My rule: “You only catch people when they are doing something right. When they’re wrong, you teach”. That’s a learning experience because you don’t learn from right, you learn from wrong. So you sit down and you ask, “What can we learn from this so that when we see it coming again, we don’t do this again?” So we’re going to dissect it, take it apart, look at the dynamic, and remember that dynamic. And when we see this problem coming next time, we’re immunized against this problem now. We’re building antibodies to this, and we’re not going to get this one again. No one should ever get into trouble for a mistake! Big problems come when employees do not make decisions.
Lesson, Father’s My father, when I was born, was a sharecropper. That’s about the poorest of the poor jobs you can get. Then, he worked in a coal mine, and then eight years later, he became one of the largest plastering contractors in California. It was a big success story. I went to work for him one summer when I was fourteen. I was spreading plaster at age fourteen because I could reach eight feet high, and so they didn’t need to put up the scaffold. One day, we were sitting down having lunch and there was a 60-yearold man with the white plastering hat on. He had skin cancer and sunburns and he was alcoholic, and my dad said, “Do you see that man?” I nodded. He said, “That’s you.” I was shocked. He said, “When you’re sixty, you’re going to be just like him.” Then he said, “I’m going to give you the secret: You play when you’re young, and you will pay when you are old. That fella, he played when he was young and he’s paying every day now. Or, you can go the other way. You can pay when you’re young, and then, you will play when you are old. The choice is up to you. And the way you pay, is you go to school, you go to college.” Nobody in my family had ever gone to college, no one. So I’m the first one to graduate from college and then I got addicted to college spent a total of six years in day school and nine more years in night school. Fifteen years total of college. So I paid, and I paid, and I paid. Limits to Thinking… in Handcuffs If you focus on what you can’t do, you overlook what you can do. Rules tell you what you cannot do. Rules are handcuffs. If you have the right culture, then people are free to think. Rules limit the thinking. Listening and Creativity In companies, creativity can be facilitated by an “open” leader who structures the culture to be free enough to listen to everyone and not judge any idea. That means listen to all ideas and not be critical of it. No one knows where the next great idea will come from. In Radica, I held two “ideation” meetings a year. I started these meetings for salesmen. At first, the salesmen think they know the market they don’t. The creative people think they know the market—they don’t. The marketers think they know the market—they don’t. They are statisticians. I found that if a salesman thinks he cannot sell a product, he can’t. Salesmen always criticize the creative staff. So, to get the salesmen “on board,” I created the ideation meetings to get all of the departments together in a room for the purpose of creating the next products with input from each department to make them part of the process (own the monkey). Everyone is exposed in this room when forced to create; the truth comes out that it is very difficult to create. The details of the steps of these ideation meetings is another subject. In the end, creativity is a disciplined process where all departments contribute; it takes an experienced and disciplined thought leadership to milk out the ideas and get them to be a marketable product. Listening and Ideation I took my technique from the think tank at GM. We started with additive logic. We would “add”: write on a white board all of the concepts from attendees. Every idea was recorded; a visual on the board could spark an idea from another member. When all of the ideas were offered and fatigue sets in, I would switch to subtractive logic. I would ask, “Which one of these products has the customer appeal that would create the highest income in the shortest time?” We would start ranking the ideas. As we progressed, someone would offer a new idea. I would stop and say, “OK, now we are back to additive logic, let’s add.” When the new additions were added, I would go back and start over the subtractive process of ranking the ideas. These “additive” interruptions are both healthy and tiring. The staff caught on that this was a lot of time consuming and exhausting work. I think fatigue is part of the creative process. We would end up with new product lines and product extensions to existing lines. But everyone was now onboard, because they had the base line info on how difficult it is to create. Now the salesmen were on board. But the problem was not over. The development process is time consuming and the other departments (i.e., accounting, sales, etc.) do not fully understand how much detail goes into product development. The product development people are usually the most educated department in a company and their work is the least understood. I found that the sales department understood the least about how much time/work was involved. After we prioritized the new-products list from the ideation meeting, the salesmen would keep adding, subtracting, or changing; this drives the development people crazy. The seemingly smallest proposed change usually means a “start-over” for the development team. This causes the schedule to start over, but the sales would say, “It’s just a small change, why a year longer?” This led me to create a “gestation period” for product development.
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