2 cents // Ville Kilkku

The four stages of market-focused reinvention as a model for change leadership

Change is not easy. In a recent IBM study, less than half of change management programs were successful, and the bottom 20% of companies only succeeded 8% of the time. For any company hard at work implementing a change program, it is essential to also keep reflecting on what has been done and how to ensure that the program is steered in the right direction.

In this post, I will examine a change management framework from a recent book by Gregory S. Carpenter, Gary F. Gebhardt, and John F. Sherry Jr., all of whom are influencers from the Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. The book is called Resurgence: The four stages of market-focused reinvention.

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Reaching for enterprise agility with a dual operating system

The world is changing at an ever increasing pace. This is the mantra that we are relentlessly exposed to, and there is a fair bit of data to back up that claim as well, so clearly there are some challenges for businesses that need to be met.

One of the latest attempts to address these challenges comes from John Kotter, famous for his 8-step process for leading change, who has adapted his change leadership process into a more agile version that he calls the “dual operating system” of the firm in his book Accelerate: Building Strategic Agility for a Faster-Moving World.

In this post, I will look into what the dual operating system is all about and how it compares to other paradigms that also attempt to meet the same challenges.

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Stories are an essential instrument for change leadership

There is an apocryphal story of how President Kennedy visited NASA and came across a janitor who was cleaning the floors. The President asked him what his job was, and the janitor confidently replied: ”My job is to put a man on the moon.”

It does not really matter whether the story is true or not, as we can all, as human beings, recognize the sentiment, and the power of such conviction on the purpose for which we work. Figures do not motivate people, purpose does. My claim is that the only way to instill a strong sense of purpose in a human being is through stories.

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Having a large order backlog is actually not a good thing

One of my favorite brain teasers when giving Lean training is the question of whether having a large order backlog is a good thing or not. It is rare for anyone to immediately say that it is a bad thing, and this is why it is such an illuminating example of how to think Lean.

Many companies that are doing well like to tell how their order backlog has increased and is at a high level. This is commonly seen as a sign of success, but it is not necessarily so. To see why this is so, we need to look at the issue from the point of view of both the company and the customer.

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Have to and cannot, the most misused phrases in business?

Simplification is often useful in life, but taking a very straightforward approach can also prevent us from seeing and discussing many of the options that are available. In practice, this often boils down to the ease with which we succumb to using the words “have to” and “cannot” in our daily lives.

I do not claim that there are never situations where people have to do something or cannot do something. However, especially in the domain of business operations, these situations are nowhere near as prevalent as the common use of these terms implies.

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Lean is more than continuous improvement of existing process

There are probably quite a few misconceptions regarding Lean, and this state is not made any easier by the fact that there are many ways to apply Lean nor by the fact that many ideologies have borrowed the name and some tools from Lean (such as Lean Six Sigma).

One of my pet peeves is the misconception that Lean is about improvement, but not about innovation. I see how this misconception is easy to arrive at, as the most common tools people borrow from Lean focus on waste elimination or value stream mapping and are often associated with iterative improvement of the process in small steps.

However, Lean itself has innovation at its very core, and in this post I aim to elaborate on that a little bit more with the help of an analogy.

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Toys-to-life games and toys: from Skylanders to LEGO Fusion

Toys-to-life refers to a relatively new category of games and related toys that was born as recently as 2011 with the release of Skylanders: Spyro’s Adventure. It has been a spectacularly successful category, with the Skylanders franchise alone surpassing $3 billion in sales.

As of late, there have been many new entrants to the competition, so it is a good time to take a look at what toys-to-life games are all about, what kinds of offerings there are on the market, and where the market may be headed.

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What are we really trying to teach children via computing?

Teaching children computing is all the hype nowadays. The forerunners, such as the UK and Estonia, have already started, with other countries, such as Finland and South Korea, not far behind.

The public discussion in Finland has mainly focused on how children will be taught coding. However, this is a fundamental misunderstanding on what this future subject is about according to its most vehement proponents.

In this post, I will examine what exactly we want to teach children via computing, and whether teaching computing is a good way to accomplish this goal.

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Finland is building and dismantling its data infrastructure

There is an intriguing paradox going on in Finland. The country is hoping to become a key data center location in the digital world (and not without merit), but at the same time the infrastructure needed to access that digital world by the end users is in many places being demolished. Is this a viable path?

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