Real-time Collaborative Architectural Modeling Enhances Complex Product Development

Posted on September 24, 2009 by ellendnaylor

Bryan Moser spoke to our Denver PDMA (Product development Management Association) chapter about the value of models such as the one his company, Global Project Design (GPD) developed  to forecast, optimize, allocate and measure coordination in complex product development projects. These models take into account different cultures, time zones, language barriers, and dispersed decision-making. They also incorporate engineering behavior among different cultures based on their typical interaction.

Today there is pressure to succeed in a dramatically concurrent fashion, which increases the risk of rework, quality and design. The thinning of the workforce affects production as does the loss of deep knowledge and connection from workers who have been laid off or who have retired. Another finding in these complex product development initiatives is that the cost of coordination is high and is on average 30%-35% of the time consumed.

Bryan walked us through the example of the Sikorsky S92 helicopter product development project. Their biggest concern was defending their intellectual property as they selected companies in various countries to work as an integrated team. The team was spread across the globe in countries such as Brazil, Taiwan, Spain, China and Japan, and included big company names such as Embraer of Brazil and Taiwan Aerospace, for example. Sikorsky USA was the decision-making company.

Sikorsky had predicted that it would take 5 years from product spec to prototype development. It took 9 years, and GPD’s model prediction was only off by 2 months from the actual time. Sikorsky hadn’t taken into account the dynamics that would add considerable time to product development, such as coordination, culture, language, time zones, and a lot of dead time that one team would experience if another was late in delivery, for example.

We can’t turn the clock back on product development since the expertise for various segments of complex product development is best served by a global team. However, putting on a nationalist hat, previously teams all worked for one company, in similar time zones and had strong connection and communication since they all spoke the same language, and could develop products more expeditiously from having worked together extensively over the years. This is lost in these complex product development projects where people who have never worked together, are thrust together to develop a product.

This real time collaborative model takes into account the various languages and points of view, and the time needed to build relationships with people who have never worked together before.

One of the key findings for these complex projects is that there is a fair amount of wasted time as work time averages:

~54% Direct Work
~30% Coordination
~16% Less Useful Time

The key takeaway is that coordination is often way underestimated in these complex product development projects across multiple countries. It’s better to run the model earlier in the process, so as to re-schedule or re-work pieces to reduce the less productive coordination time. GPD’s model is agent based on simulation models about how teams make choices and includes the last 30-40 years of research of behaviors in engineering work.

In conclusion, product development professionals face:

A decline in judgment based on experience alone. Traditional centralized and detailed plans ignore and misrepresent the complexity of projects.

Coordination – Interaction of teams to satisfy dependence across subsystems can be 35% of the effort, cost and duration of these development projects.

Choosing the best coordination architecture can lead to a 20% improvement in time/cost performance and will improve your competitiveness! Judgment through situation awareness is also gained.

Filed under: communication, competitiveness, connection, Denver, product development | Comments Off on Real-time Collaborative Architectural Modeling Enhances Complex Product Development

Are Associations Going the Way of Print Media?: Part II

Posted on September 22, 2009 by ellendnaylor

Association chapters, the grass roots of associations, are often the step-children in the association world since they don’t produce revenue, and many don’t even break even. I think that is particularly true using the traditional model, especially if the association centrally controls chapters versus letting them run themselves.

In today’s world the high cost of in-person chapter meetings has resulted in much lower attendance. Chapter leadership often runs in-person meetings using the same format in the same location year after year. We are certainly guilty of that in our Denver SCIP (Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals) chapter, which I really hadn’t thought about until I did the research to analyze the location of our members. About half of us work in Boulder and the Northern Denver suburbs, so are not keen on trekking into Denver where we hold our meetings. We have never hosted a Boulder meeting, and then again none of our Boulder members has volunteered to host. They probably didn’t realize that half of us are there!

