In Pursuit of Elegance

I can't wait to get my hands on Matt May's new book In Pursuit of Elegance: Why the Best Ideas Have Something Missing which will be published next week.

His recent ChangeThis manifesto provides a sneak preview of th content:



Matt's previos book The Elegant Solution: Toyota's Formula for Mastering Innovation is one of the most referred to books in my blog. It captures what I have been doing for the past 15 years in my career - applying to knowledge work what I learned from studying industrial management, production control, quality management and organizational development.

I have referred to his book in my previous posts:

Mind of an Innovator:
Innovation, problemsolving and learning employ the same iterative process—blending supposition, logic, creativity and reflection.

Ideas Come from Everywhere
The Toyota organization implements a million ideas a year.

That’s a fact, he says. It is their greatest source of competitive advantage. It’s their engine of innovation. But more than that, Toyota has created a culture where every idea counts. It’s an environment of everyday innovation as a result of fanatical focus on getting little better, daily.

Long Term Goals
Toyota implements 1 million ideas each year. He continues, Do the math: 3000 ideas a day. That number, more than anything else, explains why Toyota appears to be in a league all their own, playing offense on a field of innovation, while their competitors remain caught in a crossfire of cost-cutting.

My Management System
an excellent book about Toyota’s innovation system which is built on learning: “Learning and innovation go hand in hand, but learning comes first.”

In Search of Simplicity
The first step is to start a war on complexity, which can be identified by inconsistency, overload, and waste – all of which unnecessarily consume the resources of time, effort, space, and money without adding value.

His ideas are universally valid and can be easily transferred to knowledge work in the office.

How to Have Much Less Stress

During the past months I have been under quite some stress caused by unexpected difficulties in many areas of life. One by one these difficulties are being solved and my energy level is back to normal. When you are feeling stressed, one thing to do is to

Turn to your friends, family and mentors for advice!

While I was planning to write about stress, John Spence whose blog I follow, did me a favor and posted the outline of his stress workshop:

John Spence Workshop number one: Dealing with Stress and Anxiety

Step one: make a list of the top 10 things that give you stress, anger, anxiety and frustration in your life right now.

Step two: give each of the items you wrote a rating from 1 to 10. A score of one indicates that this is a stressor for you, but it does not really affect you too much - it is basically an annoyance, a nuisance. At the other end of the scale is a rating of 10, which means that this item is highly stressful to you and it causes a tremendous amount of frustration and pain in your life. Score each one now.

Step three: next to each of the stressors you have indicated, write either a “C” for the items you have control over — that you can directly impact, change or very strongly influence. Or write “NC” which indicates that although this might be a stressor for you, in reality there is nothing you can do to truly impact it. These are things like the economy, the government, taxes, other people… things that you might have a little bit of influence on but there is no way that you alone can dramatically change this issue. Be very honest with yourself when assessing each of your issues from step one.

The goal then is to have the courage and discipline to take massive control of the items you wrote a “C” next to and get those scores as close to one or zero as possible…AND… learn to completely let go, as much as a humanly possible, of anything on your list that you wrote “NC” next to.

It is the one of the most important lessons I’ve ever learned: that the majority of pain, anger frustration and anxiety in most people’s lives… is caused by things that are completely out of their control. Even though there is literally nothing they can do to make any kind of significant impact on them, day in and day out they worry, stress and get angry over things that they should just try to put out of their mind and forget about. Learning to take control of what you can control, and letting completely go of what you will never control is one of the most important life skills anyone can develop.

Step four: Write out five specific and realistic ACTION STEPS that you can take right away to begin to take proactive control of the items you wrote a “C” next to. Hoping they get better, waiting for someone else to fix them, wishing they will go away on their own… not a good strategy. Getting busy on taking strong, positive control of them… a very good strategy indeed!

See also John Spence Workshop number two: The Happiness List for increasing the positive side of life while this stress workshop was aimed to decrease the negative side of life.

Now it is time to relax for the weekend!

Learning from the Best

This time my blog post is a little different. It is a case example of how

I have been trying to teach business strategy to my wife.

