Month: December 2017

When we try and create something new, whether for a new startup or as a new product line in an existing company, what questions should we ask ourselves to increase our chances of success?

Everett Rogers, an eminent sociologist, came up with the diffusion of innovations theory that tried to show how ideas and innovations spread through societies.

He argued that there were five characteristics that people looked for when considering a new product – in essence asking themselves five questions.

A hacker, in the eyes of many, is a criminal – someone who breaks into computer systems and steals information or worse.

Real hackers, however, don’t see things that way.

They call criminals “crackers”. Hacking is something much more creative.

Too many of us are bound by the rules, the way things are done and have always been done.

This is why we spend time entering data into mind-numbing spreadsheets, making cold calls, going into a physical office every day and following processes laid down by administrators.

That’s business as usual.

A hack is simply a cool new way to do something.

It’s that shortcut we figured out, a piece of code that can take something that takes 2 weeks to do at the moment and gets it done in 2 minutes, the one change in our daily routine that saves us an hour of effort.

The main characteristics of a hack are that it is simple – almost obvious in retrospect, and masterful – something that bubbled up from all the expertise and work we had already put in.

It is also illicit – it doesn’t follow the rules set out by the system.

Just because managers have said something should be done in this way doesn’t mean it’s the best way to do something.

If we all accepted the status quo all the time, there would be no innovation, nothing would change.

One of the greatest “hackers” of all time, Richard Stallman, would never have built his free software and associated free software license that went on to transform the world of computing, creating a real alternative to the corporate giants – Microsoft and Apple.

Sometimes, to do something better, we have to ignore imposed rules – and act illicitly.

The problem, of course, is when this turns into illegal activity – and that’s what worries the general public.

The idea of hacking – the good way – is behind sites such as lifehacker, that provides tips and tricks for getting things done, or the concept of growth hacking – unconventional ways to acquire customers and rapidly grow a company.

In today’s technology dominated economy – innovation comes from looking at things differently and coming up with simple and masterful ideas that transcends conventional wisdom and conventional rules.

The hackers in the machine are the ones doing innovative things and creating value – whether it’s in software, business systems, marketing or operations.

Being a hacker, in essence, can make what we do more interesting.

The 5S method is a way to organise work spaces in manufacturing – and is a core part of the concept of lean.

It uses 5 Japanese words: seiri, seiton, seiso, seiketsu and shitsuke. They can be translated as sort, set in order, shine, standardise and sustain.

It’s easy to see that having an organised workspace makes a difference in physical work.

But what about knowledge work? Can it be used there as well?

Bradley Staats, David Brunner and David Upton looked at whether lean principles could be embedded into a software company.

Staats and Upton write in the Harvard Business Review that lean projects don’t necessarily produce better quality work but do come in on time and under budget.

Knowledge work has specific aspects that make it different from manufacturing, such as uncertainty over the tasks that need doing, the fact that a lot of knowledge may be inside people’s heads as tacit understanding and that how things are done may change during the projects as requirements evolve.

In manufacturing, we usually know what we need to do, how to do it and in what order we should do it.

An assembly line designed to make cars doesn’t usually end up producing pizzas. But that seems to happen quite often in knowledge work.

So, how might we apply 5S in knowledge work?

Sort is all about removing obstacles. It means getting rid of piles of paper, books that we are never going to read and clutter that gets in the way.

The things that are in front of us or on our desks should be the things that we use every day. Everything else should either be discarded or be put somewhere where we can get them when we need them.

Set in order is then about arranging things in the way that makes it most efficient for us to use them.

For example, if you are right handed and your office phone is on your right side, the chances are that you’ll pick up the phone in your right hand, and then move it to your left to take a note.

When you put the phone down, it will probably introduce a kink into the cord – and that’s why so many office phones have such twisted wires.

Putting the phone on the left should sort this out.

Shine is about keeping our desks and workspaces clean.

Standardise is about doing things in a particular way – that’s crucial in manufacturing so that variation is minimised and everything comes out the same.

In knowledge work this is sometimes taken to mean that everything should be documented and made explicit so that people can follow a set of instructions and do things.

This is something I disagree with. If you can make something into a procedure then it should also be possible to automate it and remove the human element.

Instead, standardise in the context of knowledge work should be more about getting ourselves in the right frame of mind to do creative and innovative work.

We should aim to set ourselves up to get into flow with what we are doing, so standardisation should really mean things like checking email at set times, doing timed pieces of work, creating spaces for deep work without interruption and so on.

Finally sustain is about what we do every day.

Because knowledge work is so intangible, it’s easy to get bogged down in day-to-day firefighting and forget that we also need to innovate and create.

And that takes time and energy.

Which we might be able to create if we use the 5S method to address the things around us getting in the way and grabbing our attention.

What should we do when we’re trying to start something new – whether it’s a new product line within an existing business or a startup dedicated to the idea?

All too often, we can come up with ideas for products and services and go quite far down the track of designing and creating them before finding out that the market isn’t that interested.

Alexander Osterwalder came up with the Business Model Canvas – a way to model a business using a one page framework.

This was much simpler than writing a 50-page business plan, and was enthusiastically adopted by the startup community.

A variant of the model by Ash Maurya is the Lean Canvas.

While the Business Model Canvas is designed to address all aspects of a business, the Lean Canvas focuses specifically on new product development.

The Lean Canvas retains five components of the Business Model Canvas:

• Value proposition: What does the customer get?
• Customer segments: Who is going to want this product?
• Channels: How are we going to get to speak to them?
• Revenue streams: What will they be willing to pay?
• Cost structure: What will it cost us to deliver the product or service?

It adds four new components.

First – what is the problem we are trying to solve for a customer?

As Theodore Levitt said, People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill, they want a quarter-inch hole.

If the product doesn’t address a real problem that potential customers have then it’s hard to justify its purchase.

Then, what is the solution we are proposing?

The solutions needs to be simple – easy to understand. That doesn’t mean it has to be easy to do – or the customer could just do it themselves.

It must be possible, however, to see how the solution solves the problem.

We then need to look at two more components – metrics and unfair advantage.

Success or failure needs to be measured in an objective way and for that we need to select metrics.

Selecting a metric directly influences the activities we do in order to improve our score on that metric – so it’s important to select a few and important ones.

Finally, there isn’t much point spending time and money developing a solution if it can be easily copied or bought from someone else.

We have a competitive advantage only when it is hard for others to compete with us.

So, in summary, in order to build something useful, we need to start with a customer’s problems, come up with a solution, make sure we are doing the right things, and make sure that what we do is unique to us.

An easy list to write – but not a simple one to do.