Wiring the Winning Organization: How Great Leaders Liberate Collective Intelligence to Generate and Deliver More and Better Value, Faster and with More Certainty
Steven Spear Senior Lecturer, MIT Sloan School of Management Senior Fellow, Institute for Healthcare Improvement Principal, See to Solve LLC
As early as the 1970s and early 1980s, Japanese firms revealed a striking competitive paradox. Their best wasn’t succeeding by making “the right tradeoffs” among quality, cost, features, and speed. Instead, they were delivering products of higher quality, with more variety, at lower cost, and at faster speed—while appearing to exert less effort. It was as if they were playing an entirely different game.
Close study revealed “the secret.” While much of the industrial world focused on optimizing the flow of materials through machines with fancy math, with people as an afterthought, the best created conditions in which people could solve hard problems, develop outstanding solutions, and deliver exceptional value to society. Everyone else was competing on brawn power; they were winning on brain power.
Amidst today’s turbulence—political realignments, economic disruptions, and rapid technological change—this approach to sustaining competitive advantage—seeing and solving problems better and faster than anyone else—is even more vital.
This talk explores how the best do this, by making problem solving easier to do, problems easier to solve, and problems easier to see earlier and more often, before they grow big. Examples will include both historical lessons from the pioneers and contemporary applications of these same principles.