Perspiration, innovation, and success.

On a day like today, 164 years ago (Feb 11, 1847), Thomas Alva Edison was born. Most people know about Edisson as the inventor of the light bulb and the phonograph, and that he invented a bunch of other things (but have little to no idea what those other inventions are). He held a recortd 1093 patents! According to the Wikipedia, Edisson had only three months of official schooling--he dropped out amongst other things because he was considered "addled".

Edisson is also credited to have said "Invention is 1 percent genius and 99 percent perspiration"--he might have had quite a metabolism. But really, what made him do so much was a combination of high energy, a curious mind, and an amazing skill for making associations. Figuring out new, different ways to put seemingly unrelated things together and coming up with new applications to things that already existed or that he had invented were the skills allowed him to do so much. Just look at his inventions and you will see that most of them were incremental inventions; an invention was built from the results of a previous one. But that wasn't all, he was a great businessman and created an industry to support him, so the 99 percent perspiration was done mostly by all the workers he had at his factories and laboratories. A good number of the inventions and patents weren't a result of his ideas but rather the result of the collaboration with some of those workers; and some key ideas were actually from those people and not from Edisson himself.

Edisson's Menlo Park, NJ laboratory

Long before lean manufacturing and before Frederick Taylor, Edisson was pioneering mass production; most likely influenced by the raise of the Industrial Revolution and the works of Eli Whitney Jr., who make key inventions on machinery to automate some processes for the textile an milling industry.

Edison had an amazing insight on the importance to balance value to customer and value to the Enterprise to have a successful business. He also understood the importance of collaboration as a means to accelerate innovation. The conversations held with his most important workers and seriously consideration and analysis of what they proposed led to most of "his" inventions.

Today's organizations have fallen behind. They make employees work isolated inside cubicles and "teamwork" is rally a buch of people working by themselves on separate pieces of a product. Communication between groups in the organization is limited to orders and FYI's mostly. The groups building products have no direct, or very little, contact with customers or end users. The enterprise's priority is to make profit and not to satisfy users. As we try to turn things around applying Value Innovation, Lean-Agile, and Kanban we often confront strong resistance to change.  It seems some executives are so afraid of failure that they lost track of the fact that to move ahead of the competition and to succeed it is important to move away from the beaten path and do something new and different; and that to do so we have to be willing to invest and perspire,

Competencia en trabajo de conocimiento es algo malo

Wow! Such a long time without posting. Too much going on with the business and I feel ashamed for the lack of posting. Here's an email response I sent to a person in Peru regarding competence vs collaboration:

Agile nos recomienda que cuando tenemos que llevar a cabo una evaluación, tal como por ejemplo para determinar una herramienta a adoptar, es mucho mas efectivo evaluarlas todas al mismo tiempo en lugar de una a la ves. Esto es adecuado porque reduce el monto de tiempo que toma llevar a cabo las actividades de evaluación.

La manufactura lean (entiendase Kaizen) nos dice que el trabajo competitivo es bueno porque motiva a las personas a hacer mejor.

Esa labor de competencia en Lean es, sin embargo, aplicable solamente en tareas de naturaleza manual (i.e., manufactura) y no en tareas de carácter creativo tal como el trabajo de conocimiento. Hay estudios extensivos que demuestran que motivadores externos de hecho hacen que la ejecución sea peor que si no hay motivadores en absoluto. Afortunadamente ustedes no están utilizando como motivación el darles a las personas dinero sino el adoptar su trabajo. El problema con ese modelo está en que no es lean porque genera desperdicio. Todo el tiempo y labor del equipo que pierde el concuso se va a la basura! Si ustedes pueden darse el beneficio de tener dos grupos compitiendo entonces sería mejor tenerlos a todos como un grupo colaborando efectivamente para generar una solución, y el motivador que deben encontrar es un motivador interno y no un motivador externo. El motivador externo es ganar la competencia. El motivador interno que actualmente utilizan es el adoptar la solución mejor. Podrían agregar otro(s) motivador(es) interno(s). De esa manera el trabajo de todos los involucrados será de valor. Colaboración supera competencia siempre, por eso los modelos industriales de Japón y Korea superan los de los E.U. y muchos otros paises.

Competencia impulsa a apresurar las cosas mucho mas que impulsa a innovar. Motivadores internos motivan a innovar. El concepto de respeto a las personas e incremento de conocimiento (lo cual se logra muy bien mediante cooperación) supera por mucho la competencia. El grupo de trabajo que pierde la competencia perderá motivación en su grán mayoría y el grupo que ganará comenzará a tender a ver a otros por encima del hombro y se distrairá y se confiará durante la siguiente ronda de concurso, por lo que la efectividad de ambos grupos disminuirá con el tiempo. Ese acto de ganar y de ser mejor es una ilusión.