Recently a few of us put our heads together to start adapting our chapter meeting venue to the reality of today’s dispersed and busy workforce. We are co-hosting a meeting with the Denver APMP (Association of Proposal Management Professionals) chapter on Sept. 25 at 3 p.m. where people will have 3 choices for connection:

1. In person business meeting: 3:00 – 4:30 pm
Ballard Spahr, LLP
1225 17th Street, Suite 2300 Denver, CO  80202
Directions:  http://maps.google.com/maps?hl=en&tab=wl
Cost:  $10 (pay on-site or register through SCIP)

2. Webinar Business Meeting: 3:00 – 4:30 p.m.
Dimdim Webinar: RSVP apmp.colorado@gmail.com, and include name, SCIP/APMP member or guest and David Shipley will email you instructions from Dimdim.
Cost: None

3. Social Meeting: 4:40 p.m. – 6:00 p.m. (or later…)
Location: Prime Bar
1515 Arapahoe Street Denver, CO  80202
(One block away from Ballard Spahr) RSVP: renaylor at wispertel.net
Cost: You pay for your drinks & snacks

The presentation “From CI to the Opportunity: Practical Steps to Winning!”
addresses the competitive intelligence (CI) process and how to use CI to get to the “First Place”—that is winning more business!

Folks are invited to attend any of these venues. If you don’t have time for the meeting, you can meet us at Prime Bar. We are hoping to engage our members by giving them more choices for connection, and the additional cross-pollination between SCIP and APMP members. Just in case you’re interested, here is the detail for things like registration, speakers, etc.

So what are you doing to engage participation and cooperation among your membership at the local association level? We’re considering a LinkedIn Group, a Ning group, or starting a Denver chapter within the already existing CI Ning group. We will Tweet on Twitter about our local meetings under #denverci. Our virtual space will provide 24/7 communication and we will help our members find work through job postings there too.

In the spirit of cooperative intelligence, I am forming a Denver group around intelligence collaboration to include people who are not full-time CI practitioners. For example your job might be in product management, sales, marketing, forecasting, strategic planning or mining information, but intelligence collection and analysis is part of your job. If you’re interested, please contact me at renaylor at wispertel.net and I’ll include you in our future events.

BTW, this is similar to the intelligence collaboration instigated by futurist Eric Garland  on our CI Ning which I invite you to join.

Filed under: communication, Competitive Intelligence, connection, cooperative, Cooperative Intelligence, Denver, leadership, LinkedIn, research, SCIP, Twitter | Comments Off on Are Associations Going the Way of Print Media?: Part II

Key Insights to Be a Better Leader in Today’s World

Posted on September 18, 2009 by ellendnaylor

leadershippanelists2009DenIn the spirit of cooperative intelligence I am sharing my takeaways from this workshop on leadership sponsored by Denver-based Sustainable Business Group, a leadership and management consulting firm led by Herb Rubenstein.

Wayne Nelson, Chief Strategist at Anderson Professional Systems Group kicked off the meeting with a discussion about emotional intelligence, telling us the 5 components of emotional intelligence: self awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy and social skill from Daniel Goleman’s book, Emotional Intelligence.

What I found even more interesting was his discussion about 6 leadership styles:

Coercive – Tight control over things. “Do what I tell you.”
Authoritative – Build the vision. “Get people to follow where you need to go.”
Affiliative – Promote harmony, cooperation. “Puts people first, tasks second.”
Democratic – Builds on group consensus. “So what do you think?”
Pacesetting – Intent on setting high performance standards. “Do as I do it.”
Coaching – Develop the team or individual for the future. “Try this: How can I support you?”

We all have a tendency towards a particular leadership style.  A good manager is flexible and uses the right style to be effective at the appropriate time. It’s also good to employ people whose styles you lack to keep balance in the workplace.

Jennifer Churchill of Opus Leadership Group focused on talent retention.

She suggests 3 key areas to promote talent retention:
1. Senior Management must be involved (acquisition/retention of top talent)
2. Conduct a gap analysis of your company’s talent to find what’s missing
3. Strong leaders attract and retain strong talent (management by example)
So know yourself and the kind of leader you are.

