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Collaboration is Powerful Medicine

January 19, 2012 By Leave a Comment

True collaboration involves a team in which authority relationships are flat rather than hierarchical.  For this reason, true collaboration cannot take place without every team member having open access to all information.  Otherwise, the relationship is not flat. True collaboration also requires belief that the shared information is accurate and complete.  True collaboration requires trust. While these requirements may seem obvious, they are not easy to meet for most organizations that seek to increase collaboration among employees and other stakeholders. So why go to the trouble?  Because, it seems that true collaboration is as powerful as taking the right medicine when it comes to improving outcomes.

OpenNotes, a collaborative research project that invites patients to view and ultimately contribute to writing their medical records, is trying to determine whether collaborative interaction (between the patient and healthcare provider) with the information in individual health records can create “knowledge-medicine” that positively impacts actual health.

The theory being tested is that collaboration – merging divergent perspectives among parties interested in achieving a mutual goal, interacting in a flat relationship with open access to complete information – will yield actionable knowledge held with high conviction. Based on this high conviction knowledge, behaviors (decisions and actions) and outcomes will be positively affected. That is, what I am labeling “true collaboration” can produce a health impact similar to medicine.

The transition to electronic health records which will hold legible, accessible content has the power to change the perception of who rightfully owns the information. Although individuals technically own their medical records, gaining access to them has been challenging at best. A doctor’s handwritten notes scrawled in the standard joke of indecipherable physician scribble sets up a barrier of privacy that feels as if it goes in the opposite direction – as if the notes belong to the physician rather than the patient. When medical information is stored and accessed in the same way as financial information, it will level the playing field, creating the expectation that this information rightfully belongs to the individual and is being shared with the healthcare provider. In the OpenNotes experiment, the combination of the patient’s ability to access information directly, removing the healthcare provider as a gatekeeper, coupled with the ability of the entire health team and the patient to review the information together builds trust that the information is accurate and complete, and flattens the authority hierarchy, creating the conditions for true collaboration.

The emphasis of the OpenNotes project is on improving patient outcomes by changing patient behavior.  But there are tantalizing hints that it will also transform the healthcare providers’ practices as well.  One physician is quoted as saying: “’It might be better to say the patient is ’20 percent over ideal body weight’ rather than ‘a jovial obese man came into my clinic,’….” because using the term obese risks alienating the patient.  But changing how physicians document what they observe subtly alters the very act of observing.  It forces the physician to view healthcare as a process that involves human beings (both patients and healthcare providers) who need to be engaged in ways that will actually alter behaviors over time.  The patient needs more specificity to understand what is required (reducing weight by 20 percent) and the physician needs to consider how best to motivate productive behavior change.

An article on placebo research (see below) suggests why viewing healthcare as a human-centered process is necessary:

There has always been a distinction between disease and illness.  Disease is a biological condition that we have historically treated with drugs, surgery, and other technological solutions.  Illness, on the other hand, defines the context of a medical encounter, including the relationship between doctor and patient…[It] is essential to consider both the science and art of medicine – to think about diseases as illnesses, and not to rely solely on short-term, high-tech solutions.

Of course, the OpenNotes endeavor is fraught with concerns:

Will physicians’ notes change if they know patients are reading them? [I think so, but the question is, will they change for the better?]  Will patients withhold information they don’t want to see recorded? [The classic "knowledge is power" problem.]  Will they be more likely to seek a second or third opinion?” [Driving up costs at a time when this is precisely the opposite of what is needed.]

In addition to improving health outcomes, true collaboration needs to do it along classical economic improvement dimensions – better, faster, cheaper, less risky.  At present, whether it can achieve improved health outcomes faster, cheaper and with less risk remains unclear. But, the OpenNotes project sounds a hopeful note – with a nod towards not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good – stating that this collaboration is “…designed to help more people than it hurts, but… medicines are never perfect.” The reason to sit up and take notice of initiatives like OpenNotes is that the power of true collaboration to change behaviors and alter outcomes extends well beyond the boundaries of individual health to the health of all of the organizational systems on which our livelihoods depend.

 

Sources:

  • “Project Puts Records in the Patient’s Hands,” Roni Caryn Rabin, The New York Times, Tuesday, January 10, 2012 page D6.
  • “The Power of Nothing, Michael Specter,” The New Yorker, December 12, 2011.

 

Addendum:

The article on placebo research was fascinating in its own right.  Below is a brief snippet of what intrigued me:

The Program in Placebo Studies and the Therapeutic Encounter is a Harvard-sponsored institute that is studying the role of placebos in clinical practice.  And what, at the end of the day, is a placebo but trust in the information about a medical intervention that alters patients’ perceptions and, in some cases the biochemistry, of illness?  Placebos are mind-boggling to contemplate, because many times they represent false knowledge.  Patients believe that a medical intervention (a pill, injection, salve, a procedure) is designed to alleviate some discomforting aspect of their condition.  This belief in or expectation of a particular outcome triggers the body to contribute to the anticipated outcome.  For example, on being told that they are receiving high doses of morphine (when in fact they are receiving saline) some patients experience pain relief.   The belief that they are receiving morphine triggers their bodies to produce endorphins (the body’s natural opiates).  But even without deception, it seems that placebos provide a benefit.   Recent research involves disclosure to the patient that the therapeutic treatment is a placebo along with what is known about the benefits of placebos.  This research demonstrates that even when patients know that they are receiving a placebo, many derive a positive health benefit.

 

Filed Under: Change, Collaboration

Back to the Future

December 19, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Sometimes I’m hard pressed to understand why I read what I do.  What is it that actually interests me about some stories?  Then, after a while, I see that it isn’t the content per se  but rather the narrative which keeps me engaged and draws me along.  Of the handful of narratives that mesmerize me, the recursive innovation narrative (or back to future story) stands out.

In this narrative, innovation comes about by rediscovering something that has been lost along the way.  Typically, the loss occurs because popular or commercial interest becomes caught up with an idea that, in the long run, is either revealed or proven to be false.  Or one idea has become so widespread that it crowds out another idea that is equally, if not more, important.  The innovation lies in reclaiming or reasserting the thing that was once known but became lost in the process.

Here are two stories of recursive innovation:

Running Redux

Humans are born runners.  The combination of an ability to cool ourselves through perspiration (rather than panting as other animals do) and the “springiness” of our legs allowed humans to outlast their prey when it came to running.  So, why is it that close to 80% of all contemporary runners suffer injuries each year despite specially engineered running shoes, running surfaces, and training regimes?  And why is it that in some cultures which lack all of these advantages, people we would consider elderly can run 100-mile races as a matter of course?

