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Planning priorities for empowered teams
J PROD INNOV MANAG 1993;10:251-263
ABSTRACTS
thing might be. From his study of more than a thousand examples, the author found four domains for serendipity: science (e.g., when Rontgen noticed that his rays penetrated black paper); technology (Ktesibios’ discovery of cylindrical piston hydraulic action from a pipe in which he had hung a ball of lead to ease the of a mirror); art, (e.g., raising and lowering Kandinski’s discovery of abstract art when he chanced upon one of his paintings standing on its side on the easel and seeing that he could find meaning in it when no meaning had been deliberately put there); and daily life (e.g., Honda’s findings that the small motorcycles driven by its sales force were more interesting to potential buyers than were the larger machines then being sold). We must notice, however, that many so-called examples of serendipity are not necessarily valid. Some are fairy tales (e.g., the discovery of cooked meat when a cottage fire roasted newly farrowed pigs). Others are apocryphal (e.g., the discovery of coffee by a goatherd’s observations that his animals became very active after eating a particular red berry). Some are fake or exaggerated (e.g., Newton’s late-in-life story about the apples). Others, of course, are well documented. The author also sorted all of his examples into seventeen piles based on how the unsought findings had been generated. The more common are as follows: l
Analogy. Laennec’s invention of scope after seeing children scratch end of a piece of wood and listen to the other end. And De Reaumer’s wood pulp could be used to produce based on the study of wasp nests.
the stethopins on one the sound at finding that rag papers,
l
257
From by-product to main product. Perkin found the first synthetic dye when analyzing a black solid that came as a residue from his experiments at producing quinine artificially from coal tar.
Other methods used to find unexpected discoveries include a wrong hypothesis, inversion, the testing of a common belief (milkmaids who caught cowpox were immune to smallpox), scarcity (cigarettes from a beggar who “reprocessed” cigar butts), work interruption (Bernard accidently administered two different sugar concentrations because he had been called away from an experiment), and play (Reutersvard discovered the impossible tribar by doodling cubicles around the Star of David during a boring school class). To repeat, the author insists that all of these cases were accidental only in event, not in discovery. The abduction came as a process, one made possible by the intellectual preparation and/or intensity of observation and inquiry. Planning Priorities for Empowered Teams, Clay Carr, Journal of Business Strategy (September-October, 1992), pp. 43-47 This brief article is a warning that empowered teams (whether self-managed on a limited scale or total scale) often fail, more often than the business press tells us. Too, the greatest chance of failure lies in cases where the team’s operations transcend more than one cultural set within the firm. (Early successful teams often came in isolated manufacturing plants, e.g., Gaines Dog Food plant in Topeka, Kansas.) Empowered teams certainly can work, and do work. But there are warnings to be observed. There is no universally applicable technology of work organization and management. Team empowerment, like TQM and walking around, are not cure-alls. An organization must integrate three structures-its mission, its technology, and its culture. The team is a technology, and unless it meshes well with mission and culture, it will fail.
l
One rare and surprising observation. Blass’s finding of trickle irrigation by noticing one tree in a line growing higher than the others, based on a leaking water pipe.
l
Repetition. discovered
l
Successful error. Ringer’s lab boy’s mistake in using tap water in an experiment (it contained calcium and potassium ions). And 3M’s “bad and discarded glue” that serves so well on Post-it notes.
A goal to implement teams is an inadequate goal. Change takes time, and energy, often that drained from current operations. Implementing a work system for its own benefit is not enough benefit to the participants to pay for the change.
l
From side effect to main efict. Iproniazide gave tubercular patients a good mood, and it became a drug against depression.
Teams succeed when they have clear, worthwhile, and compelling goals. The goal of putting in an empowered team should be measurable and
AIDS, as a heaping this way.
of cases, was
258
J PROD INNOV MANAG 1993:10:251-263
specific, not something vague like “raise morale.” The goals must also be worthwhile, especially to all of the participants, not just to the firm. Third, the goals must have some penalty for poor performance. For example, the author says “It is no secret that Ford Motor Co. . . . [got] . . . serious about quality (and the teamwork it requires) because it was dancing on the edge of corporate disaster.” Needless to say, it is necessary that the individuals on the team be committed to the goals. l
l
Teams succeed when members are rewarded for team-not just individual-success. Too often the team members are evaluated in such a way that meeting a team goal may hurt them in individual evaluation. If team evaluation is not possible in a firm, then team empowerment is not recommended. Traditionally, firms feel that the team does not
require supervision; first and second line supervisors are left out of the operation. This is a mistake because establishing the team and taking it to an efficient level of operation takes time, lots of time. During the development phases, supervision is needed, though it can be gradually reduced as the team becomes capable of selfmanagement. l
Teams that are significantly self-managed will create conflict with existing cultures. This is especially critical for new product teams, because this author feels such teams are most effective in situations where there is only one culture. If the innovation activity incorporates people from technical, manufacturing, marketing, and finance, there is acute difficulty in identifying and imposing a unique culture that is different from any of the four represented on the team.