Kevin Asbjörnson, Founder and Principal Performing Artist of Inspire! Imagine! Innovate!  brought a global aspect to leadership. Music is a global language and inspires whole person leadership by getting us to use the right side of our brain and connect both sides of the brain to bring leadership balance and passion. One take-away for me was that Empathy is the foundation of emotional intelligence regardless of your culture. I had thought it was Self-Awareness. As a behind the scenes primary researcher I am an ‘off the chart’ empath, and don’t think of myself as a leader. I look forward to hearing and experiencing Kevin’s piano performance around leadership. Somehow we didn’t have room for a Yamaha at our session!

Inevitably, the topic of social networks came up in the context of emotional intelligence as people reach out for connection in cyberspace. I have the idea that social networks have taken off since the workplace has become lonely. Gone are the days when a product team meets in the company cafeteria. We work remotely from each other all too often with a lack of leadership and weak connection. We have this human need to connect and cooperate and help each other out. This is increasingly achieved through connections made via social networks!

I liked the saying that Herb shared with us, “Nobody cares what you know until they know you care.” That’s good to keep in mind when you’re connecting, whether through the old fashioned ways of in-person meetings, telephone and email; or the various forms of social networks such as LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. Keep that communication two-way and listen!

Filed under: communication, connection, cooperative, Cooperative Intelligence, Denver, emotional intelligence, leadership, LinkedIn, research, social networks, Twitter | Comments Off on Key Insights to Be a Better Leader in Today’s World

Tips on Setting up a Competitive Intelligence Process

Posted on September 16, 2009 by ellendnaylor

I was recently asked by a prospective client to summarize how I could help his company develop and implement a competitive intelligence process. While I tend to follow certain steps in setting up a CI process, I was taken aback since this company’s industry is such a specialized niche within financial services, and I am not a “one size fits all” consultant.

Here are some of the takeaways that apply to any industry:

Determine the most important areas to track and analyze or what we in competitive intelligence refer to as Key Intelligence Topics (KITs). You can’t focus on everything or you won’t do anything well. Within in that, focus on the most essential KIT immediately and make a big splash within your company. Your company executives and marketing people will have a lot of good ideas about KITs, but don’t just rely on them. Ask people in other functional areas so you gain balance and aren’t blindsided.

Don’t forget to market and position your CI initiative. Start by letting people know what CI is: what you do and don’t do and set up ethical boundaries. Nobody owes you anything in the busy workplace. Present CI in the context of what they do and how you can help them, and that will go a long way to gaining their cooperation. Create a logo so people can readily identify what you send them by its look, and share only quality stuff and not too often.

I think most companies are close to parity when it comes to conducting secondary research, that is monitoring competitors, market trends including and all the components of the STEEP analysis:

S=social
T=technological
E=economic
E=environmental
P=political

However, where excellent companies stand out is in connecting with people who are responsive both inside and outside their companies across a variety of disciplines. The initial challenge is to locate these connections, and then keep track of them as they move to different areas within your company, leave your company, or start at your company. It’s even more of a challenge to track your external contacts. I use both ACT!, a great contact database to keep track of my contacts, as well as Outlook.

If you establish cooperative relationships and disciplined communication with relevant people you will have a competitive advantage. You will keep your network informed and over time, those people you connect with will think to inform you when they find nuggets that they know you value.

Trade shows are often overlooked as a means to obtain competitive intelligence and so much more. Dig into your company’s trade show strategy and engage those who are attending to become collectors of CI. Sales is often conducting some form of win loss analysis, and is a great conduit to your customers, a great source of CI if recorded.

Lastly, don’t forget your competitors are collecting against you, which we call counterintelligence. Influence your company to take steps to protect your company’s important information like R&D, product development & intellectual property.

For lots more detail about setting up a CI process, I suggest you buy SCIP’s intelligence guide book, Starting a Competitive Intelligence Function.

Find out how we can work with you to develop a competitive intelligence program.

Win/Loss Analysis book gives you a process to learn why you’re losing business and how to keep more of it!

Receive our 6-page Win/Loss Cheat Sheets

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Filed under: communication, Competitive Intelligence, connection, cooperation, cooperative, win loss analysis | 1 Comment »

Gain Cooperative Intelligence through ‘Being There’

Posted on September 11, 2009 by ellendnaylor

UlladeStricker

Cooperative Leadership

‘Being There’ is what I think of when I think ‘cooperative leadership’. Offer colleagues the opportunity to lean on you, and learn how to lean on them. We often forget to ask people for their help in our anxiety to please and be helpful. Be specific with your request for help. This allows the other person to quickly judge if s/he can help you or refer you to someone else.

