Harvard Business Review on Embracing Uncertainty

I just read a recent Harvard Business Review article about how companies like Apple, Microsoft and Nokia face the same challenges past greats like Polaroid, DEC, and Atari faced in their day: How to stay fresh.

(By the way, I access the HBR and other great magazines through something called "Business Source Premier," a free service of many public libraries. Check your local library to see if you can get in. You get pretty amazing access to top-tier business periodicals)

The point of the story, "Embracing Uncertainty," by Alan MacCormack, is that big, successful companies once known for their innovation can fall prey to identifying "best practices" and designing "standard operating procedures." As MacCormack says,

"This can make a company wildly efficient at what it does today. But it has a serious downside: an avoidance of novelty that can eat at the very soul of a company."

I love that idea of a company being "wildly efficient." But yes, the more you screw down the way you do things, the harder it might be to change. Maybe this falls into the realm of "great being the enemy of good." It's against human nature to disrupt what's working. So you better have a big incentive to make it worth people's while to go against their instincts.

What Makes Companies go from Outsourcing to Insourcing? The Need for Innovation!

Was Outsourcing a Mistake, or Just a Blip?
The December 12 Atlantic Monthly has a couple of great articles on the rise of insourcing. In The Insourcing Boom, author Charles Fishman makes a pretty stunning assertion:

What is only now dawning on the smart American companies, says Lenzi, is that when you outsource the making of the products, “your whole business goes with the outsourcing.” Which raises a troubling but also thrilling prospect: the offshoring rush of the past decade or more—one of the signature economic events of our times—may have been a mistake.

People Working Together IN THE SAME PHYSICAL LOCATION to Innovate a New Product

The gist of Fishman's article is that markets move too quickly now for manufacturers to outsource production. To evolve a product at the speed consumers expect, companies need to draw on the skills of all the people involved in the production process--from engineers to line workers to sales people.

And as great as web collaboration software is, as helpful as Skype calls can be, companies are seeing the most benefit by putting people together physically--not virtualy--to reeeningeer old processes and innovate new products.

Fishman has some great examples of how this works in the real world. He tells one story of how a team of GE employees in the U.S. got together and reimagined how to build a dishwasher. When they were finished, they had eliminated 35 percent of the labor required to build one.

Less, but Smarter, Use of Labor
That's pretty amazing. But what is even more stunning is what they did with that extra 35 percent. GE management asked the team to pick a dishwasher part they thought they could build better here in the U.S. They chose a part, reinvented and improved it, and then went on to try to improve other parts.

And that, Fishman says, is how "the outsourcing cycle starts to turn. Once you begin making the product itself, you get the itch to make the parts, too."

How cool is that: The turn of the cycle from outsourcing to insourcing. This change points to the importance of innovation, of real-time collaboration across teams. I can't help but imagine one of these teams in a room, with MINDMAP up on the wall, brainstorming how to "build a better mousetrap."

Can Your Company Do Better Through Cross-Team Collaboration?
This global turn of events is pretty exciting for companies like CS Odessa, which has always believed in the power of creative people working together to solve business challenges.

So what about you? Does your company outsource? What would happen if you started manufacturing your products right here in the U.S... if you put your U.S. workers together to help them innovate the next product. You would be in some very good company if you gave it a try!

Note: Fishman's article provides a number of other very tangible reasons why the insourcing trend is gaining strength here in the U.S.

Visit www.conceptdraw.com to see how our products can help your teams innovate.

Brainstorming is Great--When It's Tied to Action

If you've ever been in a corporate brainstorming session (and I've been in more than a few), it's easy to get pessimistic. Yes, we've spent all this wonderful time together, filling up giant sticky notes, using different color markers--maybe even playing with slinkys, modeling clay, and yo-yos. But what do we actually accomplish?

Too often, months go by until you or one of your coworkers asked that inevitable question: Whatever happened to all those ideas we generated way back when? Is there a new service in the works we haven't heard about yet? Is our tagline changing? Or have all those flip charts ended up in someone manager's bottom drawer?

What if those "Big Idea People" had to take ownership of their ideas?
When was the last time you started with a brainstorming session and ended the session by assigning tasks to each participant to help make those new ideas become a reality? Have you EVER had a session that ended like that? The beautiful thing about ConceptDraw MINDMAP is that it makes this transition from brainstorming to concrete action easy to accomplish.

The general flow of a brainstorming session like this actually starts before the session itself. In fact, there has been a lot of discussion lately about how to conduct brainstorming sessions. I won't go into all that. Suffice to say that I think a really good way to prepare for a brainstorming session is to tell everyone in advance what you are going to be brainstorming about, and give them a chance to get some ideas together before the session starts.

(Click on image to enlarge.)

The Lean, Clean, Effective Brainstorming Machine
Once you've done that, then the session steps are:

1. Conduct the brainstorming session by getting input from each participant. Take the ideas they've come up with prior to the session and add them to a mind map projected for everyone in the room to see. If you have more than one topic on the agenda, address each topic one at a time.
2. For each topic, have the participants discuss and debate the merits of each person's ideas. People should be respectful of each other. But they don't need to be overly polite: If they don't like an idea, they should be encouraged to say why; to be honest--and maybe to offer an alternative.
3. Hopefully, with honest, creative exchanges like these, you can come to a point where everyone agrees on some great new ideas. But now, rather than simply congratulating each other on your brilliant thinking, go one step further: Have everyone is the session take personal responsibility to move one or more ideas forward.

   Enter their commitments right into the map. If one ideas is to gather research, write down who will do that, and when they will do it by. If someone else needs to be brought into the discussion, make sure someone is assigned to do that--along with when they will do it by.

4. Instruct people to record the actions or information they were responsible for right on the map, like they have in the following map image (Click on it to enlarge it.)

One Seamless, Efficient Process
Now with this last step, something interesting has happened: Your Brainstorming Map has just turned into your Meeting Map. The next time this groups come together to discuss this project, you simply open up the map and you instantly have at your fingertips the kind of information that can sometimes takes the larger part of a meeting just to find.

I'm sure you can see where this leads: Ideas once lost in the bottom drawer are now front and center, with resources and due dates assigned. This is a big deal. Because companies are nothing more than the ideas of the people who work there--put into action.

Give ConceptDraw MINDMAP a try the next time you want to go beyond brainstorming and right into action to make your ideas a reality.