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3M and Imation: Demerger as a Source of Innovation1 John Denton and Christian de Cock The case documents an eventful year in the history of 3M, a company that until November 1995 had been considered a paragon of corporate consistency. The particular emphasis of this case is on the spin-off or demerger of 3M's data storage and imaging businesses into a new company called Imation. Although the decision to demerge was taken in a global context, the detailed comments and reflections of participants involved in this process are drawn from Europe and, in particular, from the UK. The case makes extensive use of quotes from these managers in order to bring to life decisions and events. This case explores the strategy behind 3M's decision to demerge, and considers the myriad of structural and cultural issues arising from the decision. Finally, the case examines the results of the demerger and assesses the position of the fledgling company.
Dear Employee: Today, we are announcing some important news . . . important to the company and important to you. We're announcing our intention to launch our data storage and imaging systems businesses as an independent company, which we fully expect will be a strong competitor in the markets they serve. We also are announcing that we will discontinue our audio and video tape business within a year. As you probably know, these businesses have not been able to achieve a satisfactory return on investment in recent years, because of intense price competition, and we don't see the prospect of significant improvement. Reflecting our values, employee issues in this transition will receive the highest level of attention. The high performance of the company depends on employees who are highly motivated and proud to be part of 3M. 3M and the new company will determine as soon as possible what employment levels are appropriate for their organisations, but expect to reduce approximately 5,000 positions. I know all this is a lot of change for you to absorb. I know you will have questions about what this all means. Additional information is already on its way to your management for sharing with you. Please raise your questions about these changes with your superior or manager . . . We will work hard to provide timely, relevant information. # Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1997. 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF and 350 Main St, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
Over the next 12 months, we will be launching the new company and realigning 3M to better address our markets. It will be a real test of all of us. I know I can count on your continued support in making these changes. We enjoy a leadership position, which is the envy of many of our competitors. We believe that, by providing both 3M and the new company with improved prospects for long-term, profitable growth, these changes will enhance that leadership position and offer the greatest amount of opportunity for the greatest number of employees. L. D. DeSimone
3M and Imation: Introduction The above message is an abridged version of the email that was sent to all 3M employees on November 14th, 1995. The reorganisation proposed by 3M Chairman and CEO De Simone included, as the Wall Street Journal put it, ``all the favourite morsels that analysts have come to crave: layoffs, spin-offs, and business discontinuations.'' 2 The announcement marked the start of a momentous year in 3M's 93-year history and it is the events of this year that this case study will address. In summary, DeSimone's message conveyed 3M's intention to spin-off its data storage and imaging businesses into a separate company and to discontinue its audio and
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visual tape businesses. Although these were two distinct strategic decisions, at an operational level managers had to cope with the implications of these two decisions simultaneously.
3M: Background 3 Observers and outsiders frequently describe Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing in terms approaching awe. The International Directory of Company Histories 3M is the preferred name of the Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company, based in St. Paul, Minnesota. It is a company that between 1985 and 1995 gave its investors a solid 15.5 per cent annual return. In the past 11 years it has scored in the top ten on Fortune 's list of Most Admired Corporations ten times. 3M is widely regarded as one of the world's most innovative companies. Two corporate rules are repeatedly quoted in the literature in this respect. A key one is the 30 per cent rule, which requires that 30 per cent of a division's sales comes from products introduced within the past four years.4 Then there is the 15 per cent rule which allows virtually anyone at the company to spend up to 15 per cent of the workweek on anything he or she wants, as long as it is product related.5 In other words, people can manage themselves 15 per cent of the time. Although 3M's name has become almost synonymous with innovation, the company has shown extraordinary consistency and continuity. Employee turnover is less than 3 per cent per year and the average tenure of officers is 31 years. This is due to what has been described as its, ``improbable, almost defiantly non-corporate nature.'' 6 Many of 3M's management principles can be traced back to a memo penned over half a century ago by founder William L. McKnight.7 The 3M of 1995 was massive (sales over $15 billion and employing over 70,000 people), highly diversified (over 60,000 products) and multinational (operations in 61 countries). Over 50 per cent of 3M's revenues was generated outside the United States, where it had manufacturing facilities in 42 countries. 3M's products, while based on a number of core technologies, range from fire hose linings to heart-lung machines, from ScotchTM tape to Post-itTM Notes, and from sand paper to optical fibres. After the reorganisation, 3M will still have sales of approximately $12 billion, of which more than half will come from outside the United States.
Innovation, consistency, continuity
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3M and Imation: Rationale for the Demerger The bottom line is that we found ourselves looking at two strikingly different types of businesses that needed different criteria to judge the ultimate success of the business financially and/or from a competitive standpoint. Within that light it really looked to be the case that both businesses would prosper better if they were distanced from one another. John Mueller, Chairman and CEO, 3M UK. 3M has traditionally been seen as highly skilled at managing an extensive product range across a diverse portfolio of businesses, rather than as a mere holding company. For this reason the demerger represented a major strategic departure,8 rather than a decision solely driven by the investment community. This is not to say, of course, that financial considerations played no part in the decision. As it happened, the investment community reacted very positively to DeSimone's announcement and 3M's shares closed up 2 at 61 valuing the whole company at $26 billion. I think the scrutiny given to this part of the business with regard to how best to manage it began, gosh, I would say as many as ten years ago and certainly in earnest in the last five. So it was not something that was decided overnight. It was not something that was unduly influenced by the investment community which in some cases around the world has really driven companies to demerge. John Mueller, Chairman and CEO, 3M UK. At the time the demerger was announced the Financial Times described the move as ``a response to acute competitive pressures resulting from rising prices of raw materials and a sluggish US economy.'' 9 This, however, is an overly simplistic assessment of 3M's strategy. The real driving forces behind the decision lie much deeper. To understand these it is necessary to look closely at the nature of the businesses being spun-off. The data storage and imaging industries are highly competitive as well as very fast moving, thus making them fundamentally different from those parts of 3M which tend to be primarily material science based. In many segments 3M faced strong competition from Asian companies with lower cost bases. Hence, these businesses faced a constant battle to build and maintain technological leadership. 3M believed that this made its data storage and imaging businesses fundamentally different
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to its core businesses, and thus that a different style of management was required. 3M's strength comes from very strong research and development long term products. Therefore the pace of change within those groups isn't necessarily a key success factor. If you are working in something that serves the printing industry or the PC industry, you have to have a pace of change that matches theirs . . . Now it was wrong to ask 3M to gear its whole organisation to do that, but it is right that Imation should, and if Imation doesn't, it won't succeed. In retrospect it obviously was such a good thing to do that I for one am very impressed with the ability, the bravery of the 3M management to do it. It left them, to a degree, exposed to comments as to why they did not do this before and all these sorts of things . . . Dick Northrop, Vice-President, Imation Europe The results of 3M's attempts, prior to the demerger, to compete in what it identified as ``a fundamentally different business'', were that the company was not achieving its goals for growth and profitability. In 1995 3M was suffering from a significant financial downturn during which it failed, for the first time in years, to meet its financial goals ± 10 per cent growth in earnings per share and 20 to 25 per cent return on equity. At the time the data storage and imaging businesses were accounting for about 15 per cent of sales, but contributed only five per cent of profits. The company's management structure and practices couldn't account for the amount of differentiation between the businesses. Ken Jackson, 3M UK's Human Resources Director, believed that ``an unrealistic amount of corporate energy was being diverted into a relatively small part of the business''. Financial judgements for most of our businesses are built on margins or levels of profitability and we have some rules of thumb that we apply in terms of decision making with regards to placing investments in terms of ultimate profitability, return on investment and the like. When you apply those techniques to some of the imaging and information technology businesses often they'll come up short . . . The generation of cash flow in the information technologies businesses is perhaps a better way to judge the success of those businesses as opposed to levels of profitability . . . So we found ourselves looking at two strikingly different businesses and we were trying to use one set of criteria to judge
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their success. We practically made that happen by doing all sorts of things internally, but in the final analysis, based on the significant difference, the best option was to spin this off as a separate entity. The thesis here is that both the new entities will have a better chance of success over the long term than the two pieces when they were inextricably linked. John Mueller, Chairman and CEO, 3M UK
3M and the Audio-Visual Business: Rationale for the Discontinuation 3M had been considered to be vulnerable in audio tape, video tape, and related media since the mid-1980s. The businesses were riding down a steep cost curve that rapidly turned high-value-added items into commodities. Profits continuously kept shrinking. 3M couldn't cut costs enough to get ahead of the curve or innovate its way off the slope altogether. Still, 3M held on because the businesses supported technologies it needed elsewhere. For example, the chemistry-based colour capabilities of videotape are also used in film and x-rays. When 3M was confident that its knowledge of digital colour technology had advanced enough, the company realised it could afford to stop investing in chemistry-based skills and hence get out of the business. There were now eight or ten players in the field, a lot of capacity and what was known in that business for the last two or three years a concept called ``free fall pricing''. It was like any commodity that gets into oversupply, the price goes right into the abyss. We probably would have outlasted that but one other issue dropped on the picture from the horizon, that being the change in technology. What has come, recordable CD-Rom, will move the business along to another, entirely different technology format . . . So you put the two things together; not a lot of competitive differentiation, a lot of players coupled; now with an absolute certainty of a change in technology from one format to another, and it just says ``why are you trying to push this bucket of water up there?'' Ain't going to happen folks . . . John Mueller, Chairman and CEO, 3M UK The discontinuation was a decision that was especially hard to deal with in the UK as 3M UK had the last remaining major plant in Europe. In addition, the Scotch brand had established itself as a strong market leader in the video tape market and was a profitable business.
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3M and Imation: Structural and Cultural Issues In terms of the magnitude of the change, this is something very much more significant than any change we have gone through before. There were a couple of areas that made the process more challenging. One was the legal situation relating to the transfer of undertakings which is quite complex with different lawyers in different European countries. The other one was that we would do this within the human resources principles and values that we had for decades as the guiding light and that includes treating people with dignity and respect in all situations. Paul Davis, Human Resource Development Director, 3M Europe
Largest change in 3M's history
Having looked at the rationale behind the spin-off and discontinuation decisions, the case now turns to the structural and cultural effects of this decision. The transition from one company to two separate companies represented probably the largest single change in 3M's history. Not surprisingly, the effects of a change of this magnitude are significant and diverse. Firstly, the case will address the immediate aftermath of the announcement of the demerger and the discontinuation. This represented a difficult time for the company and a number of problems manifested themselves. Secondly, the cultures of the two companies are explored as employees from both companies reflect on how they might begin to differ as they seek to adapt to their differing competitive environments. Thirdly, the case looks at a perennial problem surrounding the introduction of organisational change: the pace of change efforts. In the case of the Imation demerger ± seven and a half months from announcement to formal split ± managers were under extreme time pressure and this created both problems and opportunities. Finally this case explores the issue of Imation's name and how the company seeks to hold onto the loyalty associated with the 3M name, while also seeking to establish its own presence in its markets.
