Developer Creativity » Thought Leaders

Innovation Efforts Are Disappointing

Ronald Brown — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 14:00:01 +0000

According to a McKinsey & Company study, more than 70% of senior executives said that innovation will be one of the top three drivers of growth for their companies.

Unfortunately, at the same time they also said they were “generally disappointed” in their ability to promote it—but they knew intuitively that any sustainable effort must be grounded by their company’s people and culture.

Slow Development Is Innovation Impediment

Ronald Brown — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 14:00:21 +0000

A few years ago,BusinessWeek recounted how, in a joint survey with the Boston Consulting Group, one thousand senior managers ranked slow development times as the number one obstacle to innovation. Innovation, the publication said, is about selecting and executing the right ideas and bringing them to market in record time (Jena McGregor, “The World’s Most Innovative Companies,” BusinessWeek, April 24, 2006).

Critical Success Factors As Decision "Filters."

Ronald Brown — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 14:00:42 +0000

A critical success factor is so essential to achieving a desired outcome that if it’s missing, or falls below an acceptable range, your project is destined to fail.

D. Ronald Daniel of McKinsey & Company started the discussion about critical success factors in 1961, and Jack Rockart of MIT gave it renewed and expanded life in 1986. Every aspect of your business has at least some critical success factors. What they are depends on what you’re trying to do and its scope. They can apply to one specific task, or they can apply to your business in its entirety. They can be specific and unique or they can be broad and universal.

Once in place, critical success factors become ideal “filters” for subsequent decision making.

New Product Developent Is a Science

Ronald Brown — Sun, 06 Jun 2010 14:00:15 +0000

Determining the causes of product success has been the subject of great interest and rigorous study since the beginning of the modern marketing era, starting in the 1950s.

From academia to large companies, from consultants to advertising and public relations agencies, from businesspeople to sociologists, psychiatrists and even neuroscientists, there has been a determined march forward to discover the mysteries of why people buy the products they do.

The guesswork of the distant past has been replaced with high-quality research and well documented field experiments. It may not be physics, but important principles have emerged from this collective effort, validated time and again through decades of application.

New Product Development is now a science.

Core Best Practices for Success, Con't

Ronald Brown — Fri, 28 May 2010 17:36:35 +0000

In January, 2010, another major consulting firm, McKinsey & Company, announced that it had surveyed over 300 employees at 28 leading products companies.

Once again, there were three fundamental new product development lessons that emerged: the most successful companies develop clear project goals, they emphasize cultural behaviors that lead to success, and they build strong relationships with customers. Companies that employed these principles were twice as likely to meet ROI targets.

For simplicity, we’ll distill those practices down to three core words: Goals, Culture, and Customers.

Core Best Practices for Success

Ronald Brown — Thu, 27 May 2010 14:00:46 +0000

Years ago, a major consulting firm, Arthur Andersen, started a database of best practices for business activities. Later, after information and experience had accumulated through many years and possibly thousands of implementations, clients asked if any fundamental lessons had emerged from the more than thirty thousand pages of insight.

The response was yes, there were three things that stood out. The most successful companies were highly focused on building strong and lasting relationships with customers, they constantly improved their own businesses at all levels, and they used processes to keep those two main objectives running smoothly.

For simplicity, we’ll distill those practices down to three core words: Relationships, Proactive, and Processes.

The Largest Hidden Liability

Ronald Brown — Tue, 25 May 2010 14:00:09 +0000

Shortly after I began collecting background material for my book, I came across a press release from Bain & Company with this headline: “Less Complex Companies Grow Nearly Twice as Fast as Competitors.”

Bain examined the complexity of product and service offerings across a range of companies. Too many choices—product proliferation—were impeding customer action and a sure sign of lack of customer understanding. “Complexity is often a company’s largest hidden liability,” according to Bain’s head of global performance improvement practice.

Less complex companies grew revenue 1.7 times faster than their peers, reduced costs and accelerated customer decisions.