People with strong social capital are often cooperative leaders whose expertise, connections, opinions and contributions are respected by others. Social capital is not earned by a job title, but rather through the earned respect of others. In competitive intelligence social capital is valued, when positioning and communicating with fellow employees, especially executives. Remember it takes time to build those relationships, and sometimes we’re impatient to get respect before we’ve earned it.

Ulla describes another cooperative leadership practice. Take a stand confidently and refuse to bend in the face of criticism or opposition. Cooperative leaders “just do it” without a safety net. Ulla shares her experience of convincing a manager of the need for a program at a local educational institute, which she then created. She “did it” because she thought it needed doing.

Cooperative Connection

Work constantly to strengthen your networks. Always ask yourself, “Who else should be part of this conversation?”  Remember that people who could benefit from your knowledge need to learn about your expertise. Communicate in person or electronically with your peers and managers at work or by presenting at relevant meetings, trade shows or through teaching. Share your discoveries, experiences and opinions electronically through websites, blogs, social media or formal publications.

I love how Ulla ends her article by suggesting that you make it a priority to undertake actions and responsibilities that are above and beyond the call of duty. You can do this because you have others to lean on.

Ulla de Stricker, 2007 chair of SLA’s Leadership and Management Division, is a Toronto-based information and knowledge management consultant. She speaks regularly about career-related matters and writes about information and knowledge management on her blog. Her book, Business Cases for Info Pros: Here’s Why, Here’s How, was published in 2008 by Information Today, Inc. Here is a list of her publications. Contact Ulla.

Filed under: Competitive Intelligence, connection, cooperative, Cooperative Intelligence, leadership | Comments Off on Gain Cooperative Intelligence through ‘Being There’

Honoring Edward “Ted” Kennedy: Cooperative Statesman

Posted on September 5, 2009 by ellendnaylor

“Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country!” While this quote came from his older, brother, former President John F. Kennedy, I believe Ted Kennedy lived this quote for at least the 47 years that he was a senator from Massachusetts.

He was the epitome of cooperative leadership both in his personal and professional lives. I was moved by the personal account from Teddy Jr as he recounted his dad’s resolve as 12 year old TJ fell down a slick hill, having lost a leg to cancer. His father said, “I know you can do it. There is nothing that you can’t do. We’re going to climb that hill together, even if it takes us all day.”

As the youngest sibling in his family he developed emotional intelligence and patience that gave him great success in politics as he was a master in communication, bartering, persuasion and negotiation. Charles Campion recalls, “His greatest legacy was his own faith and unwavering beliefs. He followed his own compass, and regardless of the polls and even his own political vulnerabilities, he would never compromise or finesse on his principles.”

He battled for those who had weak representation among lobbyists championing civil rights, women’s rights, workers’ issues, immigration reform, health-care and education reform and the environment. He sponsored a long list of bills for these causes, and walked both sides of the aisle for their support. For example, it was no coincidence that President Bush called on Ted for support in passing the “No Child Left Behind” education bill. Only weeks after his brain tumor was diagnosed, he left his hospital bed to vote for legislation blocking deep cuts in Medicare payments to doctors.

He was incredibly connected on so many fronts, and there were high expectations of his involvement ranging from the Institute of Politics at Harvard’s JFK School of Government, his family, his staffers, his Senatorial initiatives and so much more…

I also appreciate his strong connection with the public and the issues affecting our nation, and attribute this to his hiring an incredible staff over his 47 years as a senator. I often think it was his experience with pain and suffering and the mistakes he made along the way—that kept him in touch—empathetic to other’s plights and connected to the public and to his family. I also believe his strong Catholic faith contributed to his listening and caring, and his tireless efforts to support issues he thought were important with conviction.

