No matter what industry you’re in, you’re not going to steal a march on the competition by jumping on the same bandwagons that they’re on. Instead, you need to innovate. Adopting lean production, six-sigma, theory of constraints, etc. will all help you improve your business, but, if your competitors are applying the same techniques to their businesses and processes, then the best you can hope for is parity.
Unfortunately, innovation is something that’s very easy to say, but which sounds very difficult to achieve. Or is it…?
Once, as a 14- or 15-year-old schoolboy in an Engineering Workshop: Theory & Practice class, our teacher, Mr. Lawless (who was anything but lawless by nature), challenged us to design a part for a specific application. I don’t recall the details of the exercise, but I do remember being flummoxed: there seemed to be an infinite range of possibilities and I simply didn’t know where to begin! It felt as though I was being asked to conjure a solution out of thin air; however, I didn’t regard myself as being particularly creative and this task seemed beyond my capabilities.
Fortunately, he then told me something I’ve never forgotten: “Designing something sounds difficult, but it’s really just problem solving.” Suddenly, everything clicked into place. All I had to do was to figure out what the part needed to do and then solve the problem of what it needed to look like to fulfill its task. Easy!
To me, innovation has a lot in common with design: it sounds difficult, but it’s really just about solving problems. In particular, it’s about solving problems with both passion and dogged determinedness and perseverance. Before you know it, you’ve solved a series of problems and ended up with something that appears highly innovative.
After all, as Thomas Edison famously observed, genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.
The industrial revolution, for instance, came about as the result of the efforts of people like John Kay and James Hargreaves. Before Kay, weaving cotton was a cottage industry, and the cost of the resulting cloth reflected the amount of manual effort that went into its manufacture. Kay knew that there was high demand for cotton thread and realized that if he could reduce the effort required to weave cloth, he could both increase supply while reducing costs. Over a period of years, he made a series of inventions that culminated in the flying shuttle, which both boosted the productivity of individual weavers while also allowing them to work on wider looms without needing the assistance of additional weavers.
In turn, Kay’s invention created problems for the spinners that produced the cotton yarn used on the looms—they simply couldn’t keep up with the resulting demand! They also had highly manual, time-consuming and, therefore, costly production methods. Hargreaves solved their problem with the invention of the spinning jenny.
Neither man applied solutions that others had thought up. Instead, they simply developed their ideas by solving one simple problem after another. (Another interesting point to note is that innovation is contagious. Once one person figures out how to improve something, the ideas start flowing.)
One of my favorite innovators is the clockmaker, John Harrison. His life’s goal was to solve the problem of determining longitude at sea. As a result, he developed a series of ever more accurate marine chronometers. He achieved his goal by single-mindedly overcoming one obstacle after another.
Another good example is Henry Ford. He didn’t set out to be an innovator, nor did he copy the practices of his competitors: he simply applied himself to solving the problems he encountered and he never stopped applying himself. The result, the concept we term mass production, and which is today largely scoffed-at, resulted in vehicles that were more reliable, cheaper and profitable than those of his competitors.
Taiichi Ohno, the originator of the Toyota Production System, didn’t just wake up one morning and read a book on lean production techniques then go to work on his system. His company faced a number of severe manufacturing constraints and he had to overcome those problems just to help his company stay in business. The result was a number of ideas that we collectively now refer to as lean production. Ohno—and Toyota—were then able to build vehicles even more reliably, cheaply and profitably than Ford’s successors.
All of these people shared one characteristic: while all of them—as that other great innovator, Isaac Newton, modestly claimed—stood on the shoulders of giants, they all focused primarily on solving their own problems; they didn’t merely seek to apply the off-the-shelf solutions of others.
Sure, techniques such as lean production, six sigma, theory of constraints, etc. are good starting places for improving the efficiency of your business, but if you really want to get ahead, you have to innovate.
If you truly want to rise above the competition, Hindsight Consulting can help. Call me to discuss how, together, we can solve the problems that are holding your business back.
Mike Allen
President, Hindsight Consulting, Inc.