Christopher McDougall believes “…we don’t need smarter shoes, we need smarter feet”   He has resurrected an exercise routine that rewires the brain and the body to run the way that nature intended – the 100-Up Exercise.  An undeniably simple routine, the 100-Up (see the YouTube video) is a three-minute exercise that upends modern running dogma.  It isn’t about the shoes, the surface, the intensive training – it’s about rediscovering the way that humans were born to run.

So when and where did it go wrong?  Apparently, not so long ago and also apparently, the commercial shoe industry in the U.S. played a major role in leading runners astray.  In the 1970s and 80s, runners became obsessed with the notion that the proper running shoe was the key to great running because the biggest problem with running was heel-strike impact.  The first inkling that the shoe solution to heel-strike impact might be wrong came when researchers began to observe barefoot runners.  What they noticed was that barefoot runners did not land on their heels, but rather, on the balls of their feet.   This was not a shoe-problem, but a form problem.  However, ingrained notions of running are difficult to dislodge and even though barefoot running has taken off, it is still shoe- rather than form-focused for the most part.  The biggest evidence of shoe-bias is the invention of those strange looking glove-like shoes.  You can shell out the bucks for Vibram Five-Fingers, but if you are still running heel first, you are highly likely to injure yourself.  According to those who practice the new method informed by 100-Up, you can run with the shoes you already have because it’s not the shoes, it’s the way you run that matters.

Apples Lost and Found

The apple as a healthy snack is a relatively new invention.  Apples have been around a long time (from a human civilization perspective), but up to the Civil War period they were primarily used as either feedstock for animals or an alternative to water in the form of hard cider for humans because apples were not particularly tasty to eat.  Prohibition was especially bad for apples (hard cider was alcoholic), and it was during this period that they got a PR makeover with an adage promoting their health (“An apple a day keeps the doctor away”) and an agricultural focus on propagating better tasting varieties. Before industrial scale refrigeration, most people enjoyed local apples and there are a multitude of types associated with particular geographies.

Some Fun Apples (Esopus Spitzenberg and Yellow Newton Pippin):

However, with the advent of refrigerated rail cars, apples could be transported over long distances.  Refrigeration and the rise of the national grocery chain combined to promote the apple attributes of durability, long shelf life and aesthetic appeal.  As a result, the plethora of apple species dwindled to three – McIntosh, Red Delicious and Golden Delicious — and apples as a local treat gave way to the national grocery produce staple.  Apple breeding increasingly focused on making sure apples looked rather than tasted good.  We all know how delicious apples can look and how disappointing they can taste.  That shiny, beautiful outside masking a mushy, mealy, flavorless inside.  This is how it came to be that Americans now consume about half the amount of apples as their European counterparts.

The sorry state of affairs persisted for some time until a confluence of events turned the tide to favor a tasty apple with great texture and crunch.  In the 1970s, several new apple varieties – so called “super apples” – were imported from outside the U.S. and began to be cultivated here.   At the same time, price controls were imposed to help the U.S. deal with stagflation, but produce was exempt from this constraint creating an opening for these new apples.   Americans got a taste of delicious, but less than perfectly formed apples and loved them. Once again, the apple as a flavorful, nutritious food found in many varieties was back on the scene and apple consumption began to increase.

Recursive Innovation

The article from which my much abbreviated apple mini-history is derived goes on to describe the equally fascinating business model of patenting and controlling the production of apple varieties.  But what struck me as I read about apples past and present was how much it reminded me of the story about running.   The themes in both stories are the same. In the push to scale an innovation, to achieve industrial capacity, a critical artisanal element was lost, left by the wayside because its importance was not understood.  This element would turn out to be a sustainability factor which had to be rediscovered in order to breathe life back into the innovation.

I am not suggesting that the sustainability factor is always apparent.  Clearly if people knew what it was they would not so casually allow it to be jettisoned in favor of other elements which might turn out to be helpful for a time, but ultimately outlive their usefulness.   Yet this challenge – knowing what to discard and what to retain – remains a key challenge of innovation.

As we come to the close of the year, this question – what to hold onto and what to let go of as we move ahead – has particular resonance, both organizationally and individually.  Much of the world is  captivated by the idea of sustainability whose light and fluffy exterior is characterized by “doing well by doing good” and whose dark underbelly is the stuff of self-preservation.   What I like most about sustainability as a screen for what should be retained or discarded is its strategic urgency.  Strategic – doing well by doing good.  Urgency – self-preservation.  I’ve been told and have experienced it to be true in my own life that what gets done is whatever is threatened by a burning platform (regrets to the “what gets measured, gets done” crowd – burning platform trumps measurement).   As we move into the new year and look for new ways to separate the proverbial wheat from the chaff, one possibility might be found in the recursive innovation narrative and its North Star of sustainability.

Sources:

  • “The Once and Future Way to Run,” Christopher McDougall, The New York Times Magazine, November 6, 2011
  • “Crunch,” John Seabrook, The New Yorker, November 21, 2011
Filed Under: Business Model, Innovation, Strategy, Sustainability

The Death of BIG Ideas

November 21, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Late this summer, I read a column in the The New York Times Sunday Review by Neal Gabler that drove me mad.   Gabler believes that Americans do not think anymore and, as a result, we no longer formulate BIG ideas that have the power to transfix and transform society.  In his editorial, Mr. Gabler points to an earlier time – pre-social networking and pre-Googling – when BIG thinkers were cultural icons – Albert Einstein, Betty Friedan, Marshal McLuhan. He makes the rather strange point that “a generation ago, these men [I assume he means “people” since he includes a few women in his examples of BIG thinkers] would have made their way into popular magazines and onto television screens.”  He seems to mean that we no longer want to hear what scientists have to say if we can’t consume their ideas in a Tweet-stream.

But, I wonder about that when I watch the Daily Show or the Colbert Report with my 20-year-old son and we are listening to the US Ambassador to the UN discuss why the UN matters to the US or a Senator discuss the debt ceiling debate. Okay, okay – it’s a six minute interview with snarky humor laced throughout, but that’s about three minutes longer than the so-called major networks’ coverage of important topics and about as long as NPR gives a story (and that’s called an “in-depth” treatment). These are BIG problems calling for BIG ideas and they are not solely problems of the marketplace, the one domain in which Gabler acknowledges that BIG ideas are clearly being born.

But, if Gabler gives, he also takes away.

“Entrepreneurs have plenty of ideas, and some….have come up with some brilliant ideas in the ‘inventional’ sense of the word. Still, while these ideas may change the way we live, they rarely transform the way we think. They are material, not ideational.”

