Slaying dragons and storming castles isn't for the faint of heart. In a world run by powerful bosses and inflexible systems, rarely if ever is creative license granted freely. It's taken.
How cool is that? That's my quote of the day. Matthew May, a Toyota business partner authored "The Elegant Solution: Toyota's Forumula for Mastering Innovation." (More here.)
The quote struck a cord. I mean, how many of us find limitations in the places we work and then either rack our brains trying to make some thing of organizational excellence happen? With limited resources and not enough hours in the day, how many times have we each found ourselves saying "choose your battles." (More...)
At one of the companies I work with, there's this icky little rule that says, the employees' time has to be 100% client billable. That's right one-zero-zero percent. It's kind of a standing joke among peergroups that employees each bill clients about 2 hours a week just trying to figure out where to bill all their hours! (Ask yourself, how many times did you go to the bathroom last week? Did you count that time at the coffee kiosk as productive time? What about that self-training you did to learn a software application that didn't directly benefit the client, but was needed anyway to get the bulk of your work done for clients in general? Or, how about that time you helped Joe figure out that thing with the invoice?)
One hundred percent billable. It's a stupid rule. But what makes it stupider is that it incents the wrong things. More to the point: colleagues recognize there are some areas of collaboration that would make productivity much more efficient. Or better yet, scrap efficiency, some things might actually add value! The hitch is that they have to do some otherwise non-billable collaboration time to take a moment to think outside the proverbial box so they can define a "new box" without which the great ideas can't be put inside of. Now I ask ya, where's the incentive to do that?
But, nonetheless, though we choose our battles, there still are some that are worth fighting. You know it. Your gut tells you. The stars align, the magentic flux reaches some harmonic wave, or something about a thing's karma just seems right. And we decide to take it on.
We face hundreds of problems and opportunities each day. We need some way to weed out the important ones, the right ones, the ones we should be working on—because those are the ones that demand elegant solutions.
So the trick is, what do you focus on to make happen those things that you know will further the cause towards organizational excellence when the organization itself doesn't reward you to behave that way?
...resource constraints have been a key driver of innovation... Toyota (for example) treats resources constraints the same way artists do.
All artists work within the confines of their chosen media, and it’s the limits that spur their creativity. The canvas edge, the marble block, the eight musical notes—the resources are finite. So it’s how you view and manage them that makes all the difference.
Maybe you read the book, maybe you don't. In the meantime here's a PDF printed from the ChangeThis web site. (You may recognize it as one of the blogroll links in the sidebar.) It's a 30-page adaptation by Mathew E. May of key points in his new book. It's a great read. And, it's free.
Download 291.01.ElegantSolutions.pdf
When you're done, you're encouraged to forward it along to others. For free. How cool is that?