3M, Imation, and the Discontinuation: The Immediate Aftermath of the Announcement The biggest problem we faced in doing all this was the shock and the fact that it just arrived ± clarity was right down here [while pointing to the nil point of a graph].
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Jan Conway, Manager ± Employee Planning and Resourcing, 3M UK. In announcing the demerger and discontinuation CEO DeSimone faced something of a conundrum. If employees were told first 3M would be open to allegations of insider dealing. If the investment community was told before anyone else, the media would have picked it up straight away and employees would have found out about this momentous change on the evening news or from the newspapers, an implicit violation of 3M's cultural values. So the decision was made that the media, employees, customers, legal bodies would be told, globally, on the same day. The way to do this was the email from the CEO to each individual in the company. There were rumours that there was an announcement coming. I would not say it was a total surprise but nobody expected something as major as that. There was a lot of respect within the company, that it was done that way. Everybody understood why. The legal people had to be told first and I think there was a lot of acceptance of the fact that everybody else was told at the same time. Everybody was treated equally. Ben Holmes, Corporate Communications Executive, 3M UK I think it was the best kept secret ever in the company. I have been in the company 23 years and it is very hard to keep secrets in 3M. A lot of people back in November last year were waiting for something to happen but I think they were still surprised when this did happen. When you change something in an organisation what tends to happen is that people have got used to the idea that it is going to happen and begin to think about what processes are in place to make it happen. It is just a question then of getting an idea how it should be done, maybe some sort of consensus about how to do it, and then just doing it. This is quite different in that there was a major catch up situation. I don't think many people outside the board new about it. So the whole of the management of the company were in catch up and that took a long time. John Howells, Technical Director, 3M, UK. Tony Griffiths, 3M's Manager of Corporate Marketing and Public Affairs, believed that the message ``worked well in that it was very speedy.'' However, he also pointed out that, ``the problem is that you want managers to take ownership of issues and be able to talk to their people about them . . . but managers were not equipped with more than the basic
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announcement. So there was very little counselling a manager could give to affected staff.'' This individual feedback was certainly required by many of the affected staff as the following quotes regarding people's initial reactions demonstrate. The most significant and the absolute first reaction is `what is going to happen to me?' It becomes a very personal and a human thing. The second is `why is it going on in the first place?', and third is `what is the next step, what happens now?' It is kind of one, two, three. And, of course, the toughest to answer was the first one, `what is going to happen to me?' In a lot of cases we had to say that we have not got all that worked out yet but rest assured it will be and you will be involved with the process and I think we kept our word. John Mueller, Chairman and CEO, 3M UK. On 14th November the HR Manager who has responsibility for audio visual was immediately inundated with calls and he had the same information as they had, so it was quite hard . . . In a way we were all in it together. We were saying, `what does it mean? What am I going to do?' Jan Conway, Manager Employee Planning and Resourcing, 3M UK. The way of disseminating the momentous decision also held interesting future management implications. To me it was a signal. Future information is going to be freely available to everyone. You will use IT solutions for the dissemination of information and any manager cannot expect to know more than the staff know. It indicates that a manager of people needs to be more competent in being able to interpret information and have enough confidence in what the company is doing or acknowledge the company's directions to be able to offer some or counselling or put the information in context. Tony Griffiths, Manager of Corporate Marketing and Public Affairs, 3M UK Two key problem areas which needed to be addressed, in addition to setting up the new company, were the distribution of technology and the European dimension of managing the transition. The challenge from a North American point of view was the complexity of untangling intellectual properties: which product areas own intellectual properties? 3M had over 110 technologies and over 60,000 products. A true playing field for lawyers. . . The intellectual property situation was less of a direct challenge for European managers.
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However, they had to cope with the complexity of managing the change in over twenty countries. Every bit of 3M was based on a single country type of arrangement. The old story of someone getting off an aeroplane with a few samples of sandpaper and setting up a business is almost true. All the businesses were set up under local laws, local customs and local prices. They have their own computers and systems. So you've got a situation where to make a European business out of that, you first of all have we have to make a global business, then we have to make a European business. To bring our European business together is a very complicated job when it comes to systems which drive the business. Particularly if you want to centralise business because of operational benefits. Lance Quantrill, Marketing Communications and Public Affairs Manager (Northern Europe), Imation. I think the main thing that we had to do it in each country was to make sure, from a legal point of view, that we were doing the right thing. Much as people imagine there is a European Union, there are still a hell of a lot of differences from country to country . . . The other thing I think as well is that the 3M organisation in each of the 20 odd countries varies in strength, depending on the size of the country, the market share and the maturity of the organisation. UK, Germany, France, Italy are long established areas. Some of the other countries have not been as established so long and in some of those countries perhaps the regulatory situation will be less and in some more. There were some areas that I am sure could be taken and passed on but there was still a great deal of difference as well. Perhaps from the Northern American point of view that was not envisaged from the start. Because the US tend to think of Europe as Europe you see, and of course it isn't . . . John Howells, Technical Director, 3M UK. The biggest challenge, however, proved to be the management of the inevitable reduction in manpower and redistribution of the workforce across the various divisions.
3M, Imation, and Discontinuation: What Happens to All the People?10 ``3M Management believes that it is essential to provide an organisational structure and work climate which respect the dignity and worth of individuals, encourage
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initiative, challenge individual capacities, provide equal opportunity for development and equitably reward effort and contribution. It will endeavour to provide a stable work environment which promotes career employment. It believes 3M employees are the Corporation's most valuable resource.'' From 3M Corporate Objectives. The demerger, and the audio-video discontinuation raised a number of difficult Human Resource issues for 3M to resolve. 3M made a huge effort to address these issues in a manner which was in keeping with its stated commitment to its employees. When the decision to demerge was taken the Imation businesses employed 11,000 people worldwide. Imation initially only wanted to employ 9,000 people, which left, at first sight, 2,000 people with no place in either company.11 However, it was never the company's intention to force all these employees to leave the company. 3M faced particular problems in the UK because the Human Resource implications of the demerger were severely exacerbated by the closure of the audio-visual manufacturing plant at Gorseinon in Wales. 3M's response was set out in the following memo sent to senior managers by John Mueller in early December: Our guiding corporate principle is that, `Our policies are designed to minimise the need to hire externally while qualified, unassigned resources exist in 3M. Both employees and management must give up some freedom of decision making in this regard.' . . . In all likelihood there will be too many reductions and too few open positions for the reassignment process to handle everyone. In addition, therefore, we must ensure that our overall approach to reassignment, retirements and redundancy leaves all employees understanding that people have to be treated with dignity and respect by a company truly doing its best to manage a difficult situation. John Mueller, Chairman and CEO, 3M UK. On a practical level the company put in place a number of structures and procedures12 to achieve the goal set out in John Mueller's memo. The first of these was a transition team which had overall responsibility for the human resource issues created by the demerger and the closure. The company engaged an outplacement consultancy, at a cost of £150,000 in the UK. Transitions workshops were organised where managers could go and learn about the
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implications of change. This was followed up with career workshops, job search seminars, etc. In terms of procedures, 3M produced a weekly vacancy list which went first to all unassigned people. They got to know about the vacancies before they were posted and they could only be posted if there was nobody suitable internally. The company relocation policy was extended to all employees at all levels (a package which cost the company in the region of £20,000). 3M also introduced a twinning policy where the company actively looked for job opportunities to match with reduced positions all over 3M. Jan Conway explains: Right from the start this only affected some businesses but there were people in other businesses who were saying ``You know I might quite like to consider voluntary redundancy''. We then introduced a twinning procedure so that they could go as long as we had a suitable replacement for them from the unassigned list. This took a bit of manoeuvring but we have probably done about 15 or so of those. Which again has made the person who wanted to go very happy and made the person who did not want to go, who has now got that job, also happy. That was quite creative and a lot of talking had to go on between people. You can't have a procedure for this. You can have lists with names and a list with vacancies and so on, but in the end there has to be a lot of consultation, communication and a desire to make it work. Jan Conway, Manager ± Employee Planning and Resourcing, 3M UK. Surprisingly, given the magnitude and implications of the change the outcomes of the `people managing' process were very positive. It is the greatest test of our principles of operation we have ever had. Looking back on it now, we held true to those principles and what had to be done was done and if we needed to go a bit further to support an individual member in the situation that was done. Paul Davis, Human Resource Development Director, 3M Europe. You have a lot of anecdotal evidence around as being quite good. ``I have not been that happy but all things considered I have had a lot of support from 3M.'' Recently I was using a quote from somebody in Audio Video who got up to say at one of the business review meetings ``Unfortunately I have been made redundant
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but I would like to thank the company for everything they have done for us.'' Jan Conway, Manager ± Employee Planning and Resourcing, 3M UK. One reason for this positive outcome is that the company did not hold back in terms of financial resources dedicated to dealing with all the human problems. We had to do a lot in terms of providing financial information. People can't make any decisions without financial information. We had available what we called one-to-one pick-up meetings. If you have a lot of announcements it is a complete shock and obviously people can react in a huge variety of ways. Financial counselling was offered to some people who were only thinking about retiring or going. That took the format of a two hour consultation with an independent financial company who produced a report of about eight or nine pages covering absolutely everything. So that has cost a lot of money, and been worth a lot of money to people receiving that sort of advice . . . I am sure that this package is so generous in what we have done. I really do think it is difficult to think what else we could have done. Jan Conway, Manager ± Employee Planning and Resourcing, 3M UK. Several 3M and Imation managers pointed out, however, that procedures and structures were necessary to deal with the situation, but were not sufficient by themselves. The personal involvement of managers at all levels, including the very top, was required. A lot of personal stuff. Is my pension going to be honoured? Is my salary going to change? Is my opportunity for advancement? It all becomes very personal which is why the process becomes very difficult. Those kind of questions you don't answer for 200 people at a crack, it comes down to one on one. Personnel worked on this, and we had an outside consultancy that does a lot of this one on one. We had extra duties put on most management to make certain we spent time to deal with these questions, just like I am going to do with this person Monday morning who is now officially part of the new company but still has some kind of bad feelings about things that I will try and help with that. John Mueller, Chairman and CEO, 3M UK. This involvement of managers at all levels can be traced back to 3M's unique culture, an issue the case turns to next.
