Business Corner
STRATEGIES & ANALYSIS
BY PHIL PHILLIPS
CONTRIBUTING EDITOR
PHILLIPS@CHEMARKCONSULTING.NET
Innovation is not the “Best Practices”
technique we eulogize today
Success
in today’s
business
climate
requires
companies
to build
foundations
differently
from the past.
We are all guilty of using the term
“Management Best Practices” when discussing how we as managers are guiding
our respective companies, divisions or product lines.
Chemark is as guilty as anyone since we put forward
this discipline as a branch of our footprint of offerings.
Are you caught up in this dogma of “what’s popular
this quarter and how-to spin-offs?”
There are many stories of companies that lagged
behind new competitors and attempted to catch up
over a 5-10 year period that are familiar to you.
One prominent example is General Motors (GM).
GM started losing market share to the Japanese in
the mid-70s and has never caught up. It lost its
position primarily due to the cornerstone upon
which they were so successful prior to that time
started to crumble at the edges, causing its adjacent foundation pieces to shift and lose strength
thus shaking the GM house in the process. GM’s
historical cornerstone strength was built on top
down management style; staying conservative in
all its decisions; total control of all its core manufacturing and distribution; high production equals
low unit costs output concepts; give labor what
makes them happy; and finally, self-contained
product design.
GM and others are trying to catch-up. However,
today, as Bill Gates has tagged in his book, “The
Speed of Thought,” it will be impossible to catch-up let alone surpass some competitors using the old foundation
truisms. The caution lights won’t
even be noticed before you’re
extraneous.
In the current business climate
to be successful, the foundations
must be built differently. They
are described as novel innovation
plans and they will defy every
management principle you have
ever used from the past. To
understand, adopt and successfully practice this principle you
must scrutinize every consideration that supported your historic
beliefs in running a business.
THE INNOVATION MODEL
The model for successful innovation inclusion into
your business is simple and displayed in the pie
chart on the opposite page. Each of these components of the new innovative model is critical for you
to understand and, of course, to practice them is
the key to strategic growth and wealth creation.
For example, here are a few test questions—
out of a total of 12—regarding your organization’s present skill set versus the skills needed
to become a revolutionary innovator:
• How many people understand the function
industry revolution plays in wealth creation?
• How many know how to calculate the decay of
current business models?
• How many know how to identify and decon-struct industry and company orthodoxies?
• How many are able to condense proprietary foresight out of a sea of information on discontinuities?
• How many are adept at inventing new business concepts and reinventing old ones?
Of course, the majority of this question set
must be answered positively in order to be considered revolutionary-ready. How to perform the
readiness tasks to become innovative-capable
requires a great deal more time and space than
we can devote herein. CW
Design rules for radical innovation
