JWI 555 Strayer Univeristy W 4 CoreLogics Vision for Change Initiative Discussion Please use CoreLogic as the company for reference and answer the below qu | Course Hero

JWI 555 Strayer Univeristy W 4 CoreLogics Vision for Change Initiative Discussion Please use CoreLogic as the company for reference and answer the below questions

In this discussion, we focus on the vision for your own change initiative. Use the questions below to develop and refine your vision statement:

What is your vision statement for the change initiative you have chosen for your Assignment 2 project?
Why did you choose this vision?
Use the EVM tool presented in this week’s lecture to help you further refine your vision statement.
How much alignment to this vision do you feel is already in place, even if it is not well articulated yet?
What steps are needed to communicate the vision and align stakeholders around the change initiative? HBR.ORG
DECEMBER 2014
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SPOTLIGHT ON INNOVATION ON THE FLY
Leading Your
Team into the
Unknown
How great managers empower their organizations
to innovate by Nathan Furr and Jeffrey H. Dyer
This document is authorized for use only by Ashley Murray in Organizational Chg and Culture at Strayer University, 2020.
SPOTLIGHT INNOVATION ON THE FLY
SPOTLIGHT
Nathan Furr is an assistant
professor of entrepreneurship
and Jeffrey H. Dyer is the
Horace Beesley Professor of
Strategy at the Marriott School of
Management at Brigham Young
University. They are the authors
of The Innovator’s Method:
Bringing the Lean Startup into
Your Organization (Harvard
Business Review Press, 2014).
Leading
Your Team
into the
Unknown
How great managers empower
their organizations to innovate
by Nathan Furr and Jeffrey H. Dyer
2 Harvard Business Review December 2014
This document is authorized for use only by Ashley Murray in Organizational Chg and Culture at Strayer University, 2020.
FOR ARTICLE REPRINTS CALL 800-988-0886 OR 617-783-7500, OR VISIT HBR.ORG
ARTWORK Berndnaut Smilde, Unflattened
2012, photomural, prism, light, 200 x 300 cm
Courtesy of the artist and Ronchini Gallery
This document is authorized for use only by Ashley Murray in Organizational Chg and Culture at Strayer University, 2020.
SPOTLIGHT INNOVATION ON THE FLY
ASK NOTABLE INNOVATION leaders what they think
about traditional management practices—say, those
taught in a typical MBA program—and you get some
pretty strong reactions. Take Elon Musk, a cofounder
of PayPal, Tesla, and SpaceX. “At my companies,” he
says, “our position is that we hire someone in spite
of an MBA, not because of one.” Or Intuit cofounder
Scott Cook: “When MBAs come to us, we have to fundamentally retrain them—nothing they learned will
help them succeed at innovation.”
Nothing? Why is that?
We’ve been investigating that question for more
than five years now, in the course of our work identifying companies that have earned a significant
share-price premium by consistently launching innovative products and entering new markets. These
companies have been successful time and again,
we’ve found, not because they’ve won big bets but
because they’ve made the process of bringing new
offerings to market more reliable and less risky.
They’ve done so by drawing on a wealth of ideas
developed over the past 50 years. Among them are
Ted Levitt’s insights into understanding the true
scope of a business and the purpose of its offerings from the customer’s point of view; Clayton
Christensen’s work on identifying the jobs people
need to do, for which they buy particular products
and services; Jeff Dyer, Hal Gregersen, and Clayton
Christensen’s research on the skills innovators use to
discover new ideas; IDEO’s approach to developing
empathy with customers and synthesizing new ideas
from disparate sources, known as design thinking;
Steve Blank and Eric Ries’s method, called lean startup, for testing possible offerings through a series of
quick, focused experiments; and Ian MacMillan and
Rita McGrath’s test-and-learn approach to validating the viability of promising offerings and business
models in the market. We have brought these strands
together to map out the end-to-end process successful innovators use to conceive, develop, test, and
launch innovations more reliably (see the sidebar “A
Comprehensive Approach to Innovation”).
Like any effective corporate operation, this process, which we call the innovator’s method, requires
discipline, perseverance, and dedicated, effective
leadership. But as innovators like Musk and Cook
point out, it is a different kind of leadership, calling
for skills and tactics that many of us have yet to master. In this article we lay out those skills and offer our
insights into the unique challenges they pose.