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3M and Imation: Two Companies ± One Culture? The culture on which 3M has been built ± including innovation, risk-taking, respect for the individual, teamwork and integrity ± will be carried forth by both companies. Livio DeSimone, Chairman and CEO, 3M World-wide. We are building a new company with a new culture focused on the customer. Bill Monahan, Chairman and CEO, Imation world-wide. 3M's corporate culture has always placed great value on both employees and customers, and is widely regarded as one of its greatest assets. The benefits of this unique culture in managing a major transition even surprised old stalwarts. A lot of people have gone not only the extra mile but maybe the extra four or five and we are going to be doing some things to recognise people who have really spent a lot of extra hours and a lot of extra hard work to get this thing off the ground. Announcement to spin-off was seven months, of a $2.5 billion company; this is not easily done. And we made it and we have a lot to celebrate, a few hitches, but operationally they are up and running, they're doing business, taking orders, meeting customers, and doing all the things any business is supposed to do. John Mueller, Chairman and CEO, 3M UK. I still find it remarkable that there was so much co-operation from the people who were going to become Imation people and the people who were remaining 3M and the people in the middle who weren't quite sure where they were going. I think it says something about the spirit or the culture or whatever it is that 3M has, that enables people to put themselves out to cooperate like that. A learning point there is that in some way there is something fairly strong in the spirit of 3M. Tony Griffiths, Manager of Corporate Marketing and Public Affairs, 3M UK Naturally, with Imation being staffed exclusively by former 3M employees, something described by Ken Jackson as ``an inevitable mistake'', the two companies began their separate lives with almost identical cultures. Interview quotes from both 3M and Imation managers give some indication on how the cultures might grow apart, basic values they will still share, and how 3M and Imation might learn from one another.
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In many ways it [Imation] was a clean sheet of paper. People began to exercise their creative juices and found some things that they would like to suggest or try which might not have fitted here . . . In fact some of the best things they have done have come from 3M people who said ``I always knew there was a better way but it just did not fit with how 3M went about things.'' John Mueller, Chairman and CEO, 3M UK. I saw the other day the video presentation that was made for the Imation distributors to launch the new company. It was excellent, but I was a bit gobsmacked afterwards because it just wasn't 3M. Which is right. But I couldn't for a minute tell you why it was not 3M, but it was just different. It was good, it was positioning. Ben Holmes, Corporate Communications Executive, 3M UK. Pretty soon after Bill Monahan was appointed CEO, he was regularly sending out e-mail messages to everyone who was going to be appointed to Imation. The openness and confidence shown by doing that is something we can learn from. In many companies, and I think that 3M is the same as many companies in this respect, managers want to get the situation pinned down fact-wise before they talk about it. I don't think we can do that anymore because things change very quickly. That is one thing we have learned from the way Imation is doing it. You can't wait until you have pinned everything down and then crafted an announcement and put it on the notice board to brief all managers and ask managers to brief employees. Tony Griffiths, Manager of Corporate Marketing and Public Affairs, 3M UK The reason why we can do well is simply that now we are lined up against our competitors in our marketplace and we have to meet customer needs in that business. We can move at our own pace. We make decisions in 45 days against the 45 weeks it would have taken 3M.13 I am being a little unkind about the 45 weeks, I don't know how long it would take them. But history would indicate that it takes them quite a long time. But more importantly, as we say in Imation, we would rather be 80 per cent right than 100 per cent late . . . Dick Northrop, Vice-President, Imation Europe
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It is a real delight to be freed, if you like, from management time of pushing things forward and making sure we are 100 per cent right. That extra 20 per cent takes a long time and sometimes we don't have that. Lance Quantrill, Marketing Communications and Public Affairs Manager (Northern Europe), Imation.
3M and Imation: The Pace of the Transition Our spin-off has gone extremely well. We met our deadline to complete the spin-off by July 1st. Our customers are seeing us hit the ground running. Bill Monahan, Chairman and CEO, Imation. The demerger was announced on November 14th 1995 and took place on July 1st 1996. During the seven and a half month intervening period 3M employees and future Imation employees faced massive pressures and made huge changes in order to be ready for the separation. Despite their efforts there wasn't a complete break on July 1st and some systems, notably in IT, continued to be operated jointly. The quotations below show some of the arguments for and against trying to achieve so much in such a short time frame. There are probably arguments on both sides of the street. You can say yes, it would have been useful to have more time. Yet if we had taken a whole year instead of seven months you would have prolonged a lot of the agony. It takes away your complete attention from what you have to do to be successful. On the other hand, you would probably have been able to look more into all the details of business and maybe have come up with a little better answer and maybe we would have been able to get a complete break. Six of one and half a dozen of the other. John Mueller, Chairman and CEO, 3M UK. It is easy to look back and say we would do things differently but what stops me pinpointing is the time factor you see. This was just not long enough. What people would have wanted to have done was to spend some time thinking about it. Planning it and then implementing. There was none of that. It was straight into the 6 months, better get on with it. There was very little planning time in comparison to the way you do other things. It was two
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steps forward and one step back at some stages. John Howells, Technical Director, 3M UK. I think it is a case of work expanding to fill the time available. If the time gets short the work still gets done. It gets more frenetic, but it gets done. Paul Davis, Human Resource Development Director, 3M Europe. The extreme pressure was in itself a crucial motivating factor, driving the business forward. The feeling was ``not only do we have to change, but we have to change by July 1st, because by July 1st, my God, we have to be up and running.'' And there was no choice about that. We did not set the date, Mr DeSimone set the date, and it was an impossible thing to do. So people worked 16 hours a day to get to July 1st. What did it do? It motivated these people and this company into something that guys like yourselves who write books on management would give a fortune to bottle. Absolutely, it is a wonderful thing. So in a sense the act itself created change, created the need for change. The July 1st date meant that the whole company was galvanised behind one objective: to get there. Dick Northrop, Vice-President Europe, Imation. In February/March there was a period of `can we do it by July 1st?' I certainly had that feeling ± that there was just too much to do. I think by July 1st the surprise then was how much we had achieved. A lot was in place and it was a question of just doing it. I am surprised now, after July, that it went as well as it did because six months, looking back, was incredibly aggressive for such a complicated company with products and technologies. But they did it and it was a pretty remarkable exercise. John Howells, Technical Director, 3M UK.
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team to help Imation develop its own. So in some places there was resistance to having to develop something new for Imation rather than just duplicate what 3M already had. That was quite complex. I guess it would have been simpler, but not acceptable, to simply say ``this is the 3M system so that will be the same for the Imation system''. It would probably have been easier but not what Imation wanted and that caused conflicts, time conflicts, people conflicts, resource conflicts . . . Tony Griffiths, Manager of Corporate Marketing and Public Affairs, 3M UK. That the pace of change had taken out quite a toll on people is illustrated by the following comments. When you start to make changes like this you are affecting people's lives. If you have been with the company 25±30 years it counts you see. We wouldn't want one of these every year, that's for sure. John Howells, Technical Director, 3M UK. We do not have exercises like this all the time, I am glad to say. Our nerves couldn't stand it. Jan Conway, Manager ± Employee Planning and Resourcing, 3M UK.
Imation: What's in a Name?
However, problems did remain because of the extreme time pressure.
Imation's logo ± a hand waving a wand that trails bits of information from its tip ± demonstrates the company's focus on creating imaginative customer solutions. The logo, referred to as `The Hand of Imagination', emphasises the creative touch that sets Imation apart. Imation Corporate Fact sheet
There was resistance in areas where there is a large either physical or systems infrastructure, because of the difficulty of changing physical or systems infrastructures. And Imation wanted to do things quite differently from 3M in IT and logistics, and the control of the finances. The 3M staff functions not only had to continue with their own systems and processes but they were also on a transition
When the merger was first announced the company that was to be spun-off was referred to as New Co. The name ``Imation'' was not unveiled until April 16th, 1996. The name was developed with input from customers, employees and marketing experts. The company undertook a careful legal review to ensure that the name could be used in the many countries in which it operates. Imation's Customer Communications plan describes
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`Imation' as ``. . . a distinctive name. It's simple and evocative and holds meaning for our business. It's also a name that can be used globally.'' The creation of the name Imation and its corporate logo is also supposed to reflect the company's key philosophies. To invent a name that reflects who and what we are as a company, we took our core businesses ± information and imaging ± and combined them with our central values of innovation and imagination to create Imation. William Monahan, Chairman and CEO, Imation world-wide. Imation is naturally very keen to take full advantage of its 3M heritage. The company has taken great care to ensure that it doesn't lose the brand leadership that 3M had established in many areas. Lance Quantrill explains: At this meeting at the end of July we foresaw a danger where we could move very enthusiastically to the Imation name and start building that, but we would not have exploited the goodwill and moved the 3M connection strongly enough to give us the maximum base of competency and awareness, familiarity and favourability . . . One of our competitive advantages is certainly building on the 3M brand. Why kick that out? It is a terrific quality name, reliable name, honourable name. So we would like to build on that. Lance Quantrill, Marketing Communications and Public Affairs Manager (Northern Europe), Imation. Imation plans to use the 3M brand in connection with its marketing efforts for a period of up to five years. The company has produced a $15 million European advertising campaign to achieve awareness of the connection expressed in its logo: Imation: Borne of 3M Innovation. To support the transition, Imation's logo and product packaging temporarily will carry the phrase `Borne of 3M Innovation.' Imation is also gradually changing its packaging, starting with inserts in diskette boxes. Imation managers see the progression from the 3M brand, through 3M and Imation, then Imation and 3M, and finally to Imation. Trade clippings show that although the birth of Imation got good coverage, a certain amount of slippage has occurred in that people are referring to Imation again as 3M's data storage business and to its products as 3M products. Further potential negative consequences of the demerger for existing 3M customers are outlined in the quotes below.
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I know patents have been transferred from 3M to Imation. I know that brand names have been transferred. I am not sure if there is any continuing joint development budget. There is a potential negative consequence for some of our customers who were buying both what are now 3M and Imation products. They will now need to deal with two suppliers rather than one supplier. That is one of the issues that was being addressed by our office, to minimise the effect on customers and to gradually untangle distribution and customer arrangements and logistics so it virtually doesn't affect our customers. Tony Griffiths, Manager of Corporate Marketing and Public Affairs, 3M UK The last thing we want to do is lose any customers and there is no reason for any customer to transfer their business. We have won it whether we are 3M or whether we are Imation and it is up to us to gradually move the goodwill in the 3M name to the Imation name. Lance Quantrill, Marketing Communications and Public Affairs Manager (Northern Europe), Imation.
