Getting the Right Things Done in a Digital World

Pascal Dennis, co-author of (Harnessing Digital Disruption)

My career has been a happy & lucky journey of discovery. In the early 1990s, I was a young chemical engineer & aspiring manager absorbed with the management gurus of the 20th century. In the West, Deming, Juran, Peter Drucker; in the East, Shingo, Ohno, Kano and the rest. I believed that if I could absorb this ‘system of profound knowledge’ (Deming’s phrase), I’d have a gift for life: the ability to create Value in any endeavour. When I joined Toyota, in my mind, the world’s greatest university, my learning accelerated. I felt like a kid in a martial arts movie.

By the early 2000s, I felt confident enough to start an advisory business with like-minded people. We began in manufacturing, our home industry. With time we migrated into aerospace, consumer goods, financial services, Health Care…, in each case translating the profound methods we’d learned.

We worked with fine people & companies and got to explore our miraculous world. But about ten years ago, something began to nag at me. I sensed a complacency in myself & my community. Did we really have all the answers? Was OpEx/Lean really the key to the kingdom?

If so, why was everybody talking about Tech startups and places like Silicon Valley & Singapore. Why were companies like Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple (GAFA), and Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent and Xiaomi (BATX) so valuable, and so famous? Their business valuations exceeded those of the great industrial companies. Toyota, Honeywell, P & G etc. were still great, but something fundamental had changed.

I began to explore the innovation hot spots and the start-up scene. I became acquainted with the work of people like Clay Christensen, Steve Blank, and Alex Osterwalder. I began to develop a basic grasp of Design Thinking, Agile, Lean Experimentation (aka Lean Startup), and Growth Hacking. I quickly realized that these methods share core principles with OpEx/Lean. But Innovation methods & mindsets had evolved in a different direction, because the job to be done was different. Innovation methods were aimed at creating something new - new customer journeys, offerings, and even new business models. The job to be done of OpEx/Lean, by contrast, is to protect the existing company.

And then, one morning in late 2016, I got an extraordinary call from a French banker and innovator named Laurent Simon, who was waiting out a delay in a Moroccan airport. "I like your books,” he said. “Shall we write one together?"

We quickly realized we were simpatico and agreed to work together. I would teach Laurent what I knew, and Laurent would teach me what he knew. And so began the second great learning journey of my charmed career. 

Laurent lived in hot humid Singapore, and I in cold, windy Toronto. Our first meeting was in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa, and that’s where we had our first of many long ‘walk & talks’, which we’ve sustained since then.

I began to visit Singapore regularly and to participate in Innovations sprints led by Laurent. It was a steep learning curve, but it was fun. INSEAD business school has a Singapore campus, which became our home base. In fact, I enrolled and became an INSEAD alumnus.

Singapore’s iconic Marina Bay Sands Hotel – the roof top bar figures prominently in our book!

With time, we built a body of knowledge, and practice. Then we published a book called Harnessing Digital Disruption, a business novel whose setting is a major international bank. ‘HDD’ crystallizes our body of knowledge. 

Here is a summary of what I have learned, and what I believe it means for OpEx/Lean and Innovation professionals, and for progressive organizations around the world. In the months to come, I’ll delve into each of these in detail: 

1. It's no longer enough to Protect the Core business with OpEx/Lean methods, you must also ignite new growth using Digital methods. Prosperity and growth, therefore, will go to the ambidextrous. 
2. Ambidexterity means operating in two very different worlds - worlds that were first described 2400 years ago by Aristotle. Methods & mindsets learned in one world, may not apply in the other. 
3. OpEx/Lean lay the foundation for Igniting new Growth – but is not sufficient. 
4. Innovation begins not with technology, but with the customer. Thus, Harnessing Digital Disruption begins & ends with the CEO and his most important customer, looking out on the Andaman Sea. 
5. Innovation entails the ability to create a) better Customer Journeys, b) new Customer Journeys, and c) new offerings & even new businesses. Laurent Simon and I have developed the corresponding concept of the ‘Innovation Tree’. 
6. The 'front of the house' (i.e. Design, Marketing, Sales) & 'back of the house' (Production, Supply Chain, Distribution) do not understand each other. Result: a Bermuda Triangle of waste. 
7. Protecting the Core and Igniting New Growth are both difficult, but the former is harder and is usually the constraint.
   

What does it mean for business Leaders and for OpEx and Innovation professionals? 

Mastering OpEx/Lean fundamentals is not enough. We must also understand the methods & mindset that underlie new Growth. When confronting a business challenge, leaders must ask: Am I in the world of Protecting the Core, or the world of Igniting new Growth? What methods & mindset apply here? How do I best support and motivate this team? 