4 Harvard Business Review December 2014
Don’t Dictate a Vision—
Set a Grand Challenge
If we ask you to think of a leader setting a grand innovation challenge, what might come to mind is some
story about Steve Jobs—maybe the one in which he
challenges his team to put 1,000 songs in your pocket.
That’s not what we’re talking about here. Nor are
we talking about setting a vision the way traditional
leaders do, by laying out the company’s strategic priorities. Both approaches imply that the leader’s role
is to decide what to do and then direct the organization to do it.
Innovation is at heart a process of discovery, and
so the role of the person leading it is to set other people down a path, not to short-circuit it by jumping to a
conclusion right at the start. To lead innovation, you
don’t have to be the next Steve Jobs, nor do you need
to guess the future. Rather, you must carve out the
mental space within which the innovation process
can be carried out.
How? First, by setting the expectation that innovation will push boundaries. Fashion designers often include very bold designs in their lines to inspire
customers to try more-flamboyant styles. In a similar
way, Amazon pursues its flying drones, and Google’s
X lab its driverless cars and high-altitude Wi-Fi, in
part to make their entire organizations bolder and
more innovative.
You need not go so far. You can push boundaries
just as dramatically by demonstrating a willingness
to reimagine some of your organization’s most fundamental assumptions about products, customers, and
business models.
Consider Kraft’s experience in China. Kraft entered the Chinese market in 1984, intending to build
a $1 billion business based on the company’s existing roster of successful products. By 2006 revenue
had reached only a tenth of that goal, and the business was losing money. To turn the situation around,
Kraft sent in three senior leaders to head up a “blank
check” initiative, which gave them the freedom
within a set time frame (12 months) to make any
changes they saw fit.
The three spent time talking to consumers in order to understand their problems and to begin considering solutions and workable business models.
On the basis of the initial insights they gained, they
floated a question: “What would happen if we abandoned our low-cost, high-volume approach to selling Oreos?” It was a shocking suggestion. It would
COPYRIGHT © 2014 HARVARD BUSINESS SCHOOL PUBLISHING CORPORATION. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
This document is authorized for use only by Ashley Murray in Organizational Chg and Culture at Strayer University, 2020.
FOR ARTICLE REPRINTS CALL 800-988-0886 OR 617-783-7500, OR VISIT HBR.ORG
Idea in Brief
THE PROBLEM
At its heart, innovation is a process
of discovery that requires a different
approach to leadership than the
core business.
THE SOLUTION
The accomplished innovation leader works
more by example than by dictate: asking
questions rather than making decisions;
clearing a path to the unknown for the
innovation team rather than identifying
the end goal; and giving people the right
kind of time, the right constraints, and
the right tools.
mean closing down the large, modern factories and
the centralized Beijing and Shanghai distribution
operations and sending home experienced, expensive expats. But raising the question put the possibility on the table that the operation could be made
profitable if the company aimed for lower margins.
That would give Kraft’s innovators the flexibility,
resources, and time to experiment with radical business model alternatives.
That sounds bold enough, but the three went
even further—they questioned the nature of the
Oreo itself. “Would an Oreo still be an Oreo if it
weren’t round? Or if it were made up of different flavors?” they asked, after field research indicated that
consumers in China found the cookies too bitter and
the filling too sweet.
By suggesting how far the boundaries could be
pushed, the leaders carved out the mental space
their innovation team needed to develop more than
20 prototypes of the Oreo for the Chinese market.
Among the successful variations were not only familiar tweaks, like smaller package sizes and a less
sweet version, but also entirely different flavors
(including peanut butter and green tea ice cream), a
version with many layers, and one in the shape of a
drinking straw. Eventually the willingness to rethink
boundaries paid off as revenue swelled sixfold and
Oreo became the number one cookie brand in China.
Clearly not everything the Oreo team tried was
going to work (a bubble gum–filled version tasted
pretty good but couldn’t be swallowed), which
brings us to the leader’s second task in carving out
the mental space for innovation: demonstrating your
intention to both embrace and manage uncertainty.
Most people are terrified of what uncertainty might do to their careers, so it’s crucial
to communicate that some uncertainty is a
good thing. Demonstrating vulnerability can be
THE IMPLICATIONS
Innovation leaders can create a sustainable
competitive advantage not through the
superiority of a particular invention but
by creating an organization that can learn
from mistakes faster, more efficiently, and
more consistently than competitors do.
effective. Acknowledge that even the innovators in
the trenches—not just the efficiency-oriented organization—find high-uncertainty problems to be hard,
messy, and nonlinear. Send the message that this is
normal and that it’s OK to feel apprehensive.
