by Gary Mintchell | Nov 7, 2017 | Commentary, Leadership, News
Turning a giant organization that has the great inertia can be likened to turning a large ship at sea. It takes great force and a lot of space. Such is the task of remaking Microsoft.
Satya Nadella has been CEO of Microsoft replacing the combative Steve Ballmer more than three years ago. I’ve seen him speak at conferences at least three times. I’ve talked to many Microsoft people. He truly has turned that big mass toward the future.
Hit Refresh: The Quest to Rediscover Microsoft’s Soul and Imagine a Better Future for Everyone tells Nadella’s personal story, as well as his business and leadership.
He begins personally. The key takeaway is his discovery of empathy. I imagine that that value was in short supply in Redmond during Ballmer’s tenure. Nadella talks about a mentor, but also the birth of a handicapped child and what the family learned while caring for him introducing him to the emotion and value of empathy.
Like most people with an MBA, he was steeped in strategy theories. As he thought about his task as the new leader of Microsoft, naturally he thought about strategy.
His early three-pronged message was
1. Reinvent productivity and business processes
2. Build an intelligent cloud platform
3. Move people needing Windows to wanting Windows
Remembering Peter Drucker’s dictum, “Culture eats strategy,” he also move quickly to change the corporate culture. He includes a few stories revealing how he went about that gigantic task.
His view of what leaders tasks are:
1. Bring clarity
2. Generate energy
3. Find a way to deliver success
He has given much thought to values. These are similar thoughts to what we hear at National Instruments’ gatherings—engineers solving the world’s biggest problems. He urges policy makers, mayors, and others not to try to replicate Silicon Valley but instead to develop plans to make the best technologies available to local entrepreneurs so that they can organically grow more jobs at home—not just in high tech industries but in every economic sector.
by Gary Mintchell | Sep 26, 2017 | Productivity
As many of you know, I use an app called Nozbe as part of my Getting Things Done practice for personal productivity.
Several years ago I wrote about GTD and soon heard from a guy called Michael Sliwinski. He was from Poland and had written an app oriented toward David Allen’s GTD methodology. He told me about Nozbe. I was using something else but not thrilled with it. After a few months I tried Nozbe seriously and got hooked.
Michael is in the process of writing a book to complement use of his app and introduce people to productivity. I’ve read a draft of the forward of the book. In it he mentions myths of people who use productivity systems.
One myth concerns the type of people who use a system. He calls them “dweebs”. You know, those unimaginative, dull, plodding sort of people.
Truth be told, creative people are usually quite organized in their lives. They have a morning routine (usually write or draw first then exercise; executives work out first as a general rule) and like organization and regularity.
I’m a writer. I find that having a productivity system allows me to focus on one thing at a time and get it done. There are things that interfere, but I can always start my day off on the right foot.
by Gary Mintchell | Aug 9, 2017 | Commentary, News, Productivity
Maybe We have been thinking about productivity all wrong
I’ve been on a mini vacation and soccer season is heating up—early. I foresee a very busy eight weeks ahead.
My focus has been manufacturing technology for most of my career—and certainly my writing career over the past 20 years. One purpose of technology pretty much for as long as there have been humans has been to increase productivity. We answer the question, how can one human produce more goods and services economically.
Perhaps it was just an early plow that enabled the first farmers to grow more crops so that the community could eat better which today enables just a few farmers to feed a nation.
Eliminating jobs is the other side of the equation. We need productivity in order for the economy to grow. We need jobs for everyone so that everyone can eat—and also find some self-worth. 19th Century philosophers bemoaned the mechanical manufacturing age because they thought that it took the soul out of a craftsman’s work. Work is part of the formula for making us human.
Does automation simply take away jobs in aggregate? I wrote about this a few months ago after interviewing some people from A3, the automation association (robots, vision, motion control trade association). The answer is no.
Productivity has not been growing in the US for quite some time. Economists are wondering why. Recently an article appeared in The New York Times publicizing a recent paper that looks at the current state of productivity growth in the US from a different angle.
I have excerpted parts of the article below.
American businesses are doing a terrible job at making their workers more productive.
Productivity growth is the weakest it has been since the early 1980s — only 0.8 percent a year over the last half a decade, compared with 2.3 percent on average from 1947 to 2007. This is the root cause of slow growth in both G.D.P. and worker pay.
At least, that is the standard way of thinking about productivity and its relationship to the economy. In a mainstream view, productivity is a kind of magic force that helps explain rising output. New labor-saving inventions come along or new management practices are taken up that miraculously allow companies to produce more output with fewer hours of work.
The authors ask, can we think about this differently.
It’s a chicken or egg problem: Does low productivity cause slow growth, or does slow growth cause low productivity?
The second possibility is the provocative argument of a new paper published Tuesday by the Roosevelt Institute, a liberal think tank. The paper argues that the United States economy is not actually closing in on its full economic potential and has plenty of room for continued growth — so long as the Federal Reserve doesn’t put on the brakes of the expansion prematurely.
J. W. Mason, the author of the report, argues that soft productivity growth reflects not some unlucky dearth of new innovations, but rather is a consequence of depressed demand for goods and services and a slack labor market that has depressed wages.
Maybe if the labor market were tighter and wages were rising faster, it would induce companies to invest more heavily in new labor-saving innovations.
