Aaron’s Potlatch

At work, I and my team have been assigned to work on a new project, however, nobody knows what this project is supposed to accomplish. Everyone is talking about providing the “best widget/service in the industry”. Resources, and millions of dollars have been allocated, but nobody can describe why, or what the desired end goal is. Just to have a shinier fancier widget or service?In my experience, this is the wrong way to communicate, collaborate, and motivate. Companies should agree upon goals that are stated in terms of customer experience of what customers really want, and should be described in desired end result that is free of HOW to accomplish this. Couple of examples:

1. GM vs Toyota. GM (or other American auto companies) had been merrily dominating the American auto industry, but Toyota with an obsessive focus on Customer value was addressing quality issues. I can just picture internal goals/metrics at GM at the time about producing “x units” or “y cars/day”. While Toyota focused on producing happy customers. Because GM focused on an internal measurable (x units, or y cars) as opposed to a Customer metric (were they happy?), Toyota eventually won out. That focus on internal deliver-ables which are ASSUMED to be equivalent to what the customer wants are almost never right. All employees must have an understanding of what the goal is, what the customer value, see the toyota usa web site about “Customer First“.

2. Ipod vs “MP3 players”: IPod was not the first MP3 player on the market, but it did come to dominate. Other MP3 players may have had more “features”, but Apple realized that by focusing on what customers really wanted (“Good music listening experience”), they had to expand their definition beyond the “MP3 player’ and encompass some additional portions of the music experience (coolness, and the transfer, management of songs).

In both of the examples, Toyota, and GM made what I call a Proxy Association Error. That is, the Music player was a “proxy” for the music experience, and the automobile was a proxy for the transportation, people didn’t want car’s or players, they wanted music experience and transportation. Once a better proxy was found, the customers abandoned the old way for a better one. Toyota, and Apples competitors didn’t see this, they thought the “Car” and “MP3 player” were the actual thing that people wanted.

So, here are my paradigm for how to distribute work (not tasks) to a company:

1. Get the entire employee population involved in seeking to understand what customer value is (real customer value, not proxy error, the “music experience” not the “mp3 player”).

2. The goal of any work should be stated in how it should help the customer. The Goals should be distributed should be stated in terms that are free of how, and leave the wisdom of the crowds and changing winds of the marketplace open to allow a different solution that still makes the customers happy.

Examples:

“Identify the top causes of dis-satisfaction by customers, and put in place plans to mitigate them” not “Implement improvement of the invoice service”. The first leaves the ability for the employees of the company to contribute their own ideas, the 2nd doesn’t.

I am working on a new Strategic Goal planning tool which helps users create goals, collaborate on them with others, and track accomplishments, with visibility up and down the organization. It is intended to bring the best aspects of the wisdom of the crowds to helping guide a company as exist within the Open Source community.