I have to say, that I am still trying to make sense of this assertion. It seems to me that many commercial inventions do, in fact, change the way we think. They create new frameworks which change how we see things and this is precisely how understanding is transformed. The fact that these ideas are embodied in a product or a service (are experienced in the corporeal world) does not – to my mind, at least – negate their “ideational” impact. And, the notion that ideas in the marketplace and ideas in the… “non-marketplace(?)” are fundamentally different also makes me wince. Are there any corners of human activity that are free from the curse of “monetization?” The marketplace subsidizes some pockets of activity, insulating them from its daily concerns – non-profits and government – but they are not immune or outside of its reach (ask any university that relied on its endowment funds for operations in 2009 or NGO that relied on donors).

Finally Gabler goes full bore and lets loose about what he calls our “post-idea” world. This is the world in which we are more concerned with amassing information to stay informed than to make sense of the world. We live in a gap between apprehending and comprehending the world in Gabler’s terms. Reducing our expression to 140 characters or video clips and restricting it to our circle of online friends (even if they number in the millions as they do for Lady Gaga and Ashton Kutcher) traps us in an endless loop of opinions which are the antithesis of BIG thinking.

I admit that I find it impossible to keep up with the flow of information that comes my way. But this was the case 20 years ago – before the Internet, before Kindles, before iPhones and iPads and netbooks and Blackberries and instant messaging and Twitter. It was nice not to be so accessible, so 24/7, but it didn’t make it any easier to be thoughtful.

In some of the work that I do, BIG ideas are afoot and they are engaging many people in provocative and energetic discussions that seek to enlarge our understanding of what it means to live in an increasingly inter-connected world in which seemingly small choices ripple outward with surprisingly large impact over long periods of time. Strands of thinking that come many different fields – complexity theory, evolutionary biology, particle physics, finance, philanthropy – are being woven together to form new ways of seeing, of understanding our world.

My children’s education at the elementary, middle and high school levels is far more concerned with understanding than it is with simply acquiring information – a marked contrast to my own experience. And, my kids are every bit as connected 24/7 via text messages and video chats as any of their peers. Yet somehow, BIG ideas still entrance them as they struggle to make sense of their world in all its close immensity. I am not a betting person, but I would still bet that there are BIG ideas out there that are heading our way and that as a species our drive to make meaning will prevail.

And, that’s as a good a reason as any on this Thanksgiving Holiday to be thankful.

 

Source: “The Elusive Big Idea,” Neal Gabler, Sunday Review, The New York Times, August 14, 2011.

Filed Under: Change

Timing Might NOT Be Everything

October 18, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Recently when I’ve been in the middle of political discussions with friends or family, I’ve found myself on the side of an argument where I rather sadly concede that President Obama might not be the right person for the times.   It occurs to me that this point of view might have less to do with the President and more to do with a middle-aged belief about what has limited or supported my personal accomplishments to-date – a belief that I’ve been fortunate to have predilections about what I do to make a living and a temperament about how I do it that have been well-suited to the particular state of the business world during my career lifetime (so far, at least).  A feeling that timing is everything.

A few weeks ago, I attended a one day seminar on the topic of Forecasting in the Face of Risk and Uncertainty.  Most of the people attending this event were involved in the financial markets and their main (and in most cases, only) interest is figuring out how to make money.  Ironically, virtually all of the presenters (other than the final session panelists) were people who are mostly interested in thinking about BIG problems – scientists and academics – and relatively unconcerned about how to convert their ideas into money.   The seminar’s major themes that interested me were these:

  • Risk = Hazard x Vulnerability
  • Risk should not be confused with Uncertainty.  Risk implies that future events will occur with measurable probability.  Uncertainty implies that the likelihood of future events is indefinite or incalculable.
  • It appears that uncertainty is increasing as systems become more complex and tightly coupled.
  • The more complex and tightly coupled the system, the greater the likelihood that there will be accidents.  In these environments, adding more controls or safeguards in attempts to offset the likelihood of accidents will have the perverse effect of increasing the likelihood that accidents will occur because the controls increase both the complexity and tight coupling of the system.
  • But, simplicity is not necessarily the solution to complexity because simple systems are just as vulnerable to phase shifts or environmental disruptions.  In fact, simple systems and complex, tightly coupled systems share one design feature – they tend to be optimized perfectly for a specific environment.  If the environment changes even slightly in a way that makes it difficult for the system to adapt, the system is prone to collapse.

During the final session one of the panelists observed that the cockroach is a very successful creature – having survived massive disruptions in its external environment time and time again.  Apparently, cockroach survival has been enhanced by its extreme sensitivity to puffs of wind (indicating a potential predator on the move).  Puff of wind, cockroach senses it,  and initiates evasive maneuvers (turns and moves in the opposite direction).  However, cockroaches are not very well-designed insects.  In fact, this panelist described them as a perennial runner up in the competition for best insect design.  However, their less than perfect optimization for the environment has served them well in the long run.  They haven’t gotten to dominate the planet at any given time, but they’ve outlasted many other perfectly adapted insects (and other life forms as well).

Optimizing for a particular set of circumstances (tightly coupled complex or simple system design) is analogous to being the right person at the right time at the right place (etc., etc.).  In business settings we often talk about a process being well designed if it gets the right information to the right person at the right time.  But what if all this rightness is wrong?   What if it’s better in the long run to be almost right?  What if the right time is too short a timeframe for rightness?  What if timing is not everything?

Organizational innovation, it seems to me, is an attempt to survive (retain relevance) over the long term.  But, some of the limitations that organizations place on themselves in order to manage the inherent risks and uncertainty that accompany innovation might inadvertently increase those risks and not effectively manage uncertainty.  For example, companies believe that it is risk limiting to hew close to their existing markets – explore adjacencies where they can leverage existing resources and expertise.  And, on some level, this makes sense – you’ve got all this stuff (resources, expertise, infrastructure, systems) available and you know how to use it to make money (or create value if you’re a non-profit or an institution with a mission that has a broader definition of value than a financial one).  But what if by staying close to what you know and using similar or the same resources and expertise, you are adding complexity to your system and more tightly coupling success to the same set of value drivers and risk factors?  What if what looks like you’re managing risk is actually creating more risk and giving you a false sense that you are prepared to handle uncertainty?  Rather than having created a more robust and resilient organization, you have created one that is ever more sensitive to slight shifts in its environment and has a reduced capacity to adapt.  So you get to be the perfectly right organization for the time, but you have not become the organization that has a better chance of being around for a long time.

