Kaizen. At the end of every day, have employees fill out a card describing how we could make the business better. The best suggestion each week gets a free dinner at a local restaurant.
The Zen Master of Subtraction: Steve Jobs by mm It's no secret that Steve Jobs was a practitioner of Zen Buddhism. I believe his teenage sojourns to India not only broadened his perspective, but had everything to do with his eventual design aesthetic, one of clean simplicity and uncluttered elegance, which influenced all of the Apple products developed under his watch.
This most famous of Diane Walker's portfolio of the man speaks volumes. It's the first photo in Isaacson's centerbook collection, and shows Steve Jobs in his "fully furnished" living room, circa 1982.
Everything you need to know about the Jobs/Apple design philosophy is in this photo. And some of my favorite parts of the book are those that revealed his subtractive mindset:
Page 336: One of Jobs's great strengths was knowing how to focus. "Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do," he said. "That's true for companies, and it's true for products."
page 337: [In 1997 when Jobs returned after 12 years away] Apple had a dozen versions of the Macintosh, each with a different confusing number, ranging from 1400 to 9600. "I had people explaining this to me for three weeks," Jobs said. "I couldn't figure it out." He finally began asking simple questions, like, "Which ones do I tell my friends to buy?"
"Stop!" he shouted at one big product strategy session. "This is crazy." He grabbed a magic marker, padded to the whiteboard, and drew a horizontal and vertical line to make a four-squared chart. "Here's what we need," he continued. Atop the two columns he wrote "Consumer" and "Pro"; he labeled the two rows "Desktop" and "Portable." Their job, he said, was to make four great products, one for each quadrant."
According to Isaacson, and indeed history, "this ability to focus saved Apple."
pages 378-379: Once a year Jobs took his most valuable employees on a retreat, which he called "The Top 100." They were picked based on a simple guideline: the people you would bring with you if you could only take a hundred people with you on a lifeboat to your next company. At the end of the retreat, Jobs would stand in front of a whiteboard (he loved whiteboards because they gave him complete control of a situation and they engendered focus) and ask, "What are the ten things we should be doing next?" People would fight to get their suggestions on the list. Jobs would write them down, and then cross off the ones he decreed dumb. After much jockeying, the group would come up with a list of ten. Then Jobs would slash the bottom seven and announce, "We can only do three."
NOVEMBER 9, 2011 3 Ways to Think Like an Innovator Most people struggle to do what innovators excel at: connecting the unconnected. Here are three ways to get in the habit of making new associations: Just do it. Force associations across different ideas when they don't come naturally. Ask yourself: What else could this idea be connected to? Shake it up. When associations don't emerge, try forcing them to surface. Put seemingly unrelated ideas or words together and see what comes to mind. The creative combinations may spark a new idea. Repeat. Research shows that if you practice associational thinking long enough, the task will energize you rather than exhaust you.
Encourage Decisiveness at Your Next Meeting Meetings without outcomes are a waste of time. Yet, many meetings fail to produce results because the conversation circles around the issues rather than focuses on them. To make sure decisions happen and people take action, you need to have a productive dialogue. Here are four things every meeting should be: Open. The outcomes of your meeting should not be predetermined. Questions like, “What are we missing?” signal honest searching for alternative perspectives. Candid. Encourage people to air conflicts. When people express their real opinions, productivity increases. Informal. Keep it loose. Conversations should be unscripted with honest questions and spontaneity. Conclusive. Everyone should leave knowing exactly what they are expected to do. Adapted from Harvard Business Review on Making Smart Decisions.
NOVEMBER 11, 2011 Don't Mess with Your Customers Everyone knows that companies have to keep customers happy. But far too many companies still make them angry. Customer rage results in lawsuits, mass defections, and social media attacks. Here are three ways to prevent your customers from revolting: Don't squeeze them. Often a company's most profitable customers have the most reason to be dissatisfied. Be sure that all of your customers feel the value they get is equal to what they pay. Get rid of unnecessary rules. Eliminate rules that you want customers to violate (i.e., charging for ATM transactions). They make customers feel taken advantage of, and rightly so. Rely on satisfaction, not contracts. If your customers are only sticking around because of lengthy contracts, something's wrong. Demonstrate confidence in your value proposition and give your customers good reasons not to defect.
Stay Engaged in a Downturn In hard economic times, it’s normal to feel powerless. You may feel stuck in your job, or incapable of influencing your organization’s future. Instead of ruminating on uncertainty, focus on staying engaged. Here are two ways to do that: Support the progress of your team. Devote a portion of your day to helping a struggling teammate or mentoring a high-potential coworker. As the team progresses, you’ll feel more motivated. And as the team succeeds, it will become more valuable to the organization. Achieve small wins. Even when you face uncertainty, you can enjoy work and maintain good performance by getting manageable tasks done. Don’t try to tackle a huge project. Just make small progress toward your goals every day.
