Читать книгу Driving Eureka! - Doug Hall - Страница 46

The country of Japan was where Dr. Deming’s teachings were developed, refined, and made real. For Innovation Engineering, Procter & Gamble served a similar role.

It started when, after graduating from the University of Maine, I took the path less traveled by chemical engineering graduates. Instead of taking an engineering job, I went to work for P&G in their brand management department.

As I look back on it, it’s a miracle that Mark Upson hired me. I did not have the experience to do the job. Fortunately, Mark took a gamble on me because of my entrepreneurial energy. I’d created and sold learn-to-juggle and magic kits as a teenager—and founded a promotional products company on six campuses when I was in college.

Being a chemical engineer in a marketing job, fresh out of college, was a major shift in mindset. I found myself relying on the system-thinking principles my dad was continuing to teach me. When I got tired of reworking budget charts, by hand, for the hundredth time, I changed the system. I found a new computer program called VisiCalc—the first major spreadsheet. I wrote a one-page memo and got the first personal computer on a P&G Brand Group—an Apple IIe. It enabled me to do budget chart changes in 95% less time than by punching a calculator. It also allowed more advanced statistical analysis of business data. At the time, the office manager actually said to me, “One day I can imagine one of these computers on every floor.” I replied, “I can see one on every desk.” He just shook his head.

I applied system thinking to strategy, finance, product development, packaging design, and promotion design.

To the leadership of P&G, my nontraditional system approach was both exciting and frustrating. Fortunately, most of the people I worked for were by nature system thinkers who evaluated the whole and not simply the parts. My first boss had this to say about me:

Were there times I wanted to strangle Doug? Absolutely. He was what I call a ‘high-maintenance subordinate.’ You had to watch him like crazy. He’d be nodding at what I was saying, but his mind would be somewhere else. Linear, he’s not. He’s more like a helicopter pilot—he sees the same thing you see, but from a different perspective. . . . Doug’s divergence paid off a number of times in the context of inventions that would not have been discovered simply by taking incremental steps forward from where we were.

—Barb Thomas, my first boss at P&G

I was quickly promoted to brand manager. In the 1980s, the P&G brand manager job was like the chief engineer role at Toyota. I had the responsibility to lead the business of my brand; however, I had no authority over any of the departmental silos. As the brand manager I was the “hub of the wheel,” leading the inevitable trade-offs required to move business-building innovations from idea to reality.

Being a P&G brand manager was the greatest job I’ve ever had. It is the inspiration for the project leader role designed into Innovation Engineering and explained in Chapter 8. The only difference is that, today, anyone in the company can take the role, whereas at P&G in the 1980s it was filled exclusively by those in the marketing department.

After a few years, I was offered the opportunity to be either the brand manager of Tide or to be brand manager of a struggling (and, frankly, failing) innovation group in the food & beverage division. For me it was an easy decision—innovation was my passion.

Soon Eric Schulz joined the team. He fully bought into the idea of changing the world by changing the innovation system. He had faced the pain and suffering of the existing P&G innovation system that was designed to control rather than to enable innovation.

Our starting place was to learn everything we could about innovation. We interviewed top experts. We read academic articles and ran lots of experiments. We quickly learned that if it took three months to execute a learning cycle—concept, package, customer research, and analysis—we could only do four cycles in a year. So we changed the system. We invented a new system we called Rapid Test that enabled us to create, test, and report results from four cities in seven days. Today, that Rapid Test system is even faster. As you will learn in Chapter 10, companies today can simultaneously test in four countries and painlessly get results in hours.

And thus was born the P&G Invention Team. I was soon promoted to associate advertising manager (director of marketing at other companies). I insisted that we have no budget. We would cross-charge business units for our work. The result? We ended up making quite a profit, which was a real problem for the finance department, as staff groups were not supposed to be profitable.

Demand for our services was greater than Eric and I could provide. Instead of hiring more people, we became very good at collaborating. You will learn more about how to accelerate collaboration in Chapter 10. We worked with partners who understood system thinking—big companies, small companies, citizen inventors, and university professors. These external collaborations multiplied our capacity and were a raw and rough version of Connect and Develop that P&G would make famous in later years.

The finance department did an audit of our effectiveness. They compared projects of similar complexity. They found that our P&G Invention Team took a product to market with 10% of the staff, in 16% of the time, and at 18% of the cost of a similar project using the traditional system. It wasn’t that we were any smarter. We upgraded the existing system to enable us to work faster and more effectively.

Sadly, the person responsible for managing me at the time didn’t get it. Incorrectly, he wrote in my last personnel review that I had a special gift. I didn’t. The secret to my success, then as now, was system thinking.

Doug brings an extraordinary degree of creativity, entrepreneurial instinct, and energy to his work. He has brought eight product concepts from invention to shipping, all within the past year . . . with a ninth project soon to follow. This has to be something of a record.

The next part of the review was not so positive.

Doug has just one key opportunity for improvement: He needs to treat the “system” with more respect. . . . [He] takes almost malicious pleasure in “beating the system” by developing new product concepts faster and cheaper than if work were done through traditional channels. . . . It does not help to rub people’s noses in their inefficiencies, their cost of operation or their tortoiselike speed. . . . Finally, and of much lesser importance, Doug has a too-low tolerance for paperwork, memo writing, budgeting, and similar administrative errata which, until successfully addressed, will limit his effectiveness in conventional management assignments.

It would take me another 20 years to realize that the most valuable advice in this review was the second part. I was using upgraded systems to beat the system—but not treating the existing system with respect. The art department wasn’t wrong when they protested my renegade actions, nor was the product development, regulatory, or legal departments when I broke existing rules.

What I didn’t understand was that true system thinkers work within the system to improve the system. Rubbing people’s noses in their inefficiencies, their cost of operation, or their tortoiselike speed is not appropriate. The problem is the system, not the people.

Eric has gone on to do amazing things at Disney, Coca-Cola, and other places. Like me, he has moved to teaching. He currently teaches marketing at Utah State University, where he has incorporated system thinking into solving marketing problems. His students have no idea how lucky they are to have him teaching them.