The closing statement is challenging: “Self-managing teams are never successful . . . until the organization as a whole has accepted their legitimacy.” How Sustainable Is Your Competitive Advantage? Jeffrey R. Williams, California Management Review (Spring 1992), pp. 29-5 1 This long article speaks to the overall issues of corporate strategy, and cannot be abstracted in total here. However, in the product innovation process, the matter of sustainability is critical. One of the author’s key ideas is that product innovation should consider
ABSTRACTS
the market for which it is being developed, the corporation within which the development will take place, and the impact of the consequent sustainability that can be predicted. At the heart of this analysis is the question: How sustainable will a firm’s advantage be? If the firm is successful at product innovation, how long can they expect that success to hold? Why is the success short-lived in some firms and long-lived in others? The research behind this article sought to find the variables that answer those questions. The overall sustainability of the competitive advantage is the consequence of (1) the imitatibility of the new product, and (2) the imitatibility of firm-specific resources. The strength of the core competencies, in turn, is a consequence of the firm’s organizational routines, the presence of complementary assets, and the isolating mechanisms. Using these variables, the author has classified resource-sustainability situations into three categories: l
Class I, Slow-Cycle Resources. “Products and services in this class (Lotus l-2-3, USAir’s flights through Pittsburgh) reflect resource positions that are strongly shielded from competitive pressures.”
l
Class 2, Standard-Cycle Resources. “Products and services in this class are typically standardized for production at high volume-for example, automobiles and appliances, fast food, long-distance telecommunications, and credit card services.”
l
Class 3, Fast-Cycle Resources. “Organizations in this class (Motorola’s palm-sized cellular phone and Sony’s Walkman) face the highest resource-imitation pressures.”
These classifications come partly from market dimensions and partly from firm dimensions. Thus large firms may well operate in all three classes, though large firms usually work primarily in Class 2 where they get most of their volume. When a firm is predominately in one class, it is difficult to build new businesses in the other classes. (E.g., Grumman Aerospace, a Class 1 firm, tried to enter the (Class 2) mass-transit bus business, but over-engineered its buses with light metal frames which couldn’t take the potholes of New York City streets.) Here are some of the businesses studied, and their classifications:
ABSTRACTS
thing might be. From his study of more than a thousand examples, the author found four domains for serendipity: science (e.g., when Rontgen noticed that his rays penetrated black paper); technology (Ktesibios’ discovery of cylindrical piston hydraulic action from a pipe in which he had hung a ball of lead to ease the of a mirror); art, (e.g., raising and lowering Kandinski’s discovery of abstract art when he chanced upon one of his paintings standing on its side on the easel and seeing that he could find meaning in it when no meaning had been deliberately put there); and daily life (e.g., Honda’s findings that the small motorcycles driven by its sales force were more interesting to potential buyers than were the larger machines then being sold). We must notice, however, that many so-called examples of serendipity are not necessarily valid. Some are fairy tales (e.g., the discovery of cooked meat when a cottage fire roasted newly farrowed pigs). Others are apocryphal (e.g., the discovery of coffee by a goatherd’s observations that his animals became very active after eating a particular red berry). Some are fake or exaggerated (e.g., Newton’s late-in-life story about the apples). Others, of course, are well documented. The author also sorted all of his examples into seventeen piles based on how the unsought findings had been generated. The more common are as follows: l
Analogy. Laennec’s invention of scope after seeing children scratch end of a piece of wood and listen to the other end. And De Reaumer’s wood pulp could be used to produce based on the study of wasp nests.
the stethopins on one the sound at finding that rag papers,
l
257
From by-product to main product. Perkin found the first synthetic dye when analyzing a black solid that came as a residue from his experiments at producing quinine artificially from coal tar.
Other methods used to find unexpected discoveries include a wrong hypothesis, inversion, the testing of a common belief (milkmaids who caught cowpox were immune to smallpox), scarcity (cigarettes from a beggar who “reprocessed” cigar butts), work interruption (Bernard accidently administered two different sugar concentrations because he had been called away from an experiment), and play (Reutersvard discovered the impossible tribar by doodling cubicles around the Star of David during a boring school class). To repeat, the author insists that all of these cases were accidental only in event, not in discovery. The abduction came as a process, one made possible by the intellectual preparation and/or intensity of observation and inquiry. Planning Priorities for Empowered Teams, Clay Carr, Journal of Business Strategy (September-October, 1992), pp. 43-47 This brief article is a warning that empowered teams (whether self-managed on a limited scale or total scale) often fail, more often than the business press tells us. Too, the greatest chance of failure lies in cases where the team’s operations transcend more than one cultural set within the firm. (Early successful teams often came in isolated manufacturing plants, e.g., Gaines Dog Food plant in Topeka, Kansas.) Empowered teams certainly can work, and do work. But there are warnings to be observed. There is no universally applicable technology of work organization and management. Team empowerment, like TQM and walking around, are not cure-alls. An organization must integrate three structures-its mission, its technology, and its culture. The team is a technology, and unless it meshes well with mission and culture, it will fail.
