Getting more from your training programs

The article Getting more from your training programs in McKinsey Quarterly has some interesting data:

Companies around the world spend up to $100 billion a year1 to train employees in the skills they need to improve corporate performance
Only one-quarter of the respondents to a recent McKinsey survey said their training programs measurably improved business performance, and
Most companies don’t even bother to track the returns they get on their investments in training.
Training is generally provided because employees often need new skills to deal with changes in an organization’s strategy or performance.

We have talked about the importance of evaluating and measuring training programs. We have discussed approaches to rigorously explore the value delivered by training programs. The overall message is that change through training is difficult and (as we have discussed in the past) managers need to be vigilant to get value out of training. This article provides a handy checklist:

1. Create a need or a desire in the staff to receive training. This can be done by clearly delineating the problem that the training is trying to solve and involving at least some of the staff in generating the training. Here is a handy description of how people avoid training.

Instead of approaching training as active learners, many employees behave as if they were prisoners (“I’m here because I have to be”), vacationers (“I don’t mind being here—it’s a nice break from doing real work”), or professors (“Everybody else is here to learn; I can just share my wisdom”).

2. Uncover the mindset or culture that is underlying the behavior that requires change. Ensure that the mindset is addressed explicitly – remembering that the training alone cannot change mindset.

For instance, a big-box retailer had been trying to increase its focus on customers for more than two years. It invested millions of dollars in teaching a five-step selling process, monitoring customer feedback, and rolling out e-learning programs to improve its employees’ knowledge of the products it sold. Salespeople passed every certification test they were given yet still didn’t use the new skills on the floor. Customer feedback and store performance remained lackluster.

An examination of the mindset showed that

salespeople clung to age, gender, and racial stereotypes about which customers would make purchases—and tended to ignore the others.

3. Ensure leaders and managers are on board with the new behavior that the training is supposed to implement. This has been the biggest problem in many implementations I have been part of. More on it below.

A closer examination revealed that the new marketing skills hadn’t taken root, because the company hadn’t trained the department’s leaders, who lacked the necessary skills and could not be effective role models. Further, the leaders were not prepared to change the way they ran meetings, made decisions about branding or advertising programs, conducted performance dialogues, or coached others on marketing skills.

4. Managers and executives should reinforce the new skills as frequently as possible. Unless leaders are completely sold on the new way of doing business, training will not be successful.

To show that things would be different this time, the executives insisted that the conversations take place and even shadowed the supervisors on the shop floor to help them. While this was uncomfortable for everyone involved, the supervisors soon gained confidence using the new skills and began to see results. Indeed, within just two months, productivity, reliability, and safety performance had all improved, and the plant was able to produce 25 percent more output than it had in the past.

5. Measure the impact of new training and ensure it is delivering value.

One more quick point:

“selected employees in the adjacent departments must be retrained in complementary skills. In a purchasing program, this might mean teaching product developers and people who find supplies for new products how to interpret total-cost-of-ownership analyses so they can set specifications that fit the new procurement strategy. Changes can go as far as altering the development of new products or launching processes to fit the new procurement system. Such a holistic approach helps to set the right expectations and to align employees collectively with the new behavior.”

Enhancing multinational multicultural team efficiency

We have discussed how team become virtual even if the members are just on different floors of the same building. We have also discussed barriers to the success of large teams. Corporate Executive Board provides two more points to keep in mind:

1. Set up organization structures and processes to work across cultural diversity.

The firm created “local growth teams” consisting of regional experts in sales, marketing, and distribution, and “global product teams” of engineers and product specialists with visibility across all regions to avoid product proliferation or cannibalization.
The local teams are given incentives to maximize local growth and the global teams to maximize global product revenue. The firm then runs frequent sessions where all regional teams meet with each other and the global team to share ideas. This clear structure with its division of labor and supporting rules and processes leads to a harmonious and effective team.

2. Provide teams with effective tools to address diversity and communicate effectively across cultural barriers.

Schlumberger, an oil services firm, provides its R&D teams with a set of guidelines to help overcome project execution problems common to global teams. These include detailed role descriptions for all team members, clear rules on working across time zones, training on common cultural differences and ways of working, and budget for initial in-person meetings between all team members, as well as check-in meetings every two to three months.

