アメリカ人経営者が語るビジネス・シーン:Ideas

Ideas

2009年12月13日

the 8:30 rule

I do a lot of teaching and facilitation in corporations and universities,

and through that get a chance to interact with lots of young business

people. Typically these are high-performers chosen by their companies to

participate in the courses my company offers, or MBA/MOT students at top-

level universities. So this is a highly-motivated talent pool to start with.

Despite their already busy work schedules, they sacrifice precious free time

with family, friends and hobbies in an effort to better themselves and learn

more about the world around them. This is fantastic, and I applaud their

efforts.

But at the same time, there is more that most of these students could do to

leverage the opportunities they are getting. The "best of the best" that I

see in these groups, the true global professionals - people who make a real

difference in shaping their companies or organizations and the markets that

they touch - are those that always "take the next step" in whatever they

do. They don't just attend the courses they are offered. They make sure to

follow-up, understanding that application is key.

The most successful people I know are the ones who not only gather a lot of

meishi at the cocktail party - but those who send a thoughtful note and

even an extra question to those they have met the next morning. They not

only write down the name of the book the speaker mentioned - but quickly

buy it and start reading it in the train that night. And when they get a

business idea in the shower, they not only write it down on a long to-do

list - they immediately gather a couple of colleagues over lunch and explore

how to expand it into a project.

From these observations, I have developed what I call the "8:30 Rule". The

next time you meet someone interesting, or learn a new concept, or have an

idea - DO SOMETHING with it at 8:30 the next morning. Before everyone else

gets to the office. Before you get bogged down with email. It doesn't have

to be a big step, just a concrete step that you can follow up on later.

Order the book online. Write a quick summary of the idea and email it to a

colleague for input. Create a mind map about how it relates to your work,

and reserve 30 minutes in your next monthly team meeting agenda to

discuss its potential relevance. Believe me, if you don't do it then,

you will probably never get around to it later.

There is always a danger that people feel self-satisfied after attending a

seminar, and then lose all the potential value of it by forgetting to truly

follow-up and apply their learnings in their daily life. I do it myself

all the time. True Global Professionals don't fall into that trap. I

have been trying to apply my own "8:30 Rule" as a way to force myself

to improve in this way. I hope it can help you as well.

jeffjapan at 10:06│コメント(0)│トラックバック(0)

2009年09月29日

design thinking

My company has been doing a lot of work recently around Customer Insight(s) - that is, trying to help our clients develop useful processes to better, more consistently understand and address the evolving requirements of their markets.

Through this work, I have done a lot of reading and thinking about concepts like creativity, innovation, knowledge management, etc. One of those concepts that I really like and want to learn more about is called simply "design thinking".

If you are a "knowledge worker" and haven't yet run across this term, you will soon. It looks to be an emerging discipline with lots of both solid research and examples of practical implementation behind it. It began with product design (famous early promoters include the IDEO group out of Silicon Valley and various industrial design and engineering groups at Stanford University) but is now being more broadly applied to problem-solving, including business issues.

As with most good ideas, this one appears quite simple on the surface but is immensely difficult to pull off in practice. Traditional analytical thinking channels us toward inductive or deductive reasoning - that is, connecting the dots from various data sources (market research surveys, field force feedback, past trends & experience), drilling down from the general to the specific or vice versa, straightlining from cause to effect to "identify the roadblock" and offer a fix. I agree that in many cases this limits our potential field of view. (I can recommend a good first article, written by Sara Beckman, faculty director of the MOT Program at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley, that outlines the benefits and limitations of Six Sigma types of analytical approaches.)

In contrast, design thinking, encourages abductive thinking - thinking about the possibilities of what could be. Wikipedia says abductive thinking "comes prior to induction and deduction... the colloquial name is to have a 'hunch'. Abductive reasoning starts when an inquirer considers of a set of seemingly unrelated facts, armed with an intuition that they are somehow connected."

Sounds like this Mr. Hunch could live somewhere near the Customer Insights family I am searching for. Let's go a little deeper...

First, an easy summary of the design thinking process from an article in Fast Company:

1. Define the problem - easy to say, but here emphasis is on questioning the brief (e.g. are we expressing the problem correctly) and becoming aware of the various "filters" that might be clouding our perceptions.

"Observation" is a key aspect of this step - back in business school I saw a video of IDEO cross-functional teams getting out in the field, questioning users, and challenging all assumptions with why, why, why...

