Columbia disaster – Dogged Engineer’s Effort To Assess Shuttle Damage

I found this http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/26/us/dogged-engineer-s-effort-to-assess-shuttle-damage.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm (from 2003) where we get some more details about how the engineers and Mr. Rocha organized themselves prior to the accident. One comment describing Mr. Rocha caught my attention :

“he was too nice about it, because he’s a gentleman; he didn’t get nasty about the problem.”

Mr. Rocha followed the rules, the framework established at NASA and did not want to break the chain of command. Could it be that the engineers chose a wrong person for the task of representing them? Someone who was too scared about his reputation?

The peculiar thing is that Mr. Rocha was actually capable of that and bypassed his managers later on during the investigations when the engineers were accused of not “Speaking up”. So why couldn’t he do it in the first place?

I think the “culture” was used in this case as an excuse to avoid pointing out the ones who are accountable for this tragedy. The kind of culture as the Columbia case describes can be found in many companies around the world and anyone who has a critical piece of information should do whatever it takes to deliver the message.

Innovation: The Lean Startup

Here is the book I spoke about in class. “The Lean Startup,” By Eric Ries.
He sees a startup process (anything new inside a big firm or a new firm) as a PROCESS, where there are bad and good processes. That is exactly what we have been discussing in class. Several of his observations are those we discussed in class, so I wouldn’t say he breaks new ground with this book but he puts things together nicely. Morten

Amazon link:

http://www.amazon.com/Lean-Startup-Entrepreneurs-Continuous-Innovation/dp/0307887898/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1316808109&sr=8-1

Collaboration for Collaboration’s Sake: Can You Take Collaboration Too Far?

At what point does collaboration just become “collaboration for collaboration’s sake?” Can collaboration actually be detrimental to a companies performance? When should my team pursue cross-company collaboration, and when should we “go it alone?”

http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2011/09/collaboration_is_misunderstood.html

The above article by Harvard Business Review tackles these questions by proposing a single (rather broad) criteria for determining when to pursue cross-company collaboration:

… avoid relying on a collaborative relationship except in the rare cases when a company objective is important enough to warrant some collaborative action but not so important as to warrant a dedicated team.

The author then defines three conditions for success in collaborative relationships:

  • the participants have committed to work together — collaboration requires emotional engagement;
  • the participants have high respect for each other’s competence on the topic of the collaboration or a natural first-among-equals exists amongst the participants, because of technical knowledge or experience; and
  • the participants have the skills and permission to creatively bargain with each other over costs and benefits.

The main argument that he uses to defend his point is that dedicated teams and customer-supplier relationships have “clear mechanisms for resolving disagreements,” and that you should only pursue collaborative relationships when the benefit is worth discarding these existing mechanisms.

While this article comes across as generally pessimistic about the value of collaborative relationships within companies, I think that it raises the following interesting questions in the context of the course:

  1. What should the conditions for establishing successful collaboration be, and are the conditions mentioned here too restrictive or too broad? What (if anything) is missing?
  2. How does a manager decide whether pursuing a collaborative relationship will result in a strategic advantage, or when it is simply “collaboration for collaboration’s sake?”
  3. Is it fair for upper management to demand that employees “collaborate” without defining clear bounds or conditions under which collaboration can be successful? Is finding good conditions for collaboration the responsibility of managers or of employees (or both), and how would we evaluate Intuit’s “collaborate or perish” style of performance evaluation in that respect?
  4. How do these conditions play out for Network organizations, where collaborations might not be carefully curated by upper management and dedicated teams change frequently? How could we design networked organizations from the ground up to foster these conditions?

Thoughts?

– Mark

Integrated Place for Course Materials

Session #6, 09/30/11

Session #5, 09/23/11

Session #4, 09/16/11

Session #3, 09/09/11

Session #2, 09/02/11

Session #1, 08/26/11

Apple and Innovation

Here is a great blog on Apple on the point that innovation at Apple is not only about Jobs but also a lot about the culture and processes set up to innovate.

http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2011/08/for_the_second_time_steve.html

Great quote:
“The last 15 years have been all about establishing an internal culture for innovation and a set of norms of behavior and expectations. While the culture came from the drive of Steve Jobs, it is a reasonable expectation that he infused it into the organization itself.”

In general, this is a great website for blogs about management for this course–Harvard Business Review’s blog page;
http://hbr.org/

Morten