1. Learn process. The lack of a tailored management process has led many a startup to abandon all process in favor of a "just do it" approach that avoids all forms of management. A successful startup must create order, not just chaos, and put a rigorous process around the development of a product.
2. Learn to experiment. Every startup is a grand experiment that attempts to answer a question, but the question isn't "Can this product be built?" It's "Should this product be built?" and "Can we build a sustainable business around this set of products and services?" This experiment is more than just theoretical inquiry; it's a first product, which, if successful, allows a startup to begin enlisting early adopters, adding employees to the next experiment or iteration, and eventually building a product. Ries maintains that, "By the time that product is ready to be distributed widely, it will already have established customers. It will have solved real problems and offer detailed specifications for what needs to be built."
3. Learn to pivot. Once a startup has figured out the problem that needs to be solved, it develops a minimum viable product, or MVP, to begin the process of learning as quickly as possible. "Once the MVP is established," says Ries, "a startup can work on tuning the engine. This will involve measurement and learning and must include actionable metrics that can demonstrate cause and effect question."
Ries stays true to some age-old old quality continuous innovation techniques such as "5 Whys"-asking the simple question of "why?" to study and solve problems along the way. Done correctly, it will be clear whether or not a company is truly moving the drivers of the business model. If not, it's a clear signal to make a structural course correction to test a new fundamental hypothesis about the product, strategy and engine of growth. Ries terms this a "pivot." To my mind, this is by far and away the single most important principle to take away from The Lean Startup. Learn to pivot, and you learn to master uncertainty.
4. Learn to validate. In the manufacturing world, progress is measured by the production of high quality goods; but in the startup world, progress is measured in terms of validated learning. Validated learning "is a rigorous method for demonstrating progress when one is embedded in the soil of extreme uncertainty," writes Ries. "Once entrepreneurs embrace validated learning, the development process can shrink substantially. When you focus on figuring the right thing to build--the thing customers want and will pay for--you need not spend months waiting for a product beta launch to change the company's direction. Instead, entrepreneurs can adapt their plans incrementally, inch by inch, minute by minute."
Kaizen. At the end of every day, have employees fill out a card describing how we could make the business better. The best suggestion each week gets a free dinner at a local restaurant.
ReplyDeleteThe Zen Master of Subtraction: Steve Jobs
ReplyDeleteby mm
It's no secret that Steve Jobs was a practitioner of Zen Buddhism. I believe his teenage sojourns to India not only broadened his perspective, but had everything to do with his eventual design aesthetic, one of clean simplicity and uncluttered elegance, which influenced all of the Apple products developed under his watch.
This most famous of Diane Walker's portfolio of the man speaks volumes. It's the first photo in Isaacson's centerbook collection, and shows Steve Jobs in his "fully furnished" living room, circa 1982.
Everything you need to know about the Jobs/Apple design philosophy is in this photo. And some of my favorite parts of the book are those that revealed his subtractive mindset:
Page 336: One of Jobs's great strengths was knowing how to focus. "Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do," he said. "That's true for companies, and it's true for products."
page 337: [In 1997 when Jobs returned after 12 years away] Apple had a dozen versions of the Macintosh, each with a different confusing number, ranging from 1400 to 9600. "I had people explaining this to me for three weeks," Jobs said. "I couldn't figure it out." He finally began asking simple questions, like, "Which ones do I tell my friends to buy?"
"Stop!" he shouted at one big product strategy session. "This is crazy." He grabbed a magic marker, padded to the whiteboard, and drew a horizontal and vertical line to make a four-squared chart. "Here's what we need," he continued. Atop the two columns he wrote "Consumer" and "Pro"; he labeled the two rows "Desktop" and "Portable." Their job, he said, was to make four great products, one for each quadrant."
According to Isaacson, and indeed history, "this ability to focus saved Apple."
pages 378-379: Once a year Jobs took his most valuable employees on a retreat, which he called "The Top 100." They were picked based on a simple guideline: the people you would bring with you if you could only take a hundred people with you on a lifeboat to your next company. At the end of the retreat, Jobs would stand in front of a whiteboard (he loved whiteboards because they gave him complete control of a situation and they engendered focus) and ask, "What are the ten things we should be doing next?" People would fight to get their suggestions on the list. Jobs would write them down, and then cross off the ones he decreed dumb. After much jockeying, the group would come up with a list of ten. Then Jobs would slash the bottom seven and announce, "We can only do three."
Man after my own heart!
