Problem Solving

How to … Plan in a Time of Uncertainty

January 25, 2023 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

In periods of uncertainty and ambiguity, move away from annual plans and focus on the next three months. Reflect on the unpredictability of the future and stay on your toes by forging plans for unexpected scenarios so you won’t be caught flat-footed when that time comes.

Establish “trigger points” and “accelerate, maintain, or terminate criteria” in advance and keep an eye on key indicators to “wait and see” or “stay the course” should one of your planned-for scenarios materialize.

Idea for Impact: When the horizon is much shorter, operate with agility and allocate your resources in real time.

“Fly the Aircraft First”

December 29, 2022 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Today is the 50th anniversary of the Flight 401 disaster. I’ve previously cited how the crew of the ill-fated Eastern Airlines Lockheed L-1011 got so single-mindedly preoccupied with tackling a nose landing gear indicator light malfunction that they didn’t pay attention to the fact that their airliner was descending gradually into the Florida Everglades.

In summary, the pilots were too distracted to fly the aircraft. Human factors, specifically cognitive impairments, can precipitate distractions away from vital tasks.

The incident led to a breakthrough called Crew Resource Management (CRM.) This “human nature innovation” actively orients pilots to prioritize tasks in order of operational safety. The adage “Aviate, Navigate, and Communicate (A-N-C)” reinforces the ‘fly the aircraft first’behaviors until they’re internalized and become routine.

The top priority—always—is to aviate. That means fly the airplane by using the flight controls and flight instruments to direct the airplane’s attitude, airspeed, and altitude. Rounding out those top priorities are figuring out where you are and where you’re going (Navigate,) and, as appropriate, talking to ATC or someone outside the airplane (Communicate.) However, it doesn’t matter if we’re navigating and communicating perfectly if we lose control of the aircraft and crash. A-N-C seems simple to follow, but it’s easy to forget when you get busy or distracted in the cockpit.

Idea for Impact: “Fly the aircraft first.” Know when to set aside the seemingly important things to accomplish the more vital ones.

Innovation’s Valley of Death: Case Study on the Bombardier CSeries

December 20, 2022 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

The discovery and development of an invention are usually easier relative to the creativity and resources required to make it a commercial success. Indeed, many entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs struggle to commercialize their idea meaningfully—establish the idea’s marketability to prospective backers, engage potential customers, and price and promote their product or service for a favorable return on investment. Consider this case study of the Bombardier CSeries jets—fated for misfortune for many years only to morph into the successful Airbus A220 series:

As a country, we habitually underinvest in R&D. And, when domestic champions like Bombardier do emerge, they often prove unable to turn their great ideas into commercially successful, globally dominant businesses.

In a knowledge economy, a country’s future prosperity is increasingly tied to its ability to generate and capitalize on innovative new ideas.

“The paradox is that while there is innovation going on in Canada, we do not observe the same level of commercialization and ownership of those innovations [as in other countries]. In many cases, inventions developed in Canada are then commercialized by foreign companies that keep much of that benefit.”

Idea for Impact: Don’t let your idea fizzle because they can’t take your sizzle to market. Focus not just on overcoming internal barriers but also on how to commercialize your innovation. Hire outside capabilities if necessary.

Be Smart by Not Being Stupid

December 12, 2022 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

No superhuman ability is usually required to dodge the many foolish choices to which we’re prone. A few basic rules are all that’s needed to shield you, if not from all errors, from silly errors.

Charlie Munger often emphasizes that minimizing mistakes may be one of the least appreciated tricks in successful investing. He has reputedly credited much of Berkshire Hathaway’s success to consistently avoiding stupidity. “It is remarkable how much long-term advantage we have gotten by trying to be consistently not stupid instead of trying to be very intelligent.” And, “I think part of the popularity of Berkshire Hathaway is that we look like people who have found a trick. It’s not brilliance. It’s just avoiding stupidity.” They’ve avoided investing in situations they don’t understand or summon experience.

