Waking Up Product Development
It seems interesting to note that just as this publication is undergoing tremendous changes, so too are all of our businesses and market climates…again. As Time Compression’s newly minted columnist charged with covering the world of product development, I’m here to tell you that in the current 3B world of busts, bailouts, and bankruptcies, there is hope. Bill Gates told me so.
Columns
From: Time Compression, Gregg Tong, Vice President
from
The Management Roundtable
Posted on: 1/1/2009
Posted on: 1/1/2009
It seems interesting to note that just as this publication is undergoing tremendous changes, so too are all of our businesses and market climates…again. As Time Compression’s newly minted columnist charged with covering the world of product development, I’m here to tell you that in the current 3B world of busts, bailouts, and bankruptcies, there is hope. Bill Gates told me so. Bill “I’m a PC” Gates, the word’s wealthiest software engineer, reflected recently on our country's economic woes and what that means to the state of innovation. When you're a person whose opinion can shift the Dow Jones Index, you're at least worth hearing out: “This country, in terms of its science and innovative businesses, it’s a great thing for the world,” said Gates. “We need a risk-taking culture. The mechanism of risk-taking is not under threat. Even if we did have an economic cycle that was negative, a lot of that endures. In the long run, the U.S. is going to do very, very well…. We’ll see our way through it and continue to be a fantastic country and have a great economy.”
There, don’t you feel better? Yeah, me neither. But he’s right. Innovation is going to get us out of this mess. But in what form?
From a historical perspective, America’s economic cycles during the past several decades have followed a similar-yet-accelerating innovation pattern that will likely continue. Earlier last century, it was the car industry that hit the planet like an asteroid, creating large economic ripples throughout the globe, distributing wealth and jobs for lots of people. Then in the 1980s, moving PCs from industrial facilities to desktop was in the driver’s seat. In the 1990s, along came the Internet and the rise and fall of the startup Tsunami. Each period experienced explosive growth and equally dramatic downturns. Successful things almost always crash when they get too high, sometimes known as the “Icarus effect.”
So it stands to reason that we are just a single revolutionary transportation, computing, IT, or similar industrial phenomenon away from having healthy 401k’s again. (And don’t kid yourself, “IT” is not the iPhone.) So what is it going to take? Innovation alone is actually a benign substance. Ideas are plentiful, but the means to execute them are not, and the skills to do so quickly even rarer.
The answer is that we will see. Regardless of the economy, millions of companies will continue to exist and churn out products and services that will run the gamut of innovation, from fads to game changers. And their chances of success at producing the next car, PC,or Internet are much better than the bard-aspiring monkeys with typewriters. Still, something has to change. Did you ever notice that in bad times we focus on operational efficiencies? But what about turning ideas into revenue streams and products into profits? While I’m sure layoffs and budget cuts will be in our lives for awhile, their impacts on the bottom line are finite, whereas creating markets, increasing their size or dominating by share, have much higher ceilings and bottom-line impact, and are under the control of product development. Manufacturing may be the wheels that get you to your destination, but it is the product development engine that makes the car move.
Speaking of cars, one of the most active new approaches to product development process is “Lean Product Development,” inspired by the Toyota Production System (TPS) as described in such books as The Machine that Changed the World and Lean Thinking. Just as TPS has “leveled up” manufacturing efficiency, Lean PD hopes to give companies the power of a lean focus on process, and how to see and resolve the hidden factors in a system that create very costly cycle-time delays. We will be focusing on Lean PD’s devilish details in future columns.
In the early 1990s, I had the good fortune of working with Jim Womack, co-author of the two books mentioned above and the de facto Lean Guru of U.S. industry. I recall a story he once told about a Japanese lean “Sensei” (the term given to master teachers/consultants), who was touring a factory with his clients, all top executives. As they walked the shop floor, the Sensei examined the tall piles of components and work-in-process stacked around the tooling areas and assembly cells, costing the company money just by existing as waste. The Sensei clapped his hands loudly and shouted, “WAKE UP PARTS!” All the executives, perhaps mesmerized, seemed confused and quickly jotted down in their notebooks, “wake….up…parts.”
Clearly, they missed the point. The parts are asleep, unable to add value in their slumberous state. Product development is the same way with engineering change orders, resource management, requirements definition, testing, prototyping and modeling—our processes are often caught napping, and are as hard to rouse as a teenager on Saturday morning. In a time when all industries need to keep running on a clock that never stops, we need to splash some cold water on our engineering, marketing, and every other function that seems to be asleep.
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There, don’t you feel better? Yeah, me neither. But he’s right. Innovation is going to get us out of this mess. But in what form?
From a historical perspective, America’s economic cycles during the past several decades have followed a similar-yet-accelerating innovation pattern that will likely continue. Earlier last century, it was the car industry that hit the planet like an asteroid, creating large economic ripples throughout the globe, distributing wealth and jobs for lots of people. Then in the 1980s, moving PCs from industrial facilities to desktop was in the driver’s seat. In the 1990s, along came the Internet and the rise and fall of the startup Tsunami. Each period experienced explosive growth and equally dramatic downturns. Successful things almost always crash when they get too high, sometimes known as the “Icarus effect.”
So it stands to reason that we are just a single revolutionary transportation, computing, IT, or similar industrial phenomenon away from having healthy 401k’s again. (And don’t kid yourself, “IT” is not the iPhone.) So what is it going to take? Innovation alone is actually a benign substance. Ideas are plentiful, but the means to execute them are not, and the skills to do so quickly even rarer.
The answer is that we will see. Regardless of the economy, millions of companies will continue to exist and churn out products and services that will run the gamut of innovation, from fads to game changers. And their chances of success at producing the next car, PC,or Internet are much better than the bard-aspiring monkeys with typewriters. Still, something has to change. Did you ever notice that in bad times we focus on operational efficiencies? But what about turning ideas into revenue streams and products into profits? While I’m sure layoffs and budget cuts will be in our lives for awhile, their impacts on the bottom line are finite, whereas creating markets, increasing their size or dominating by share, have much higher ceilings and bottom-line impact, and are under the control of product development. Manufacturing may be the wheels that get you to your destination, but it is the product development engine that makes the car move.
Speaking of cars, one of the most active new approaches to product development process is “Lean Product Development,” inspired by the Toyota Production System (TPS) as described in such books as The Machine that Changed the World and Lean Thinking. Just as TPS has “leveled up” manufacturing efficiency, Lean PD hopes to give companies the power of a lean focus on process, and how to see and resolve the hidden factors in a system that create very costly cycle-time delays. We will be focusing on Lean PD’s devilish details in future columns.
In the early 1990s, I had the good fortune of working with Jim Womack, co-author of the two books mentioned above and the de facto Lean Guru of U.S. industry. I recall a story he once told about a Japanese lean “Sensei” (the term given to master teachers/consultants), who was touring a factory with his clients, all top executives. As they walked the shop floor, the Sensei examined the tall piles of components and work-in-process stacked around the tooling areas and assembly cells, costing the company money just by existing as waste. The Sensei clapped his hands loudly and shouted, “WAKE UP PARTS!” All the executives, perhaps mesmerized, seemed confused and quickly jotted down in their notebooks, “wake….up…parts.”
Clearly, they missed the point. The parts are asleep, unable to add value in their slumberous state. Product development is the same way with engineering change orders, resource management, requirements definition, testing, prototyping and modeling—our processes are often caught napping, and are as hard to rouse as a teenager on Saturday morning. In a time when all industries need to keep running on a clock that never stops, we need to splash some cold water on our engineering, marketing, and every other function that seems to be asleep.