I love how he was a cooperative communicator right to the end of his life. During his final illness he finished writing True Compass (to be published on September 14), which he worked closely with Pulitzer Prize winner Ron Powers to assemble. In this book, he makes a strong and personal plea for health-care reform, the culmination of his life’s work.

President Obama called Ted Kennedy, the “greatest senator of our time.” He leaves behind a legacy that few in public life will ever achieve. On the Labor Day weekend, I salute you Edward Kennedy, a man who labored hard and with integrity as a champion of the poor, downtrodden and dispossessed.

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Will Associations Go the Way of Print Media?

Posted on August 31, 2009 by ellendnaylor

SCIP just announced that its formal merger was consummated with Frost & Sullivan’s Institute. This merger is a sign of the times: it’s hard for associations to survive in this tough economic climate. But I think it’s more than that: the association model is changing not just due to competition from other associations, but for people’s time and easy access to connections formerly made through associations via social media.

Historically associations mailed trade journals and relevant news to the membership; and conducted in-person events such as conferences, educational programs and city chapter meetings. Member volunteer time was crucial to keeping costs down and content up, and still is. The association staff needed to be sensitive to the association’s industry, but association management was the key skill required.

Today the transaction cost of in-person meetings has escalated as people are stretched to do more with less, and can’t get away from work as easily. They can also find relevant information and connections especially through social networks liked LinkedIn, Twitter and industry formed Nings. These changes are sorely felt by associations in reduced attendance at annual conferences and chapter meetings. Annual conference revenues are the bread and butter of most associations. Like other associations, most SCIP chapters record poor attendance. The more progressive include complementary associations such as Robert Bugai, SCIP’s NJ Chapter Chair who hosts semi-annual networking meetings with 10 other organizations. The Denver chapter of the Association of Corporate Growth attracts strong attendance. It has local association support, an excellent PR machine and strong word of mouth fuelling intense interest. It is known to offer some of the best networking connections in the Denver metro.

SCIP has responded by offering fee-based Webinars and an on-line news bulletin, which contains a “New & Notable” section by Bonnie Hohhof, worth the price of membership for those who take the time to read it!  However, all major educational programs are in-person.

I belong to AIIP (Association of Independent Information Professionals) which hosts a listserv (AIIP-L Discussion List), alone worth the price of membership. Individual members ask questions of each other, share information and words of encouragement—an excellent, ongoing form of connection. AIIP’s member directory is public and searchable. The publicity is fuelled by strong word of mouth and through such journals as FUMSI, a portion of which is edited by Marcy Phelps, current President of AIIP. AIIP actively exhibits at complementary association’s conferences such as SLA and SCIP. The booth is staffed by volunteers and paid for through reciprocal exhibition at AIIP’s annual conference. Webinars, free to members, are given by members. AIIP volunteers often ask other members how the association can serve them better. I predict this model will survive these tough times since it is evolving according to the needs of its members through good two-way communication.

Associations need to adapt their model to their membership in these changing times since the old value proposition won’t work. Here are a few ideas to consider:

1. Multiple, affordable means to connect members electronically
2. Free services that are interactive, like Webinars
3. Continuous PR blasts about the profession’s benefits to both users and providers of that association’s constituency
4. Strong industry knowledge by association staff (like Bonnie Hohhof at SCIP)
5. Steady corporate and service provider sponsorship (financial and time)
6. Cooperative affiliation with complementary associations or industry associations which value your association’s skill

As a long-time SCIP member, I hope that the Frost & Sullivan Institute’s marketing machine and reach extends SCIP and the competitive intelligence discipline to be more recognized and valued by those who use competitive intelligence in its many forms.

Filed under: AIIP, communication, Competitive Intelligence, connection, cooperative, LinkedIn, SCIP, social networks, Twitter | 7 Comments »

How a Good Relationship between Marketing & R&D Improves Product Development

Posted on August 5, 2009 by ellendnaylor

When Marketing and R&D are truly focused on understanding and acting on customer needs, it makes both of their jobs easier and their results more productive! This is a powerful competitive weapon since this is not the case at many companies.

R&D employees complain that Marketers provide weak data, that they’re most useful in developing launch plans rather than in developing new products. Meanwhile Marketing employees perceive that R&D doesn’t involve marketing early enough in the product development process. R&D will take credit for successful products while blaming marketing when a product doesn’t sell.  Does this sound familiar?