From the website http://matthewemay.com/2011/11/08/the-zen-master-of-subtraction-steve-jobs/
ReplyDeleteNOVEMBER 9, 2011
ReplyDelete3 Ways to Think Like an Innovator
Most people struggle to do what innovators excel at: connecting the unconnected. Here are three ways to get in the habit of making new associations:
Just do it. Force associations across different ideas when they don't come naturally. Ask yourself: What else could this idea be connected to?
Shake it up. When associations don't emerge, try forcing them to surface. Put seemingly unrelated ideas or words together and see what comes to mind. The creative combinations may spark a new idea.
Repeat. Research shows that if you practice associational thinking long enough, the task will energize you rather than exhaust you.
Encourage Decisiveness at Your Next Meeting
ReplyDeleteMeetings without outcomes are a waste of time. Yet, many meetings fail to produce results because the conversation circles around the issues rather than focuses on them. To make sure decisions happen and people take action, you need to have a productive dialogue. Here are four things every meeting should be:
Open. The outcomes of your meeting should not be predetermined. Questions like, “What are we missing?” signal honest searching for alternative perspectives.
Candid. Encourage people to air conflicts. When people express their real opinions, productivity increases.
Informal. Keep it loose. Conversations should be unscripted with honest questions and spontaneity.
Conclusive. Everyone should leave knowing exactly what they are expected to do.
Adapted from Harvard Business Review on Making Smart Decisions.
NOVEMBER 11, 2011
ReplyDeleteDon't Mess with Your Customers
Everyone knows that companies have to keep customers happy. But far too many companies still make them angry. Customer rage results in lawsuits, mass defections, and social media attacks. Here are three ways to prevent your customers from revolting:
Don't squeeze them. Often a company's most profitable customers have the most reason to be dissatisfied. Be sure that all of your customers feel the value they get is equal to what they pay.
Get rid of unnecessary rules. Eliminate rules that you want customers to violate (i.e., charging for ATM transactions). They make customers feel taken advantage of, and rightly so.
Rely on satisfaction, not contracts. If your customers are only sticking around because of lengthy contracts, something's wrong. Demonstrate confidence in your value proposition and give your customers good reasons not to defect.
Stay Engaged in a Downturn
ReplyDeleteIn hard economic times, it’s normal to feel powerless. You may feel stuck in your job, or incapable of influencing your organization’s future. Instead of ruminating on uncertainty, focus on staying engaged. Here are two ways to do that:
Support the progress of your team. Devote a portion of your day to helping a struggling teammate or mentoring a high-potential coworker. As the team progresses, you’ll feel more motivated. And as the team succeeds, it will become more valuable to the organization.
Achieve small wins. Even when you face uncertainty, you can enjoy work and maintain good performance by getting manageable tasks done. Don’t try to tackle a huge project. Just make small progress toward your goals every day.
There are four key elements to that learning:
ReplyDelete1. Learn process. The lack of a tailored management process has led many a startup to abandon all process in favor of a "just do it" approach that avoids all forms of management. A successful startup must create order, not just chaos, and put a rigorous process around the development of a product.
2. Learn to experiment. Every startup is a grand experiment that attempts to answer a question, but the question isn't "Can this product be built?" It's "Should this product be built?" and "Can we build a sustainable business around this set of products and services?" This experiment is more than just theoretical inquiry; it's a first product, which, if successful, allows a startup to begin enlisting early adopters, adding employees to the next experiment or iteration, and eventually building a product. Ries maintains that, "By the time that product is ready to be distributed widely, it will already have established customers. It will have solved real problems and offer detailed specifications for what needs to be built."
3. Learn to pivot. Once a startup has figured out the problem that needs to be solved, it develops a minimum viable product, or MVP, to begin the process of learning as quickly as possible. "Once the MVP is established," says Ries, "a startup can work on tuning the engine. This will involve measurement and learning and must include actionable metrics that can demonstrate cause and effect question."
Ries stays true to some age-old old quality continuous innovation techniques such as "5 Whys"-asking the simple question of "why?" to study and solve problems along the way. Done correctly, it will be clear whether or not a company is truly moving the drivers of the business model. If not, it's a clear signal to make a structural course correction to test a new fundamental hypothesis about the product, strategy and engine of growth. Ries terms this a "pivot." To my mind, this is by far and away the single most important principle to take away from The Lean Startup. Learn to pivot, and you learn to master uncertainty.
4. Learn to validate. In the manufacturing world, progress is measured by the production of high quality goods; but in the startup world, progress is measured in terms of validated learning. Validated learning "is a rigorous method for demonstrating progress when one is embedded in the soil of extreme uncertainty," writes Ries. "Once entrepreneurs embrace validated learning, the development process can shrink substantially. When you focus on figuring the right thing to build--the thing customers want and will pay for--you need not spend months waiting for a product beta launch to change the company's direction. Instead, entrepreneurs can adapt their plans incrementally, inch by inch, minute by minute."