety expert, Dr. Bob Wachter, they cost too much and accomplish too little.  His complaint is backed by sound systems thinking.  IRSs gather and process data that is delayed and aggregated.  While useful for seeing trends and identifying hotspots, such data is not useful for diagnosis and treatment.  By the time there is a response, the conditions that caused the problems may have disappeared.  What is needed is real time, nested problem seeing and problems solving so systems can maintain their stability and responsiveness without overloading some central safety function.

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In a previous post, I suggested public sentiment that government does too much but not enough is not contradictory.  It reflects a recognition that government does too little of what it should do, too much of what it shouldn’t.  Today’s news that retails sales were dragged down by a drop in auto purchases, a deflation after the ‘cash for clunkers’ program ended supports that point (”Retail Sales Drop on Fall in Autos” Wall Street Journal, Jeff Bater, October 14, 2009).

There is a wealth of evidence and theory that markets work best in directing resources to their most productive use.  The general consensus is that government’s role is appropriate to counteract market failure–unavailability of reliable  information for markets to work, absence of decision rights to act on information even if it were reliable, or decisions that have consequences external to the decision maker.

Our financial market meltdown was triggered particularly by the first and third forms of market failure: Regulators allowed less and less transparency about transactions and credit risk and people were able to make transactions where they enjoyed the upside but dumped catastrophic costs on the rest of us.

The right response then is to fix the markets.

Pretty well accepted is that government is lousy, absolutely lousy at intervening in markets to pick winners and losers.  If government does so, it is a likely as as not to pick wrong, diverting resources from better to worse purposes.

The cash for clunkers was a case study in such wrong headed policy.  It pulled forward purchases that would have been made anyway, so net sales were likely flat, were an exceptionally expensive way to protect a relatively few number of jobs (albeit in politically influential districts), and probably was bad for the environment in the end, given the enormous energy required to make a new car relative to the energy required to propel an existing one