Playing increases productivity.

Last year I volunteered to translate David J. Anderson's book on Kanban into Spanish. Translating a book was a first for me and I had no idea what I've gotten myself into. Don't get me wrong, the book in itself is great and Kanban is an important part of my business. But translating a book is much  harder than I ever imagined.


Once the translation was finished the index needed to be created and that task was to be done by sometime else mainly because were couldn't find a tool able to easily generate it. Long story short getting the index done started longer than the translation itself because we couldn't find sometime to do it and it became clear that getting it done would end up being costly.


It occurred to me that maybe we could get a highly motivated student to do it well at a lower cost. I offered a high school student a third of the amount a professional would charge, which to him was to be the highest paying gig he had ever had, and I considered that to be enough of a motivator.


Taking advantage of a week- long school break we estimated the task would taking almost the entire week working full time. That became a turn off top the student who was looking forward to having some fun least pat of the time, but the money ease too good to pass. And so he began working on it at my office. I was keeping an eye on him and my main concern was the qualify of the work and likelihood of requiring longer time.


A couple of hours later I noticed  him doing things extremely quick. I went to his desk to check upon his progress and saw that not only everything was being done as expected but he was blasting away! I asked him how he was doing and he said "I am pretending this is one of my video games and figured out a strategy to do this with the minimum eye and keyboard movements." This was awesome! Although money was a good extrinsic motivator, he had found his own intrinsic motivator... to win the game.


He got done in just a day and a half. Upon reviewing the work done I noticed the need to do some time- consuming changes to improve the index and asked him to do a second pass, which he finished in less than one day. He was able to spend over half of the week having fun with his friends and having pocketed some good money, which he added to his savings to buy a semi- professional video camera.


Reading the Wired magazine this morning while enjoying a hot mocha I read an article about how the UK' s Guardian newspaper had the daunting task of analyzing 170,000 pages of bonus expenses and how reporters were, understandably, reluctant to do that. They then turned the task into a hammer and made it public. The result, over 2,000 people played it and the task got done in less than
four days.


One of the three core aspects of value innovation is to have an innovation fostering environment and the more work we do in the form of games is a great way to achieve that.

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,

Book review: Innovation Games

Everybody wants to better their businesses and make serious efforts to do so, but maybe we could be more effective is the efforts were less serious and more fun. Business communication is always challenging within the organization, with customers, providers, contractors, etc.. This is in part because they are not face-to-face and because most times one or more people who could add significant value take a passive role, in part because most times there is someone who enjoys dominating the meeting. End result is incomplete and biased information and decisions.

One main reason why games work is because (a) they are fun, and (b) they make everybody to actively participate. Hohmann's book is a great starting point. The games cover diverse needs and conducted properly add significant value (and save costs) to teams, projects, and entire enterprises.

Don't get serious... instead, start using this book!