Chasing the Rabbit: Official Blog by Author Steven Spear

Chrysler has a business approach proven flawed.  It’s owner, the private equity firm Cerberus, wants the American tax payer to cushion the downside should a modified model not work.  However, do they promise to share the upside or to share participation in other parts of their portfolio  too?

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It is natural to think that effort determines outcome:  Try harder, invest more, and get better results.  However this is not entirely true. 

An important qualifier is that the structure and dynamics of systems can greatly magnify or dampen the impact of investments made in and through them.  Some simple examples.   If we see an engine over-heating, adding more coolant may provide a temporary salve, but only until the blockage or leakage is found will the problem’s recurrence be avoided.  The lights may blow in a building.  Using good bulbs to back fill for bad ones will offer temporary illumination, but not like checking the wiring and surge protection.

So too with the economic crisis we are now experiencing.   Read the rest of this entry »

In an HBR blog posting, “Managing Resources In and Uncertain World,” John Hagel, John Seely Brown, and Lang Davision posit that we are in a world moving from push to pull.  Why?  Push depends on creating schedules and forecasts that are reasonable predictions of what will actually occur.  Pull systems are responsive, reacting to what has already happened.  Below, my comments on the origins of pull at Toyota (a need to keep scarce resources harmoniously coordinated), its potential (to increase agile responsiveness to changing circumstances), and obstacles to its broader adaptation (a prevailing belief that managers are paid to process data and decide what to do rather than develop people who can continuously discover better what has to be done and how to do that work better).  

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The principle thesis of Chasing the Rabbit is that the tremendous gap in performance between high velocity organizations and their rivals depends on two distinctions, one structural, the other dynamic.  

The structural difference is whether or not functional specialties are managed in isolation or always in service to the process or system which creates value for customers/clients/patients.  

Then, there is a dynamic one.  The great organizations are constantly identifying flaws in the ‘jobs’ they are trying to do for the mark, the configuration of the products and services they’ve created to do those jobs, and the design and operation of the systems that deliver those products and services.

This week, I had the distinct privilege to participate in a progam at the Harvard Kennedy School of Goverment, Leadership for a Networked World.  What was fascinating was how value creation in the private sector depended on fire sighted innovators coming to the same conclusions–the pieces had to managed in servcie to the whole, and whatever you design, it will be imperfect, so you have to discovery your way to ever better solutions. Read the rest of this entry »