Nokia’s troubles continue

We have talked about troubles at Nokia in the past. I had posited that Nokia’s troubles arise from mismanagement not lack of innovation. We had also discussed that the change at Nokia will require a management cultural change that brings innovations to market – not just strategic change or new alliances (such as the one with Microsoft). Here is some more evidence from Mobile-review.com:

“When you are in a big trouble and every day there is even more bad news for you it is only natural to try to save your career so the exodus from Nokia continues. Employees responsible for NFC development are leaving the company massively as well as the most valued engineers and developers. And all this is only the top of the iceberg. The company is also being destroyed by the management steadfastly depriving Nokia of any chance for a future. The company is shutting the OVI Contacts ‘cloud’ service that allowed you to store your contacts online (like Gmail and many other services) on January 24. In the end of January the web interface will be gone as well as the possibility to sync your contacts with any service except for your Nokia phone. The company is simply ditching a service that works fine (it is a rather limited service but it worked fine) in order to… well, nothing, they are just getting rid of it for no apparent reason.”

Nokia’s share price keeps declining. New products based on WP7 are not exciting and their reviews have been lukewarm at best (anandtech, engadget). Nor are they being successful in the market:

Independent researches beg to differ – Exane BNP Paribas carried out a potential consumer poll on five markets where Lumia 800 has been released. Out of 1300 people 456 planned to buy a smartphone within a month and only 2% of them were interested in Nokia WP7 phones. It is a fail so big it can only be compared to the size of the PR budget of these products.

Clearly, Nokia will have to do more than just bring another smart phone to market. They will have to differentiate and bring new innovations. This is easier said than done. In the fast paced world of mobile electronics, competitors do not get many chances to catch up… Nokia has been trying to address this through acquisitions. However, integrating new software and OS into a product line – difficult at best – is even more challenging in a diminishing organization. I am yet to see examples or stories about changing R&D management…

Six Principles of Effective Global Talent Management

The Sloan Review article Six Principles of Effective Global Talent Management has some interesting information useful to all R&D managers:

“ONE OF THE BIGGEST CHALLENGES facing companies all over the world is building and sustaining a strong talent pipeline. “

The article has six recommendations for success:

Rather, we found that successful companies adhere to six key principles: (1) alignment with strategy, (2) internal consistency, (3) cultural embeddedness, (4) management involvement, (5) a balance of global and local needs and (6) employer branding through differentiation.

Here my takeaways:

Align Skill-set / Talent management with corporate strategy
Ensure talent management processes are consistent with each other and with corporate culture

There are also some interesting benchmarks:

General Electric’s “vitality curve,” which differentiates between the top 20%, the middle 70% and the bottom 10%.
Unilever, the Anglo-Dutch consumer products company, puts 15% of employees from each management level in its high-potential category each year, expecting that they will move to the next management level within five years.
Infosys limits the high-potential pool to less than 3% of the total work force
GE began targeting technology skills as a key development requirement during its annual organizational and individual review process, which GE calls Session C.
Oracle found that its objective goal-setting and performance appraisal process was no longer adequate. Management wanted to add some nonfinancial and behavior-based measures to encourage people to focus on team targets, leadership goals and governance.
IBM holds “ValuesJam” sessions that provide time to debate and consider the fundamentals of the values in an effort to make sure that they are not perceived as being imposed from the top!
BT, the British telecommunications giant, has implemented a performance management system that looks at employees on two dimensions: the extent to which they achieve their individual performance objectives, and the values and behaviors they displayed to deliver the results.
A McKinsey study found that more than 50% of CEOs, business unit leaders and HR executives interviewed believed that insular thinking and a lack of collaboration prevented their talent management programs from delivering business value.
P&G, was in one year able to attract about 600,000 applicants worldwide — of whom it hired about 2,700 — by emphasizing opportunities for long-term careers and promotion from within.

To centralize or not to centralize?

McKinsey Quarterly had an interesting article on whether To centralize or not to centralize?:

The chief executive of a European equipment manufacturer recently faced a tough centralization decision: should he combine product management for the company’s two business units—cutting and welding—which operated largely independently of each other but shared the same brand? His technical leader believed that an integrated product range would make the company’s offerings more appealing to businesses that bought both types of equipment. These customers accounted for more than 70 percent of the market but less than 40 percent of the company’s sales. “You cut before you weld,” he explained. “You get a better weld at lower cost if the cutting is done with the welding in mind.” Managers in both divisions, though, resisted fiercely: product management, they believed, was central to their business, and they could not imagine losing control of it.