What’s particularly interesting is that this diagnosis — though decidedly not the policy prescriptions — has some overlap with the arguments of influential conservative economists.
A recent paper published by the Hoover Institution and American Enterprise Institute argued that the productivity drought was caused by insufficient investment in capital equipment and software, and was poised to rebound.
But capital spending has been weak over all, and particularly weak for those more transformative innovations.
If you look at long-term patterns of productivity growth, they roughly fit this idea, that a booming job market tends to be followed by a productivity boom, and that deep recessions are followed by productivity slumps.
The strongest productivity growth in post-World War II America came in the late 1960s and early 2000s. The two periods of greatest weakness were the early 1980s and the last decade since the global financial crisis.
In this way of thinking about productivity, inventors and business innovators are always cooking up better ways to do things, but it takes a labor shortage and high wages to coax firms to deploy the investment it takes to actually put those innovations into widespread use.
In other words, instead of worrying so much about robots taking away jobs, maybe we should worry more about wages being too low for the robots to even get a chance.
by Gary Mintchell | Jun 27, 2017 | Automation, News, Productivity
Siemens holds its Automation Summit this week in Boca Raton, FL, and it kicked off its media program with a round table discussion with the Financing group.
Siemens Financial Services exists as a sales support group to assist customers who perhaps require assistance financing a project. This could involve helping with cash flow or giving the customer some operational flexibility. This often helps smaller businesses as they adapt to the changing business and technology conditions they are facing today.
“Siemens is a one-stop shop.”
They brought back memories of my early sales training on solution sales when they mentioned that Siemens Industry is getting adjusted to solution sales (rather than product sales) and the Siemens sales teams are learning that financial can be a key component of a solution sale.
Siemens is not the only company in this space, by the way, adjusting to a new way of life beyond “selling boxes.”
ROI
Where can Return on Investment (ROI) be found in a digitalization project? Siemens suggests several ways:
• Increase manufacturing productivity
• Reduce energy consumption
• Reduce downtime
• Shorten setup and changeover times
• Improve quality
• Improve planning and forecasting—which leads to
• Reduced inventory
• Reduce waste
What are Industry 4.0 financiers offering that supports this new mindset?
Industry 4.0 Finance can:
• Embed financing options into the initial value proposition, opening a wider range of affordable digital transformation possibilities
• Flex financing periods to suit the pace at which each manufacturer will reduce costs or increase sales as a result of the company’s digital transformation
• Cover the total solution and total cost of ownership (hardware, software, services), allowing manufacturers to secure digital transformation at a guaranteed and sustainable monthly cost
• Employ machine data to ensure finance is based on usage or outcomes, aligning technology capabilities with their resulting commercial benefits
• Use cost-saving or money-making outcomes to fund enabling technology, making digital transformation
• cost neutral
• Build in technology upgrade options so manufacturers do not become trapped in technology obsolescence in a world of quicker innovation cycles
• Bridge the cash-flow gap between technology investment and the resulting benefits to make digital transformation more financially sustainable
Adding fincining assistance as part of a solution sale to help customers overcome a potential obstacle to implementing digitalization and reaping the benefits seems like good business sense.
by Gary Mintchell | Jun 8, 2017 | Productivity
It’s time to approach the personal productivity topic again. It has been too long. As you may know, I am a follower of Getting Things Done developed by David Allen and detailed in his book Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress Free Productivity.
I also use the Nozbe app to implement GTD. I know that if your tool is too awkward to use, you won’t use it. Works in automation, works in personal productivity. (affiliate link)
So you have your goals; you have your personal vision; you have projects; it boils down to next actions.
But beyond these things, what is really important these days?
I ran across this article on Medium by David Kadavy who is asking the deeper questions—what is really going to differentiate me from my peers and keep me active in the future. He postulates that even knowledge work is threatened by technology, so productivity needs to ramp up another notch or two.
He starts, “It’s not that GTD isn’t still a powerful tool for figuring out how to, well, get things done. It’s that the criteria for what should be done is more stringent than ever. Yes, books like The 4-Hour Work Week and Essentialism have helped us recognize the power of cutting through the noise to focus on the things that will bring us the most impact with the least effort. And it’s true that the ability to prioritize Deep Work will give you an edge over peers who are playing Candy Crush and checking their email every 5.45 minutes.”
“But there’s a realm beyond all of this. As jobs become automated, what remains of “work” will move up Maslow’s hierarchy. The success of the elite worker will depend upon that person’s ability not to get things done, but to have breakthroughs — to use access to knowledge and automation to deliver explosive ideas. To do that which only a human can do. Think Zero to One — the idea that incrementalism holds us back from paradigm-shifting innovation—but for your own career.”
He is on to something. This may not be new. I remember Peter Drucker from 30 years ago talking about doing the right thing rather than doing things right. And certainly creativity is something that sets humans apart from other mammals.
So, how do we get creative? It is more of a discipline of habitually doing things rather than praying for “bolts from the blue.”
- Try reading every day
- Read things from disciplines far outside the one you’re working in
- Every morning sit down with a notepad, write a question or problem, then list 20 ideas
- Practice asking questions—developing questions is more important than having answers
One last thought—as engineers and manufacturing leaders, what are we doing to make the world a better place? What are we doing to help people’s work better rather than simply trying to replace workers?
