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
The public sentiment that the government is going too much and also too little is not self contradictory. An effective, market based democracy depends on people being able to make informed choices well. Government does too little when it fails to ensure the health of markets. It does too much when it tries to replace the market as the decision making mechanism rather than restoring its healthy functionality. Read the rest of this entry »