Welcome to the Effective Executive Innovation Initiative!

If you are a department-level director or above at your company, you're sure to have seen opportunities to improve business processes somewhere in your domain.

In other words, you see opportunities to innovate.

But you may also be at a loss as to how to do that effectively!

I'd like to introduce you to some friends of mine.

Ken, VP of Operations for Spacely Sprockets, Inc.

Meet Ken.

Ken is VP of Operations at Spacely Sprockets, Inc.

He’s been doing this for ten years now, and he’s good at his work. In the face of an unpredictable market for sprockets he’s kept costs down and protected jobs. Senior leadership respects him. His department heads look up to him.

But Ken has a secret anxiety that keeps him up at night. He feels overwhelmed by the growing complexity of the business. His email inbox is overflowing. His todo list gnaws at him.

Across town, Spacely’s top competitor, Cogswell Cogs, has signed a new deal with Spacely’s (former) best customer. His department heads were looking nervous at the last inter-departmental meeting.

To top it off, annual inventory is coming up, and that’s always a stressful time of year. It’s also expensive and time-consuming. The inventory system is ancient, held together by an heroic IT department with duct tape and chewing gum.

In fact, one of the young bloods in IT suggested to him last week that they should consider replacing the inventory system with new software, but Ken gets nervous about projects like that.

Ken’s not opposed to business software, mind you. He loves Outlook and the company Slack. He was an early adopter of the iPhone for his work number. He’s renowned among his peers for his mastery of Excel. But those are commodity products, like the sprockets his company makes. Someone else took the risk on building them, and he enjoys the benefits.

Non-commodity and custom software, on the other hand, make Ken nervous. It’s expensive and risky. In fact, the existing inventory system was once the shiny new and exciting thing, the result of a brief encounter between Dan, the previous VP of Operations, and an energetic and persuasive young consultant at a conference.

Ken watched that project play out. He knows how much it cost, and he’s seen the disappointing results. It works, but nobody has anything good to say about it. The last thing Ken wants to do is bring in another energetic and persuasive salesman to promise him the moon and deliver him a cheeseball.

But the sprocket business is changing quickly, and the inventory system isn’t able to keep up. It’s slowing the Warehouse team down. It’s slowing Manufacturing down. It’s slowing Accounting down.

And Cogswell Cogs seems to be adapting to the changes better and eating Spacewell’s lunch because of it.

The truth is, if Ken were willing to see it, there are three other departments under his purview with fundamentally inefficient business processes that would benefit from software automation. The department heads tend not to talk about it much ever since Ken’s rant at the Christmas party last year.

Now, let’s go over to Cogswell Cogs, and see what Ken’s counterpart is up to.