Quality and Innovation

A couple days ago, Sonia Simone presented an article entitled “Four Old-School Reasons Why You Can Thrive in this Recession”. The general philosophy of her insights is straightforward:

It’s impossible to really see massive change when we’re still in the middle of it. But there are a handful of things you can bank on. One of them is that human nature doesn’t fundamentally change, even though the environment can change radically… So it might be time to think about the ancient traits that have helped entrepreneurs since the dawn of history, and how they relate to the emerging 21st-century economy.

She presents four notions: self-reliance, great ideas, “the village is your customer”, and “it’s in your DNA”. The one I want to focus on is #3 (if you want to read about the others, please visit the full article). When the village is your customer, Simone notes, quality becomes the focal element of the production and customer service processes. Hundreds of years ago, and into the early decades of the 20th century, people knew their neighbors in the community who made the products and provided the services. Personal relationships would form between you and your baker, your pharmacist, your doctor, your grocer, and so on. If your grocer sold you rotten food, for example, he would violate a trust relationship that you had established over a long period of time. Not only would breaking this trust hurt his business, but it might hurt his feelings too if you shared your discontent with your neighbors or gave him a dirty look while walking down the street.

But times changed remarkably. By the late 20th century, production, consumption and service had all become anonymous – the guy who services your car is probably not someone you know personally, nor is your mailman a personal friend. As a result, less personal impetus to provide high quality translated into an organizational imperative to deliver high quality. Without the driving force from within to provide excellent products and services, the company would naturally become the enforcer of high quality. (And without this enforcement, well, it would be a roll of the dice whether you got high quality products and services or not.)

Now fast forward to 2009 and the Web 2.0 world:

the village is back. If we blow it, customers publicly rap on our window (with social media, blogs or Twitter) and give us a piece of their mind.

Once again, our reputation and our products are one and the same. What we create doesn’t have to be perfect, but it does have to show that we give a damn.

The inconvenient part is that the village isn’t stuck with you. If your baguette isn’t great, your customer can FedEx something from an artisanal bakery in Napa or Madison or Boca Raton.

The cool part, though, is that if you make something handmade (even if it’s delivered in pixels), personal, and/or magnificently useful, your village can and will find you. Whether you make homespun yarn or an interactive course on how to start a dog-walking business, your product can find its own profitable village of happy customers.

On a related note, my next door neighbor is a dentist. She’s been trying to get me to sign up as a patient at her office for a while, but I’m nervous (not because I don’t like or trust her,which I do, but because she’s a dentist). Every time she asks me when I’m going to make an appointment, and I nervously shirk, her response is usually pretty consistent: “Do you really think I’m going to hurt you, knowing that I have to look at you every day across the yard?”

The personal relationship is a driver for providing high quality. How can we make personal relationships a component of a quality-driven strategy?

Ryan Adams (@RyanSAdams; Blog) tweeted about another blog post this morning entitled “Looking for Yes” by Seth Godin. Ryan suggested that perhaps this is the reason, as described by Godin, that Obama got elected:

I don’t think it should matter whether or not you’re trying to make a profit. If you’re out to provide a service, or organized to deliver a product, then look for a yes. At every interaction.

Salesmen know to look for a small yes, and then pursue it aggressively to get a big yes. Kids know that to get a yes from a parent, a good strategy can be to find a similar situation that will get a yes, and then to make the comparison. Kids and salesmen want that yes to happen, so they’re willing to work on it – and think about what they want from as many different angles as it will take to win over the other party! This is the ultimate mode of “thinking out of the box” because it is so genuinely motivated by a person’s desire to accomplish something. So why is it so easy to revert to an objectionist attitude, particularly in the workplace?

I hear these kinds of phrases daily: “That will never work.” “It’s too complicated.” “People don’t want that.” “It can’t be done.” “It works the way we do it now, so why change it?” How will you know it doesn’t work unless you try? The naysayers may be right – that something can’t be done – but they’re missing the underlying dynamic. It can’t be done under the same assumptions that we’re using today. You have to change your assumptions to see new ways of doing things. You have to explore your rationale for doing those things in the first place.

Prahalad’s Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid presents some striking stories of finding innovation by applying this attitude. I strongly encourage everyone to read his Strategy+Business article from 2002. The intro the the article is revealing, and hopefully enough to get you interested in how this “looking for yes” attitude can help you in your work:

Low-income markets present a prodigious opportunity for the world’s wealthiest companies – to seek their fortunes and bring prosperity to the aspiring poor.

This vision requires challenging deeply rooted assumptions in culture and in business, and aggressively seeking ways to make impossible product development cases work. “Looking for yes” is a productive attitude in general, and particularly if you are working on quality improvement or increasing innovation. Who finds opportunities? The people who have open minds, and either actively look for the opportunities, or are open to those opportunities coming their way. Who doesn’t find opportunities? Anyone who doesn’t look.

(Side note: now that my senses have been “turned on” to discrete event simulation, I’m seeing it all over the place – even in books on my own bookshelf. Why didn’t I ever notice that before?)