Contrasting Innovative Tact: Google & Apple

Performance and quality are judged by an organization’s customers. In order to understand your customers’ needs, your organization must take into account all product features, characteristics, modes of customer access, and support that contribute value as seen by your customers.

Customer-driven excellence means much more than reducing defects and errors, merely meeting specifications, or reducing complaints. In a recent article from the International Herald Times, Steve Lohr points to the very different models of innovation that the supernovas from Silicon Valley utilize; Google and Apple are constantly working to expand their market and, ultimately, bottom line.

A customer-driven organization striving to meet Baldrige Award requirements addresses not only the product and service characteristics that meet basic customer requirements, but also those features and characteristics that differentiate the organization from its competitors. Google is this type of a customer-driven innovator, as they are constantly developing and modifying their products and services in attempt to glean instant feedback from users. They are regularly asking for customer opinions, testing new “labs,” and attempting to simplify their products to impress the end-user. This unique formula, with its emphasis on regularly testing ideas and products with customers, amounts to applying, “the scientific method to market-opportunity identification,” says Errol B. Arkilic, Program Director at the National Science Foundation.  It is directed towards customer retention and loyalty, market share gain and growth, as well as demanding close attention to the voice of the customer.

The Apple model, on the contrary, is much more refined, intuitive, and top-down.  Lohr reports that when asked…

Baldrige Model: How do you manage information, knowledge and information technology?

Item 4.2 in the Baldrige Criteria asks key questions about how you build and manage your knowledge assets. The following processes, best practices, and problem areas look at critical issues in this part of the Baldrige model.

Your organization needs processes for:

• Managing the accuracy, integrity, reliability, timeliness, security, and confidentiality of data, information, and knowledge
• Making needed data and information available to employees, suppliers, partners, collaborators, and customers
• Managing organizational knowledge
• Ensuring that hardware and software are reliable, secure, and user-friendly
• Ensuring the continued availability of information systems during emergencies

Best practices to consider:

• The organization has identified what information its employees, customers, suppliers, and partners need to improve performance and has deployed processes that get the right information in the right hands at the right time.
• In a learning organization knowledge is currency, which is why a learning organization has processes for collecting and transferring knowledge and identifying, sharing, and implementing best practices.
• Critical data and information are backed up and stored offsite in case of an emergency, and the backup system is checked on a scheduled basis to ensure reliability.

Common problems areas:

• The right information either is not collected or is not distributed to the right people when it can be useful.
• Knowledge is lost when employees leave the company.
• No processes exist to identify the organization’s knowledge assets or to collect and use that knowledge.
• The organization does not pursue, value, or share best practices.

To read more about building and managing your knowledge assets, click on these articles:

• Get the Information You Need
• Knowledge Management 2.0
• Outside-the-Box Benchmarking

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My focus for the past twenty years has been on understanding how the Baldrige model gives those who use it a competitive edge, not just at the organizational level but at the personal level… Because there’s something different about these strategic performers that gives them an advantage over the short-term plodders around them.

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Whether you are an employee, manager, or leader, there are two ways to look at achieving your goals at work. You can either think like a short-term plodder and believe that your organization will recognize your talents and hard work and reward you…eventually…maybe… OR you can start acting like a strategic performer, knowing that you will get ahead by taking charge of your job and your career. As a strategic performer, you ask the right questions. You provide insightful answers. You stop wasting your days on the same old drudgery, reacting to the latest problems or the newest crisis, and you see the big picture. You understand where you can make the greatest difference and you seize that opportunity and your job becomes richer, more fulfilling, more fun, and more rewarding.

The beliefs that create success are consistent with the way…