{"id":1461,"date":"2011-06-01T10:02:24","date_gmt":"2011-06-01T04:32:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/naveen.bachwani.com\/blog\/?p=1461"},"modified":"2011-06-01T10:02:24","modified_gmt":"2011-06-01T04:32:24","slug":"innovation-vs-quality","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/naveen.bachwani.com\/greymatter\/2011\/06\/innovation-vs-quality\/","title":{"rendered":"Innovation vs Quality"},"content":{"rendered":"

Thanks to a friend sharing a link on FB, I chanced upon an interesting post on the VC Circle blog entitled ‘Status Quo Police<\/a>‘ by Adam Hartung.\u00a0 The writeup covers many aspects of innovation in large scale enterprise, and the impediments that innovators face.\u00a0 What particularly interested me was Hartung’s argument on how Quality systems and practices can often become the biggest obstacles to Innovation:<\/p>\n

Quality \u2013 Who can argue with the need to have quality? Total Quality Management (TQM,) Continuous Improvement (CI,) and Six Sigma programs all have been glorified by companies hoping to improve product or service quality. If you\u2019re trying to fix a broken product, or process, these work pretty well at helping everyone do their job better.<\/p>\n

But these programs live with the mantra \u201cif you can\u2019t measure it, you can\u2019t improve it. Measure everything that\u2019s important.\u201d If you\u2019re innovating, what do you measure? If you\u2019re in a new technology, or manufacturing process, how do you know what you really need to do right? If you\u2019re in a new market, how do you know the key metric for sales success?<\/p>\n

The key to success isn\u2019t to have critical metrics and measure performance on a graph, but rather to learn from everything you do \u2013 and usually to change. Quality people hate this, and can only stand in the way of trying anything new because you don\u2019t know what to measure, or what constitutes a \u201cgood\u201d measure.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Now, I’ve spent a fair bit of my working life as a Six Sigma \/ Quality champion, and an even longer tenure developing cutting-edge Technology solutions for organizations.\u00a0 Given my background, I always viewed Systems and Processes as two sides of the same coin.\u00a0 In fact, I believed that real success in one depended <\/em>on success in the other.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But, Hartung has a point.<\/p>\n

If you go by the classical approach, practitioners of Quality typically stick\u00a0to the “what gets measured, gets improved” argument and, therefore, are unable to get a good grip around ideas that reek of blue-sky thinking and innovation.\u00a0 How ironic that the champions of Change become obstacles to change itself!<\/p>\n

On the other hand, innovators have to contend with uncharted territories and unknown experiences, often-times operating in an environment that does not understand their unique needs.\u00a0 As Hartung elaborates:<\/p>\n

… When you\u2019re innovating, what you don\u2019t know far exceeds what you know. You don\u2019t know the market size, the price that people will pay, the first year\u2019s volume (much less year 5,) the direct cost at various volumes, the indirect cost, the cost of marketing to obtain customer attention, the number of sales calls it will take to land a sale, how many solution revisions will be necessary to finally put out the \u201cright\u201d solution, or how sales will ramp up quarterly from nothing. So to create a business plan, you have to guess.<\/p>\n

Everything done to efficiently run the old business is irrelevant when it comes to innovation.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

When you think about it, for any organization to succeed, it must achieve a fine balance – between maintaining status quo and forging a new path, between encouraging new ideas and rewarding evolutionary growth, and ultimately, between Quality and Innovation.\u00a0 Easier said than done, don’t you think?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Thanks to a friend sharing a link on FB, I chanced upon an interesting post on the VC Circle blog entitled ‘Status Quo Police‘ by<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[9,14],"class_list":["post-1461","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","tag-quality","tag-work"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naveen.bachwani.com\/greymatter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1461","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naveen.bachwani.com\/greymatter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naveen.bachwani.com\/greymatter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naveen.bachwani.com\/greymatter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naveen.bachwani.com\/greymatter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1461"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naveen.bachwani.com\/greymatter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1461\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naveen.bachwani.com\/greymatter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1461"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naveen.bachwani.com\/greymatter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1461"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naveen.bachwani.com\/greymatter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1461"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}