l
One rare and surprising observation. Blass’s finding of trickle irrigation by noticing one tree in a line growing higher than the others, based on a leaking water pipe.
l
Repetition. discovered
l
Successful error. Ringer’s lab boy’s mistake in using tap water in an experiment (it contained calcium and potassium ions). And 3M’s “bad and discarded glue” that serves so well on Post-it notes.
A goal to implement teams is an inadequate goal. Change takes time, and energy, often that drained from current operations. Implementing a work system for its own benefit is not enough benefit to the participants to pay for the change.
l
From side effect to main efict. Iproniazide gave tubercular patients a good mood, and it became a drug against depression.
Teams succeed when they have clear, worthwhile, and compelling goals. The goal of putting in an empowered team should be measurable and
AIDS, as a heaping this way.
of cases, was
258
J PROD INNOV MANAG 1993:10:251-263
specific, not something vague like “raise morale.” The goals must also be worthwhile, especially to all of the participants, not just to the firm. Third, the goals must have some penalty for poor performance. For example, the author says “It is no secret that Ford Motor Co. . . . [got] . . . serious about quality (and the teamwork it requires) because it was dancing on the edge of corporate disaster.” Needless to say, it is necessary that the individuals on the team be committed to the goals. l
l
Teams succeed when members are rewarded for team-not just individual-success. Too often the team members are evaluated in such a way that meeting a team goal may hurt them in individual evaluation. If team evaluation is not possible in a firm, then team empowerment is not recommended. Traditionally, firms feel that the team does not
require supervision; first and second line supervisors are left out of the operation. This is a mistake because establishing the team and taking it to an efficient level of operation takes time, lots of time. During the development phases, supervision is needed, though it can be gradually reduced as the team becomes capable of selfmanagement. l
Teams that are significantly self-managed will create conflict with existing cultures. This is especially critical for new product teams, because this author feels such teams are most effective in situations where there is only one culture. If the innovation activity incorporates people from technical, manufacturing, marketing, and finance, there is acute difficulty in identifying and imposing a unique culture that is different from any of the four represented on the team.
The closing statement is challenging: “Self-managing teams are never successful . . . until the organization as a whole has accepted their legitimacy.” How Sustainable Is Your Competitive Advantage? Jeffrey R. Williams, California Management Review (Spring 1992), pp. 29-5 1 This long article speaks to the overall issues of corporate strategy, and cannot be abstracted in total here. However, in the product innovation process, the matter of sustainability is critical. One of the author’s key ideas is that product innovation should consider
ABSTRACTS
the market for which it is being developed, the corporation within which the development will take place, and the impact of the consequent sustainability that can be predicted. At the heart of this analysis is the question: How sustainable will a firm’s advantage be? If the firm is successful at product innovation, how long can they expect that success to hold? Why is the success short-lived in some firms and long-lived in others? The research behind this article sought to find the variables that answer those questions. The overall sustainability of the competitive advantage is the consequence of (1) the imitatibility of the new product, and (2) the imitatibility of firm-specific resources. The strength of the core competencies, in turn, is a consequence of the firm’s organizational routines, the presence of complementary assets, and the isolating mechanisms. Using these variables, the author has classified resource-sustainability situations into three categories: l
Class I, Slow-Cycle Resources. “Products and services in this class (Lotus l-2-3, USAir’s flights through Pittsburgh) reflect resource positions that are strongly shielded from competitive pressures.”
l
Class 2, Standard-Cycle Resources. “Products and services in this class are typically standardized for production at high volume-for example, automobiles and appliances, fast food, long-distance telecommunications, and credit card services.”
l
Class 3, Fast-Cycle Resources. “Organizations in this class (Motorola’s palm-sized cellular phone and Sony’s Walkman) face the highest resource-imitation pressures.”
These classifications come partly from market dimensions and partly from firm dimensions. Thus large firms may well operate in all three classes, though large firms usually work primarily in Class 2 where they get most of their volume. When a firm is predominately in one class, it is difficult to build new businesses in the other classes. (E.g., Grumman Aerospace, a Class 1 firm, tried to enter the (Class 2) mass-transit bus business, but over-engineered its buses with light metal frames which couldn’t take the potholes of New York City streets.) Here are some of the businesses studied, and their classifications: