From Merriam-Webster’s:

an-droid: noun. a mobile robot usually with a human form

In the case of Google’s Android operating system, the “robot” is morphing into lots of forms. First and foremost, as a mobile phone with now nearly a dozen implementations. And those phones are starting to win acclaim (and not only for the Motorola Droid).

But that’s not all: Barnes & Noble based its Nook e-reader on Android and Creative is building an Android-based iPod Touch competitor.

Which is bad news for Apple, right? I’m not sure about that, but it’s certainly bad news for Blackberry, Palm and Symbian, not to mention Windows Mobile (did you forget Microsoft also supplies micro OSes for phones and the like?).

In fact, as the marketplace begins to settle out, it’s starting to resemble the PC market, circa 1995. Apple is providing a closed, end-to-end experience, while its competitor is supplying its platform to lots of hardware vendors for them to install and sell. One difference: Google (Android’s biggest backer) is not charging a license fee for the platform and offers it open source.

As has been observed with other open-source projects such as Linux, Firefox and MySQL, Android will continue to become more feature-rich, with more apps available, as Android handsets begin to take hold in the market. In comparison, Palm’s, Blackberry’s and even Microsoft’s ability to keep up with the state of the art will suffer. [Gizmodo makes a powerful case for Android's potential in this post.]

My prediction: Apple will rule the smartphone roost for some time. Android will be a strong #2. Who will be #3? Does it matter?

(Photo: Motorola Droid via phandroid.com)

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There’s a neat article by Reuters discussing how workers’ brains and management practices often work at cross-purposes. They cite, among others, Charles Jacobs, author of the book “Management Rewired,” recently reviewed here. An excerpt of the Reuters piece:

“One of the things organizations need to do is respect the deeply social nature of the brain. People are not rational, they are social,” David Rock, author of “Your Brain at Work” (HarperBusiness), told Reuters in an interview. “The social brain is such that we are really driven to increase social rewards, and we are really driven to minimize social threats.”

Rock, the founder of a company that applies the insights of brain science to leadership coaching, lists five areas in which our brain’s threat mechanisms are easily triggered at work: status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness and fairness.

When we feel threatened in any of these spheres — a superior displays power over us, rumors circulate about the future of our job, our work is micro-managed, we are excluded from colleagues’ conversations, or our work is unjustly overlooked — our brains focus our attention on the threat.

Jacobs, in his book, writes about the deeply illogical outcomes of giving and receiving feedback: oftentimes, rewards often undermine continuing what we are doing well, while negative feedback reinforces the undesirable behavior. Writes Jacobs: “A landmark study at General Electric found that the company’s performance appraisal system not only didn’t work, it produced results that were virtually the opposite of what was intended…. GE found that a manager’s praise had no effect on performance one way or the other, while the areas that a manager criticized showed the least improvement.”

What are your experiences with performance reviews, management encounters, etc.? Have they felt like threats to you?

(Hat tip to Felix Salmon)

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“Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation,” by Tim Brown with Barry Katz. 2009: Harper Business, 264pp.

When did you read it? October 2009.

Subject: A presentation of the idea of “design thinking” – the use of close observation, imagination, and consideration of constraints to conceive and implement innovative solutions to problems in business and society.

Did you like it? How many stars would you give it (1-5)? 3.5

Summary: Brown is the CEO of IDEO, the acclaimed design consultancy that helped Apple create the iPod, designed the MyBook external hard drive for Western Digital and the Palm V, along with countless other products. The first part of the book, “What Is Design Thinking?” reviews the approach that IDEO uses to attack problems and come up with innovative solutions. To Brown, design is far more than putting an attractive package around an existing product – instead, it is a way to start from a ground-level assessment of a customer need and design a total solution to the problem. Emphasis is on going out in the field to observe potential users of products to see what they do (or don’t do), the value of divergent (idea-generating) vs. convergent (integrative) thinking and early and ongoing prototyping.

The second part of the book takes up questions for the future of design thinking, such as: can companies learn to do this themselves? can it improve our broken experiences, such as the dreaded airport security line? and can it help in some of our intractable problems, such as building a sustainable future?

Favorite quote: “Rarely will the everyday people who are the consumers of our products, the customers for our services, the occupants of our buildings, or the users of our digital interfaces be able to tell us what to do. Their actual behaviors, however, can provide us with invaluable clues about their range of unmet needs.” p.41

Did anything surprise you? I was surprised, and frankly a bit disappointed, that the book is focused almost solely on work done by IDEO. While there are occasional references to other thinkers like Peter Drucker, Gary Hamel and William Whyte, they are cursory. There is no bibliography or end notes (instead, there’s a list of IDEO projects referenced, along with people who worked on the projects, for each chapter). The only book discussed at any length is Roger Martin’s “The Opposable Mind.” [Interestingly, Martin has just published his own book on design thinking, called "The Design of Business: Why Design Thinking is the Next Competitive Advantage." I'm reading that now.]

Skating over people (other than a few brief anecdotes) who influenced design thinking and overwhelmingly referring to IDEO projects lends the book the air of a memoir as opposed to a work of scholarship. And given that Brown is IDEO’s CEO, it makes the book feel a bit like public relations. Which is a shame, because the topic is important and timely and Brown’s description of design thinking and case studies are excellent.

Will this book end up on your bookshelf or in the library donation pile? The bookshelf. While it doesn’t reach greatness, it’s a good book on an important topic.

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I listened to a Fresh Air interview with “Omnivore’s Dilemma” author Michael Pollan and couldn’t get this passage out of my head (it comes 14′40″ into the interview):

But it’s very interesting to watch, as the amount of time spent cooking has fallen by about half since the 1960s, you know, obesity has risen dramatically. Now why should that be? Well, there is some very interesting research that correlates the amount of time that a culture spends cooking with its obesity rates, and that when you don’t cook and you rely on corporations to cook for you, you tend to eat more special-occasion food, things like French fries.

I mean, take the French fry. It’s a great example. I mean, the French fry did not become the most popular vegetable in America, which it now is, until corporations relieved us of all the work of preparing them. French fries are a whole lot of trouble to make. You’ve got to wash the potato. You’ve got to peel the potato, slice the potato, fry the potato and then clean up a kitchen that’s going to be a wreck. And, you know, you wouldn’t do that very often, and indeed, people didn’t do it very often.

But now, since corporations are making all the French fries, we can have them two or three times a day, and many of us do. So, you see, when there’s something built into the process of cooking that delays gratification, the work itself makes you think twice before you embark on a cake or French fries or fried chicken. And so as soon as you outsource that work, it becomes possible to indulge in all these special-occasion foods that no longer are special-occasion foods. They’re everyday foods.

And French fries wouldn’t be something we could eat two or three times a day without the Frialator. Rather than pouring oil into a pan, cooking, then discarding the oil, the Frialator allows restaurants to cook many dishes in the same oil, with only occasional filtering of the oil to remove food particles, until the oil is replaced, approximately one to two weeks in some cases.

The Beginnings
In 1918, New Hampshire restaurant equipment manufacturer J.C. Pitman and Sons created a revolutionary high-volume deep fat fryer. In this 1946 letter, company founder J.C. Pitman described the invention as follows:

In 1918 J.C. Pitman and Sons Hotel & Restaurant Equipment Manurfacturers, while attempting to work out a more satisfactory method of frying, made some important discoveries. One was that if the small particles of food which ordinarily settled to the bottom of the French Fry pot (where they collected and burned) could be kept away from the intense heat of that part of the kettle, the quality of fried food could be greatly improved. The Pitco Frialator was invented on this basic principle – and patented. This brought about a complete change in the method of deep fat frying. The fat medium was heated by tubes running through the center of the fat container. This construction permitted all sediment from the food being fried to drip below the heating tubes into a cool zone where it could not carbonize and break down the frying fat.

The importance of this construction is the reduction in fat costs, which exceeds by a wide margin the initial cost of the equipment, its depreciation and upkeep. Thanks to the thousands of Pitco Frialators now in use from coast to coast, deep fat frying has indeed become an art.

The Value Proposition
According to the Proceedings of the American Gas Association, Volume 20 (1938), a gas frialator costing $160 on average saved a restaurant owner $390 per year in oil costs.

Half a million or more in use in US
The National Restaurant Association reported that as of 2009 there were approximately 945,000 restaurants in the US. Estimating that at least 50% of these restaurants use a deep fryer, there are a lot of Frialators out there.

The Impact of “Special Occasion Foods as Everyday Foods”:
McDonald’s French fries have 380 calories per 4.1 oz serving. Eric Schlosser wrote in “Fast Food Nation” that “in 1960 Americans consumed an average of about eighty-one pounds of fresh potatoes and four pounds of frozen french fries. In 2000 they consumed an average of about fifty pounds of fresh potatoes and thirty pounds of frozen fries.” Thirty pounds of French fries equates to about 45,000 calories per person per year, using McDonald’s calorie counts. Meaning 307 million Americans (according to the US Census Population clock) will consume 13.65 trillion calories of French fries in 2009.

Thanks to the Frialator.

Photo: The Pitco Model 1

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I’ve finished a few books recently but am a bit behind on reviewing them. My kids have started documenting their books in reading journals that help them with reading comprehension. To add a bit of variety (and to make sure I’m not getting lazy), I’m going to use the reading journal format for this week’s reviews.

“Collaboration: How Leaders Avoid the Traps, Create Unity, and Reap Big Results,” by Morten Hansen. 2009: Harvard Business Press, 231pp.

When did you read it? September-October 2009.

Subject: A study of collaboration in business; when it is and when it is not appropriate, and best practices for successful collaboration.

Did you like it? How many stars would you give it (1-5)? 4 (thankfully I don’t have assigned reading… I won’t be writing about any 1-star books here!)

Summary: Hansen has spent his academic career studying how corporate groups collaborate, effectively and ineffectively. This book sums up a number of studies he has worked on with various companies over the past 15 years. First, Hansen discusses obstacles to collaboration – including the warning that not all collaboration is good collaboration. In other words, when the costs of collaboration (communication, coordination, negotiation, etc.) outweigh the benefits. This frequently happens when businesses lacking key synergies are combined via merger.

The bulk of the book is devoted to discussing what Hansen calls “disciplined collaboration.” He discusses four collaboration barriers – not invented here, hoarding, search (inability to find the insight you need), and transfer (inability to put others’ knowledge to use), and three “levers” to promote collaboration: “unify people, practice T-shaped management, and build nimble networks.”

These are practical suggestions and, on their own, not revolutionary. But to me seeing these three levers together as requirements for successful collaboration was distinctive and valuable.

Favorite quote: “Paradoxically, the emphasis on performance management over the past decade has created what Harvard Professor Leslie Perlow calls a ‘time famine’ at work. As people are pressured to perform, they feel that they don’t have the time to help others; reasonable requests for help are seen as burdens that put them behind in their own work. So people are faced with a trade-off – to do their own work (but not help others), or to help others (but get less work done).” p.55

Was it similar to anything you have read before? There are echoes of the recent book “Senior Leadership Teams” which takes up the question of how to get groups of senior executives, who naturally work to drive results from their own groups, to collaborate – another application of the “T-shaped management” approach.

Will this book end up on your bookshelf or in the library donation pile? The bookshelf. Collaboration is an important subject and I don’t have any books that deal with that as a main topic. Plus it’s good.

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The Wall Street Journal today reported that Procter & Gamble’s new CEO, Robert McDonald, had put a number of brands on notice that they had to improve results or risk being sold off.

Many of the brands reviewed, such as Duracell, IAMS and Braun electric appliances, “have long been considered extraneous to P&G’s focus on beauty, health and nonfood household staples,” according to the Journal.

If that’s the case, why is McDonald threatening to sell the brands if they don’t improve results? Why isn’t he just going ahead and selling the brands?

“This business segment is extraneous to our focus, but if it is profitable enough we will keep it,” is not a strategy. It is an anti-strategy. And I would doubt, given the many strategic threats that McDonald is facing, coaxing incremental improvements out of Duracell or IAMS is a place he should be spending any of his management time.

Bob Sutton posted on this San Francisco Chronicle article today, but it had so much good stuff relating to areas I’m passionate about that I need to write about it too.

The article concerns an effort by Bay Area nurses to reduce the occurrence of medication errors, which, according to the Chronicle, cause 400,000 preventable injuries and cost an extra $3.5 billion in medical costs each year. The results of the effort: a 88% reduction in medication errors in the participating hospitals.

Here are a few quotes that talk about areas I’m interested in – listening to and empowering customer-facing (patient-facing?) personnel, and the value of simple, low-tech solutions to business problems:

Striving to reduce interruptions that lead to mistakes, teams of nurses at the different hospitals came up with a variety of methods – often surprisingly low tech – to alert others they were administering medications….

The solutions “have to be low tech because we, as staff nurses, don’t have the money or ability to make high-tech changes,” said Celeste Arbis, a registered nurse in the medical-surgical unit there. “Something as simple as changing the process just a little bit can make a big difference.”…

Nurses attributed much of the program’s success to allowing those on the front lines to develop and tailor their own solutions.

