Hoe “Googly” is uw organisatie?

Vorige week stelde Thomas Davenport (die ja!) dit aan de orde naar aanleiding van zijn onderzoekje "Reverse Engineering Google’s Innovation Machine". Tom presenteerde de uitkomst in de vorm van een kwis, die ik hier van hem met u mag delen.

Zappa-fans kennen de uitdrukking. "Great Googly Moogly!" Verleden week, op onze wereldwijde Executive Summit, stelde kennismanagement- en proces-goeroe Thomas Davenport het onderwerp aan de orde naar aanleiding van zijn onderzoekje "Reverse Engineering Google’s Innovation Machine", gepubliceerd in het april 2008-nummer van Harvard Business Review.

Het verhaal is dat Brin en Page het niet zo'n goed idee vonden, wanneer Davenport ter plekke op de Googleplex zou gaan rondneuzen, op zoek naar het geheim achter het succes van Google. Onverrichterzake afgedropen vatte Tom het plan op om de "innovatiemachine" die Google is dan maar gewoon via het web te "reverse-engineeren", onder het motto: Google is het web, dus moet ik er op die manier ook wel uit kunnen komen.

Uiteindelijk concludeerden Tom Davenport en Bala Iyer dat "every piece of the business plays a part, every part is indispensable, every failure breeds success, and every success demands improvement", en tilden ze 7 lessen/principes boven water. Het leuke is nu dat Oom Tom daar een kwis van heeft gemaakt, die ik met zijn toestemming met u mag delen. Eerst de lessen, daarna de bijbehorende kwisvragen en natuurlijk uw score . . .

1 - Practice Strategic Patience
2 - Exploit a “Built to Build” Infrastructure
3 - Rule Your Own Ecosystem / Exercise Architectural Control
4 - Build Innovation into Organizational Design
5 - Innovate Incrementally and Constantly
6 - Support Inspiration with Data and Analytics
7 - Make Your Knowledge Workers Productive

= = = How Googly is Your Company? Take the Survey Now = = =

Where is your company on the strategic patience scale?
1 - Big, ambitious mission over very long time horizon
2 - Somewhat inspiring non-financial goals to be achieved over 5-10 years
3 - A few pedestrian non-financial goals along with financial—one year horizon
4 - Individual managers set largely financial goals—annual or quarterly horizon
5 - No planning process—we live day-to-day with only financial goals

Where is your company on the “built to build” infrastructure scale?
1 - Flexible, scalable infrastructure—IT or otherwise—extends into suppliers and customers and acts as platform
2 - Strong, flexible infrastructure, but internal only
3 - Infrastructure is adequate but not well understood internally
4 - Infrastructure is just a collection of technologies and is a barrier to growth
5 - What is infrastructure?

How much control do you have over partner relationships and business models?
1 - We run the show, even when we partner—interactions dynamically metered
2 - We have a good handle on what partners do with us
3 - Emerging links with partners, periodic reports
4 - We have controls, but they are internally focused
5 - We’re lucky to control ourselves

How Innovation-Oriented Is Your Organizational Design?
1 - Everyone’s an innovator, and it’s built into the structure and roles
2 - Lots of innovation from all over the organization, whether defined or not
3 - Innovation is a defined function (R&D), but not pervasive
4 - Some innovation, but only in narrow functions and roles
5 - Even the R&D function isn’t innovative

How Innovative Are Your Product and Service Offerings?
1 - So many new offerings it’s hard to keep up with them all; offerings offered early for customer feedback
2 - Small and large product innovations tumble out frequently
3 - New offerings appear at regular intervals and are tested internally
4 - Products are getting long in the tooth and are incrementally innovative at best
5 - Can’t remember the last time we had a new product or service

How Analytical Is Your Company?
1 - Every decision is made in scientific context based on data, analysis, and formal experiments
2 - A solid fact-based culture, with analytics when needed
3 - Generally fact-based decisions, with some intuition too
4 - Poor-quality data, or many versions of the truth
5 - We have little data about our business, and don’t much care

How Productive Are Your Knowledge Workers?
1 - We have our own principles for managing knowledge workers, and they work well
2 - Knowledge workers are happy, productive, and engaged
3 - We don’t have any major obstacles to productivity
4 - Knowledge workers face lots of bureaucracy and rules
5 - What are knowledge workers?

Now Add Your Scores
40 to 32 — you’re a Google clone
31 to 24 — you’re innovative, but not exotic
24 to 17 — you like the Old Economy just fine
16 to 8 — you’re probably hoping Google fails

Tot besluit: lees ook de HBR-blogpost "Google - The 21st Century Company" van Tom Davenport.