Archive for June, 2009
Ford’s culture edge
Wednesday, June 24th, 2009 | Uncategorized | 1 Comment
I recently wrote about GM’s failure of product vision, and its even deeper failure of corporate culture.
In contrast is Ford Motor Company, which, while suffering, is managing to get by without government bailout money.
What’s so different about their culture? A group of prominent shareholders who passionately care about the company, the descendents of Henry Ford:
The Ford family members own a special class of stock that gives them 40 percent voting control.
“I feel this is one of Ford’s greatest assets, and one that G.M. has never had,” said David L. Lewis, a business historian at the University of Michigan. “The family has been an oasis of stability through the years.”
The Enlightened Stupid Marketer
Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009 | Uncategorized, commentary | No Comments
Brilliant…
h/t The Cranky PM
Requirements docs: Goodbye word processor, hello wiki
Monday, June 22nd, 2009 | tools | 5 Comments
Product managers like Ivan Chalif of the Productologist Blog are justifiably tired of the fat MRD. Ivan make the case for 5-10 page release specs docs. Here I would like to make the case for discarding the word processor and using wiki’s instead.
Ivan points out that elements like the business case and competitive analysis are irrelevant to audiences like engineering.
While this is true it is still very important to capture that information. They state the assumptions behind the product vision, and while the engineers may not care about it, they are extremely relevant to anyone who needs to scrutinize the product vision.
There are other fundamental problems with fat documents: they are extraordinarily laborious to produce. Especially the part about finishing it: having to comb through it carefully, finishing each section, and trying to perfect it for the momentous occasion of publication. Readers will only read it carefully once (if that), and minor errors can damage its credibility and distract the reader from the critical messages. So the fat document has to be very high-quality, and that means some very late, and burnout-inducing nights indeed.
A couple of years ago, I underwent the most significant change in my toolset in years. I switched from word processors for such documentation to wiki’s.This had a number of huge beneftis:
- The documentation is more useful because each audience can read only the sections they need to. Business managers can read the business sections, and the engineering staff can read the product requirements sections.
- The publish cycle is streamlined. In the word processing world, everyone waits while you write and perfect the MRD. They provide comments, you incorporate feedback, and publish another fat version of the document. And possibly another, by which point everyone dreads having to read your document again. When you pass in the halls, people avert their eyes out of guilt for not having re-read your master work.
- You are now free to build up your document from rough notes that are incomplete or not 100% baked. With wiki’s, the whole ritual of document creation is changed. The document is always published, even in rough form, even when it’s just a skeleton. Everyone understands that the document is never “finished;” it is always a work in progress.
- The document can be created in pieces. You can put out a section for comment while you work the next section.
- The document becomes a group conversation. Reviewers can comment to each page and can react to one another’s comments (unlike change tracking in word processors).
- It’s much less daunting for a reviewer to re-read just the sections they care about, than a fat word processing document.
- The document is always up-to-date. You can incorporate someone’s comments immediately, even while meeting with them. Everyone always gets the most up-to-date thinking available. They don’t have to wait for the next publish cycle.
- Wiki’s are hyperlinked. This means less repetition, and it lets the material scale to the needs and interests of the reader.
- Wiki’s can be created collaboratively. Different product managers on a large project can own different parts of the MRD. And any reader can jump in and fix typos or make minor edits.
- Wikis are globally searchable. Old but valuable information is findable.
- No more wasteful printing of hundred page documents
- And you don’t have to throw the baby out with the bathwater. You can document everything that needs to be documented. You don’t have to arbitrarily excise important information just because it makes the documents too cumbersome.
This approach just so happens to be the Agile way of doing documentation: put out something small but something useful quickly, and keep adding and refining it.
My wiki of choice these days is Google Sites. While it’s not without its quirks, the net benefit over word processors is so great that they are tolerable. The greatest downside is that the information is hosted at Google, not within the secure confines of your corporate firewall. This may or may not be a deal-breaker. [Readers, is there a clear favorite intranet wiki that deals nicely with rich text and graphics?]
If you are still publishing word processing documents, give a wiki a try instead!
