Innovation and Leadership : Fujitsu New Zealand
Japanese Companies and Innovation
Panel Discussion between Linda Hill, Akira Fukabori and Yoshikuni Takashige
The speakers participated in the panel discussion in the concluding segment of the seminar. The audience’s responses to a questionnaire, collected in advance to the forum, were used to shape discussion topics. Key topics included how to effectively combine two different styles of leadership — top-down and bottom-up (autonomous); how to balance new and existing businesses; whether Japanese companies should build ambidextrous organizations; and how to transform seniority-based organizations.
Takashige
Linda, you talked earlier about two teams at Google working on the same project in parallel to develop an infrastructure. One of the audience has expressed the view that this may be difficult for companies that do not have abundant resources, which Google or Volkswagen have. Do you think companies with limited resources can also do exploration in such a fashion?
Linda Hill
It turns out that being lean can help you be more innovative. When you get these parallel experiments, people are learning fast. As long as they are learning, you actually use fewer resources. When entrepreneurs don’t have many resources, they are much leaner, and they know they have to be fast, otherwise you don’t exist. If you get passionate people who are focused because they want to solve the problem, that means extra productivity.
When you have a big company, you may have a different problem of resources. You can afford to do the pilot and keep perfecting it because you have access to more money, more time, more talent potentially.
Takashige
Fukabori-san, your team at ANA avatar project has only a small number of people, doesn’t it?
Fukabori
There are about nine people working full-time for the project, and 15 people hold additional posts. What’s more, it’s a little strange, but smart, lean-minded engineers from around the world, like those who worked at Google, have moved to Japan for collaboration, even though their salaries are going down.
Takashige
Regarding the style of leadership, which is better for innovation, the top-down or the autonomous style? The results of the questionnaire show that the audience is divided between the two but many of them commented that they would use either of the two depending on the situation. Also, regarding another question, whether we should have an independent organization dedicated to innovation or include it as part of an existing business, many answered that either choice is possible. These comments and answers indicate that we need to have an ambidextrous organization that Professor Linda Hill also mentioned.
Linda Hill
One of my colleagues, Clayton Christensen, who studied disruptive innovation, argues for why you need to have an ambidextrous organization, with two different structures. If not, the present structure will kill the future structure, and will not allow it to exist, because the future structure often cannibalizes the present structure. You may have to set them up separately, but what you need to do is from the very beginning, you have to think about how you are going to do the integration–not do it afterwards because then they will never get integrated.
Takashige
ANA established a small independent organization called Digital Design Lab. You had driven the Avatar project long before that. Why did you come to run the project with a small organization under the direct control of the head office? And how do you collaborate with other organizations in the company?
Fukabori
In April 2016, we established the Digital Design Lab as an independent internal organization that explores business opportunities different from the airline business, and we have recruited young employees openly.
There is growing interest in how we should structure an organization dedicated to innovation. Since my team, the Avatar Project Office, currently belongs to the corporate strategy office, we are required to run the project with KPIs for evaluation, just like other business units.
Linda Hill
One of the things that we are studying is who should run an innovation lab. I think what we are seeing – but there’s not been enough research yet – is that it’s better to have someone who’s heading up the lab who actually has deep relationships in the organization, particularly if it’s a digital transformation. When you have an outsider who knows the technology but doesn’t know the organization, they can’t exercise the kind of influence necessary. They don’t have the credibility with the rest of the organization to take the ideas and make them useful. So I think there’s a little bit of a preference I see to have someone who knows the business run it–maybe bring in new people because you need new expertise, but you already have a coalition inside that you can use and help do the translation of the new people to the existing people. It has to be someone who is very credible.
Takashige
In our conversation in the waiting room, you mentioned a clutch. There are very large, slow gears and small gears spinning at high speeds, but if you want to connect them together, you have to have a clutch in the middle.
Linda Hill
You need something to connect two separate organizations. That sounds complicated, but a clutch-like function in between can solve the dilemma between two organizations living in different cultures.
Takashige
Fukabori-san, you have so many external partners in the Avatar project and at the same time collaborating with internal organizations. How do you do that?
Fukabori
I was also impressed with Linda’s idea about the clutch in the waiting room. For the Avatar project, as well, I think it is very important to run the future business and the current business in parallel. The international prize race is part of the future, and the future vision is moving forward helped by great advisors such as Peter Diamandis, President of the XPRIZE Foundation, and Ray Kurzweil, an authority on singularity. And their advisory is free.
But at the same time, it’s never easy for an airline company to get into robotics. So we need to do it ourselves with our hands and feet, figure out what users are looking for, and do actual prototyping to get it to the market.
The world’s top engineers have moved to live in Japan, saying that they want to build the future together. However, I am afraid that they would leave us instantly if they came to talk directly with people in the company, let’s say the marketing team, without having someone who understands both cultures. It’s really important to have these two wheels running together. The corporate strategy office handles one wheel – the current business – while the top engineers run the other wheel – the future business, assisted by my team.
Takashige
The internal organization, the corporate strategy office, manages the current business, while the XPRIZE Foundation and other external talent help explore the future vision. It looks as if you took, what we call, the black ship strategy, using external power to move internal politics.
Fukabori
Otherwise, it’s almost impossible to start a robotics business within an airline.
Linda Hill
I am just picking back up on eBay. Meg Whitman, CEO of the company, told me that they would make money from the payment system, not auctions, and they were profitable from Day 1. It’s not the case that you cannot innovate and make money immediately. For the business model, eBay had very strong rules, customer-focused rules for their business. Meg even let some groups break the rules a little bit because she saw they were innovating.
Until recently, I was on the board of State Street, a major U.S. bank. I was on the technology committee. We ended up having to have two groups. There was the group of technologists who were cleaning up the legacy technology, so that the bank could be more efficient and run in a more effective way in this infrastructure. And there was another group that was actually working on the future bank. We did have to come up with different metrics or ways of looking for progress. For the part of the change that was about the legacy business and the part of change that was much more forward thinking as to where we were going as a business, we did separate them. And the technology committee of the board had different ways of assessing those two parts of the business. But they were run by the same person so that someone was being the clutch and understanding what needed to happen. I think it’s important that the board has to participate and work also with management in decision-making.
Source link