So, how do organizations use innovation to help manage for the long term?  First, I think we need to distinguish between the long term and forever.  While this might seem obvious, I’m not sure that most of us really acknowledge that every major organizational system will cease to exist at some point – nothing is forever.  Even serially successful innovative companies like Apple will not last forever.  Among the many musings about the significance of Steve Jobs and Apple in the wake of his untimely, recent death, one rang most true to me because it seemed like a perfect restatement of Clayton Christensen’s theory of innovation from below.

In this article (some of it is excerpted below), Cliff Kuang makes the point that Steve Jobs understood design better than anyone.   For a long time, personal computing devices were pretty ugly and hard to use – they were badly designed – but they were fast and powerful.  And, for an equally long time, design was too costly to be delivered to or desired by more than the elite.  (Market penetration of Macs was always a fraction of the PC.)   But, not very long ago, the price point of delivering great design in computing devices fell within reach of the many and computing power was a given, no longer a differentiator.  Today, great design has become a standard feature required of computing devices.  So, it’s possible that the wave of great design as an innovation in technology has passed.  That, more than anything else, may cause Apple to stumble going forward, but Apple has already figured out how to use innovation to manage for the long term.  The company has survived failures (NeXT Cube, Lisa, Newton), customer unhappiness (the iPhone 4’s antennae), and now, the death of its visionary founder/leader.

So, what makes systems resilient?  Just the sort of things that have been engineered out of lean organizations – slack and redundancy – the less than perfect design.  I frequently hear executives bemoaning the “hobbies” that employees pursue as evidence of innovation gone wrong.  But, I think that hobbies are the quintessential redundancies that pop up when there’s a bit of slack.  They’re good and necessary for innovation.  At the same time, organizations must also be willing to invest in some of the hobbies that appear to be scalable which requires leadership in the face of risk and uncertainty.

And what does it look like if you’re on the wrong side of a bet?  Ask yourself if you’d like to be Reed Hastings of Netflix – a guy who is experiencing what looks like BIG failure at the level of the institution. Or if you’d have been happy being Steve Jobs when Apple decided to offer Lisa customers the option of trading in their purchase for a Mac as a mea culpa for having sold them an expensive product that the company was not going to support because it was a failure.  Probably not.  But, if you are almost right (rather than perfectly right) and if you have a resilient organization that can absorb shocks to the system, you probably have a much better chance of thriving over the long haul because timing is not everything, even if it helps.

Sources:

“Wind Direction Coding in the Cockroach Escape Response: Winner Does Not Take All,” Rafael Levi and Jeffrey M. Camhi, sourced on 10/12/11 at  http://www.jneurosci.org/content/20/10/3814.full.pdf

“What Can Steve Jobs Still Teach Us?,” Cliff Kuang, Fast Company Newsletter, October 5 2011, sourced on 10/14/11 at http://www.fastcompany.com/design/2011/what-can-steve-jobs-still-teach-us

From What Can Steve Jobs Still Teach Us?:

A decisive factor that aided Steve Jobs was fortuitous timing. He came of age just in time to become a founding father of the personal-computer movement. And he was still young enough when he returned to Apple, in 1997, that his own instinctive sense of what a computer might become could be brought to life. In the 1980s and 1990s, computers were sold on their speed and technical capabilities. But by 2000, these features had largely become commoditized–it no longer mattered how fast a computer was when basic issues of usability and integration became paramount. What did speed matter if you didn’t know what all the menus meant, or if you were hit with pop-up errors every time you clicked your mouse?

Before 1997, Jobs was ahead of his time: The computers he made were overpriced for the market, because he thought that usability was more important than capability. But as computers reached maturity and became a staple in every home, his obsessions became more relevant to the market. Indeed, many of Apple’s recent signature products, such as the iPad or the iPhone, were ideas first conceived in the 1990s or even the 1980s–they had to bide their time.

Jobs is ahead of his time in other ways too: He has taught his entire organization to play in the span of product generations rather than product introductions. Apple designers say that now, each design they create has to be presented alongside a mock-up of how that design might evolve in the second or third generation. That should ensure Apple’s continued success for a long time, aided, of course, by the tremendous momentum that Jobs’s leadership has provided the company.

And for fun, it appears that cockroaches will NOT inherit the earth even though they are more resilient than humans.

Filed Under: Business Model, Innovation, Risk Management

Friendship – the perfect blendship!

September 12, 2011 By Leave a Comment

 

Pixar makes magical films – Toy Story, Up, Wall-E, Cars – so you might expect that it would be magical place to work.   And yes, it seems to be every bit as employee-friendly as every other high tech enterprise in Silicon Valley you have ever read about (even though it is not located in Silicon Valley, but in Emeryville – also outside of San Francisco, but in another universe altogether apparently).

You know what I’m talking about – the carefully designed workspaces that encourage collaboration and serendipitous interactions, the mind-body solicitousness of the fitness center and outdoor sports areas, the “you could live your entire life here” cafes, bars, and eateries.  But what I think is really remarkable about Pixar is this:  employees really like each other.

When John Lasseter, Pixar’s CEO, describes how the Toy Story team “saved” the project when it was imperiled, he says, “’We went back to what we wanted, and that was: the characters liked each other.  Because we liked each other.’”  And this, according to Anthony Lane, one of The New Yorker’s film critics and the author of a Pixar profile story, is the essence of Pixar distilled in the message of Toy Story – “You got a friend in me.”  At Pixar, friendship is cemented by intense devotion to craft that is married inextricably to technologies that continue to extend the possibilities for the special brand of enchantment that the company produces.  Lane notes that friendship is often the most enduring form of human relationships   He writes:  “[friendship is]…that practical momentum, conservative in its emotions, but radical in its taste for adventure….”

But (I can imagine you thinking out loud) they are Pixar – a smallish company with highly skilled (PhD-techno nerd-graphic design-type) employees operating in a rarified atmosphere making animated movies.  What does this have to do with anything other than a highly specialized corner of the entertainment industry?  What indeed?  To me, the idea of friendship – its practical momentum, conservative emotions and radical taste for adventure – is the energizing, forward-moving spirit that the corporate world says it wants and then crushes with a deadening, faint-hearted  version that it calls “employee engagement.”

Just compare the two – would you rather be friends with the people you work with or engaged to the company you work for?  (I know that you don’t really get engaged to a company, you are engaged with the work you do for the company, but just humor me a bit.)   The whole construct of employee engagement seems devoid of feeling which is odd because it’s supposed to be about attachment.  Just imagine, for a moment, if organizational life was built on friendship.  If products and services were really all about making friends with customers, suppliers, and other stakeholders.  If the strong bonds of friendship were what underpinned business decisions – a balancing of short and long term consequences, a desire to sustain relationships, trying to make something last beyond the ups and downs of the moment.