Clearly, centralization has many benefits – from leveraging synergies between product lines to reducing overhead costs. However it can also add bureaucracy and reduce visibility into overall performance. The article points out a three question discussion:

Is the centralization mandated by regulation?
If not, does centralization add significant value?
If not, are risks of centralization low?

Pretty useful.

The Innovation Premium

INSEAD Knowledge had an intriguing article that I have been meaning to write about. The Innovation Premium meanders along multiple themes (some of them untenable) but in the end has a couple of interesting observations. The article discusses the book The Innovator’s DNA:

“Innovation makes millionaires and undermines monopolies. It raises the profitability of companies and puts a premium on the shares of the most successful. But how can companies foster it? New research sheds light on the innovation process and how firms can tap into it to raise their performance and their share price.”

To that end, the article defines innovative companies purely based on share prices:

Common to all companies on the list is the fact that their share prices are 25 percent or more above what would be justified by cash flow alone. The leader is cloud computing company Salesforce.com, with its AppExchange that offers more than 1,000 applications for businesses, and which recently launched Chatter draws on features of Facebook and Twitter to provide social software for enterprise collaboration. Market expectations for further innovations have given it a premium based on 2010 results of no less than 75 percent.

We have discussed in the past that Wall Street is NOT a consistent or dependable evaluator of innovation. In fact, Wall Street rewards predictability more than disruptive innovations. The share price measure would move companies like Netflix from innovative to not in the matter of weeks! RIM and Blackberry has moved into the non-innovative group since the article was written a few weeks ago…

The lack of universally acceptable definition of innovation (such as the Oslo Framework) notwithstanding, the article still had some interesting points. A key point is that the leaders in innovative companies ask a lot of questions, challenge the status quo and do so based on personal involvement / observation (as opposed to through subordinate presentations):

They, too, are always asking questions and looking out for the unexpected: “Why not this? Why couldn’t we do that? What’s going on here? How could we do this better?” When someone “behaves that way, acts differently, asks lots of questions, observes like an anthropologist, experiments constantly, networks for new ideas,” Gregersen observes, “they’re likely to get incredibly insightful ideas about new businesses, new products, new services, breakthrough processes: things that will make a difference for any company or country.”

The article also suggests (as we have discussed many times) that innovation starts from the top and that the leaders actually have to start the innovation process – not wait for it to bubble up from the bottom. The article also disruptive innovation is hard to manage and integrate into the product line. Innovative leaders have to actually nurture innovation. Since the article mentions Steve Jobs, and we can certainly learn from him as well.

Unmanned aerial warfare: Flight of the drones

The Economist has an interesting article Unmanned aerial warfare: Flight of the drones. In addition to providing an overview of the market, it provides lots of interesting statistics and graphics that will be very useful. To kick it off, the article says:

Over the past decade UAS have become the counter-terrorism weapon of choice. Since 2005 there has been a 1,200% increase in combat air patrols by UAVs.

A suprising statistic for me was the number of people involved in keeping each Reaper UAV flying (I am not sure how they arrive at that information. Sounds a bit too high)

There may not be a man in the cockpit, but each Reaper, a bigger, deadlier version of the Predator, requires more than 180 people to keep it flying. A pilot is always at the controls (albeit from a base that might be 7,500 miles, or 12,000km, away); and another officer operates its sensors and cameras.

Here is the market size and forecast:

It is amazing that US is by far the largest market much larger than the rest of the world put together! I wonder how the competitive landscape is going to change in the time of austerity. Another key concern is new innovations or breakthrough technology such as artificial intelligence that may change the landscape completely.

The article is an interesting read. Please check it out.

Role of Government in Nurturing Innovation (Part II): China’s Awkward Quest for Bullet Train Technology

We recently talked about the role of government in nurturing innovation. The clear evidence was that China would not be in the wind power industry had it not been for government regulation:

But the fact is that none of this would have been remotely possible if China did not regulate the market to allow its own industry to become strong. May be there is a place for regulation – as long as the protection is for a short time, targeted and with significant competition. We know that rivalry and scarcity are drivers of innovation – so as long as money is not given out freely, it might encourage innovation and give national companies a chance to become strong. Countries could consider outsourcing innovation when necessary, not just buy the whole system from a foreign provider. May be the reason why Indian regulation did not work was because they did not have a large number of companies competing for contracts. In fact, they probably regulated the number of companies…

The article China’s Awkward Quest for Bullet Train Technology in Knowledge@Wharton highlights a few more considerations. Here is the overall background:

It took just seven years for China to build the world’s biggest — and purportedly most advanced — bullet train system. That lightning speed and the political capital invested in the showcase program come with more liabilities than acclaim. The collision on July 23 on a high-speed line near Wenzhou may not have derailed Beijing’s ambitions to dominate cutting-edge passenger rail technology, but it has shed light on the program’s shortcomings.