But the point is that neither function will reach its full potential without the cooperation of the other! So here are some tippers to encourage cooperative behavior:

R&D and Marketing need to work together.  Perhaps R&D can be masters of the art of Possibility while Marketing can master the art of the Possible–that is what customers need and are willing to pay for.  It helps to boost awareness of each other’s functions and their value within the company.  Another idea is to get R&D to quantify the value of their work by how it will help the customer. Encourage Marketing to be more technically aware so as to appreciate R&D’s value to the company.

When Marketing has too much power, it stifles the creativity of engineers, so product advances may only be incremental  On the other hand when R&D has too much clout, Marketing is only called in at the end of the product development process, when it’s time to develop a launch plan.  Products might get developed that the customer will never buy!

Other ways to get Marketing and R&D to cooperate is to create cross-functional teams to discover unmet customer needs.  This forces people to experience each others’ contributions and to forge connections and communication.

A major oil company forces R&D to prepare its reports for Marketing and Sales based on how the new technologies will help customers.  Thus R&D has to explain all the critical benefits in layman’s terms.

Focus on the customer. Get both sides to ask good questions to customers. Observe and engage with customers to generate reliable, robust marketing insight. Let engineers spend time with current and potential customers.

Companies that bring R&D and Marketing together around what really matters to their customers will build a strong competitive company!

Check out an earlier blog on how teaching Sales elicitation skills–that is knowledge acquisition through conversation, rather than direct questions–will improve a company’s competitive intelligence, product development, and customer intelligence. This is also a good way to get Marketing, Sales, Product Developers and R&D to connect. They have to so that Sales knows and understands the key questions they need to get answered by their customers.

What behaviors have helped your company get marketing, R&D and product developers to communicate constructively?

This blog contains excerpts from “Playing Well with Others,” a Wall Street Journal article by Phil Kotler,  Robert C.Wolcott and Suj Chandrasekhar.

Win/Loss Analysis book gives you a process to learn why you’re losing business and how to keep more of it!

Receive our 6-page Win/Loss Cheat Sheets

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Filed under: communication, Competitive Intelligence, connection, cooperation, cooperative, Elicitation | 2 Comments »

Improve Your Competitiveness: Adopt Technology & Pharmacology to Boost Intelligence

Posted on July 22, 2009 by ellendnaylor

I read “Get Smart” without any reference to Maxwell Smart by Jamais Cascio in the July/Aug Atlantic Online magazine. The focus of the article was on how technology is making us smarter.  Those who don’t take advantage of technology and pharmacology might be at a competitive disadvantage, increasingly so in the future.

We are still biased towards near-term solutions and winners will need to plan for and understand long-term risks.  Today we are getting smarter through what Jamais describes as intelligence augmentation.

While Nicholas Carr (“Is Google Making Us Stupid“) argues that the Internet with its information dense, hyperlink-richness makes it harder for us to engage in deep, relaxed contemplation, Steven Johnson (Everything Bad is Good), argues that the increasing complexity of the media we engage with, is making us smarter. With this intelligence, we are able to make connections and see patterns in order to avoid being overwhelmed by this information glut.

As a competitive intelligence professional, I am expected to uncover patterns to predict where a competitor, the market or technology is going, so ” getting smarter” really resonates, especially from the information glut, never mind the increased connections due to social networks.

What’s exciting about the future is how tools for managing information overload are being developed. Fluid intelligence, the ability to find meaning in confusion and solve new problems, independent of this knowledge, is what competitive intelligence professionals do today. Just imagine how much more powerful we’ll be in the future.

When I interviewed some competitive technical intelligence (CTI) experts for my chapter in CI Foundation’s Competitive Technical Intelligence, these experts were already using some great visualization tools to harness the tons of information they must process to compete in the pharmaceutical and chemical industries, for example. Several experts cited Eastport Analytics as a resource to help CTI managers select the right software tools to support their needs for monitoring, mapping and analyzing the competitive marketplace. Eastport Analytics offers 450 software tools and stays informed with all the latest software changes, upgrades and new providers.