Imation: Future Prospects Since 3M's illustrious past featured prominently at the beginning of this case, it is only fair to conclude by documenting Imation's first few months and its prospects. Led by Chairman and CEO William Monahan, Imation begun operations on July 1st, 1996 with approximately 9,500 employees and a market presence in more than 60 countries. The company is headquartered in Oakdale, Minnesota, and has 17 manufacturing, research and distribution facilities located in a number of countries. Imation combines manufacturing and marketing of products and services formerly produced by 3M's Data Storage Products, Medical Imaging and Photo Color Systems, Printing and Publishing Systems, and Customer Support technologies and Document Imaging operations. By integrating these related operations, Imation hopes to leverage the natural synergies between all product development, manufacturing and distribution to create new market opportunities through shared technologies. Imation holds leadership positions in the markets in which it participates. In 1995, the businesses which make up Imation generated sales of $2.3 billion, which would have placed Imation on the Fortune 500 list of the United
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States' largest manufacturing companies. Strongly positioned in the global marketplace, over 50 per cent of the company's sales are generated outside of the United States. While Imation is a leader in most of the industries in which it does business, it currently operates in a largely untapped $20 billion global imaging and data storage market, offering tremendous international opportunities for growth. All of these opportunities are reflected in Imation's aggressive corporate goals: to improve Imation's economic profit by $150 million by the end of 1998 and achieve an annual earnings per share growth rate of 15 per cent. On October 30, 1996 Imation Corp. announced results for the third quarter ended September 30, 1996 (the first quarterly results as an independent business): a net profit of $11.8 million on revenues of $559.3 million. This is an improvement on the comparable quarter a year ago, when the businesses that now make up Imation realised a net loss of $1.8 million on revenues of $546.2 million. New product platforms accounted for 13 per cent of total revenues in the quarter. Imation reported revenue growth of 2.4 per cent, the first in 11 quarters for these business units. For the nine months ending September 30, excluding restructuring charges and onetime costs, Imation's net income would have been $28.7 million. Including pre-tax restructuring charges of $53.9 million primarily related to employee separations and special one-time costs of $22.5 million primarily related to start-up activities, Imation reported a net loss of $19.9 million on revenues of $1,696.6 million. These restructuring charges and one-time costs were reported in Imation's results for the first six months of 1996.14 For the comparable period a year ago, Imation as part of 3M, realised net income of $2.5 million on revenues of $1,687.9 million. As soon as the spin-off plan was announced, Imation's management began developing and implementing an 18 month reengineering process to facilitate sustainable, profitable growth, increase cash flow and improve asset management. Changes included a systematic program to reduce operating costs, trimmed product portfolios, plant and facility consolidations, a focus on profitable new product solutions, decreased management layers to create a streamlined organisation, new performance-based compensation structures, outsourcing of non-core competencies and a re-engineered supply chain with a goal to significantly reduce cycle time. Imation's businesses also will be more closely integrated. Barriers that existed be-
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tween business units are being broken down to leverage their synergies and create new market opportunities from shared technologies and distribution channels. Imation was able to announce a 6 per cent reduction in operating costs on October 30th 1996 (mainly due to a lower overhead structure) compared with the third quarter of 1995. This hit list of goodies of how a company should be organized and be a responsiveto-market business equally fits us [3M] but is not as easy for us as it is for them [Imation], because they are starting from scratch. If you are starting from scratch you re-write all the bureaucracy or lack of it whereas we have to look at what we are doing and say ``What they are doing is right, we have got to change but it will take us a little bit longer . . .'' John Howells, Technical Director, 3M UK. Well, the first thing that we have done is to have a lot less staff. Three layers of management have gone out of the system. So those of us who are expected to make a decision and lead the company are much nearer the marketplace. We are much nearer the customer. So hopefully we should therefore know a little bit more about what the customer needs and what the market reactions are. More importantly than that, one of the strong features about 3M and companies like it is the quality of their management, and usually men and women who are regarded as high quality people need to get involved, need to make a contribution. So if you have three layers of management all making contributions it slows things up and it protects the status quo. We have an organisation which is very much leaner, very much less bureaucratic because we start without a rule book and then see how we go. Dick Northrop, Vice-President, Imation Europe Slightly under one year after DeSimone's momentous email, Monahan was able to send out a message of his own,15 underlining the successful management of the demerger process. I want to note that we started the process of creating a new company last November. A year ago, we did not have a name for our new company. Now we are building the Imation image and brand awareness among all our key audiences world-wide, establishing who Imation is and what Imation stands for. We have a strong ad campaign and direct marketing appearing
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have an engaged and committed group of employees who are excited about being part of Imation, and are embracing the changes we are implementing. We expect to be a leader in the imaging and information industry and a successful and profitable company. William Monahan, Chairman and CEO, Imation world-wide.
in over 100 publications in 21 languages to assure a fast start to building our market awareness. Now we have a strong, viable company with growing revenues, a healthy financial position and a much more competitive cost structure. We have a new organisation, a solid foundation of technology and new products that are focused specifically for success in the imaging and information industry. We
Appendix A (financial data16 derived from the 3M 1995 annual report) 3M Financial Summary
Net Sales Income from continuing operations (after tax and minority interest) Net income17 Stock price at year end Total assets Research and development Number of employees at year end
1995
1994
1993
1992
$13,460 $1,306
$12,148 $1,207
$11,053 $1,133
$10,817 $1,116
$976 66.38 $14,183 $883 70,687
$1,322 53.38 $13,068 $828 69,843
$1,263 54.38 $11,795 $794 69,715
$1,233 50.31 $11,528 $800 69,732
Discontinued operations (results of data storage, imaging systems ± the future Imation ± and audio and video business)
Net Sales Income operations (net of income taxes) Loss on disposal (net of income taxes) Total discontinued operations (*) Net assets
The loss on disposal of $373 million includes the future estimated results of operations through the estimated date of spin-off or closure. Major components of the loss on disposal include $300 million of severance costs and $265 million of asset write-downs, net of deferred income taxes of $232 million. Related to the spin-off of Imation and the
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1995
1994
$2,645 $43 $(373) $(330) $1,408
$2,931 $115 ± $115 $1,669
phase-out of the audio and video-tape business, the company recorded a restructuring charge of $79 million. 3M took one-time, pre-tax charges of $653 million against fourth quarter earnings. Of this amount, $574 million was in discontinued operations, while $79 million was in continuing operations.
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Appendix B: The McKnight Principles As our business grows, it becomes increasingly necessary to delegate responsibility and to encourage men and women to exercise their initiative. This requires considerable tolerance. Those men and women to whom we delegate authority and responsibility, if they are good people, are going to want to do their jobs in their own way. These are characteristics we want, and people should be encouraged as long as their way conforms to our general pattern of operations.
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Mistakes will be made, but if a person is essentially right, the mistakes he or she makes are not as serious in the long run as the mistakes management will make if it is dictatorial and undertakes to tell those under its authority exactly how they must do their job. Management that is destructively critical when mistakes are made kills initiative, and it is essential that we have many people with initiative if we are to continue to grow. William L. McKnight These principles were set out in 1941 by William McKnight, 3M company president at the time.
Appendix C: HR support for redundancy/reassignment situations
Additional support was available in specialist workshops Cost outplacement consultants: 150K Cost financial counselling: 95K Internal vacancies placements (August 1996): 19 *The order of these could vary depending on local circumstances
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Appendix D: Imation Operating Philosophy and Milestones OPERATING PHILOSOPHY Imation's vision is to deliver unsurpassed value to its customers, shareholders, employees and communities throughout the world. Imation's operating mission is clear and concise: To be the best global source for imaging and information solutions for customers seeking tailored products and systems for their information needs. A common thread woven through all company operations will be ``Customer First.'' MILESTONES November 14, 1995 3M announced plans to spin off its data storage and imaging businesses as an independent company November 17, 1995 William T. Monahan named chief executive officer of the new company December 20, 1995 Management team announced April 16, 1996 Imation unveiled as name of the new company July 1, 1996 Imation is launched as a fully independent company
Appendix E: Additional Quotes This final appendix contains quotes which provide additional insights but did not fit under any of the headings used in the case or were considered too long to be included in the main case. On HRM issues: It was never 3M's intention in moving to this spin-off to push 2,000 people out the door. We have developed three ways in which those people were to be absorbed one side or the other. We first announced a rather, let me use the word liberal, early retirement programme that allowed people to take retirement earlier than perhaps normally they would have expected. There was a financial incentive offered to induce the process. Clearly the objective of the company was not to hurt people. It is one of the reasons I am proud to be a 3M employee and I am sure it is one of the
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reasons that many people are proud to be part of this company. It has a very, very well articulated and not only well articulated, but also well followed, practice of taking care of people. So the first strategy was to offer early retirement and we had a good number of people take it. I am not sure exactly on the number. Secondly, both of these entities continue to grow, maybe not as fast as we would like, but we are growing and as opportunities present themselves for additions to help with parts of the company that are doing well, we put in a mandate that we must first look at the people that are displaced as a result of this process. Thirdly, any company, in this case both these companies, have a kind of natural attrition. People get married and move away, they find other jobs, they decide on other career paths and all kinds of things happen where people for good honourable intentions leave the company to pursue other things. As that happens we put another mandate in place that says ``as natural attrition occurs we will re-absorb some of this number''. On the whole the objective was to have as few official or formal separations, forced exits, as possible and I think we are very close to achieving that objective. Now there will be some but I don't think it is going to be very many. If it's 10 per cent of that number I'll be very surprised. I don't think we will be able to give you those numbers until the end of this year because we have allowed for some flexibility, movement in here, that will really be there until the end of this calendar year. We tried to get everything done by July 1st but that never happens so we have given some latitude to everyone in the company to deal with the issue of displacement of people until the end of this year. But I would have thought it would have been a number far less than 10 per cent of the total involved here by the end of the year that will be forced exit from the company, which I think it is very good. Nonetheless, it is heart wrenching because it is always hard to push somebody out the door. John Mueller, Chairman and CEO, 3M UK. I think it was such a shock. You go on thinking ``Oh, it will never happen to us''. We wanted to give people a lot of practical support because we have a very long service profile. A lot of people in 3M have been here for a long time and a lot of people haven't had an interview for anything, even internally, for 15±20 years perhaps. Very good people but they just