Some problems should have been expected because development of large systems such as wind mills or high speed rail (HSR) is complex and requires time. There is only so much a country can do to accelerate implementation to catch-up with others.

Transportation experts assert that the accident was a consequence of China’s haste. New lines have opened in quick succession, and corners inevitably cut to meet deadlines — the most visible evidence of which being the low-tech, crumbling rail stations dotted across the country that have yet to be upgraded. “China’s high-speed rail program proceeded at breakneck speed, with a far faster roll-out than any other country has attempted, and this was seen as a matter of pride,” says Richard Di Bona, technical director of LLA Consultancy, a transport consulting company based in Hong Kong.
According to Tsung-Chung (T.C.) Kao, a professor at University of Illinois’s Rail Transportation and Engineering Center at Urbana-Champaign, China is facing up to the fact that it failed to spend enough time testing the high-tech system. “They built the HSR system and networks too quickly and there are many bugs … that have to be fixed now,” adds Kao, a former vice president of Taiwan High Speed Rail Corporation, who was part of an 11-year HSR project on that island.

The rush to speed-up innovation caused problems in Chinese wind power industry as well. I still believe that there is a role for government in nurturing innovation. However, the overall scale/type of problems in the high speed rails is a bit different. Here are some lessons from the article:

Unlike wind mills, there were only a couple of companies developing HSR in China. Unlike wind mills, there was only one major customer (Railway Ministry). The lack of customer and supplier diversity actually prevented true competition / rivarlry and and reduced the drive for innovation. The lack of diversity also drove corruption.
HSR became primarily driven by politics and national pride instead of innovation. This is much harder to do when there is a diversity of customers and suppliers.

So in the contract decisions was based on politics, rather than technology, says Ryoji Nakagawa, a professor of international relations at Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto.
National pride reached its apex this spring when a Railway Ministry spokesperson boasted during the unveiling of the Beijing-Shanghai bullet train that the Chinese rail system had surpassed Japan’s renowned Shinkansen
HSR is much more complex compared to wind power and requires significantly larger investment. It is difficult to maintain government nurturing environment for very long-term. Even at break-neck speed, roll out of HSR probably takes a order of magnitude higher resources and time.

“It took 18 years for Japan to develop a bullet train that could run at 300 km/h after the Tokaido Shinkansen opened in 1964,” says Kamiura. “We spent so much time just improving rail track technology to be able to take the speed from 200 km/h to 300 km/h.” Even today, the maximum speeds for most of Japan’s bullet trains are 240 km/h and 270 km/h. The Sanyo line, connecting Osaka to Hakata in Kyushu, raised its maximum speed to 285 km/h in 1997 and to 300 km/h in 2006.
Chinese HSR companies were very closely tied to foreign partners and the project became technology transfer instead of innovation.

The reality, experts say, is that at best China has integrated the technology of its overseas partners, rather than leapfrogging it. The main so-called CRH2 trains rolled out as China’s own were produced under a joint venture between state-owned CSR Qingdao Sifangand Kawasaki Heavy Industries. According to experts, the CRH380A is based on the same technology as the CRH2 and Japanese bullet trains, and on July 23,it was a CRH2 train that slammed into a train developed in a joint venture between Bombardier of Canada and CSR Sifang Locomotive and Rolling Stock Company, known as a CRH1.

Finally, the national pride also led to pressure to file for patent protection (to demonstrate that China was innovating). It is important for R&D managers to remember that Trade Secrets are probably as important as – in not more than – patents in a true IP-based innovation protection strategy.

Seeking such patents is a double-edged sword. Commercial considerations are only part of the reason why China wants such patents. “Again, this is a political statement,” says Kao. “They want to show off their success to the top leaders and bosses,” who want evidence that the government’s huge investment in the bullet train program is paying off.
But the process would force China to reveal details of its technology — even possibly that it made limited changes to the technology transferred by its foreign partners, Nakagawa contends.

Is communication with supervisor more important than other team members?