2. Create and consider many options

3. Refine selected options

3.5 Repeat / reiterate

4. Pick and execute

Well, steps 2 through 4 seem the opposite of deep - so obvious as to hardly warrant comment - but again tough to do in actuality. (My friend and colleague Henry Andersen at Nihon University has assisted me in helping clients develop some good techniques to get through these steps in the past.) But here at least I find good confirmation of something I think I knew before getting started on my research:

There is potentially more power in properly defining a problem than in solving it.

Not quite satisfied with the Fast Company definition, I found another article by Alice Rawsthorn (also carried in the International Herald Tribune - the finest newspaper on Earth, in my opinion) that talks about the concept in reference to a new book out, Change by Design: Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO (those IDEO guys again...).

She writes that

"Mr. Brown describes...the shift from old-school 'design,' which he regards as 'technology-centered,' to the 'human-centered' discipline of 'design thinking'...the application of the traditional skills that designers develop, often without realizing, to identify problems and invent solutions in collaboration with experts from other disciplines, their clients and the people who will use the results."

OK, so this is the cross-functional and creative team aspect... But again, how to get it done - that is the magic... Will pick up the book and continue my search...

One other quick footnote: I came across a powerful quote from Roger Martin, dean of the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto: “Reality is the enemy of innovation.” I think this is exactly right in most business cultures (and especially in the more risk-averse cultures I often encounter in Japan!). What people did yesterday and the week before and the year before - whether that worked particularly well or not - proves to be such a crushing burden that new ideas are formed hesitantly, expressed reluctantly, and almost never moved forward (until a competitor does something similar and the company jumps to play catch-up).

jeffjapan at 00:04│コメント(0)

2009年06月18日

ちょっと重い本

やっとでました。超有名な戦略経営学者であるハーバード大学のマイケル・ポーター先生とヴァージニア大学のオルムステッド・ティスバーグ先生が２００６年に出版した"Redefining Health Care: Creating Value-Based Competition on Results"の日本語版（医療戦略の本質：価値を向上させる競争）。予約購入で先日私のところに届きました。ちょっと重いと言えば重い（626ページ、内容も軽くありませんよ！）ですが、夏休みにじっくりと時間が取れる方々に是非お勧めしたい一冊です。

ポーター氏が1985年に取り上げた"Value Chain Analysis"(バリュー・チェーン)の、医療業界への応用編となります。詳細が多く、基本的にアメリカ市場状況しか紹介されていませんので、100%参考になる訳ではありませんが、基本的なメッセージが分かりやすく、日本でも十分な意味をもつと思います：

1)　ある薬剤の単価、ある医師の時間配分、ある機械の利用頻度など、単発のコスト削減ばかりを見るゼロ・サム競争ではなく、ある疾患で苦しんでいる患者様へ包括的に提供する価値に基づく競争が原点。

2)　患者様が病気になってからでは遅い。医療システムの全ステークホールダー（医師、看護師、薬剤師、患者、病院経営者、製薬・機器メーカーなど）が予防医療（PREVENTION）を促進させるために、自分なりにできることをやるべき。「突き詰めていえば、本来は健康な方が安上がりであるため、医療の質の向上はコストを低下させるのである。従って、健康を維持することが究極的なコスト削減になるのだ。「p.164」

3)上記のことを実施するために、業界として不足している、またはあるステークホルダーが見せたくないアウトカムデータが必要です。（私の立場からすると、この点について、日本の業界が世界の流れにかなり遅れていることは非常に残念です。）

一つのブログポストで纏められるトピックではありませんが。。。

医療関係者以外の方にとっても、医療制度の在り方やサービスは大切なことですので、是非自分の観点で本を読んで、仲間とディスカッションしてください。

翻訳の山本雄土先生は大変な仕事量をこなして、素晴らしいものを日本の医療業界に届けてくれたと思います。山本先生、お疲れ様でした！

jeffjapan at 10:29│コメント(0)│トラックバック(0)

2008年12月24日

Earth Rising

When business slows down around Christmas and the New Year, I

often find myself searching out old books and thinking (or trying to

think!) a little bigger about things. This Christmas Eve, I found a great

present in my newspaper - a beautiful piece by Oliver Morton, the

chief news and features editor of the journal Nature.

Don't link to this until you can get yourself a hot cup of tea in a quite

place to sit down and enjoy it properly. (New York Times記事)

Unfortunately, the weblink doesn't include the original photo that was

in the paper - but I found it at a different site for everyone (here ).

Print this big in color first, then sit back and ENJOY!

jeffjapan at 11:28│コメント(0)│トラックバック(0)

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