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hadn't had to, so they needed a lot of practical help. Now the interesting thing is that I have been trying to do some statistics on where we are now on actually placing people. In Audio Visual up here 40 per cent or something have been placed internally, and then another 38 per cent have got jobs outside, and a lot of this has been down to the help they have had from Sanders and Sydney [outplacement consultants]. Even the simple things like the CV and the selfpresentation skills. We are confident of placing most of the others. Statistics will change probably over time because we are still only half way through but about 120 people have left. 50 per cent of them have taken early retirement and the remainder have gone to jobs. Jan Conway, Manager ± Employee Planning and Resourcing, 3M UK. We still gave people their redundancy packages even if they got a job within less than the notice period. Now we could have said ``you have another job, you are not having the redundancy package'' and we legally certainly did not have to do it. So for the people who landed on their feet it was great. They got a redundancy package, they got a new job and they had support to get it. It has been excellent but that was actually very tricky early on. Jan Conway, Manager ± Employee Planning and Resourcing, 3M UK. On Leadership: Monahan is a great change agent. The fellow that we have put in charge of Imation was certainly a candidate to be, not the next, but probably the one after next, Chairman of 3M. He is a very, very bright, gifted man. I think that is a show of force. We took probably the second or third best person in the company, at least in the sense of who might rise to the Chairman level and he has become Chairman of this new company. So we did not keep back the new company from taking some of the very best talent the company has. John Mueller, Chairman and CEO, 3M UK. A Metaphorical Description of the Demerger Absolutely nobody in this organisation had anything to do with the decision. Nobody, because Monahan did not know about it, he was not involved. So the decision was made and, for the vast majority of people who now work for Imation, they were kicked out. I liken it to being a very good student living at home with your parents,
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who are fond parents, nice family relationship, producing good reports from school, and going home one evening from school and finding your suitcase at the bottom of the drive and mother and father standing in the bedroom window saying, ``clear off, we don't want you any more.'' That was the feeling of shock. The company promoted all the time from within: long service rewards. It was a great shock to people to be kicked out in that way and I don't know anybody that did not feel some state of shock. But the interesting thing was that kind of two days after that, at the most, people were talking in small groups and saying, ``this is a very good idea''. That energy started to develop within a couple of days and was greatly helped by 3M who have been excellent parents because not only did they say ``get out'' but they paid us our allowance, if you know what I mean. We got a lot of help from the company. It was superb. So people began to realise that it was a very good thing, from a business point of view, for 3M and for Imation and I suppose everybody thought ``What about me? Am I going to be OK? Is my pension going to be secure? Is it still the same contract of employment?'' All of the things that one does worry about and so that was the next phase but along with that was an excitement welling up in people that said ``I want to change.'' The physical act of being kicked out was a catalyst in itself for change. Dick Northrop, Vice-President, Imation Europe On Identity Problems I think the missing event from the 3M point of view was saying what 3M was to become. Imation, shortly after the announcement were fairly clear on what they were to become. For 3M it is only now that that is emerging. So I don't think we were quick enough to be able to say what 3M will be in 1997 onwards or whatever. Now for Imation it was easy of course because it was new. Everything they did was new and everything they said was. It was rather more difficult for 3M with ninety years of history to say this is what we were, this is what we are going to become. So you can understand why it was not done. Also within 3M was a certain reticence to say ``that is what we are going to be when we grow up'' because 3M is a sort of evolving community. It is almost amoeba like. It moves ahead here and then if it gets too much resistance it pushes ahead there. So it
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is actually quite difficult to paint a factual picture of what 3M is going to be like. Tony Griffiths, Manager of Corporate Marketing and Public Affairs, 3M UK. On Morale in Audio-Video: The morale funnily enough has been quite high. Which has been really weird. People have been on a real high, I don't know why. Whether it is team work, pulling together, all in the same boat or what. We were saying, ``We have all these job workshops don't you want to come on them?'' ``You need to be looking for another job now.'' ``No, no I am much too busy. We have to get our orders in for Christmas. All these customers to go and see.'' ``Yes, I will come but it would be better if it was in a couple of months time.'' It is bizarre. One sales rep in the Audio Video group that I know has been too busy to go job hunting. I don't know if she is sorted now and there was no pressure from 3M at all. Her manager was saying to her, ``Come on you've got to go.'' ``No, Scotch videos will be in the shops at Christmas and I have the promotions to sort out''. It is absolutely amazing isn't it? Jan Conway, Manager ± Employee Planning and Resourcing, 3M UK. I think from their point of view it is a bit of a commitment, sort of ``Going out with a bang''. Scotch video in the UK and France were in a particularly sad situation. Scotch is brand leader in these two countries and is a successful profitable business. But the decision was a global decision. It is particularly hard for the UK where the Gorseinon manufacturing plant had worked and worked over the years to get unit costs down and had done a fabulous job, but ultimately it just wasn't enough. And so I think there was an element of team work ± pulling together and they certainly were united incredibly much behind Chris. He is a great champion for them all and it was like ``We are going to go out with a bang''. Ben Holmes, Corporate Communications Executive, 3M UK.
Notes 1. This case was written for educational and training purposes rather than to illustrate the effective or ineffective handling of an administrative situation. The Harald Burmeister Scholarship, created by the Centre for Organisational Studies, enabled us to carry out the research which underpins this case. The co-operation of the interviewees in 3M and Imation is also gratefully ac-
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2. 3.
4.
5.
6. 7. 8.
9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.
15. 16. 17.
knowledged. Teaching notes for this case can be obtained from Christian De Cock, School of Management, Royal Holloway, University of London, Surrey TW20 0EX (email:
[email protected]). Quoted by Thomas A. Stewart, ``3M Fights Back,'' Fortune, February 5, 1996. Further information on 3M's history and milestones can be found on the internet: http:// www.mmm.com/profile/looking/history. html Twenty-seven per cent of 1995 organisation wide sales came from products new within the past four years, compared with 26 per cent in 1994. Dr. William Coyne, senior vice president research and development, points out: ``The number is not so important as the message, which is this: the system has some slack in it. If you have a good idea, and the commitment to squirrel away time to work on it, and the raw nerve to skirt your lab's manager's expressed desires, then go for it.'' Thomas Derdak (Ed.), International Directory of Company Histories (St. James Press: Chicago, 1988), Vol. 1, pp. 499±501. See Appendix B. As recently as 1989, a Business Week article pointed out that: ``3M is never mentioned as a possible break-up candidate. Bust it apart, sever the connections, and 3M's energy would likely die.'' Tony Jackson, ``3M Shakes up with spin-off, shutdown and staff cuts,'' Financial Times, Wednesday November 15th 1995. In what follows we only consider the situation as it was dealt with in the UK. This would easily translate as 100+ people in countries where 3M had major operations. See Appendix C for more information on the structure and content of HR support. He refers to Imation's first acquisition (Luminous, 62 employees) in September 1996. For the six months ended June 30 Imation reported a net loss of $31.7 million on revenues of $1,137.3 million, which includes pre-tax restructuring charges of $53.9 million related to employee separations and special one time costs of $22.5 million primarily related to startup activities. Excluding restructuring and special charges, Imation's net income would have been $16.9 million (the results reflect the revenues and expenses of these businesses as they were operated within 3M, including an allocation of certain general corporate expenses of 3M). As prepared for delivery on October 30, 1996. Dollars ($) are in million. The difference between the net income and income from continuing operations is explained by the income of discontinued operations (*). John Denton and Christian DeCock are Lecturers at the School of Management, Royal Holloway, University of London.
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Appropriation of Technology as a Creative Process1 Nina Degele The developers of software create software, and the users of software engage in a process of its appropriation. This article describes how these processes can be analyzed within a framework based on systems theory. At least three areas are worthy of attention: The distinction between use of software and use of ``hard'' technology; the appropriation of software at managerial level and creativity as a recursive process in multi-level systems. It is hoped that this framework might provide a useful research tool in furthering understanding of the creative process occurring in software applications.
Introduction
W
hen we think about technological inventions, Thomas Edison's light bulb or Konrad Zuse's programmable calculating machine comes to mind. Creativity researchers with a psychological background investigate creative persons and their products (Taylor 1988). Outcomes of artistic, scientific and psychological creativity end up in archives ± where everything new is stored (Groys 1992). What does not find its way into these storages is the everyday action of everyday people who use technology. Those users of technology do not attract scientific attention. This is unjust, since the developers of software create software, and the users of software engage in a process of appropriation. Furthermore, managers make capital out of both. This article describes how these mechanisms work, drawing the findings from three case studies on expert systems.2 The first program was designed to help physicians in diagnosing rheumatism; the second was developed for aiding bank consultants in sketching investments; and the third was designed to configure telephone apparatus. Given the original objective of the systems' customers, all three programs failed. As far as creativity as a critical success factor is concerned, the meaning of ``appropriation of technology'' can be studied from two angles: Physicians, consultants and telephone vendors work at the micro-level of # Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1997. 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF and 350 Main St, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
direct use of the program. At the macrolevel of industrial organization the commissioning management makes use of the system, but in an indirect way. In both cases creativity is involved. The appropriation vocabulary provides an alternative to the interpretive vocabulary suggested by Rickards (1996).
1 What does ``appropriation of software'' mean? What is happening in the use of software? Bearing in mind the linear model of a software lifecycle, engineers first develop products such as data-bases, word processing systems or even expert systems and then users apply these in their daily work. Using these programs normally goes hand in hand with unintended effects ± outcomes which have little in common with the original intentions of managers and software engineers. For example, a consultant may not use the system for selling ambitious investments. Instead, she may give the impression of competence by handling the keyboard and mouse in a nonchalant manner ± to instill a tense of competence and control. In a second example, physicians do not wish to examine their patients with the expert system developed for rheumatology diagnoses. Its operating mode differs from their modus procedendi, it takes far more time than examining the patient without using a computer, and
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Expert systems are tricky Exploring existing margins
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ultimately, the results are not reliable. Surprisingly enough, students like operating the system. They evaluated the system and use it to prepare for their exams; so that they learn rheumatology in a ``reality-stimulating and stimulating'' way. One final case ± consultants and vendors in telephone shops neither configure expensive telephone machines with the expert system, nor do they sell telecommunications equipment. But they do use their configuration program to check current prices or to print leaflets. In all three cases, the managers' objectives and the actual use differ considerably. Creativity researchers have a name for effects such as those mentioned above. They call it ``serendipity'' (van Andel 1992). It means ``unexpected occurrence'' and has its origins in the sociology of science. Robert Merton and Elinor Barber wrote a typescript which was never published in 1958: ``The serendipity pattern refers to the fairly common experience of observing an unanticipated, anomalous and strategic datum which becomes the occasion for developing a new theory or for extending an existing theory.'' (Merton/ Barber in: van Andel 1992: 23) Following this definition, purposeful research projects are accompanied by unexpected effects; not going along with the original question but opening new perspectives for research. ``Serendipity'' describes the art of discovering an unsought finding. ``Successful errors'' belong to this category. A research group wanted to join the wings of an aeroplane with an extremely adhesive gum they hoped to invent. They failed. In spite of this, they invented a soft gum, a temporarily permanent adhesive emerged known as ``post-it'' stickers for the office ± and made a fortune for 3M. Something similar happens to software. In appropriating software, users explore existing margins, they invent new rules and they go beyond designated limits ± a creative act: ``Creativity finds expression in the process of generating unique products by transformation of existing products. These products, tangible and intangible, must be unique only to the creator, and must meet the criteria of purpose and value established by the creator.'' (Isaksen 1995: 55) Creativity means the development and communication of unplanned links in a meaningful way. In systems theory, creativity consists of changing points of reference. This does not occur necessarily of one's own free will. Creative appropriation of technology conceals a force which I will reconstruct twofold: At the micro-level as a technical one, at the macro-level as a social one.