I believe that the nascent corporate social responsibility movement (another label that just kills all of the passion and power of what’s going on) at its most basic is an embodiment of friendship  There is something in the air these days and it’s bigger than engagement.

Perhaps it’s a consequence of how quickly changes that once seemed to take more than one person’s lifetime to experience have now become observable well within the boundaries of one person’s lifetime.   We might just well have come to a point in history when kicking the can down the road doesn’t really achieve the goal of palming problems off to another generation.  It may be that we are going to have to dig in and be responsible for the world in which we live – whether we inherited it or we created it.

How observable?  In an article discussing the US government’s investment in lithium battery production as part of a highly controversial US-style industrial policy (betting on certain industries having the potential to create jobs and economic leadership in the world economy),  the unforeseen consequences of having outsourced industrial production to Asia in the 1960s is identified as one of the major contributing factors to our lagging position industrial technologies.    The author quotes a seminal article by Pisano and Shih, two Harvard professors, who believe that globalization has had the unwitting effect of tearing apart the ecosystem that generates future innovation.

Pisano and Shih write that “…US corporations, by offshoring so much manufacturing work over the past few decades, have eroded our ability to raise living standards and curtailed the development of new high-technology industries.”  When consumer products companies offshored production to Asia, the drive to improve battery technology migrated to that part of the world too, because that was where it was needed – for toys and then small electronic devices.  Fast forward to 2010 and now the transportation industry (manufacturers of essentially large consumer electronic devices) needs this technology, but its locus is in Asia.

While no one is prescient enough to foresee how the arc of history will bend, if one takes a long view, it’s easy to see that caring for interlocking relationships in the present might serve to strengthen the foundation for future endeavors.  And what else is friendship but relationships that we tend today with a view towards tomorrow?

If we want our organizations and our economic systems to have a better chance at withstanding the vicissitudes of time, perhaps friendship is the best template we have.

 

Sources:

  • “The Fun Factory,” Anthony Lane, The New Yorker, May 16, 2011
  • “Make or Break,” Jon Gertner, The New York Times Sunday Magazine, August 28, 2011
And, another take on Friendship (thanks to Cole Porter, Ethel Merman and Bert Lahr)

Filed Under: Business Model, Collaboration, Sustainability

The Future Just Creeps On In

April 28, 2011 By Leave a Comment
There’s a big ol’ hole that’s gone right through the sole of this old shoe
And the water on the ground, ain’t got no place else it found
So it’s only got one thing left to do
Just creep on in, creep on in
And once it has begun, it won’t stop until it’s done, sneaking in
(“Creeping In” by Dolly Parton)

“Our imagination is stretched to the utmost, not, as in fiction, to imagine things which are not really there, but just to comprehend those things which are there.”  Richard Feynman

Last week, as I emerged from Penn Station in New York City, I strolled up Seventh Avenue and out of the corner of my eye caught sight of the large Borders book store that commands the corner of Seventh Avenue and 32nd Street.  What flashed through my mind at that moment was “I never thought I’d live to see the end of books.”  As a kid, I’d spend the entire day closeted in my room reading a book with a dictionary beside me on the bed. I loved unlocking the meaning of big, prepossessing words as I made my way through stories that were just a little too difficult for me.  Looking back on it, I see that I was making a kind of intellectual journey through worlds that were otherwise inaccessible to me as a child of Jewish middleclass suburban Baltimore.  Later on, in my undergraduate years, I used to sit in the Divinity School Library at Duke University, my Biblical Hebrew text before me, surrounded by dictionaries and concordances – all in an effort to untangle a foreign, dead language and try to reconstruct a way of experiencing the world that could only be understood through surviving fragments of text.  When I got out of college and no longer had to read what was on a syllabus, I went on wild reading binges, foraging through the St. Mark’s Bookshop in New York City.  For me, reading has always been another way of seeing and experiencing the world and books have been my passport.

But, now I own a Kindle and my dictionary is no longer beside me.  Instead, I click my Kindle’s home key and enter the word I don’t know to instantly have it defined by my favorite dictionary (the OED), and then click back to exactly where I stopped reading.  I made the transition to the Kindle with some trepidation – after all, I LOVE books.  I had about three days of feeling very strange about not flipping a page and the heft of the reading device not feeling right and not really liking the percent completion display which was my only way of knowing how much I’d read and how much more there was to go.  But then, that was that, and I was on my way to loving that my dictionary was right there, all the time.  When I saw the Borders bookstore in New York City, I had just finished reading an article in The New York Times about the coming-to-me-soon future in which I would be able to borrow books from my library on my Kindle.  In fact, if I owned a Nook or a Sony e-Reader, I could do that already.  In my soon-to-be future, I wouldn’t have to go to my library to borrow a book.  I already don’t have to go to a bookstore to buy one and I don’t have to pay at all for classics like my favorite Edith Wharton or to finally read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.  The future has already arrived and I am smack in the middle of it, I just hadn’t noticed.   

Yesterday, I read another article in The New York Times about supercomputers used for scientific visualization that are called macroscopes.  Macroscopes are “…a new class of computer-based scientific instruments…composite tools, with different kinds of physical presences that have such powerful and flexible software programs that they become a complete scientific workbench.”  These supercomputers make “…it possible to uncover phenomena and processes that in the past have been, ‘too great, slow or complex for the human eye and mind to notice and comprehend.’”  Macroscopes can see the future creeping in on you in ways that human beings cannot. 

What’s also amazing about these supercomputers is that the technology itself is affecting the very nature of the scientific research process.  From the lone independent researcher toiling away in isolation, it is now more likely that hundreds or even thousands of researchers in disparate geographies and ranging across many different disciplines collaborate on and jointly publish research, no longer isolated, but intensively connected through these supercomputers.  And the supercomputers themselves are not one piece of equipment or software housed in one place, but can themselves be collaborations of different pieces of equipment and applications in far-flung corners of the world.  The unrelenting force of collaboration – called the “killer app” by one scientist in the article – is also making what seemed like a risky approach, developing software in an open-source mode, now seem like the only way forward.  Technology has managed to destroy a culture and build a new one, in this case, seemingly without the calamity that accompanies most destruction. 

The same is going on in the organizations where we work.  They are already different, but we are swept along in the currents and can’t really appreciate the full extent of how much the future is already here until, perhaps, we read an article about borrowing books from a library on an e-Reader without visiting the library and catch a glimpse of a Borders bookstore on the street corner 15 minutes later.

