Welcome to the March 2011 edition of Strategic Innovation newsletter, a free monthly newsletter on leadership, strategy and innovation. Delivered on the first Tuesday of each month.

Back issues are archived for free downloading at:www.daniellockconsulting.com/newsletter

Tips for improving

•Visualise your work: I don’tmean imagining it; I mean literally write it up on a whiteboard, perhaps usepost-it notes and track the movement of work through the process.
•Utilise queuing theory in yourpersonal workflows: lead time (the time taken to complete thework) increase exponentially with the amount of work in progress (WIP).Therefore limit the amount projects you are working on. Add a holding pen atthe bottom of you project list. These are the project you add to the queue whenhave some time. This will speed up your delivery of projects your are committed to.

Article of the month: Case study on improving strategic agility

A FEW years ago Avery Dennison, a manufacturing company, was suffering from increased costs, margin pressure and a changing businessenvironment. Avery needed to improve its strategic agility, talking to CEO Forum, Managing Director David Martin recalls, "Another driver of our quest for greater agilitywas a recognition we had become too inwardly focused as an organisation.”

The most common reaction might have been to slash costs across the board delivering a quick hit to profitability, at least for the next quarter. Profits must goup. Make no mistake, but you can’t cut your way to growth.

Avery realised that sustainable profitability is more about a company’s long term ability to deal with problems. "Increasing agility is largely about empowering people to act,” Martin adds.

Like many large companies Avery had become a conglomerate of silo business units. "A big issue for us was the ability for people to work across traditional functional boundaries within the organisation.”

The tools

To address the lack of communication and enhance cooperation across business units, Avery needed a common approach, of addressing this reality. "This is where we found the Lean approach pivotal.” Martin said this gave Avery’s people"a common way of approaching problems and coming up with solutions.”

In making problem solving work in large organisations, self-directed cross functional teams, which come together for only the duration of the project are the best way to break down silo’s. It isn’t that people are selfish, and don’tlike to cooperate with each other, it’s just that large organisations require specialisation and without executive leadership giving permission via these teams to come together and work on problems it cannot happen.

Avery did a few things:

• Re-defined their strategic direction, and communicated this to the organisation. This led to a change in the problems people were working on.
• Empowered their people with not only direction, but permission and tools.
• Became more outward looking, by focusing themselves on the customer and working back.

It’s not the methodology

While Avery used Lean as an approach, and any approach to structured problem solving would have worked with this combination of leadership and permission. Once, strategically, the leadership of the business agrees to release people to work on problems of this nature, previously unsolvable problems - and by extension –finger pointing can be solved.

Lean is not miracle cure all. Purists and acolytes miss the point, quality is not about awards, or nice signs on the walls, it is about conforming your customer’s requirements. From a speech made to Yale from author of 48 Laws of Power, Robert Greene:

"I make the point that you are not going to get far unless you are the kind of person that knows how to think inside the other person’s mind. And that requires a totally different kind of personality. Where you have to not be so self-absorbed. Where you can think inside of other people and what their interests are and what is going to appeal to them.”

If you decide to bring in an arbitrary tool set with a high priced consultant, nothing will change. Except that you wasted money and a lot of time. (The money you can always get back.)

The conclusion

Transformational journeys of this nature require leadership and a determined focus on delivering value for your clients. Looked through this lens decisions about allocating your resources, become easier, and can be delegated closer to the frontline.

For Avery it was a positive journey and now that they "have profitability and growth, we’re focused heavily on retention, especially leadership retention, as we see this is as fundamental if we are to keep growing the company and achieving our goals.”

Technique of the month: Set up your own task force

 Choose the top 3 problems (or areas of opportunity) in your business, and set up across functional team with accountability allocated at the highest level practical to work on and solve the problems.

The qualities these teams should exhibit:

1. One person and one person only accountable, and to lead the team (otherwise youhave a committee and nothing will get done).

2. Have members from each department and or silo affected represented on the team.

3. Choose your brightest people.

4. Alter their job descriptions and reward them accordingly.

5. Allow the team to be self directed, checking in with them periodically and offering to remove roadblocks accordingly.