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Software is ``soft ware''. This property includes a creativity-encouraging force. Software is malleable throughout its entire life. In this sense, softness means modularity and multifunctionality. In expert systems, this property is built in in a particular way. Modular and multifunctional expert systems fulfill different jobs and tasks. This is due to the ambition of software engineers to build flexible and user-oriented software solutions. On the other hand, expert systems with only one specific objective and without links to other computer systems would have no chance of being utilised in the real business world ± the development of such a program would be too expensive. Hence, software engineers design modular programs which include a data-base, an editor, a calculating function ± and the proper expert system. As a result, a program for configurating telephones is able to print contracts, an investment consultant system may deliver a record of the consultation, and the medical assistant may assist the physician in writing his letters to colleagues providing information on the patient. Furthermore, the users sometimes change the definition of their expert system by using it as a ``stupid'' information system, as a substitute for leaflets, as a pocket calculator, as a toy or even as an object for gaining prestige. These different possibilities inserted into the modular structure of the ``soft ware'' make it usable more than once ± far more than a refrigerator or toaster. The rules of usage are not defined by anybody ± this would be as successful as counting the stars. On the one hand, expert systems offer a lot of possibilities. On the other hand, they force the user to shape, to invent and to create the use. Taking into account this ambivalent situation, using expert systems is not only exciting but also tricky. Users have to invent rules and routines. Otherwise they could not incorporate the program into their work in a meaningful way. They have to decide, when, where, with whom, for what purpose and how they will put it into action. This force is induced by technology: Using a phone, little choice is given. On the other hand, expert systems need to be appropriated, created by use. Hence, users must invent rules of acquisition. Those rules need not match the customer's intentions. They rarely do. Establishing meaningful links which are communicated, users act in a creative manner. Put in the framework of systems theory, a second source of creativity is now emerging. The appropriation of software by users is only part of it. It has to be matched with the appropriation of software by managers.
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2 The appropriation of software by management Given the force of appropriation which I have described, management is also affected. Whilst not denying that technology has social effects, the focus, rather, is on the social forces which give rise to particular reflections of computer usage. How do managers make use of an expert system? In the first place, they have specific goals for commissioning an expert system: they want to increase their turnover, they wish to improve medical diagnoses, they want to gain a competitive advantage and so on. Even if they do not achieve this objective, they are confronted with the physicians', consultants' and telephone vendors' mode of system use. What all this is based upon is the claim that they may operate in a productoriented or in a process-oriented way. What does this mean? In the product-oriented case, managers identify the success of an expert system with the prescribed or intended usage. Given that, the usage of expert systems (see examples above) covers only a small portion of the appropriation possibilities. One critical success factor of usage (amongst others, which I will ignore for the lack of space) is knowledge. With only a little subject-specific competence the user will not be able to understand and control the system. Knowing a lot about his domain makes the system less helpful because the user knows too much. In both cases the system works as a hindrance. As an example ± the physicians who evaluated the diagnoses program for rheumatics could not benefit from the system. There are three reasons for this. First, the system coerced them into proceeding in counter-intuitive ways. Second, operating the program took too much time. Finally, the machine-based diagnoses were worse than the human ones. On the other hand, students' and nurses' knowledge of rheumatology was far more limited. So they could not decide in which cases the use of the expert system was meaningful, in which cases it was superfluous, and under which circumstances they could trust the electronic advice. Consequently, there remained only a very small group of staff with a middle-level competence who could benefit from the system ± not enough for the everyday clinical work for which the system was intended. Under circumstances such as the above, management acts in a product-oriented way: A hospital, a bank or a telecommunications company commissions an expert system as
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a problem solution. As a result, the creative potential embodied in the appropriation will be left in the cocoon stage. It will change into a butterfly in the case where management is not primarily interested in the product (the completed expert system), but in the process of planning and developing an expert system (or even a conventional program). GoÈran Ekvall (1993) illustrates such a change of orientation by way of investigating a high-tech project. The product developed by the company was too expensive and too ambitious for the clients' needs. However, the undertaking could be regarded as technologically successful ± in the long run the product worked as suitable material for a large variety of new products. Bearing in mind this general picture of emergent effects, I will now return to the notion of ``serendipity'': A scientifically-based observation does not fit with the well-known facts. But it stimulates the researcher into finding a suitable solution. Transferring this idea to the level of management, the mis-use or refused usage of computer programs may cause the managers to re-define the expert system as a problem-solving method. In this case, they make use of the system before using it or after not having used it. The development of an expert system forces the participants to define the original problem precisely. If management wants to find out if the system will be helpful in reaching its corporate goals, it has to analyze the whole company. The field of application, the hierarchies involved, networks and knowledge structures and communicative relationships between individuals, departments and hierarchic levels all have to be identified and structured very carefully. As a possible result, it may be necessary to reorganize tasks and information flows. Perhaps the customers will find out that their perception of the original problem has changed or even that the problem has disappeared. Even a failed project offers insights into critical success factors. Given that, creative appropriation of technology by managers has two fold meanings: Firstly, managers move away from a restricted product-oriented measure of use which is identified with the prescribed usage. Secondly, the creative appropriation of technology by managers can be described as a process-oriented way of thinking. It encompasses the whole company. I am now in a position to consider more carefully how these factors fit together, drawing on systems theory as a framework.
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3 Creativity as a recursive process: a systems view
Creativity is a recursive process
Creativity research based on systems theory locates creativity in the environment of the person: Positively sanctioned actions which influence people in spite of spatial or temporal distance from the initiators are creative. In this sense, the personal computer was not invented by one single genius working in isolation in his garage. It came out because individuals in different locations and at different times collaborated in such a way that the personal computer emerged as a collective product. This explosion of interactive creativities is an excellent output of a creative ecosystem (Harrington 1990) or by a creative constellation (Muller 1996). This point of view is favoured by researchers who investigate environmental factors as the enabling and limiting constraints of creativity (Amabile 1990; Magyari-Beck 1990; McWhinney 1993). They substitute the question as to the essence of creativity with the search for its location. The domain consists of creative products and processes which transfers information to the person who produces variations. The social field selects from this variation and transfers the selection back to the domain. An interaction of these three subsystems (domain, person and field) in the described manner will yield creative products (Csikszentmihalyi 1990; Feldmann et al. 1994). What are the implications for theory building? At the micro-level, the field of direct users appropriates the expert system. People select from a pool of possibilities which are offered by the system designers. It can be viewed as a creative process (De Cock 1996): At the macro-level of the industrial organization, managers evaluate the user's appropriation. They feed back their selection into a revision process of the computer program (see table 1). Table 1. Creativity as a recursive process Persons
Field of Appropriation
Software engineers
Micro-level: users use the system Macro-level: Business organization (management) Micro-level: Software engineers improve the system or develop a new one
User Manager
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Sequential models of software engineering rarely take into consideration recursive possibilities. The dominant view on software engineering is too restricted to anticipate creative development: engineers produce artifacts and users use them. That is not to deny that a linear model is sometimes accurate ± in the case where a product is truly finished before being used (e.g. a refrigerator or toaster). Expert systems, by definition, operate differently: they must be smart and up-to-date, they must learn and behave adaptively. Software is malleable throughout its entire life. Therefore, software engineers must foresee the subsequent use at a very early stage. They have to anticipate the behaviours and appropriation techniques of the users, and incorporate facilities into the product. Sociologist Thomas Malsch (1987) described a threefold cycle consisting of generating knowledge, objectivating knowledge and putting it back into the cycle of production: First, the practical knowledge of workers is incorporated into the machine. Next, it is objectivated, and finally, it is retransferred back into practice. This knowledge is appropriated in a communicative way, and is transformed and transferred into the next cycle. What is the implication of this theory for creativity? The usage of technology meets development, and creative appropriation of technology returns to development. Creativity can be regarded as a recursive process through which evolutionary change convinces to create and re-create itself.
Notes 1. This article is a modified version of a paper presented in Bielefeld, 10±13 October 1996 (EASST/4S 96): Signatures of Knowledge Societies. 2. Expert systems are programs designed to help users performing knowledge-based tasks such as diagnosing diseases, configurating machines or doing consulting. Expert systems are based on digitally represented human knowledge (see Degele 1994).
References Amabile, T.M. (1990) `Within you, without you: the social psychology of creativity, and beyond'. In M.A. Runco and R.S. Alber (Ed) Theories of creativity (pp. 61±91), Newbury Park, Sage, CA. Andel, P. van (1992) `Serendipity: ``Expect also the unexpected.'' ' Creativity and Innovation Management, Vol. 1, pp. 20±32.
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Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990) `The domain of creativity.' In M.A. Runco and R.S. Alber (Ed) Theories of creativity (pp. 190±212), Newbury Park, Sage, CA. De Cock, Ch. (1996) `Thinking creatively about creativity: What can we learn from recent developments in the philosophy of science?' Creativity and Innovation Management, Vol. 5, pp. 204±211. Degele, N. (1994) Der uÈberforderte Computer. Zur Soziologie menschlicher und kuÈnstlicher Intelligenz, Frankfurt/Main, Campus, Germany. Ekvall, G. (1993) `Creativity in project work: a longitudinal study of a product development project.' Creativity and Innovation Management, Vol. 2, pp. 17±32. Feldman, D.H., Csikszentmihalyi, M. and Gardner, H. (1994) `A framework for the study of creativity.' In Feldman et al. (Ed) Changing the world. A framework for the study of creativity (pp. 1±45), London, Praeger, UK. Groys, B. (1992) UÈber das Neue. Versuch einer KulturoÈkonomie, MuÈnchen, Hanser, Germany. Harrington, D.M. (1990) `The ecology of human creativity: a psychological perspective.' In M.A. Runco and R.S. Alber (Ed) Theories of creativity (pp. 143±169), Newbury Park, Sage, CA. Isaksen, S.G. (1995) `On the conceptual foundations of creative problem solving: a response to Magyari-Beck.' Creativity and Innovation Management, Vol. 4, pp. 52±63.