Jamais writes about the development of attention filters or focus assistants which would focus our attention on messages that are important to us, based on learning what kinds of messages we are reading and which we discard through the various media we subscribe to. We would move from a world of “continuous partial attention” to one of “continuous augmented awareness,” as the messages we don’t care about would be faded on our display screen, for example. As our capacity to provide that filter becomes faster and richer, it becomes akin to collaborative intuition.

Pharmacology can also help enhance the brain. Modafinil, originally developed to keep people alert for an extended period of time like 30 hours, also provides cognitive enhancements, such as pattern recognition, spatial planning and sharpens focus and alertness. There are other brain boosting drugs, but the point is that people seeking competitive advantage may include brain drugs to improve their competitiveness.

The article also goes into the development of an artificial mind which would continue to modify itself to get smarter. That seems pretty far out to me.

However, I agree with the conclusions of the article that by 2030, we’ll live in a world where sophisticated foresight, detailed analysis and insight and augmented awareness will be commonplace. Many professionals will use simulation and modeling in their daily work as the supporting technology will be readily available.

While cultures may adopt these technologies differently, hopefully our global diversity will help us be cooperative and cope with the various world dangers such as the climate crisis, energy shortage, growing population density, global hunger, global healthcare and the spread of pandemics, which will require the greatest possible insight, creativity and innovation.

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Deloitte Shift Index Findings: Global Collaboration Will Improve Business Competitiveness

Posted on July 15, 2009 by ellendnaylor

The Deloitte Center for the Edge recently got my attention with its findings that competition is intensifying globally with a US return on assets dropping consistently across 15 different industries by 75% over the last 40 years!

DeloitteFirmPerformance1965-2008

Some other key findings: 

US competitive intensity has more than doubled during the last 40 years. The “topple rate” at which big companies lose their leadership positions, has more than doubled, suggesting that “winners” have increasingly precarious positions. Customers appear to be gaining and using power as reflected in increasing customer disloyalty. 

The exponentially advancing price/performance capability of computing, storage and bandwidth is driving an adoption rate for our new “digital infrastructure,” that is two to five times faster than previous infrastructures, such as electricity and telephone networks.

The Shift Index consists of 3 indices: Foundation, Flow and Impact, plus 25 other metrics that together quantify the stock, pace and implications for change. Given that competition is intensifying, here are some ways organizations might improve their performance.

1. Recognize the Foundation Wave: The business landscape has changed through the spread of the digital infrastructure and this has been reinforced by long term public policy that shifts towards economic liberalization. Changes in Foundations tend to reduce barriers to entry and movement, leading to a doubling of competitive intensity.

2. The Flow Wave looks at drivers of performance shaped by digital infrastructure. This wave looks at the flows of knowledge, capital, and talent enabled by foundational advances. Knowledge flows are the key to improving performance. This is a key area where many conventional businesses fail as they are too insular and have developed serious blindspots. This is the opposite of “Command and Control” leadership.

3. The Impact Wave comes last, as it will take time for companies to participate in and harness knowledge flows leading to improved performance and more innovation.

Successful firms will shift from what’s worked in the past, scalable efficiency to scalable learning. 

This is a huge shift for most large US companies, and many of them are failing due to their closed nature, lack of flexibility and poor use of technology to gallop past competitors and collaborate with suppliers, customers and many other sources to develop innovative products. 

Think Apple Computer when you think about a successful company by these “Shift Index” standards.  Apple has kept its entrepreneurial magic largely by reaching out and being innovative in product development, and using all the technology, including social networks to continue expanding its connection to knowledge. This is a company that knows its customer. It’s no coincidence that Apple customers enjoy the experience of using its products. Who doesn’t just love their iPhone!

The conclusions and details of this study go far beyond what I can cover in a blog.  Check it out. I think a lot of what it preaches is what good competitive intelligence has been preaching for YEARS.  Keep reaching out and connecting both internally and externally and build on the intelligence you gather. Stay connected with people through all the means technology allows you to reach them. Isn’t this the foundation of a good early warning system?

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