She is an elementary school teacher and could not care less about business strategy. But I decided to try, because her situation makes it rather relevant.

She has been a teacher for more than ten years in Finland, which has been ranked the highest-performing country in education. We currently live in Japan, and the Japanese are extremely interested on what is the secret behind Finland's success, and why their system is no longer as effective.

Jim Collins, in his book Good to Great, defines a Hedgehog Concept. A concept which helps you, the hedgehog, to beat your competition, the fox, no matter how hard he tries. My wife has been able to combine the three elements for the concept

1. What you can best in the world at – she is the best expert of Finnish school system in Tokyo


2. What drives your economic engine – what she has done provides small extra income, enough to motivate her


3. What are you deeply passionate about – as any teacher, she is passionate of her job

Treacy and Wiersema describe three strategic value disciplines that can create customer value and provide a competitive advantage. One of them is customer intimacy - cultivating close and long term customer relationships and intimate knowledge of customer requirements. She has managed to do that with Gakken, the biggest educational publisher in Japan. And to some extent with Mrs Itokazu, a member parliament, who is hosting and advertising her next presentation.

On her presentations we have applied the tips from Presentation Zen. You can see some sample slides here. Being her secretary, it is really refreshing to be able to design simplistic slides. Naturally she has a handout to go along with the slides.

Teachers are professionals in delivering presentations. And her presentation is Made to Stick. It has the elements of SUCCESs, it’s Simple, Unexpected, Concrete, Credible, Emotional, and is told with Stories.

Her book, The power of Finnish education (in Japanese) was written by a Japanese journalist from a Japanese point of view. It contains Simple, Unexpected, Concrete, Credible and Emotional Stories like in chapters called "My first time as home room teacher – of 33 students!", "Children deciding classroom rules", "Summer holiday without homework" and "Are field trips a nightmare for teachers?".

This is how I see her strategic position. She is not yet convinced about that and still wonders why people are interested to hear her presentation and even pay for that.

The name of this blog post is borrowed from an article written about her and the Finnish education system on page 48-49 on iNTOUCH magazine.

Leadership in Hard Times

I was reading the latest issue of Harvard Business Review in the train on my way back home. The editorial was giving some advice for leaders during these hard times

Leadership is never easy, but it’s incredibly tough right now.

Some of the advice sounded familiar as I have been blocking about similar topics lately.

Hire the best possible people to work for you, even if they fought you for your job. Surround yourself with a team of people who can challenge your thinking and whose strengths make up for your deficits. Share credit with your closest colleagues, so that they’re fully committed to your mission. Be sure to communicate, often and authentically, with your larger public. And don’t forget to relax. Says Doris Kearns Goodwin in Leadership Lessons from Abraham Lincoln.

I have been blogging about this in my post Right People On The Right Jobs, but maybe should go a bit deeper.

If you’re leading an organization through this downturn, you’re undoubtedly introducing major changes—and inevitably encountering resistance to them. It’s wise to engage with the resisters, learn from them, and alter your course if they suggest smart adjustments to your initiatives. Your biggest critics can be turned into your best advocates if you have the courage to listen carefully. This advice feels all the more important right now, given that an organization’s very survival may depend on making the right changes. Say Jeffrey Ford and Laurie Ford inDecoding Resistance to Change.


I have been blogging about this in my posts Leading Change, Change Resistance and Lessons in Organizational Resistance.

Leadership on tough times is a topic everyone writes about now. Dan McCarthy blogged about it in February "long overdue" as he said. But Lee J. Colan was early, he published a ChangeThis manifesto in December repeating his article from 2001.



His basic message (in the manifesto above) is

1) Change is an opportunity to improve our business
This results in leadership behavior like upgrading the workforce and strategic cost cutting. Greater employee commitment and a strengthened ability to sustain growth are the outcomes.

2) Involve personnel in the change - everybody needs to understand
- Where are we going? (Strategy)
- What are we doing to get there? (Plans)
- How can I contribute? (Roles)
- What’s in it for me? (Rewards)

3) Don't panic, focus and keep doing what you do best

I actually have nothing to add on these articles.