b.cognosco
Where leaping to conclusions is my primary form of forward motion.
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Book Reviews
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Amazing Discovery - Innovation Is Not A Strategy
Steve Hannaford Tells Us Why Chrysler is Dead
Wednesday, January 9, 2008
The 4-Hour Work Week
Got a new book over the holidays - "The 4-hour Workweek" by Timothy Ferris. One of my consulting colleagues recommended it a few weeks ago as being a good source for tips and ideas for some of the areas I've been investigating as a sideline the past few years. I love the book. I read most of it on a 2-hour flight from Atlanta to San Antonio, so it's clearly a fast read. But it's also a practical book, containing specific and usable ideas and recommendations in the areas of personal automation, personal outsourcing, product development, and removing yourself as a bottleneck.
This is what I call a "connector" or gap-filling book. I think you have to be at a certain point in your thinking on these areas in order for it to resonate with you. I've spent more time than I care to admit thinking about and poking around the edges of this stuff and made very little progress. I've read numerous books on time management and internet marketing and product development and PPC advertising and such. I've conducted a few of my own experiments. I've tried to find assistants and sources for doing tasks that are necessary but burdensome and low priority for me. But it just never worked like I wanted. There was never a serviceable "big picture" I could latch onto and I never got that mental "click" that happens when a concept gels in your mind and you can begin to make it your own. I don't know why this is so hard in some things and so easy in others, but I've learned to keep striving for that "click" and I know it when I feel it.
“4-hour Workweek” was a constant stream of little connections and examples that fit together to form a proper big picture, such that things which previously seemed isolated and disconnected are now linked in an overall vision. This is important for me as I have no energy for pursuing small things, no matter their potential, when I can't see a clear contribution to a the bigger goal.
I don't have any interest in copying Ferris' global vagabond lifestyle. But his approach to creating a low-pressure, low-risk, low-involvement business structure is compelling - especially if you have already been struggling to do many of the things he discusses. If you haven't, Ferris' claims may seem like just so much additional BS in a world already filled with it. But I don't think they are. My goal for 2008 is to implement as many of Ferris' strategies as possible, starting with the identification and outsourcing of my "boat-anchor" tasks and moving up to higher-level functions such as product design, marketing, etc. I will outsource as much of this as possible, and catalog my progress and failures here. It will be nice to have a theme for blog entries again.
Terry Frazier at 11:58 PM
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Thursday, May 17, 2007
Amazing Discovery - Innovation Is Not A Strategy
The cover story for the May 3 issue of BusinessWeek was "World's Most Innovative Companies" The big point was that the idea of running around as a multi-millionaire CEO chanting the word innovation as if it would magically alter your organization has now been recognized as another in the long line of stupid management fads.[...] At the behest of an "ideation" consultant, he donned a blue superhero costume—cape, tights, and all—to put a little extra oomph behind the company's innovation-boosting campaign. "I guess the thinking was that if you free people from the norm, you'll unleash a torrent of creativity," says Scott Anthony, president of Innosight, a consulting firm co-founded by Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen. Anthony refused to name the company because it was a client. "Innovation Man led to a lot of laughs," he quips, "but it didn't lead to a lot of innovation."According to the article many CEOs, having failed at turning their billion-dollar behemoths into innovation engines, are experiencing "innovation fatigue." I am shocked! Shocked, I say. Shocked to learn that innovation is not a commodity that can be ordered up like Papa John's Pizza. Shocked to learn that innovation doesn't exist on its own like, say, cotton.
The same might be said for many gimmicks that companies have tried over the past few years in their attempts to boost growth. Suddenly trendy, innovation took on the flavor of an elixir, as companies raced to hire "chief innovation officers" and build innovation centers complete with purple-painted walls and conference rooms with funny names. Ford Motor Co. (F) boasted in a press release about its new Innovation Acceleration Center in Dearborn, Mich.: "It's amazing what a room filled with radio-controlled cars, a 3-ft. Statue of Liberty made of Legos, and some comfy couches can do to stir the imagination." [...]
It turns out that innovation is actually a result - something that happens after you change every aspect of your stodgy, corrupt, inefficient, overbearing, outsourced, badly managed global corporation where everyone spends 80 percent of their time in meetings, 20 percent of their time doing reports, 10 percent of their time fixing stuff someone else did wrong, and 5 percent of their time doing something valuable that a customer will actually pay for. (I know, that's 115%. That's called increasing productivity. Guess which 15% gets dropped when your average, everyday human realizes they can only give 100% today.)
And this turns out to be very, very hard.
But there are a few innovative companies. And they're innovative because, well, because they just are. Because they actually do the hard things most companies can't, or won't, do. Because they focus on things far more tangible than "being innovative." Things like finding and hiring talented employees and then not stomping on them or burning them out. Things like actually listening to employees with good ideas. And things like not letting the accountants and lawyers decide about what does and does not get done.
Mostly, innovators just seem to understand that innovation is a fundamental result, that comes from getting the fundamentals of running a business right. What a shocker.
Terry Frazier at 4:34 PM
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Tuesday, May 15, 2007
Steve Hannaford Tells Us Why Chrysler is Dead
The US auto industry is in turmoil - rising gas prices, changing buyer
tastes, stiffer environmental laws, and massive labor costs, among
other things - have cost US automakers tens of billions in losses in
recent years. And now the pompous jackasses at Daimler-Benz have killed
Chrysler. It's bad enough that my beloved IBM ThinkPads have been sold
to Lenovo - I can't even imagine buying a Chinese-made Jeep! Chrysler
was in trouble when Daimler bought them in 1998, but the Germans were
supposed to make it better, not spend $40 billion to make it worse.
[More...]
Terry Frazier at 9:00 AM
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