Insightful Quality, Second Edition

Victor Sower, Frank Fair

• Publisher: Business Expert Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781948580540
• eBook ISBN: 9781948580557
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Operations
• Index: Business

In order to survive and attain market leadership, organizations must engage in longer-term strategic quality activities to address radical, paradigm-shifting improvements that affect the organization and its competitive position. This requires a different way of thinking and acting by leaders and managers that is known as insightful thinking. This book can show you how to achieve this kind of success. It is about how to think insightfully about quality and to increase the creativity, innovation, and agility of an organization and its employees. Quality must be addressed in strategic as well as operational terms in order for organizations to compete effectively over the long term. Strategic quality management requires insightful leadership.The second edition updates the case discussions about real organizations that illustrate the main points of the book. It challenges leaders and managers to adopt a new way of thinking and presents thought-provoking ideas about how organizations can begin the process of charting their own paths to insight and lasting success.

Chapter 4

The Insightful Organization

An organization’s ability to learn, and translate that learning into action rapidly, is the ultimate competitive advantage.

—Jack Welch

Creative and innovative employees have been shown to be essential to the survival of organizations. Organizations often attempt to identify and hire individuals and leaders who are inclined to produce creative work as well as innovative outputs. IBM’s Institute for Business Value conducted an investigation that determined that creative work is the number one leadership proficiency or capability.¹ Without individual creative performance and innovation, organizations would have a difficult time successfully competing in today’s rapidly evolving technological market place.

But creative and innovative individuals are not enough to assure organizational success. The organization must create an environment that encourages, provides facilities, and leverages individual creativity and innovation. One person who was keenly aware of these considerations was Robert Brunner. Brunner is the person, more than any other, who gets credit for establishing the Apple design team as the heart of Apple’s process of innovation. He was the first person hired to build the design team, and from the start he was concerned about, among other things, the work environment needed to entice topflight design talent to join the Apple team. There would be no “cubicle hell,” as he put it. Instead, he located a big open space with high ceilings and, as a plus, it was in a building that was not in the Apple headquarters building. It was “off the beaten path” and thus away from potentially meddlesome upper level company executives. Brunner even insisted on arranging the office furniture in unusual formations around the space so that there was no suggestion of isolated cubicles.²

But of course there is more. Considerable research has been conducted to identify which organizational factors serve as facilitators of and barriers to the generation of creative output.³ A low level of team support has been found to result in lower levels of individual creative performance while supportive creative organizational policies, procedural and distributive justice positively affect individual creativity.

Hiring creative and innovative—indeed insightful—employees is important, but not sufficient to assure that an organization will be creative and innovative. What is required is an insightful organization within which these creative individuals can thrive. In this chapter we ­discuss fourteen characteristics of insightful organizations.

Developing the Insightful Organization

When we use the word organization we mean a collection of individuals that is organized and led to achieve a mission. When we speak of an insightful organization we mean more than a collection of insightful individuals. One key to developing and sustaining an insightful organization is leadership. Without insightful leadership, an organization filled with insightful individuals will not achieve extraordinary results. There is a classic expression which we adapt to our purpose here that poor organizational leadership will overcome insightful individuals every time.

In the next section we will discuss some of the characteristics of insightful organizations. These characteristics are not present in the same degree in all parts of an organization. For example, in the manufacturing area, the emphasis is on conformance to specifications and reduction of variation. This is usually accomplished with strict standing operating procedures (SOP) which must be followed exactly by the manufacturing personnel. In contrast, insightful organizations encourage all of their employees in all parts of the organization to be insightful. At 3M, an insightful organization, even production employees, not just technical professionals, are encouraged to submit ideas that will make 3M better and they receive time and resources to pursue their ideas.⁴ However, the production employees are not free to experiment on their own with SOPs. Their ideas are evaluated and implemented into revised SOPs, retraining, and new processes if they prove to be worthwhile improvements. In this way the integrity of the manufacturing process is maintained, variation is minimized, but the processes and SOPs are not stagnant.

Characteristics of an Insightful Organization

In our research we have determined that there are many characteristics which may be found in insightful organizations. Some of these are listed in Table 4.1. These characteristics are not discrete but rather are interrelated. Systems theory tells us that changes in one part of a system will have an effect on other parts of the system. For example, trust, tolerance for risk, and how an organization reacts to failure are closely interrelated. If there is a lack of trust in the organization’s professed risk tolerance, employees in the organization will play it safe. They will not stretch to achieve risky objectives for fear that the organization says one thing—that risk is tolerated—but does another—punishes failure. Ask yourself “how does my organization react to failure?” Does it seek the individual responsible for the failure for appropriate punishment or does it seek to understand the causes for the failure and what can be learned from it?

Table 4.1. Some Characteristics of Insightful Organizations

Insightful leadership

Courageous leadership

Shared vision

Tolerance for risk

Trust

Encourages personal developmental activities

Encourages and provides opportunities for diverse interactions

Sees failure as opportunity to learn

Excellent intraorganizational communication

Open to ideas from all sources—no “not invented here” syndrome

Systems thinking

Agile

Does not judge ideas too quickly

Strong customer orientation and understanding of customer needs

Insightful Leadership

As we discussed in Chapter 3, the concept of insight derives from Plato. We define insight as the ability to see reality clearly enough to come up with new ideas that are worth testing. Insight is the top level of Plato’s divided line, and with that understanding by our definition, one possessing insight will also possess the attributes associated with the three lower levels of awareness: imaging, perceptual belief, and understanding. This means that insightful leaders possess understanding derived from study and hands-on experience of the theories and knowledge relevant to their organization. In addition insightful leaders also possess the ability to see associations and envision ideas that others do not.

Leadership sagacity is an important aspect of insightful leadership. Leadership sagacity is defined as the possession by an individual in an authority position of keen mental discernment, good judgment, and wisdom necessary to recognize valuable work. It is essential to a leader’s ability to identify creative ideas and to provide the leadership required for an organization to be both creative and innovative. It is vital for leaders who have approval authority for the allocation of resources and support to have a high level of sagacity so that they have the level of discernment necessary to decide which creative ideas should be championed toward innovation.⁵ Ganesh Kailasam, vice president of R&D at Dow Chemical’s Performance Materials Division and winner of the 2011 American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE) Industry Leadership Award say...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Testimonals
• Abstract
• Contents
• Tables
• Figures
• Examples
• Abbreviations and Acronyms
• Ack
• 02_CH001
• 03_CH002
• 04_CH003
• 05_CH004
• 06_CH005
• 07_CH006
• 08_Notes
• 09_References
• 10_Index
• 11_Adpage