It’s equally important to demonstrate your intention to limit risk by putting some boundaries around
uncertainty. That means releasing some constraints
as you are establishing others. For instance, although
it’s not your job to tell your team what specific opportunities to pursue, you can as a starting point
identify a market to address, designate one that’s
off-limits, or select a customer segment to explore.
A leader with a deep understanding of customer behavior and technology trends can also suggest some
initial avenues of inquiry.
A couple of basic tactics can be especially useful
here. The first is setting a “time box”—that is, giving your team a fixed amount of time, usually two or
three months, to resolve the most basic uncertainties
surrounding an innovation project. That’s straightforward enough. But the second tactic, managing
decision points, is tricky. When results of experiments are not what you’d hoped, and time is running
out, it’s your responsibility to help the team evaluate the results honestly, change direction if need be,
and sometimes pull the plug, freeing up mental and
physical resources to try another approach. That’s
easy to say, but anyone who’s killed a project knows
it takes resolve and not a small amount of courage.
It’s important for a company to have leaders who
articulate the core strategy, act as guardians of the
flagship offerings, and remain vigilant in serving valued customers. But if you are acting as an innovation
leader, that is not your job. You must be an advocate
for the new and the different, setting the grand challenge more by deed than by word—by keeping an
eye out for the unusual (the outliers, the frustrated
VIDEO For an interview
with Nathan Furr on why
innovation requires a
new set of management
practices, visit this article
on hbr.org.
December 2014 Harvard Business Review 5
This document is authorized for use only by Ashley Murray in Organizational Chg and Culture at Strayer University, 2020.
SPOTLIGHT INNOVATION ON THE FLY
customers, the anomalies), fearlessly questioning
the assumptions on which the core business runs,
and demonstrating the willingness to try things that
may be far outside the norm. Even (or especially) if
they don’t work, that will send the message that you
are serious about innovation.
Don’t Make Decisions—
Design Experiments
In the late 1980s an engineering team at NEC devising a way to program business telephones developed
an unusually small computer terminal. When vice
president Tom Martin saw how lightweight it was,
he asked if it could be made to run MS-DOS. When
the engineers said that would be easy, he realized
he had the makings of something big—a new kind
of portable PC—and he quickly assembled a crossfunctional team to develop it.
As the team attempted to balance portability and
usability, it faced some tough decisions. Adding an
internal 3.5-inch hard drive would dramatically increase the laptop’s memory but also add to its weight.
It was a tough call, but the project leader decided to
leave the drive out, reasoning that customers would
find the small internal memory adequate, since they
could always connect to an external floppy drive. As
buzz around the new product began to grow and the
launch date drew near, NEC made the investment
necessary to produce thousands of units.
By the time the UltraLite launched, on a crisp
October evening in New York City, praise was already
pouring in. At just over four pounds, the laptop was
half the weight of its nearest competitor, and its
backlit screen was a technical marvel. It appeared
on the cover of PC Magazine. The New York Times
honored it for technical merit. “The NEC UltraLite is
a Porsche,” enthused Consumer Reports. Years later
computer historians would recognize it as the product that ushered in a new era in portability.
A well-focused, fast, and
frugal experiment with
customers feels very much
like a failed product launch.
6 Harvard Business Review December 2014
Only one thing dampened the enthusiasm.
Despite expensive advertising campaigns, the
UltraLite wasn’t selling. In hindsight, the problem
was clear: Consumers simply would not accept a
computer without that built-in hard drive. The company had ramped up production on the basis of the
untested assumption that the hard drive could be
left out, and that turned out to be fatally incorrect.
We argue that NEC made two mistakes. The first
was omitting the hard drive. The second and perhaps more significant mistake was believing that it
was the project leader’s role to make that decision.
The innovator’s method reduces the risk involved
in bringing innovations to market by offering a better
tool for making tough choices—a process for systematically testing critical assumptions with customers.
The tool has powerful implications for leadership: It
requires the leader to change from being the chief
decision maker to being the chief experimenter.
What does that mean? Essentially, the leader’s
role shifts from providing answers to posing questions. When a manager or anyone else on the team
says, “I think we should do X,” it’s the leader’s job to
ensure that the next question is, “What’s the fastest
way to run an experiment to help us know whether
we should do X?”
