Jeff Waters, a long time reader and supporter of mondaydots has made his first dot video! You can find the original blog post on his blog, Life up Front. Jeff uses a great story to help the viewer (aimed at the Computer Aided Engineering, project management, and new product development audience) understand the need for the Space Claimproduct he sells.
Really nice work Jeff! Keep it up and I look forward to your next dot video!
Transcript:
One of the most basic questions I hear from managers is: How can I do a better job of motivating my team? Should you use a bigger carrot or a sharper stick?
For the last few years I have been fascinated with Clayton Christensen's theory of disruptive innovation and its application to business, politics, education, and insurgency models. What I find most interesting is that his theory, featured in both The Innovator's Dilemma and The Innovator's Solution provides a prescription for a small entrant with less resources to compete with and beat a large incumbent.
In my Gamble model post I argued that the military, like most large organizations is incredibly inert to change. I made the case that most organizations are unable to change because of an entrenched culture. Individuals that try to enter the organization with different thoughts and views usually get frustrated, leave, or quit because reward structures are rarely set up for innovation. The individuals that do move up share the values and beliefs of the current leadership and are promoted. This self perpetuating cycle doesn't allow for the needed influx of innovation to keep up with environmental change and the organization usually dies.
Don Sull has come up with another concept to explain why most large organizations go bad. He calls the concept "active inertia". In it's most simple form, active inertia is described as a company that is facing a disruptive shift in the market and instead of adapting to the change, the organization simply accelerates the activities that succeeded in the past. What is interesting is that Don argues that the things that made the organization successful in the past, actually create the pitfalls after the market disruption. Take an organization built like GM. GM was so focused on competing with Ford and Chrysler that they failed to see the signs that Toyota was causing a disruptive shift in the market. The way they framed the their "competition" blinded from the market shift and their real competitor.
One of the most basic problems I see in business today is the misalignment of the organizational structure. The process of moving an organization toward a goal in a timely manner seems simple enough, yet I see so many business go lopsided and fall short of their goal.
The state of California is up against an interesting problem - How do you do more with less? I have always found the process of public policy decision making fascinating. The process is well modeled by Neal Mitchell's public policy triangle. It is simple: decision makers must decide which initiatives to fund in order to create the most value for their constituents. If you follow Steven Covey's example of starting with a defined end state: the goal is to achieve stasis through creating the most value for your constituents by funding the right initiatives, while keeping a balanced budget.
One of the major advantages of dots is that you can use them to simplify complex situations. I am currently studying the Iraq situation in great detail and I wanted to see if I could model the situation for someone who knows nothing about the situation in under 6 minutes. This is a living model so if you have suggestions of feedback please let me know; my intention (as should be the aim of any good presentation) is to start a dialogue.
Transcript from "iraq pullout debate" mondaydots model:
In order to understand the instability in Iraq, you must first understand the different players, their motives, and location of the country. So let's meet the players. You have the Sunnis from the West and the ShIia from the South East. These two groups have not got along for over 1400 years because of fundamental religious differences. Then you have the Kurds from the north who don't get along with either the Sunni or Shiia and the U.S. from halfway around the world trying to figure it all out!
The world of new product development is fast paced and can be incredibly confusing to an outsider (sometimes even an insider). Furthermore it is an area of business where a bad decision or a delay in the decision making process can cost a company hundreds of thousands of dollars a day.
Neal Mitchell with Fastworks, a New Product Development Consulting firm based in the Silicon Valley, has done an excellent job explaining the evolution of a New Product Development Project using mondayDots. The direct post can be viewed here: Evolution of a NPD Project
I was recently challenged by a friend of mine who used to teach at HBS to read "The Gamble” by Thomas Ricks and build a multi level organization model. The book is incredibly interesting (my favorite Ricks book so far) and really shines some light on the situation in Iraq.
Absolutely fascinated by the maco-level change General David Petraeus was able to impact as a micro-level force; I decided to use the phenomenon of stochastic resonance (most commonly used in examining neurodynamics) to explain how embracing the chaos between stable state organizations uniquely positioned Petraeus to make this change. Every attempt at describing the model in written form felt too much like a book report, so I decided to use Apple’s Keynote to build and animate the model.
As I built the model, my written description got better. As my written description got better, it forced me to improve my model.
I found great power in using simple dots to explain a complex model. Modeling forces you to think about getting from point A to point B, and doesn’t allow you to hide behind bullet points or a static two dimensional graphic/chart.
I will be updating this page with information on how I created this presentation; including a step by step break down of some of the elements. I am also going to use this blog to post other models of complex ideas, problems, and solutions I encounter.