I’ve seen both these situations in action: the ability of front-line personnel to understand and fix problems with the processes they use, and the effectiveness of often-overlooked simple and low-tech solutions. Sutton wrote something very profound in his post on this subject: “I think that people — especially managers — often use spending money as a substitute for thinking, when inexpensive and low-tech solutions work just fine.”

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I learned today that Axe Body Spray for Men is running an ad in Uruguay where readers sending an SMS to their address receive on their phone the missing bits of a picture of a beautiful woman. (Those bits are clothed, BTW.)

This tells me there’s nothing about Axe the product that is distinctive, and the ad, despite being fun and engaging (especially for teenaged and 20-something males), won’t do much to make people select Axe over one of the thirty other male scent products out there.

I started thinking about this after listening to Jonathan Salem Baskin’s neat Listrak webinar last week, entitled, “Marketing Ideas for the First Post-Brand Decade.” Baskin did a nice job of showing that while customers and markets have moved beyond the days of “Mad Men” – where a well-crafted, creative advertisement could influence us to buy the latest dish detergent or safety razor – marketers, by and large, have not. Even “social media marketing,” like, say, the Axe campaign, is taking the same old ideas and porting them to new technology. Houston, we have a problem. Marketers are pushing the same old buttons to sell more variations of the same old products. It’s a negative-sum game. Variations increase cost without enlarging the overall market. Redundancy pushes down prices, invites private label competitors and overloads consumers’ minds.

Clearly, we’ve got to do something different. Marketing needs to pull back from its focus on distribution, packaging, and communication, and refocus on helping create great new products, that deliver distinctive value and make people’s lives better. Then it will be easy to communicate that to prospective customers.

Gary Hamel writes in “The Future of Management” that product & service innovation are near the bottom of the innovation hierarchy, and the pinnacle is “management innovation.” To Hamel, products are easily duplicated, quickly eliminating their added value. But as Roberto Verganti pointed out in “Design-Driven Innovation,” companies that create truly visionary products enjoy long periods of competitive advantage and profits.

Life is too difficult for many and too complex for everyone else. Everyone would like to have more fun. Therefore, there’s lots of need for products & services that allow us to manage our lives better or have diverting or engrossing experiences.

I’ve been reading “Change by Design,” by Tim Brown, and he asserts that companies need to adopt “design thinking” to create great new products and services. I can’t disagree with him, but also feel that design thinking is not that different from what great product managers and developers have been doing and should be doing. So, if your new-product group wants to hand over the reins to design thinkers, that’s their prerogative. For me, that’s the fun part of the job and I’d rather not outsource that.

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One of the most useful lessons in Rita Gunther McGrath’s and Ian MacMillan’s “Discovery-Driven Growth” is a basic one: when you’re planning a new business venture, your initial plans are laden with assumptions, and treating these assumptions as facts will get you in trouble. Yet it’s done all the time.

This lesson was reinforced in the nice interview with Rita that appeared in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal Business Insight section (”Learning from Corporate Flops“). The headline is a bit misleading – she talks less about learning from your flops than about carefully documenting your assumptions, testing them as early and cheaply as possible, and revising them when you learn they don’t hold up.

Having a detailed list of assumptions allows many people to weigh in on a new business idea – even if you can’t speak authoritatively on the whole concept, you may have very good insight on one particular assumption. And assumptions are expected to be wrong much of the time, so questioning one or showing evidence why it’s not valid is easy for the new product team to accept.

On the other hand, probing and questioning a business plan in which the key assumptions are buried and not distinguishable from known facts tends to invite emotional arguments which rarely improve the quality of the plan.

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In the November Harvard Business Review, Roger Martin (author of one of my favorite books of 2008, “The Opposable Mind“) and autism researcher Stephen Scherer of the Toronto Hospital for Sick Children discuss unraveling mysteries by looking at “outlying” data. In a few words, Scherer says a lot about how to deal with difficult problems:

Autism is a vast problem; no single researcher or lab can take on its full breadth. I focused on just one piece of it: the data that everybody else was throwing away. I call it the garbage-can approach. My belief is that answers to really difficult problems can often be found in the data points that don’t seem to fit existing frameworks.

Scherer looked for patterns in this outlying data. His success in finding some genetic markers for autism reminded me of the plea a couple of years ago to “free the dark data” from failed scientific experiments. And it reinforces the value of the “beginner’s mind” when approaching new challenges.

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