See also:
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Philip Haine is principal of Product Vision Associates, a product innovation consultancy that helps product leaders and their teams envision new, breakthrough products and reboot older ones. To follow him on Twitter click here.
GM: Epic failure of vision? Or culture?
Wednesday, June 10th, 2009 | commentary, product vision | 3 Comments
Through the lens of product vision, I’ve been watching the devolution of GM for years. So when it declared bankruptcy last week I was ready to commemorate the occasion by pronouncing it an epic failure of product vision.
After all, they permitted the competition to consistently be superior in quality, not for a few quarters or years, but for a few decades. Their best efforts at innovation were directed not towards better cars, but the problem of preserving the status quo. And they willfully ignored the writing on the wall with respect to future oil crises and the latent demand for efficiency.
Did you know that, as a result of progressive legislation, GM had an early lead not just in electrical vehicles like the EV1, but in hybrids as well? As soon as lobbyists managed to squelch California’s strict emissions standards (with the aid of the White House at the time) GM yanked the plug on electrics.
The incredible postscript to this story is that it was America’s call-to-arms for efficient vehicles that panicked Honda and Toyota into action. The Japanese manufacturers invested heavily in hybrids, leading to Toyota’s years-long lead in hybrid vehicles and the birth of the Prius. While the American auto execs congratulated themselves for persuading government not to force it to invest in the inevitable future, Toyota went ahead and invented it. Hybrids “make no economic sense,” said GM vice-chairman Bob Lutz. Oops.
And so an epic failure of product vision it certainly was. But that is not the heart of the story, or its root cause. The root cause is a cancerous corporate culture.
It’s a corporate culture where dissenting opinion is marginalized and only the yes-men survive. (For a taste of this, check out the sycophantic employee comments at GM’s own blog.)
It’s a corporate culture that’s driven by PR rather than product. It’s a culture with a cynical view of customers that says that you don’t have to actually deliver the best products to them. You only have to convince customers that they are the best products. You don’t have to actually be a green company. Job #1 is to convince everybody that you’re green. The first act of a supposedly chastened GM? Yet another PR campaign stating (yet again) how it’s turned the corner. At GM, image follows product.
This culture neglects the fact that between what you say and the money you want to make, you actually have to provide significant value to customers. Making a lot of money in a sustainable fashion requires consistently satisfying important unmet customer needs.
GM’s is a corporate culture that resolves the cognitive dissonance between the claimed and actual quality by truly believing that they are delivering quality. A company that believes its own BS sets sail from the reality-based community. If it cannot be honest with itself, so loses its ability to self-correct and goes increasingly off-course.
GM’s is a corporate culture that is in denial about its own and failures and limitations, where everyone else is the scapegoat. No failure is admitted, except perhaps the failure to get their message across to the public.
“G.M., for all these decades, has been a ‘know-it-all’ company that had all the answers [..] I think it’s been proven that they really didn’t know it all.” – David Lewis
GM’s culture is a systemic cancer that is not easily cured.
That’s why I was not very hopeful that a new GM, radically cut back, would be much different than the old, bloated GM. The only hope of turning around a corporate culture around like this is by decapitation. The old leadership is simply too vested in their past decisions, too stewed in ancient assumptions and attitudes. For fundamental change, the company’s values, reward system and world view must be turned upside down. That is only possible with strong new leadership.
And that’s why it’s encouraging news that the shareholders of GM — i.e. us, the American public, as represented by our government — are replacing its leadership. Not just the CEO, but the entire board of directors, which somehow — someone please tell me how — tolerated the destruction of billions of dollars of value before their eyes over decades.
It won’t be easy to turn GM’s culture around. Old habits die hard, and remember, it’s the yes-men who survived at GM, not the innovative rebels. But at least now, with new leadership, it stands chance.
For the rest of us, GM’s insidious corporate culture is worth pondering and comparing against the institutions over which we have influence.
Update 6/10/09 nytimes has more on the challenges of reinventing GM’s culture.
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Philip Haine is principal of Product Vision Associates, a product innovation consultancy that helps product leaders and their teams envision new, breakthrough products and reboot older ones. To follow him on Twitter click here.
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