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Magyari-Beck, I. (1990) `An introduction to the framework of creatology.' Journal of Creative Behavior, Vol. 24, pp. 151±160. Malsch, Th. (1987) `Die Informatisierung des betrieblichen Erfahrungswissens und der ``Imperialismus der instrumentellen Vernunft''. Kritische Bemerkungen zur neo-tayloristischen Instrumentalismuskritik und ein Interpretationsvorschlag aus arbeitssoziologischer Sicht.' Zeitschrift fuÈr Soziologie, Vol. 16, pp. 77±90. McWhinney, W. (1993) `All creative people are not alike.' Creativity and Innovation Management, Vol. 2, pp. 3±16. Muller, R.C. (1996) `Creativity constellation for innovation and cooperation.' In K.S. Gill (Ed) Information society. New media, ethics and postmodernism (pp. 355±390), London, Springer, UK. Rickards, T. (1996) `The management of innovation: Recasting the role of creativity.' European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology, Vol. 5, pp. 13±27. Taylor, C.R. (1988) `Various approaches to and definitions of creativity.' In R.J. Sternberg (Ed) The nature of creativity (pp. 99±121), Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Nina Degele is a Faculty Member, Institut fuÈr Soziologie, Ludwig Maximilians University, Munich, Germany.
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New Developments in Computer Assisted Creative Problem Solving Tony Proctor A new kind of computer assisted creative problem solving method is examined in which visual images are provided to support the process. Until now, much attention has been given to developing programmes which help to structure problems and ideas so that they become more meaningful to the people who are concerned with them. Emphasis has been placed almost entirely on the written word as form of expression. It is argued that a combination of pictorial imagery and written words may be more effective in helping users to gain insights into problems and to come up with ideas or solutions to problems.
Introduction
B
Recoding from iconic memory
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roadbent (1958) wrote extensively on the subject of human information processing. He introduced the notion of several distinct kinds of storage systems (memories) of limited capacity and of attention as a mechanism for filtering incoming information. A wide range of new techniques for the study of information processing was soon devised and this in turn led to a number of important discoveries. Using brief visual presentations of letters and numbers, for example, researchers identified the existence of a special visual information store (subsequently called iconic memory) with almost unlimited capacity but very short duration. It is now supposed that recoding from iconic memory to more lasting forms of storage takes place by both verbal and nonverbal means. Subsequent research produced a further division of memory into various types. A short-term memory of sharply limited capacity, which is primarily verbal and shows rapid forgetting, has been distinguished from a long-term memory that shows little evidence of any limitations at all. Special kinds of memory for visual material have also been postulated, and techniques now permit the objective study of visual imagery. The dual-coding system formulated by Allan Paivio (1971; 1979; 1983; 1986) lends a significant perspective to our understanding of imagery. The theory proposed that there are two independent but interconnected or
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symbolic systems underlying human cognition: a nonverbal system and a verbal system. Both systems, it was argued, are specialised for encoding, storing and retrieving distinct types of information. The imagery system takes on tasks such as the analysis of scenes and the generation of mental images. The verbal system deals with linguistic information and because of the serial nature of language is specialised for sequential processing. Each of these systems is further divided into sub-systems which process either verbal or non-verbal information (i.e. vision, audition, haptic, taste or smell). However, it should be noted that there are no corresponding representations for taste and smell in the verbal system. Paivio (1971) showed experimentally that pictures are remembered and recalled much more readily than words indicating, in his view, that image code is mnemonically superior to verbal code. He also found that some words are more concrete and evoke images more readily than other words. Words which are high in image-evoking value or concreteness are likely to be decoded using two codes rather than just one. Kosslyn (1980; 1981; 1983) proposed a theory and computational model of imagery which suggested that long term memory contains two forms of data structures: image files and propositional files. Images files contain stored information about how images are represented in memory. Propositional files contain information about parts of objects and how these parts are related to # Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1997. 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF and 350 Main St, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
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one another ± propositional files and image files are often linked together.
Language: a block to creative problem solving Arguably, language is a block to creative problem solving. The lower the command a person has of language the more common sense dictates that it will be difficult for the person to solve problems requiring creative insights where the use of language is involved. Given that most of the creative problem solving aids advocated in the literature require a command of language (e.g. brainstorming, morphological analysis, synectics, lateral thinking) and employ it extensively in the search for solutions to problems, it is not surprising that they can be criticised for introducing additional artificial barriers to solution finding which need not occur. Moreover, there is some evidence to show that people when thinking creatively are more likely to be using imagery than words. In a recent study of some 50 or so individuals making use of free association to come up with ideas for the use of aluminium foil, many of the respondents reported the use of visual imagery in their accounts of what led them to think of the ideas. Two such examples were: 1. Wrapping bacon or other food (e.g.; turkey) for cooking First thing I thought of when I thought of foil was kitchen. The usage that I see made use of it in the kitchen. I pictured the kitchen straight away ± aluminium foil . . . foil kitchen. And I saw the turkey . . . Christmas turkey sometimes has foil over it. 2. Making a silver moon I again saw it and I saw the surface being shiny and silvery. Now I am doing things with children in nurseries that will make . . . cut it out. I saw a picture of the surface of it which made me think of the colour and then think ``moon''. The foregoing would seem to illustrate the case for the development of creative problem solving aids that make use of both visual stimuli and language.
Techniques that make use of language and verbal stimuli Townsend and Favier (1991) list some eight creative problem solving techniques in which can be found trigger cards with drawings or
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pictorial representations of fairly well known objects: animals, tools, musical instruments, and household objects. One such technique is called Eureka, and is essentially a method involving the well known force fit technique, of juxtapositioning items and seeking significance in the combination. In applying the Eureka technique, the first step involves getting away from the problem altogether. Participants are invited to list attributes or associations connected with three randomly generated pictures (obtained by shuffling the cards and selecting three at random) that have nothing to do with the problem. The technique can be adopted by an individual working individually or it can be applied by a small group of individuals working together. In the latter case, group members take it in turn to make individual contributions ± probably in a sequential or round robin basis. The recommended procedure is for participants to construct a list of attributes and associations for each picture in turn. For example, an attribute of a picture of a bear might be deemed huge or dangerous. The listing continues in such a fashion until ideas have been exhausted or until a specific time limit has been reached. The next step involves analysing the lists by taking one item from each one of the three lists at a time and force-fitting them together for ideas relevant to the original problem. For example, suppose the problem is how to counteract declining sales of a particular product. Suppose the three pictures generated and the corresponding lists are: Cat
Banana
Computer
sleek selfish cheap to keep
skin tasty soon decays
fast intricate performs many jobs
Next suppose we try to force fit together selfish, soon decays and performs many jobs to the original problem. This might suggest that declining sales could be stimulated by launching a throwaway (soon decays), multipurpose ( performs many jobs) version of the product which appeals to a very specific (selfish) market segment. This idea might be subsequently developed by the group or by the problem owner who would have more intimate knowledge of the original problem. In essence the technique is extremely simple and builds on the notion
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that we can often achieve insights into problems by studying analogies.
The computer program A computer program has been developed which mimics the Eureka technique. The computer can readily store and display pictures either at random or in some other fashion. It can also help people to enter and record lists of information and subsequently recall and manipulate such lists in a variety of ways. The program has been developed in Visual Basic 4.0 to run under Microsoft Windows 95. A minimum of 3 megabytes of hard disk space is required, a Pentium 60 processor (minimum) and a minimum of 16 megabytes of RAM. The program allows the user to follow the approach outlined above. The editor windows allow the user to record the lists for the three pictures which are randomly generated by selecting options / pictures commands via the menubar. It also allows one subsequently to enter all the ideas or insights one has generated as force-fit solutions to the original
problem. The program thus facilitates generation of visual stimuli and recording and redefinition of ideas. For example, Figure 1 shows the program being used to help solve a problem of traffic congestion by improving traffic flow around a town centre in a small town in Lancashire. From the list of attributes and associations for the first image (disabled wheelchair sign) ``disabled'' was selected; from the list of attributes and associations for the second image (smiling face) ``alien'' was selected; and from the list of attributes and associations for the third image (paperclip) ``thin'' was selected. These three words were then combined to suggest ``disable thin streets'' and subsequently redefined as ``widen bottlenecks in the road system around the town''. There are various help screens available. The program can use a variety of image formats and display photographs as well as clip-art. This means that the user has unlimited means at his or her disposal in terms of providing evocative visual stimuli. Initial results suggest high user satisfaction and productivity.
Figure 1. Screens from Force Fit
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Conclusion This approach to idea generation and problem solving represents a different direction for computer aided creativity. In the past emphasis has been on making use of the capability of the computer to help structure or analyse problems (e.g. MORPHY, IDEA GENERATOR PLUS, IDEA TREE, INFOMAP LITE, MINDMAN, ITEM TREE, COPE (Now DECISION EXPLORER), BRAINBOX, PROJECT KICK START) or to present verbal stimuli to aid thought (e.g. THUNDER THOUGHT, IDEA FISHER). There are however many creative problem solving techniques which can make use of pictorial presentations to stimulate thought and the development of the programme discussed in this paper illustrates how this can be done. Clearly, given the large number of techniques that are amenable to this form of computerisation there is much scope to continue the work.
References Broadbent, D.E. (1958) Perception and Communication. Oxford: Pergamon. Kosslyn, S.M. (1980) Image and Mind. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press. Kosslyn, S.M. (1981) The medium and the message in mental imagery: a theory. Psychological Review, 88, 44±66. Kosslyn, S.M. (1983) Ghosts in the mind's machine: Creating and using images in the brain. New York: Norton. Paivio, A. (1971) Imagery and verbal processes. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston. (Reprinted by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Inc. in 1979.) Paivio, A. (1979) Psychological processes in the comprehension of a metaphor. In A. Otony (Ed.), Metaphor and Thought. New York: Cambridge University Press. Paivio, A. (1982) The empirical case for dual coding. In Yuille (Ed), Imagery, Memory and Cognition: Essays in honour of Allan Paivio. Hillsdale, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Paivio, A. (1986) Mental representation: A dual coding approach. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Townsend, J. and Faviour, J-P. (1991) The Creative Manager's Pocketbook. Alresford, Hampshire: Management Pocket Books Ltd.