The future belongs to the ambidextrous.

Best wishes,

Pascal Dennis

E: pascal.dennis@leansystems.org

PS To learn more about my Strategy Execution program, Getting the Right Things Done in a Digital World, feel free to drop me a line.




In case you missed our last few blogs... please feel free to have another look…

Igniting New Growth - My Improbable Journey, Part 2
Igniting New Growth - My Improbable Journey, Part 1
Year-End: Why Is Reflection So Difficult?
What is a Good Life?

Igniting New Growth - My Improbable Journey, Part 1

Pascal Dennis, co-author of (Harnessing Digital Disruption)

Singapore, Toronto, San Francisco, Bangkok, KwaZulu-Natal, Auckland - all these are part of my improbable journey these past eight years. It all began with a delayed flight out of a Moroccan airport. It was the summer of 2017. I was sitting in the backyard with my wife, Pamela.

Laurent Simon, who would become my friend & business partner, was the one in Morrocco. He decided to send a LinkedIn note.

‘I like your books,’ he said. ‘We should write one together…”

‘About what?’ I asked.

“Harnessing digital disruption…”

Laurent Simon in San Francisco

As we chatted, I checked out Laurent’s LinkedIn profile: INSEAD business school, and impressive achievements in the cosmetics industry, management consulting & financial services. Head of Innovation leader at a major international bank. A smart guy.

‘I’m having a drink with my wife,’ I told him. ‘Maybe we can chat some more next week.’

And thus began our weekly WhatsApp calls. Laurent described his innovation work in the Asia Pacific region. I described my adventures in manufacturing, consumer goods, and health care. And the fun & business results my team & I had enjoyed working with a marvelous financial service company. Each week I would summarize what I’d learned in a mind map, which became part of our body of knowledge.

Laurent and I were natural disruptors, simpatico both professionally and temperamentally. I loved being a Strategy sherpa and mentor to senior leaders. But I was also a composer & leader of the Crazy Angels band. Laurent was a Renaissance man who swam effortlessly in multiple languages and cultures.

Pascal Dennis in San Francisco

Laurent lived in Singapore; I lived in Toronto. His environment was heat, humidity and rain. Mine was snow, ice and the cold wind sweeping down from Hudson’s Bay. We finally met in person in the fall of 2017 at a conference in Kwazulu-Natal, South Africa, where I was giving a talk. And that’s where we added another routine – long walks during which we would ‘shoot the breeze’. Soon after we began to have regular meetings in Singapore, Toronto and places in between.

We had both spent the previous decade helping companies transform their work, people and management systems. We’d both seen the power of the so-called Lean management system – the methods and mindset underlying the Toyota Production System. We understood that Lean represented a series of revolutions that had ‘changed the world’:

• Quality in the process – the realization that all work comprises a system of activities and information, and that the value chain will only work if each step was done right the first time
• Flow – understanding demand, capacity and the process in great detail; applying the laws of so-called production physics to maximize flow and minimize lead time and cost
• Continuous improvement – the realization that virtually nothing in the work is ‘fixed’, and that things like working content, sequence, layout, timing are all malleable and can be endlessly improved
• Leadership – the art of defining, deploying and executing a great aspiration in accord with a concise winning logic; how to build a learning infrastructure to supports, develops and deeply engages people
• ‘Customer in’ mentality – putting oneself in the customer’s shoes, and deeply understanding their needs and wants
• Strategy and decision-making – how strategy is developed and implemented; how we align and motivate disparate groups of people in complex organizations toward a shared Aspiration; how we make problems visible and deploy remedies; how we overcome the thorny problems of governance.

But Laurent and I differed on a critical point. He believed that Lean is essentially about protecting your core business, and not about igniting new growth. I disagreed: ‘Lean is also a growth strategy,’ I argued. It took a while, but I came around to Laurent’s point of view. Lean is necessary, but not sufficient. If it was, why were the business valuations of GAFA - Google, Amazon, Facebook (Meta) and Apple – higher than those the great industrial companies I revered? Had Toyota, Honeywell, Proctor & Gamble and the like lost their mojo? Certainly not – the great industrials were as strong as ever. Something was happening, and I was determined to find out what it was.

Best wishes,

Pascal Dennis




In case you missed our last few blogs... please feel free to have another look…

Year-End: Why Is Reflection So Difficult?
What is a Good Life?
All Systems Must Support Humanity – Including Lean
To Learn Corporate Strategy, Study the Military Masters