As a policy, avoiding stupidity in investing shouldn’t mean avoiding risk wholly; instead, it’s taking on risk only when there’s a fair chance that you’ll be adequately rewarded for assuming that risk.

Idea for Impact: Tune out stupidity. Becoming successful in life isn’t always about what you do but what you don’t do. In other words, improving decision quality is often more about decreasing your chances of failure than increasing your chances of success.

3 Ways to … Manage for Creativity

October 21, 2022 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Managers can create the conditions for innovation by encouraging a culture of being creative—not just productive—and razing barriers that stifle individual expression.

Get less formal. Foster a culture characterized by a tolerance for failure and a willingness to experiment. Involve everyone and welcome great ideas from everywhere. Make sure everyone feels free to speak out: people will own solutions if they’ve been involved in the decision-making.
Simplify the workplace. Look at things with a fresh eye, as an outsider might—sometimes you’re too close to things to see the truth. Drop unnecessary work, and explore what routines can be phased out or improved. Work with coworkers to eliminate extraneous loops and redundancies if your organization has far too many rules, approvals, and forms. Streamline decision-making.
Defy tradition. If no one can recall why your team does something a particular way, the task is likely more convoluted than it needs to be. Hold a ‘why do we do it that way?’ challenge. Invite colleagues from different teams to come in and look at things in a detached way. Figure out what’s relevant and necessary (and what’s not) and frequently reevaluate the priority list as new things are added.

Idea for Impact: Managing for creativity is a conscious effort in experimentation.

Books in Brief: ‘Flying Blind’ and the Crisis at Boeing

September 24, 2022 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Bloomberg investigative journalist Peter Robison’s thoroughly researched Flying Blind: The 737 MAX Tragedy and the Fall of Boeing (2022) offers noteworthy lessons about corporate responsibility and leadership problem-solving.

In a nutshell, starting in the late 1990s, Boeing shifted from a company run by engineers who emphasized product integrity to one run by MBA-types who prized shareholder value over long-term product planning. Inspired by General Electric’s Jack Welch, the company embraced cost-cutting, outsourcing, financial engineering, union-busting, and co-opting regulators. These miscalculated strategies culminated in the 737 MAX disasters and disgraceful corporate responses.

Recommendation: Read Peter Robison’s Flying Blind, but be wary of the author’s broad-brush political biases, which, I found, sidetracked from the storyline. The internal organizational tensions that led to corporate deception and the fateful consequences of federal regulators’ consigning design approvals to Boeing are particularly interesting.

Key Takeaway: Negligent engineering to minimize costs and adhere to a delivery schedule is a symptom of ethical blight.

Make the Problem Yours

September 21, 2022 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

From a profile of The Gillette Company’s then-CEO Jim Kilts in the 20-Dec-2002 issue of Fortune magazine:

At a meeting with all his division chiefs, Kilts asked for a show of hands: “How many of you think our costs are too high?” Everyone in the room immediately raised his hand. Then he asked, “How many of you think costs are too high in your department?” Not a single hand went up. According to Kilts, it’s a common response among managers of companies in trouble: Everyone knows there’s a problem, it’s just that nobody thinks it’s his problem. And that’s where Kilts comes in: He’ll make it his problem–and yours, if you plan on keeping your job.

Idea for Impact: Make the problem yours. Think and act like an owner.

One of the most underrated skills most employees lack is ownership/stewardship—taking responsibility for results, recognizing when things aren’t working, and getting problems solved.

Plus, teams mirror initiative-takers. When someone starts to take ownership, other people see that, and they’re likely to take ownership of their bits as well.

Do Your Employees Feel Safe Enough to Tell You the Truth?

August 15, 2022 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Take any corporate scandal or the Challenger and Columbia disasters, and you’ll find lower-ranking voices that tried to be heard within these organizations to prevent or minimize the consequences of the excesses or the accidents.

