{"id":1230,"date":"2012-01-07T11:51:50","date_gmt":"2012-01-07T11:51:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.saasoft.com\/blog\/?p=1230"},"modified":"2012-01-07T11:51:50","modified_gmt":"2012-01-07T11:51:50","slug":"steps-streams-silos-and-swamps","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hcse.blog\/?p=1230","title":{"rendered":"Steps, Streams, Silos and Swamps."},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>The late Steve Jobs created a world class\u00a0company called Apple – which is now the largest and most successful technology company – eclipsing\u00a0Microsoft.\u00a0 The secret of the success of\u00a0Apple is laid out in Steve Jobs biography – and can be stated in one word. Design<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

Apple\u00a0designs, develops and delivers great\u00a0products and services\u00a0\u00a0– ones that people want to\u00a0own and to use.\u00a0 That makes them cool. What is\u00a0even more impressive is that Steve Jobs has done this in more than once and has reinvented\u00a0more than one market:\u00a0Apple Computers and the graphical personal computer;\u00a0\u00a0Pixar\u00a0and\u00a0animated films; and\u00a0Apple again with digital music, electronic publishing; and mobile\u00a0phones.<\/p>\n

The common themes\u00a0are\u00a0digital technology and end-to-end seamless integrated design of chips, devices, software, services and shops.\u00a0Full vertical integration rather like Henry Ford’s\u00a0verically integrated iron-ore to finished cars\u00a0production line.\u00a0 The Steve Jobs design\u00a0paradigm is simplicity<\/strong>.\u00a0It is much more difficult to\u00a0design\u00a0simplicity than to evolve complexity and his reputation was formidable. He was a uncompromising perfectionist\u00a0who sacrificed\u00a0feelings on the alter of\u00a0design perfection. His view of the world was binary – it was either\u00a0great or crap – meaning it was either moving towards perfection or away from it.<\/p>\n

What Steve Jobs created\u00a0was a\u00a0design stream out of which\u00a0must-have products and services flowed – and he did it by seeing all the steps as part of one system and aligned with one\u00a0purpose.\u00a0 He did not allow physical or psychological silos to form and he did this by challenging anything\u00a0and everything.\u00a0 Many could not work in this environment and left, many others thrived and delivered far beyond what they believed they could do.<\/p>\n

Other companies were swamps. Toxic emotional waste\u00a0swamps of silos,\u00a0politics and turf wars.\u00a0 Apple computers itself when through a phase when Steve Jobs was “ejected” and without its spiritual leader the company slipped downhill. He was enticed back and Apple was reborn and went\u00a0on to create the iMac, iPod, iTunes, iPhone, iPad and now iCloud. Revolutioning the world of digital commnication.<\/p>\n

The image above is a satellite view of a delta – a\u00a0complex network of\u00a0interconnected streams\u00a0created\u00a0by\u00a0a river making its way to the sea through a\u00a0swamp.\u00a0 The structure of the delta is constantly changing and evolving so\u00a0it is easy\u00a0to get lost it in,\u00a0to get\u00a0caught in a dead-end, or stuck in the mud. Only travel by small\u00a0boat is\u00a0possible and that is often both\u00a0ineffective and inefficient.<\/p>\n

Many organistions are\u00a0improvement science swamps. The\u00a0stream\u00a0of innovative ideas\u00a0gets fragmented by\u00a0the myriad of everchanging channels;\u00a0caught in\u00a0political dead-ends;\u00a0and stuck in the mud of bureaucracy.\u00a0 Only small,\u00a0skillfully steered\u00a0ideas\u00a0will\u00a0trickle \u00a0through – but this trickle\u00a0is not enough to keep the swamp\u00a0from silting up. Eventually the resistance to change reaches a critical level and\u00a0the\u00a0improvement stream is forced to\u00a0change course – diverting the flow of change away from the swamp – and\u00a0marooning the\u00a0stick-in-the-muds to slowly sink and expire in the bureaucratic gloop that they\u00a0spawned.<\/p>\n

Steve Jobs’ legacy to us is a\u00a0lesson. To create a system that continues to deliver and delight we need to start\u00a0by learning how to design the steps, then to design the streams of steps\u00a0to link seamlessly, and finally to design the system of streams\u00a0to synergise\u00a0as\u00a0sophisticated simplicity.<\/p>\n

Improvement\u00a0cannot be left to chance in the blind hope that excellence will evolve spontaneously.\u00a0Evolution\u00a0is both ineffective and inefficient and\u00a0is more likely to lead to dissipated and extravagant complexity\u00a0than aligned and elegant simplicity.<\/p>\n

Improvement is a science that sits at the cross-roads of humanity and technology.<\/p>\n

\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The late Steve Jobs created a world class\u00a0company called Apple – which is now the largest and most successful technology company – eclipsing\u00a0Microsoft.\u00a0 The secret of the success of\u00a0Apple is laid out in Steve Jobs biography – and can be stated in one word. Design. Apple\u00a0designs, develops and delivers great\u00a0products and services\u00a0\u00a0– ones that people … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Steps, Streams, Silos and Swamps.”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,23,35,41,47],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1230","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business","category-history","category-reflections","category-stories","category-transactional-analysis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hcse.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1230","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hcse.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hcse.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hcse.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hcse.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1230"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/hcse.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1230\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hcse.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1230"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hcse.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1230"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hcse.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1230"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}