 Sources:

  • “Digging Deeper, Seeing Farther:  Supercomputers Alter Science,”  John Markoff, The New York Times, April 26, 2011.
  • “Kindle Users to Be Able to Borrow Library E-Books,” Julie Bosman, The New York Times, April 21, 2011.
Filed Under: Change

Make Your Own Mistakes!

April 4, 2011 By 1 Comment

I have never liked best practices. In part, this may be due to my contrary nature. My first impulse when I’m told what to do is to push the advice far enough away until I can examine it at arm’s length and determine whether or not it makes sense for me to follow it. I’m not inclined to think that just because someone else is doing something that is working out for them that it means it’s something I should do or that even if I do it, I would necessarily get the same results. If you put a better spin on my attitude, you’d say that I have a strong independent streak.

So, some of my reaction to best practices is a matter of temperament. But some of it has to do with a feeling that the whole notion of best practices is deeply flawed.

Best practices is about the “what.” What does that company (or group or individual) do and how does it compare to what we do? Teasing out the differences, the “gaps” in business-speak, is like panning for gold. You find the little (or big) nuggets that, if adopted, can help your organization improve performance.

Part of the problem is that best practices really don’t stand the test of time. For the aspirant, it takes time and real effort to make the changes required to perform the best practice and by the time that this has occurred, it’s more than likely that the best practice itself is no longer a best practice (the best practice organization having perfected an even better practice). For the best practice organization, if it doesn’t move on and continue to evolve, the best practice is no longer best and it is no longer the bellwether.

But the most flawed aspect of best practices is that they seem to be about avoiding mistakes. They are about learning from the mistakes of others, so you don’t have to make them yourself. But what if the only way you can really learn, really master anything, is precisely by making mistakes yourself? What if it’s more risky to avoid making mistakes than to figure out how to become good at making them?

When people acquire new skills they typically progress through three stages:

Stage Characteristics
1. Cognitive intellectualize the task, discover new strategies to accomplish it proficiently
2. Associative concentrate less, make fewer errors, become more efficient
3. Autonomous become as good as we need to be, run on autopilot reaching a sustainable plateau

For a very long time, the autonomous stage was viewed as the highest level of innate capability. Sir Francis Galton identified it back in 1869 as a point beyond which an individual “…cannot by any education or exertion overpass.” However, it seems that hitting the wall is more a matter of belief than reality.

Very high achievers, those who continuously bust through limits, develop strategies to stay out of the autonomous zone. These masters use three main strategies: 1) focus on technique, 2) stay goal-oriented, and 3) get immediate feedback on performance. Nothing too shocking or out of the ordinary here. However, the first strategy is not as obvious as it might first appear and the way in which masters go about it is different from those who are good or even very good.

The key to the first strategy is technique. Observations of amateur and virtuoso musicians note that when amateurs practice, they typically play musical pieces. When virtuoso musicians practice, they play scales and difficult parts of pieces. I’d put it this way, the amateur wants the kind of feedback that makes him feel good. The virtuoso is looking for feedback that tells her how to improve. The virtuoso is looking for opportunities to make mistakes and is paying close attention to why and how failure happens. Achieving mastery is very boring and tedious. That’s why very few have the passion and commitment to persist at it.

If what it takes to be the best is a constantly moving target and requires a huge amount of humility (how else can one persist in seeking out opportunities to make mistakes and then make them?), it’s clear that simply aping a best practice is hardly likely to transform an individual or an organization. It seems to me that what does have the potential to transform performance is the process of making mistakes as one seeks improvement. But to do that, individuals and organizations have to make their own mistakes and never stop making them, something that is not readily apparent in the flawless performance that we see when we observe best practices.

Source for information about achieving mastery:

  • “Secrets of a mind-gamer,” Joshua Foer, The New York Times Sunday Magazine, February 15, 2011
Filed Under: Innovation, Knowledge Management

The Value of Experience

March 1, 2011 By 1 Comment

I have a friend who has held several senior level executive positions at very large companies over the past 20 years. She is currently looking for a job and, times being what they are, she finds that unless her experience completely matches up against the new opportunity, she’s not considered as desirable a candidate as someone else whose experience is a more perfect fit. As a strategy and innovation consultant, I’m frequently asked to provide referrals for work that is the same as the work I’m proposing to do. In effect, there is an assumption that my previous success can be replicated if somehow the situation is close enough and if I do exactly the same thing again.

We treat experience as extremely valuable – as if it embodies deep knowledge and insight and is highly predictive of success in the future. We believe that because someone has managed a particular situation in the past successfully, he or she is a better bet to achieve success in the future when placed in a similar situation. But what if experience at best is irrelevant and at worst is misleading? What if how we understand correlation is deeply flawed? What if the truth wears off?

If we define experience as the proven ability to achieve a particular result under certain conditions, it is analogous to the scientific principle of replicability which is a foundation of the scientific method. In a scientific experiment, recreating the conditions under which a particular outcome has been observed is supposed to yield the predicted outcome. But, scientists are finding is that this is not the case. In many scientific experiments, the probability that predicted outcomes will occur actually decreases relative to the number of times the experiment is recreated increases. This is called the decline effect.

Many of the obvious culprits – regression to the mean, publication bias, selective reporting – do not provide a satisfactory explanation for the problem (which is a BIG one for science). After all, if a fact is not a fact – that is, something true that remains true – then what are these things that are being observed? What is the truth?
Regression to the mean is a statistical phenomenon that common wisdom captures in the phrase “the law of averages.” So, any experiment that shows a big effect at first might be expected to show a small effect another time and then bounce around until the effects cluster about an average. However, for many experiments with statistically solid data sets, the data doesn’t regress to a mean, the data thoroughly degrades, for which there is no satisfactory explanation.
Publication bias is the tendency of scientific journals (or almost any publication) to prefer to publish research that supports previously published research. After some period of time, the insight becomes orthodoxy, and then these same journals are more open to disconfirming research. While this explains some of the reasons why certain scientific facts become enshrined and then discredited, it doesn’t explain early positive results.

Selective reporting is the perceptual bias that humans bring to observation. An example of selective reporting can be found in an experiment where scientists look for physical symmetry, which is supposed to be a marker for a preferred mate, in animal subjects. If the scientist knows that the observed subject has successfully mated and is looking for symmetry that is expressed in something as minute as tail feathers or whiskers, there is a predisposition to see it. Experiments that test the efficacy of acupuncture provide another window into the problem of selective reporting. During a 30 year timeframe, experiments were conducted in Asia and the US/Europe. All of the experiments in Asia supported the effectiveness of acupuncture and only about 60% of the US/European experiments reached the same conclusion.
The most disturbing new information that I learned about the scientific method was not that scientists and scientific publications are biased or that judgment based on beliefs turns out to be more important than decisions based on a so-called solid set of facts, but that the notion of a threshold for statistical validity, that a phenomenon’s occurrence is not likely to be caused by chance – the 95% probability level – was originally set because it made “pencil and slide-rule calculations easier.” And much research chases after achieving results that meets this criterion so that they can be treated as facts.

