Having seen An Inconvenient Truth over the weekend, and with the torrential floods over in the UK this last week, coming across this article entitled "Resilience" rang a bell. It talks about the importance of diversity/redundancy (whether you look at it from an assets standpoint or an efficiency standpoint) in an ecological system. Taking the example of the collapse of bee colonies, he points to the decreasing gene pool available in our mass-market food production agromodels, the decreasing gene pool in the fauna and flora that makes up the energy pyramid of raw to processed food, and our decreasing ability to limit antigens/pathogens making their way from monoculture production to our dinner plate.
Talking to Eriko over the weekend about the application of this to business, I remembered reading about the pros and cons of Six Sigma efficiency versus creative innovation in a McKinsey Quarterly article, or maybe on this old BusinessWeek article on GE CEO Immelt and his new creativity thing... I can't remember which for sure.
Six Sigma weeds out the causes of failure, while innovation embraces failure as a rule. When you're looking for something out of the box, don't look at Six Sigma. When you're looking at operational efficiency, don't reach for brainstorming and venture businesses.
At the time, I suggested a new company model that has a marketing and strategy process that is creativity-centric and an execution half that is process efficiency-centric. Because efficiency isn't going anywhere any time soon, just efficiency doesn't get you anywhere if you don't think laterally when competition heats up.
A good example that is one of Mike's favorites he always bugs me with: I was showing off my yachting prowess to GF down South of Tokyo in Zushi, out in the bay. Balmy sunshine, calm seas, nice breeze, so far so good. Then suddenly it gets cloudy, wind picks up and changes direction every few minutes, the sea gets choppy and then the rudder handle breaks. You're just outside the bay area, not enough to paddle back, but if you don't move you'll be carried out further into the bay by the slow currents tugging at the vessel. Solution? Lashed the two components of the rudder handle together with spare elastic band to simulate the handle, then steadied the handle with right hand and coerced the ship's sails slowly back to the harbour with the left. Get too much wind, the vessel speeds up, do one zigzag in the wrong direction and the elastic goes then you're in trouble. Catch too much slack and you may enter the "dead zone", where each time you try to push your boat left or right to get some wind, the wind pushes you back to the area where you can't catch any.
Eventually, I got back to the harbour, and only told GF that we were heading back early, she told me later that nothing seemed out of place, but I was scared out of my wits that any one thing could kick this plan out and we'd be left waving around for help. Out-of-the box and in-the-box definitely go hand in hand.
Maybe we need to build an industrial system that allows for more of the former while holding on to the knowledge of the latter. One never goes without the other.
--Mandali
