Bill Taylor, Co-Founder of Fast Company will discuss 'Disruptive Technology and Innovation' at RAPID + TCT.
At Detroit’s Cobo Center on May 21st, Bill Taylor, Co-Founder of Fast Company and esteemed author, will open the RAPID + TCT keynote sessions with a talk on Disruptive Technology and Innovation.
Ahead of his talk, Head of Content, Daniel O’Connor (DOC) discussed with Bill Taylor (BT), how manufacturing companies can gear up for change. Here is an extract from that conversation.
DOC: Much of your work is about how businesses deal with change, additive manufacturing (AM) has the power to be transformational particularly for supply chains, how can organisations stay agile so as not to be caught out by technological leaps?
BT: My first piece of advice would be to recognise that part of life in any organisation, whether you're a large manufacturing company or smaller, more nimble independent, is to recognise as a leader that the more things change the more our worries and resistance to change remains the same. If you're a leader looking to adopt new technologies to change your own production processes or to become an agent of change and disruption in a broader supply chain, you have to first intellectually recognise the natural instinctive resistance to change many of your employees and business partners have. Often people will talk about change but that is very different than embracing it, championing it and driving it.
The first thing - before you get down to technologies or process redesign - that is required is a flip in mindset; a transformation of how you and your colleagues look at the world. There has to be a recognition that we're finally in a situation where 'playing it safe' really has become the most dangerous course of all. Change finally begins to happen when people at all levels of an organisation recognise that the perceived risk of trying something new is actually much less than the cost of desperately clinging to what has worked in the past.
To me, and this may be a bracing dose of realism but for any leader who wants to embrace, champion and drive change there has to be a clear recognition that the natural course of things is to worry about change, object to change, resist change and so the work of leadership, first and foremost, is the work of getting beyond that in the minds of colleagues and partners.
DOC: There's a precedent in this AM industry where technological innovation happens at such a rate that for manufacturers, it is sometimes difficult for them to pick out a technology and invest for fear that there's something better around the corner. Is that something you've come across in other areas of business?
BT: Yes, and to me, a way to deal with the understandable confusion that comes with the rapid advance in disruption of technology is to begin everything you do as a leader and as a company - every calculation about which bets are we going to place in terms of the technologies we're going to adopt and base it on strategic clarity. Good technologies aside, as a company do you have a definition of success in the marketplace that allows you to stand for something special and inspires others to stand with you?
To, me the problem is - and I think this may be particularly true of manufacturing - people think the goal is to be the best at what lots of other companies are already doing. So, you say, how do we use technology to improve our efficiency and to improve our quality - there's nothing wrong with all that - but to me the real magic happens when you ask yourself as a company, 'how do we, as a company, do things that only we can do? What are we prepared to do as a manufacturer, as a supplier that other companies simply can't or won't do?' If you get genuine originality in how you approach the business and real clarity about what makes your company not just marginally better than the competition, but what allows our company to do things that other people can't match, that clarity allows you to figure out which among many competing technologies are the most effective to bring our strategic ideas to life.
There's so much technology available but what's really in shortest supply is genuinely distinctive, compelling original ideas about what is our definition of success for the company, what is our identity in the market place that distinguishes us from everybody else? If you create a vision around that it makes some of the technology choices easier to puzzle though.
DOC: Lincoln Electric is a company you have studied, and they have invested heavily in AM, can you tell me what it is about Lincoln Electric that stands them apart from the crowd?
BT: What I find compelling and inspiring about Lincoln Electric, as important as their technology investments have been, is also their clear recognition that in a world which is being reshaped by technology, the real source of differentiation for them, the real driver of their incredible performance in quality and innovation is humanity.
Lincoln Electric has a manufacturing social system that is so different from any company that I've ever visited that it really stopped me in my tracks when I spent time with them in Euclid, Ohio. To me the genius of them is that it combines tremendous individual shop floor level accountability, responsibility, productivity with a collective share the wealth approach. There's a tremendous measurement culture for everybody in the organisation.
Front line people, project leaders, team leaders have very tangible and specific goals; some of those goals are to do with output, some of those goals are about how they assist their colleagues and so on. At the end of every year Lincoln Electric takes a significant chunk of its profits and puts it in a huge profit-sharing pool that then gets allocated to all their employees, not in a one-size fits all way but in a way that is proportional to how they've hit their goals.
These are huge numbers; front line employees can get profit sharing bonuses that can put a couple of kids through college. What this creates is a sense of both individual performance and collective involvement that has fuelled a real commitment to productivity and innovation.
Don't forget, this is also a company that has an explicit no lay off policy, so during the great depression and during the financial crash of 2008 they didn't lay-off a single employee, everybody worked reduced work hours or went in for training because business had fallen away. To me, it's a remarkable manufacturing social system that on the one hand brings out the most fiercely competitive and individually productive side that we all have but combines that with a sense of security and a sense of collectively benefitting from the work we all do together.
I found it incredibly instructive - I think a lot of companies can learn from it - but I also found them genuinely inspiring.
RAPID + TCT takes place on 20-23 May at the Cobo Center in Detroit. Register here to attend and follow @TheTCTMagazine or head to our dedicated RAPID + TCT news section for more updates.
