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Go to POV #5
Zero
Latency: The Fast Path to
Opportunity and Problem Detection
Go
to POV #4:
Elegant
Simplicity: Applying the Concept to IT
Go to POV #3:
Elegant
Simplicity: Keeping Complexity Under Control
Go
to POV #2:
eBusiness is Business as
eUsual
Go
to POV #1:
Let's
Stop the Plate Spinning: Going Slow to Go Fast
Test yourself:
1. What is the ratio between value
added and required signatures?
2. What if you didn't open that
email?
3. Is another partnership or supplier
essential?
4. What if you eliminated the least
popular product "flavors"?
5. What if you cancelled 10% of your
calendar?
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As David Brown, one of the
founders of disk drive giant Quantum once said, business isn't very
complex, it's just difficult. The mistake that many make is that
they try to handle the difficulty through complexity. By doing so,
they sap speed and destroy alignment.
That said, Brown's comment is
powerful but not completely true. Due to outsourcing, managing
supply chain problems is complex, as are many marketing,
development, manufacturing and other issues. Nonetheless, Brown's
message is don't make business more complex than it already is.
If you look at professional
athletes, what differentiates them from weekend warriors is that they do
less; not more. Recently I watched Venus Williams at Stanford.
She hits the ball a ton but with none of the extraneous motion and body torque
that I do with less speed and accuracy. Get the point?
Applying this to business is not
easy for us humans are prone to add rather than take away. At the
same time, what I noticed about Brown and other great leaders is that they
spend a good part of their time taking things off the plate, versus
adding. Let's look at the product planning and portfolio process.
Most firms naturally gravitate to
adding to the portfolio rather than reducing it. Reductions mean
giving up revenue and causing potential customer dissatisfaction.
The question that should be asked is can we make more revenue and increase
customer sat by taking those resources and focusing them on new products,
or some other endeavor? How you answer is not as important as making
sure you ask it.
Remember when Sun Microsystems was
concurrently selling Intel, Motorola and SPARC-based machines? Like
most firms, they got there by making choices that were optimal for
different sets of customers, each at a specific point in time. Each
product had it's own specialized development, marketing, testing, and
manufacturing issues that hobbled leverage and learning. Recognizing
the dilemma, they migrated over the course of two years to a SPARC-only
architecture. Was it painful? Absolutely. Did customers
feel abandoned. Not as much as feared since they provided reasonable
alternatives but without a doubt, there was push-back.
Bottomline: Speed is a
function of simplicity and success comes from choosing the right things to
be simple about....ergo, elegant simplicity.
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