If it turns out that facts are slippery and no more solid than beliefs, how do we understand the value of experience? Our contention that experience matters derives from the scientific model of replicability. But that model is not as firm a foundation as we may have hoped. If we can’t rely on the scientific construct of replicability – find someone whose experience matches up precisely against the current situation to better predict a successful outcome – what can we rely on? Turning to science for answers means a long wait, because science is only now beginning to grudgingly acknowledge that it has a problem. Even though it is much more challenging, I believe that we need to acknowledge that we are not sure what the value of experience actually is and that we might be as wrong about it as much scientific research is turning out to be.

Source: “The Truth Wears Off,” Jonah Lehrer, The New Yorker, December 13, 2010

Filed Under: Decision-making, Leadership, Risk Management Tagged With: , ,

Dessert, Happiness, and Innovation

February 2, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Reading about the dessert revolution that was sparked in Barcelona a decade ago made me think about how limitations and the lack of them combine in subtle ways to unleash innovation.  Around the same time, I had come across the concept of synthetic happiness which also examines the interplay of limitation and freedom.  I began to wonder:  How much freedom and how much limitation create the optimal conditions for innovation?  Are happiness and innovation somehow related?

The dessert revolution was kick-started by the molecular gastronomy movement – the ascendance of chemistry in the professional kitchen.  Molecular gastronomy has been a rule-breaking phenomenon.  Rules like the order of tastes, flavors, and sensations in a meal: the rules that say savory comes before sweet and hot before cold.  Molecular gastronomy has appropriated the tools of industrial food-making and applied them to haute cuisine.  Tools that extract essential oils from fruits and flowers and tools that blow air into liquids to create foams are used to transform food and the experience of eating.  Suddenly, main courses are sweet and cold while desserts are savory and hot (one holy grail – hot ice cream).  Textures and flavors upend expectations and suddenly eating dinner is an adventure.

What is most interesting about the culinary transformation in Barcelona is that it emerged from the realm of the pastry chef in regions of the world where the pastry chef does not dominate the food culture and from individuals who are mostly the younger or youngest sibling in a family business.  As the younger or youngest sibling, these men were forced into the pastry chef role because it has lower prestige; the higher prestige roles went to the older siblings.  In this region of Spain, the culture of dessert had been limited to a few custards and cakes.  It is the antithesis of places such as France or Germany with dessert traditions that span tarts, creams, cakes, cookies, and more.   Stuck in the pastry chef role, but unburdened by a well-developed dessert culture, these young pastry chefs experienced both limitation and freedom and an explosion of wildly innovative desserts have emerged from their kitchens and spilled into the rest of the meal, putting Barcelona on the culinary map.   

What, you might ask, does innovation in Barcelona’s dessert culture have to do with happiness? 

Let’s start with a definition of happiness that comes from Dan Gilbert, author of Stumbling on Happiness. Gilbert differentiates between natural and synthetic happiness.  Natural happiness is how you feel when you get what you want – when you are not forced to face limitations.  Synthetic happiness is how you feel when you change your view of how much it really mattered that you didn’t get what you wanted – when you are face to face with a big solid wall that stands between you and your aspirations and there is no way around it.  In Gilbert’s TED talk (I encourage you to listen to it), one of his main points is that we believe that natural happiness is better than synthetic happiness. But evidence suggests that both kinds of happiness make us equally happy.  That turns out to be a very good thing because most of the happiness we experience is synthetic.  Few of us go through life without experiencing setbacks or bumping into limits. 

Gilbert then moves on to describe the series of non-conscious cognitive processes that allow human beings to revise our view of the meaning of certain experiences.  Gilbert calls this capacity a psychological immune system and it is essential to synthesizing happiness.  We might not need these processes so much if we weren’t also blessed with a capacity to simulate experiences before we have them thanks to our frontal cortex.  This unique aspect of our brain structure allows us to imagine outcomes from situations before we actually experience them and guides us to make certain choices.  For example, presented with a choice between eating mud or a nice warm buttery croissant, we will choose to eat the croissant because we imagine that we will be happier doing so (good choice!).  However, there are many more instances where what we imagine will make us happy and how happy we report feeling after we have had the experience suggest that we really don’t have a clue. 

Gilbert cites several different experiments – most of them share similar characteristics.  Groups that have what most people would call a lousy experience (becoming a paraplegic) and groups that have a terrific experience (winning the lottery) are basically as happy or unhappy as they were before the experience after some time has passed (sometimes as little as 3 months).   People who were generally happy before becoming paraplegics dig something positive out of the experience as awful as it is.  They synthesize happiness (make lemonade out of lemons).   Even in less dire circumstances, we tend to be poor predictors of what will make us happy.  And, as mentioned earlier, we tend to believe that natural happiness – not having to deal with limitations, having ultimate freedom – is better than synthetic happiness.  But, it turns out that this is not the case.

To demonstrate this fact, Gilbert describes another set of experiments in which students are allowed to select a print of a photograph that they can keep.  (I’m going to simplify the experiment design here, go to his TED talk for the more complete description.)  Some students are told that they cannot change their minds – they must keep the photo print they choose.  Other students are allowed to have several days to think it over.  You can probably already guess which group turns out to be happiest with their paintings several weeks later.  Yes, it’s the group that didn’t get to think it over; the group that had to deal with limitations.  Freedom to choose – the ability to make up your mind and change your mind – may be the friend of natural happiness but it is the enemy of synthetic happiness.

When we think about innovation we often imagine that it requires a completely unbounded intellectual space in which we are free to explore anything and everything, a space in which we will find something new and exciting.  Gilbert says that this is the prevailing view of natural happiness – it is something that we must find.  Somehow we believe that this approach – that of seeking in complete freedom – and the happiness and innovations that emerge from it are the best kind.  But what if another equally valid and productive path to innovation is more comparable to synthetic happiness?  The same path that the young pastry chefs in Barcelona experienced – faced with limitations and only afforded certain degrees of freedom.  That would be especially good news since few organizations operate without limitations.  Start-ups lack resources and established organizations have brands to protect.   How we synthesize happiness might provide an alternate way of thinking about how to pursue innovation – without contriving situations that bear little resemblance to the realities that most organizations experience.  If natural innovation requires being out of the box, perhaps synthetic innovation can be produced inside the box as long as the lid is open.  And, it is highly likely that they are both equally good kinds of innovation that will lead to happy results.

