Learning from others

My blog is a day late this week as the ICDP team has been busy finalising the materials for our Summer Members’ Meeting which starts later today.  It is the first of our main meetings to be held face-to-face since Autumn 2019 as we had to cancel the March 2020 meeting scheduled in Berlin as Covid struck.  It’s therefore quite a big deal, as all the meetings until last month had to be held virtually.  That format worked, it was cheaper and easier to slot into diaries when you could, if needed, dip in and out of the meeting.  Our attendance today and tomorrow will not be as high as we have had in the past as some companies still have travel restrictions, but it does raise the question of what the added value is of a face-to-face meeting compared to virtual?  More broadly, what is the value of a research programme like that run by ICDP?

The key is the opportunity to learn from others.  I am not suggesting for a second that ICDP is the fount of all knowledge in the area of automotive distribution.  We are not hands on, staking our careers and our employer’s money on deciding a strategy and managing operations.  We do develop new concepts and approaches, but even those are informed by what we have observed and then working out how to fill the gaps, or anticipate the next development in the operating environment.  We benefit from the insights we gain working with our members, seeing what is working well, what could be more effective, combining that with other inputs and then distilling that into presentations that we can then share with the other members in meetings like the one starting this afternoon.

From that point on, the question is what the delegates do with the material.  The fact that the companies they work for are research members is a good start.  It implies that the company is open to new ideas, and that it wants to learn.  At the start of my career, I worked for what was then BL Cars, one of the evolutionary stages of British Leyland as it progressively slid into eventual oblivion.  Seeing that the writing was on the wall, I moved to Ford which was at that point riding high, but discovered that any experience from outside the world of the blue oval was considered worthless.  Looking upwards through the (large) management hierarchy, I could also see that everyone had a 100% Ford career path.  BL – despite its problems around management-union relationships and poor execution of sometimes very well-conceived product – was innovative in a number of areas, and I was able eventually to persuade Ford to buy some visual simulation tools that had been developed at BL.  But in general, Ford was bureaucratic and closed to outside thinking.  Things have changed, but the company is a shadow of its former self in Europe and globally.

Later in my career, I was involved as a consultant in benchmarking studies for Hyundai.  The targets were always Toyota, Ford and GM, and on occasions we returned to the same topic only two or three years after the first study.  What was most striking on these occasions was that whilst in the first cycle you would see multiple gaps between Toyota and the other OEMs, in the second you would still see Ford and GM in more or less the same relative position as they were previously, but it was often impossible to distinguish between Toyota and Hyundai.  Not only were Hyundai willing to learn, and to invest time and money in the process, but they were brilliant at acting on the results.  They did not cut and paste from Toyota, but they took the time to understand the underlying principles and reasons for a particular process innovation and then applied those – not the process itself – to their own business.  The relative fortunes of Hyundai versus Ford and GM over the subsequent twenty years arguably have their roots in this openness to change and the determination to really understand what might work better, rather than look only superficially.  (Also something I saw at Ford when they launched a misconceived ‘AJ’ (standing for After Japan) improvement programme that completely failed to pick up on the behavioural underpinnings of the Toyota Production System).

The key – as demonstrated by Hyundai in the early years – is the determination to truly understand what can make your business better and to act on it.  Bob Camp, one of the pioneers of benchmarking at Xerox Corporation, used to describe the superficial approach as “industrial tourism” – have a look, take some photos, write some reports, and then get on with day job as before.  There is no room for such complacency in today’s environment.  We all need to be curious, and we all need to act on what we learn.  A day sat in a warm hotel room in west London with peers from competitors and trading partners could turn out to be a great investment – whether it validates what you are already doing, challenges it or provides the ‘light bulb moment’ for some innovation.