Some leaders are too isolated from reality and establish an “all’s-good” guise whereby anything other than affirmative becomes an undesirable—unwelcome even—answer to a performance-related question. Such leaders foster a “good-news culture,” where any truth-teller or devil’s advocate is quickly dismissed. Queries such as the cursory “Is everything okay?” elicit information-free, non-answers like “yes” and “great!”

When leaders are disconnected from reality, they become incontestably right. Employees know the rule of the game is to say what’s safe to say. To not tell the truth. To tell the leader just what she wants to hear. Employees would instead go with the flow rather than speak truth to power.

Consequently, business pressures often lead to shortcuts that go overlooked. Risk is normalized. Leaders who cannot tap into the truth get blindsided when the problems blow up because they didn’t nip the problems in the bud. Leaders have only themselves to blame when things go wrong.

Idea for Impact: Insightful leadership isn’t about the privilege of position but the privilege of information flowing upwards. Wise leaders dare to seek information they don’t want to hear. They know how to ask the right questions, look for revealing details, and set up a culture of openness that makes it easy for employees to tell the truth.

Evolution, Not Revolution

August 1, 2022 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Innovation often transpires from synthesizing existing ideas in new ways, as the following case study on the iPod will illuminate.

In some sense, the iPod wasn’t a breakthrough innovation at all. It emerged from Steve Jobs’s “digital hub” approach to integrating iMac software for playing, editing, and managing photos, music, and movies. According to Walter Isaacson’s masterful biography of Steve Jobs (2011,) when Apple designers learned that Toshiba had newly prototyped a tiny 1.8-inch hard drive that could hold five gigabytes of storage (that’s about a thousand songs,) they conjured up a digital music player. Apple found that existing gadgets were “big and clunky or small and useless” with “unbelievably awful” user interfaces.

Sony’s Walkman had previously proven the market potential of portable audio players, having sold 200 million units in the two decades before Apple conceived the iPod. Napster had offered digital audio file distribution for over five years. Finger-driven touchscreens were pioneered in the 1960s, and Citibank rolled out touchscreen ATMs in the 1980s. (Apple didn’t offer touchscreens until 2007 with the iPhone.) Hence, the iPod’s innovation was in bringing all these capabilities together in a way that was easier to use and relevant to the consumer. Dartmouth’s strategy professor Ron Adner writes in The Wide Lens: What Successful Innovators See That Others Miss (2013.)

Apple was three years late [behind Creative, SanDisk, Sony, and Samsung, who had previously launched portable music players]. As we’ll see again in the case of the iPhone, Jobs tended to be late for everything because he wanted everything to be ready for him. Reflecting on catching technology waves in 2008, he said, “Things happen fairly slowly, you know. They do. These waves of technology, you can see them way before they happen, and you just have to choose wisely which ones you’re going to surf. If you choose unwisely, then you can waste a lot of energy, but if you choose wisely, it actually unfolds fairly slowly. It takes years.” Jobs’s discipline paid off.

Idea for Impact: Innovation often builds on existing technological competencies or as a synthesis of smaller innovations.

Is The Customer Always Right?

July 14, 2022 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

No matter how finicky or rude a customer is, many businesses make employees treat bad customers with unquestioned respect or risk reprobation—even getting sacked.

Per the well-worn business adage, is “the customer is always right?” No, they’re not. Sometimes they’re wrong, and they need to be told so.

Your goal should be to do business with people that you enjoy doing business with. Some customers simply aren’t good customers. They don’t follow directions and complain irrationally. They have unreasonable expectations, and they treat your people rudely.

Idea for Impact: A prudent maxim is, “the customer is usually right.” Put the customer first, but don’t get mistreated by them. Putting the customer first doesn’t mean putting employees second. As a business, you must let customers be wrong with respect and dignity; but employees should be authorized to caution some customers, “After due consideration, we believe your actions are unacceptable. Persist, and we’d choose to lose your business.” Some bad customers are just bad for your business.

Almost always, though, unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning; they can especially offer an honest assessment of the expectations you’re setting. Customer satisfaction with a transaction depends on their expectations going into it.

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