The motivation and management of global or virtual R&D teams has been a constant theme on this blog . Since direct in-person communication is always diminished in virtual teams, I have been trying to understand the impact on communication between R&D teams and with managers on performance. I recently found an article in the R&D Management Journal describing The impact of team-member exchange, differentiation, team commitment, and knowledge sharing on R&D project team performance:

This paper integrates team-member exchange (TMX), affective commitment, and knowledge sharing to examine how work unit TMX influences employees’ R&D project team commitment and intention to share knowledge, and how team knowledge-sharing intention and TMX differentiation influences team performance.

It appears that Team Member Exchange (TMX) and Leader-Member Exchange (LMX) are well known concepts used to understand the impact of communications on team performance. A recent Ph.D. thesis from Hong Kong University (Thanks Google!) provides some background:

According to Seers A. (1989), TMX defined as “an individual’s perception of his or herexchange relationship with the peer group as a whole”. It was developed as one way to measure the level of exchange quality among coworkers. The concept of TMX has been applied to both traditional work groups as well as to self-managing teams

Similarly LMX is defined as:

Graen (1976) defined Leader-Member Exchange (LMX) as “an interpersonal exchange
relationships between a subordinate and his or her leader”. Through researching and studying over a quarter century, LMX has evolved into a general assessment of a work relationship between leader and member, measured by the extent to which there is a mutual sense of trust, loyalty, understanding, and support (Keup, L.C., 2000).

It appears that manager communication (LMX) only impacts job satisfaction. While enhanced team communication improves performance and job satisfaction. Hence R&D managers need to focus on deploying processes and tools that enhance communication between team members – especially virtual or global teams. Back to the R&D management journal paper: increased interactions and communications between team members enhances knowledge sharing, team commitment and team performance.

The results support the relationships between work unit TMX and employees’ intention to share knowledge and team commitment. In addition, the results show that work unit TMX increases intention to share knowledge through increasing group members’ team commitment. At the group level, the results support the relationships between team knowledge-sharing intention and team performance. The results also show that TMX differentiation moderates the relationship between work unit TMX and team performance. That is, greater work unit TMX is more likely to achieve higher team performance in a team with low TMX differentiation as opposed to a team with high TMX differentiation.

The Big Idea: Before You Make That Big Decision

Deciding which R&D ideas to invest in and how to prioritize product portfolio opportunities is difficult. CTOs of several large companies have actually reported that R&D performance increases with cuts in budgets (TI, Pfizer). However, we have often discussed the problems with reliance on gut feelings or irrationality of decision making. Here is an interesting article from the Harvard Business Review about The Big Idea: Before You Make That Big Decision…:

Thanks to a slew of popular new books, many executives today realize how biases can distort reasoning in business. Confirmation bias, for instance, leads people to ignore evidence that contradicts their preconceived notions. Anchoring causes them to weigh one piece of information too heavily in making decisions; loss aversion makes them too cautious. In our experience, however, awareness of the effects of biases has done little to improve the quality of business decisions at either the individual or the organizational level.

Clearly, some intuition will always be necessary to make decisions about the future. However, should we try to minimize the impact of biases in our decision making?

Though there may now be far more talk of biases among managers, talk alone will not eliminate them. But it is possible to take steps to counteract them. A recent McKinsey study of more than 1,000 major business investments showed that when organizations worked at reducing the effect of bias in their decision-making processes, they achieved returns up to seven percentage points higher.

Cost of questioning and examining decision-making can be large. The article has some great pointers about when and how to dig into decisions. Here is my version of a checklist based on the article to eliminate decision bias. (as you know, I love checklists):

Is the decision sufficiently large to warrant an evaluation of bias? (do not question all decisions)
Is there a reason to suspect the self-interest bias in the team making the recommendation? (do a thorough review)
Has the team has clearly fallen in love with its proposal and not evaluated other options? (Are credible alternatives included along with the recommendation?
If there seems to be Groupthink because dissenting views were not solicited or explored. (Solicit dissenting views, discreetly if necessary).
Are the people making the recommendation overly attached to past decisions?

Is the team is relying mainly on a memorable success?
Is the team assuming that a person, organization, or approach that is successful in one area will be just as successful in another?

Do you know where the numbers came from? Can you get better numbers / results from other models?

If you had to make this decision again in a year’s time, what information would you want, and can you get more of it now?
Is the base case overly optimistic?
Is the worst case bad enough?
Is the recommending team overly cautious?

As the article points out, a key to eliminating decision bias (and literally, the success of all change), is discipline on the part of the R&D manager. If we do not follow the same process that is required of all teams, the biases will never be questioned or eliminated.