Chasing the Rabbit: Official Blog by Author Steven Spear

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 »

Twenty years after the term “lean production” was introduced there have been countless books, immeasurable benchmarking studies, and innumerable lean implementations. The problem? No second Toyota.

For comparison? Toyota first one attention for affordable, reliable, fuel efficient small cars. It added mid sized and large autos, cars, trucks, and SUVs, the luxury brand–Lexus, and the entry brand–Scion, globalized its design and production capacity, and ran well ahead with the hybrid drive.

Certainly, in the auto industry, no one has leaned to dominate its rivals through speed, agility, quality, and cost. Any examples in another industry?

If so, who?

If not, why not?

There is a widely held but mistaken impression that senior leaders set direction with the achievement of those objectives delegated down and out to others less influential and ‘important.’  That approaches assumes an inherent simplicity in creating and operating the systems on which success depends and the straight forwardness of aligning what is to be accomplished with the how it will be achieved.

Those are wildly false assumptions, particularly in a world in which globalization and technological invention accelerate the velocity at which competition occurs.  In the world’s best organizations, leadership recognizes this reality and responds to it appropriately, accepting responsibility both for setting strategy and ensuring its sound execution.

But how can that be accomplished without overloading the core?  It means that seniors must lead, not merely by telling others what do to but by investing time and effort–top down and center out–in developing innovative and inventive capacity broadly and deeply throughout the organization.

Here is a link to an article, “Unleasing the Problem Solving Capabilities of Employees,” from Target Magazine, by Karen Wilhelm, describing efforts by leadership at DTE, the large Midwestern utility, to do just that, by applying lessons from the world’s greatest in its own work.

Best wishes,
Steve Spear

Author of Chasing the Rabbit: How Market Leaders
Outdistance the Competition (McGraw-Hill: October 2008)
• http://chasingtherabbitbook.com for preface, forward, intro, and blog.
• “Leadership and Innovation in a Commoditized World,” new piece on HarvardBusiness.Org

Laura Landro, writing the “Informed Patient” column at the Wall Street Journal, explains that  hospitals are admitting when a patient is grievously harmed. (”Hospitals Owning Up to Errors,” Wall Street Journal, August 25, 2009).  This is good news, but if it ends there, greater opportunities are lost.

Complications occur with staggering frequency.  Very few hospitals identify and investigate small as well as large ones immediately–not on a delay, to find the root causes of inefficiency and ineffectiveness that compromise affordability and quality.  Some have achieved near perfection in eliminating patient harm as an occurrence.

Until all hospitals do the same to improve, public transparency about ill events–large and small–should be required.  Now, patients largely source care blindly, inadvertently trusting institutions too often that are dangerous and too infrequently to those that are remarkably safe.  With informed choice, average quality would be driven higher and average cost progressively lower.

How do you make money making soda cans? The  imperative once may have been to lock up raw-materials, hoard critical technology, and tie-up customers. Then, reap rewards.  Today? Someone is competing with you for supplies, your technology is not proprietary for long, and you constantly being challenged for your customers’ attention.  The result, return on assets being cut by three quarters since the 60s.  The only response?  A radical change in leadership style, one in which you are constantly innovating–discovering ever better solutions to the challenges of the market, and teaching others how to innovate too, so you capacity is broad based and tireless.  Read more in “Leadership and Innovation in a Commodotized World,” at HarvardBusiness.Org.