Making that switch sounds straightforward, but
it’s hard, for several reasons.
First, it calls for a new understanding of what
constitutes a decision. When leaders stop being the
chief decision makers, they still make decisions—but
of a different kind. Most managers are used to go/nogo choices: They either commit significant resources
to a project and go full steam ahead, or they kill it.
Innovation leaders need to learn instead how to say,
“Maybe. Let’s conduct an experiment to find out.”
Second, becoming the chief experimenter often
requires developing new skills. You need to be fluent
enough in the process to help your team identify critical assumptions, fashion experiments to test them,
and interpret the results. And as you move from one
experiment to the next, you must remain steadfast
in pursuing the approach, even if your team members revert to traditional roles.
How steadfast? One of us, Nathan Furr, is frequently approached by students, managers, and
entrepreneurs who ask, “Is my idea any good?” He
reminds them that he can’t possibly answer that
question—only customers can. As a customer base,
he is a sample size of one.
This document is authorized for use only by Ashley Murray in Organizational Chg and Culture at Strayer University, 2020.
FOR ARTICLE REPRINTS CALL 800-988-0886 OR 617-783-7500, OR VISIT HBR.ORG
A Comprehensive Approach to Innovation
Conceiving of, developing, and launching new
offerings is an inherently risky undertaking. By
combining the risk-reduction ideas that innovation
thinkers and practitioners have developed over
the years, we can map out an end-to-end process
that can greatly increase the odds of successfully
launching innovative offerings in uncertain markets.
This process has four steps:
1
2
3
4
GENERATE INSIGHTS
Use questioning, observational, and networking
skills to search far and wide for broad insights
into problems that may be worth solving.
IDENTIFY AN IMPORTANT PROBLEM
Through direct observation look for an unsolved
problem or an unfilled emotional or social need
that enough people have for the opportunity to be
worth pursuing.
DEVELOP THE SOLUTION
Instead of building a complete product,
quickly construct a set of simple prototypes
of many different solutions. For each, start
with a theoretical prototype (that is, a verbal
description). If that looks promising internally,
move to a virtual prototype you can test with
customers. This must be a visual representation
but could be just a drawing. Move next to testing
a minimum viable prototype with customers (the
simplest, quickest physical version of the offering
you can devise). Finally, pilot test the full-blown
solution—the minimum “awesome” product (a
refined version that seeks to be awesome on the
few features that inspire customers).
DEVISE THE BUSINESS MODEL
Once you have worked out the offering, apply the
same experimental approach to developing and
testing the components of the business model,
including approaches to pricing and customer
acquisition.
For most innovations you need to successfully
complete all four steps before devoting resources
to scaling. The exceptions are businesses that
have network effects, such as PayPal, where
the value of the innovation increases with each
additional member. Even in those cases, you
need to work through these steps judiciously as
you scale, or you will most likely end up with a
flameout worthy of the dot-com era.
Maintaining that perspective takes a high level of
resolve, because it means relinquishing power to the
team and acknowledging that your ideas, like everyone else’s, are just guesses. As Intuit’s Cook told us,
“[CEO] Brad Smith and I have to live by the same rules.
So we end up asking ourselves questions like, ‘I have
a fundamental belief about what we should do. Now,
what are the assumptions on which it is based? And
how are we going to test them?’ We need to do this
just like we would for anyone else. Experiments will
be nothing but window dressing until you change
how decisions are made and who makes them.”
Third, being the chief experimenter is hard because even your innovators won’t always want to
do experiments. The entire purpose of conducting
experiments is to resolve some uncertainty and thus
reduce risk quickly and cheaply. To do that you need
to test prototypes, not full-blown products. This is
easy to understand intellectually but often hard to
accept emotionally. To understand why, we invite
you to engage in a short thought experiment:
Imagine yourself conducting a perfect product
launch. You roll out a brilliantly clever, well-made
product to a broad group of customers. You ramp
up press coverage and recruit an army of social media influencers to maximize adoption. Your product
makes the cover of Time. Revenue pours in. You’ve
just invented the next iPod. Great work!
Now imagine yourself conducting a bad product
launch. You introduce the offering to a very small
group. There’s no media attention. No influencers.
No advertising blitz. And a good thing, since the
product hardly works. In fact it’s so bad, you feel embarrassed. Target customers reject it. Not one dollar
changes hands.
That’s what it feels like to conduct a well-focused…
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