Sources:

Filed Under: Change, Innovation

Bye Bye Business Model

December 20, 2010 By Leave a Comment

It seems a fitting way to wrap up 2010 by looking at business models that are on the way out as we head into 2011.

Business models change without warning to those who are invested in them.  Standing outside of an industry looking in, it isn’t hard to see when big changes are in the works or to conclude that the way things are is not going to continue.  In a conversation with a former Chief Investment Officer of a foundation a few weeks ago I heard the phrase “expected surprise” which I think nicely expresses what I’m talking about.  While it may be close to impossible to predict when a change will occur, it’s not at all difficult to predict with certainty that it will occur.  Yet somehow, the argument among those cashing in on an existing business model shifts to knowing when it will occur which has the effect of kicking the can down the road.  If change isn’t imminent, then more important and pressing things take precedence, always.  Which is why when the change inevitably comes, it seems to have been utterly unpredictable and unknowable – a complete (unexpected) surprise. 

Story #1:  The book publishing industry.

The paper-based, time-intensive, highly complex process that brings us books has been convulsing for many years now, but the glue that has bound writers and editors and publishers and publicists and book sellers and even e-sellers of books and e-books is rapidly losing its stickiness.  In August 2010, Seth Godin, a prolific, best-selling author, announced his departure from his longtime publisher, Pearson PLC’s Penguin Group because “…his blog attracts an estimated 438,000 followers…” and that means he knows who reads his books.  “’Publishers provide a huge resource to authors who don’t know who reads their books…”, but that isn’t the case for Mr. Godin.  What are Mr. Godin’s plans for the future?  He’ll hire his own editor and someone who can format his book for electronic distribution and then, it’s up to him to decide how he wants to “package” up the work, how to price it, and how to sell it.  

While Mr. Godin thinks that there still is role for publishers, not everyone agrees.  An e-book publisher, Mark Coker of Smashwords, says that not only will major authors consider this approach, but also those mid-list authors who don’t get much marketing support from publishers.   Those who are not on any list are already in the business of self-publishing, self-promoting and self-distributing.  If top-list, mid-list, and not-on-a-list writers don’t need publishers – who does?

 Story #2:  Knowledge creation.

That’s right – knowledge creation.   When the developers of new knowledge (scholars and researchers) seek to publish their work in career-making academic or professional journals – the ones that christen what is and what is not knowledge – they participate in another time-intensive, complex, opaque process – peer review.  But even in the change-resistant halls of liberal arts academe, a big change has come to the business model of peer-reviewed articles.  A crowd-sourced approach has emerged.   

The Shakespeare Quarterly “posted online four essays not yet accepted for publication, and a core group of experts…were invited to post their signed comments on the Web site MediaCommons, a scholarly digital network.”  This process contrasts with the traditional method in which a hand-selected and small group of academics evaluate submissions anonymously over a period of time which can drag on for years.   And how did what is now regarded as the traditional process come to be?  Like so many traditions which are resistant to change, “[it]…is not so much a gold standard but an effective accommodation to the needs of the field.”   

Yet, the belief persists that democratizing the peer review is not in the best interests of academics.  Many hold fast to the dogma that only experts in the field can truly evaluate whether work makes a significant and unique contribution to the field.  This belief is anchored by the reality that to receive tenure, scholars must be published in peer-reviewed journals.  Only when the authors of the articles that underwent this new process were assured that, if accepted, their pieces would be counted as “peer-reviewed” were they willing to participate.   (Much like the process of ending foot-binding in China, the system (a set of practices) has to change in order to make change stick.   See a previous blog post Formula for Positive Change.)

Story #3:  Manufacturing by printer.

Order of magnitude cost reductions, extreme customization, and just-in-time production – the 3-D printer is bringing all of this to the manufacture of prosthetics, architectural models, furniture, fixtures, cars, and houses.  3-D printers deposit layers of material, often plastic or metal, one on top of the other, controlled by algorithms, to build up an object, layer by layer. 

Bespoke Innovations will use the technology to create customized prosthetics at about one-tenth the cost of traditional prosthetics which are, by comparison, generic templates.  Contour Crafting is using the technology to transform the business of building homes.   A 3-D printer that sits on a tractor trailer does away with most of the manual labor involved in the construction of the structure of the house by not only fabricating walls, but also structural supports and conduits for electrical, plumbing, and heating and cooling systems in one pass.  The Urbee is a completely printed car.  Kor Ecologic, the venture behind the Urbee, is using a volunteer-based, collective approach to bring the car to the market (you can make a donation via PayPal to fund the project).  The president and chief technology officer of Kor Ecologic (Jim Kor) says that the 3D printing technology “lets us eliminate tooling, machining, and handwork, and it brings incredible efficiency when a design change is needed…If you can get to a pilot run without any tooling, you have advantages.”

As the software required to create the design programs plummets in cost and the cost of accessing the printers puts them in reach of more commercial applications, a new business ecosystem is developing in which designers use software to encode their visions and then send these programs to printers whose equipment produces them.  As entire classes of labor costs are removed from the equation, the dynamics of labor cost arbitrage are rebalanced making outsourcing to cheap labor countries which must factor in shipping costs less attractive.  What has seemed inexorable, the United States’ inability to retain its position as a dominant player in the manufacture of goods, might not be as much of a foregone conclusion as it once appeared.

Conclusion

These stories about systems that are in the midst of or on the cusp of radical disruption are all stories about expected surprise.  If you are willing to move outside of the system of which you are a part, and look at it as if you were an outsider, no matter what system you are part of, you would most likely see signs that big changes are coming.  If you subscribe to the idea of the expected surprise, then you know what happens to the rest of a business model when one key element undergoes a transformation. It’s like dominoes that are lined up in such a way that they connect ever so slightly with one another – when one falls, the others must follow.

Sources:

  • “Author to Bypass Publisher for Fans,” Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg, The New York Times, Tuesday, August 24, 2010.
  • “Scholars Test a Web Alternative to the Venerable Peer Review,” Patricia Cohen, The New York Times, Tuesday, August 24, 2010.
  • “3D Printing Spurs a Manufacturing Revolution,” Ashlee Vance, September 13, 2010, sourced on 12/17/10 at: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/14/technology/14print.html
  • “The Urbee Hybrid – the first 3D printed car,” Ariel Schwartz, October 29, 2010, sourced on 12/17/10 at :   http://www.fastcompany.com/1698943/the-urbee-hybrid-the-first-car-to-have-its-body-3-d-printed
Filed Under: Business Model, Change, Innovation
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