Appendix: Other programs mentioned in the article and their characteristics BRAINBOX facilitates: . The construction of thought maps . The employment of lateral thinking techniques
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. The blending of computer based mapping
with group based concept sorting on a table top . The identification of personal mapping needs and the techniques which might best meet those needs. BrainBox, C/O Peter Smee, 33 Churchill Way, Peverell, Plymouth, UK, PL3 4PS DECISION EXPLORER (COPE) Facilitates the construction of cognitive maps. It is useful for gaining insights into one's own beliefs and attitudes with respect to a problem. It also helps to identify potential blocks to implementing new ideas. Originally known as COPE it was a research instrument used to record how people structure their thinking and was not specifically intended to be a computer assisted creative problem solving aid. Decision Explorer, Banxia Software, 141 St. James Rd, Glasgow, G4 0LT, Tel: 0141 552 3082, Fax: 0141 552 5765, Email: info@banxia. co.uk IDEA FISHER is a creativity aid which enables one to follow the strand of an idea through its Idea Bank. In essence, any initial word starts the user on a trail of thousands of related objects and concepts which are intended to arouse creative thinking. There is also a databank of questions which is afterward used to ``talk you through'' an idea. Idea Fisher provides the user with that all important stimulus to think creatively and does not simply act as a structuring mechanism for recording one's own thoughts. Idea Fisher, Fisher Idea Systems Inc., Irvine, California, USA IDEA GENERATOR divides the problemsolving process into three logical parts. . Problem Statement helps users define their problems and related objectives and give their brainstorming session a tight focus. . Idea Generation invites users to select from seven thought-provoking techniques to create many new ideas and solutions. For example, one technique is to consider other perspectives. Another is to think of metaphors for the situation. And a third technique is to reverse your goals. . Evaluation enables users to find their best ideas, by ranking their ideas against their objectives and considering long and shortterm costs and benefits. Subsequently produced reports then list the new ideas, numerically ranked, for further consideration. Idea Generator Plus, Experience in Software, 200 Hearst Avenue, Berkeley, California, CA 94709
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IDEA TREE facilitates mind-mapping and is good for obtaining insights into how a problem is structured. The program lets one structure one's ideas as a tree. This tree is a graphic representation of the decomposition of one's thinking into greater detail. It is possible to add ideas to the tree at any point and to reorganise them later, as one changes one's mind and new thoughts emerge. Idea Tree, Cohen L E, Mountain House Publishing, Waitsfield, VT 05673-9621 USA INFOMAP LITE InfoMap Lite translates the concept of mind maps to the graphical PC environment and not only capitalises on the mind map's ease of use and ease of learning, but adds a number of significant advantages over the manually produced variety. A mind map is a simple system for organising and visualising information, in a predominantly hierarchical manner, whereby information is attached to branches radiating from the map centre and hierarchical relationships are visualised by branches attached as the `children' of others. Non-hierarchical relationships are supported in InfoMap by map links embedded in the maps. InfoMap Lite, Co Systems Ltd., 2, Mortens Wood, Amersham, Bucks, HP7 9EQ, (Tel: 01494 434464) ITEM TREE is for those occasions when a notepad is inadequate and for times when a database is inappropriate. For bits of data that you need to keep track of ItemTree can be the ideal solution. These can be entered in a hierarchical format, allowing you to easily classify items under different categories: Item Tree, Philip P. Kapusta, 406, Monroe Avenue, Falmouth, VA 22405, USA MINDMAN helps you to organise your ideas and information about a specific problem or project using the technique of Mind Mapping. Mind Maps can be formatted either as graphics or as indented outlines and printed or exported using OLE. Mindman, Michael Jetter, Moosanger, 2, D82319, Starnberg, Germany, Tel/Fax 49 (0) 8151 6394, Email
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MORPHY is a package facilitating Morphological Analysis and including a random word generator to aid identification of attributes. Useful for generating new product ideas. MORPHY, Tony Proctor, Department Management, University of Keele, Staffs, email:
[email protected] PROJECT KICK START helps you to brainstorm, strategize & organise projects. It separates projects into phases, tasks & details. (Handles 1000 tasks and 100 resources per project.) There is an online planning advisor, libraries & templates for fast project planning. The program seamlessly outputs to Microsoft Project, Word and Excel, as well as to SureTrak, Time Line, and Milestones, Etc. Project KickStart helps you examine preconceptions and strategic goals before you start a project. For assignments that require a powerful project management system, the polished project outline can be exported to Microsoft's Project, SureTrak, Time Line or Milestones, Etc. Project KickStart takes you through the planning process, prompting you to establish the tasks, examine your goals, order your priorities, assign staff and identify potential barriers. Project KickStart, Experience In Software, 2000 Hearst Ave., Berkeley CA 94709 THUNDER THOUGHT Essentially a random word generator which takes on a variety of guises to help the stimulation of insights. This can be achieved by force-fitting' a randomly generated phrase with the problem in hand. Thunder Thought, Rosemary K. West, P.O. Box 8059, Mission Hills, CA 91346, USA, Email:
[email protected] Dr Tony Proctor is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Management, University of Keele, UK.
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The Use of Creativity Techniques in OHS Risk Management John Culvenor Modern legislation governing the management of occupational health and safety is now often based on what is known as the performance-based approach. The performance-based approach mandates a problem-solving process known as risk management. The risk management models revolve around a method of injury prevention known often as the hierarchy of control. The first priority in the hierarchy is elimination of the hazard, while the least preferred methods rely on behavioural approaches or personal protective equipment. The high-order controls on the hierarchy require a rethinking of the system to make the workplace intrinsically safe. However, in practice, the implementation of this kind of thinking is conceptually very difficult. This paper explores these issues and suggests that the techniques of creative thinking have a logical and worthwhile role in the performance-based risk management model.
Introduction: Performance-Based Risk Management
T
he potential for accidents and ill-health is a continuing industrial problem. In the past, legislation governing the management of safety has been prescriptive in nature. That is, the requirements for workplace safety were specific. They indicated what to do about specific workplace problems. Given the wide range of circumstances found in modern workplaces, prescriptive legislation can be complex. In addition to this complexity, prescriptive legislation is sometimes seen to restrict the development of alternative ways to manage risk. There is now a move away from the prescriptive approach. In contrast modern legislation tends to be performancebased. The performance-based approach mandates not exactly what to do about a problem; but rather stipulates a problemsolving process known as risk management. Typically the risk management process involves the following steps. 1. Hazard identification (what is the problem) 2. Risk assessment (how big is the problem) 3. Risk control (what to do about the problem) The philosophy of this approach is that it empowers those in control of an operation to manage risk in innovative ways rather than
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be bound by prescribed systems. While the risk management process is interesting in its entirety, in this paper I am concerned about Part 3; risk control.
Risk Control: The Hierarchy of Control The control of safety problems has for some time been based on a methodology known as the hierarchy of control. The key to the hierarchy is control at source, rather than control at the person. The basic model arises most directly to the study of occupational hygiene, where the process was modelled as follows.
hazard source R pathway R person It had been customary in occupational hygiene to view the source of contamination as the hazard and to regard the control of the problem source as a priority (Hamilton 1929). From this basic philosophy arose a hierarchical model of the priorities for preventative activities (Bloomfield 1936 Table 1; Brandt 1947 Table 1). Established in occupational hygiene, the concept was extended into the area of injury prevention (NSC 1959; Table 2). This extension was facilitated to some degree by the definition of hazards likely to cause injury in terms of their energy type (Gibson 1961; Haddon 1963 Table 2). While the concept of
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Table 1. Early Hierarchies for the Prevention of Occupational Diseases
Focusing on blame
Bloomfield (1936)
Brandt (1947)
1. Substitution of a non-toxic material for the toxic one. 2. Isolation of the harmful process. 3. Wet methods in the case of some dusty processes. 4. Exhaust ventilation. 5. Respiratory protection.
1. Eliminating the sources of contamination or reducing the amount. 2. Prevention of contaminant dispersion. 3. Protecting the worker.
energy analysis became popular, mainly through the work of Johnson (1973; 1980), the use of this model is not universal and many prefer subjective definitions of hazard, such as the potential to cause injury or illness (HSO 1995). While the exact definition of hazard varies, the importance of control at source rather than control at person via the hierarchy of control is widely acknowledged. For example, here in Victoria, Australia, Occupational Health and Safety Act 1985 has as one of its objects:
approaches make a clear distinction between controls that eliminate the hazard and those that rely on less effective means. They encourage an examination of the processes involving the hazard before consideration of other options.
. . . to eliminate, at the source, risks to the health, safety and welfare of persons at work. (Occupational Health and Safety Act 1985, p. 5, emphasis added) Clearly the elimination of a hazard is the most effective measure in prevention. From this point on, there are other worthwhile options such as to contain the hazard in a way that makes it intrinsically safe. Peripheral issues such as personal protection and safe behaviour are relegated to last resorts. The importance of addressing the sources of the problem is now recognised as the most effective way to improve safety and is emphasised by legislation. These legislative
The Difficulties with the Hierarchy of Control Use of the risk control processes as suggested by the new legislation is obstructed by a general misunderstanding of the accident process and a continued popular focus on blame and behavioural features of accidents. Accident prevention specialists have long recognised that the common apportioning of blame to victims has little to do with prevention; for instance: . . . to say that an accident was caused by inattentiveness gives us no clue whatsoever about how we could have prevented it (Chapanis 1965, p. 8) Accidents are due to human failing. This is not untrue, merely unhelpful. (Kletz 1985, p. 2)
Table 2. Hierarchies for the Prevention of Occupational Injury
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NSC (1959) (Historical)
Haddon (1963) (Historical)
HSO (1995) (Recent Example)
1. Eliminate hazard 2. Minimise hazard source/ prevent release 3. PPE
1. Prevent marshalling of energy 2. Prevent or modify the release of energy 3. Remove the man from the vicinity of the energy 4. Impose a barrier
1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.
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Elimination Substitution Engineering controls Isolation Administration PPE
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However, it seems socially and industrially ingrained that faulty human behaviour is the cause of most accidents and that it follows that behavioural prevention strategies are appropriate. This belief will be an obstruction to the development and implementation of high-order controls. A number of studies have shown that the `careless worker' myth is alive and well (Else and Cowley 1987; Biggins and Phillips 1991; Gaines and Biggins 1992). My own research (1997) indicates that victim-blaming remains a strong feature of the culture surrounding accident analysis and prevention. A further practical difficulty with employing the hierarchy of control process is that the elimination step is easily by-passed. It's fairly easy to say, ``We can't eliminate this'', and subsequently adopt one of the least preferred options. The path of least resistance is to move through the hierarchy to lower order strategies. The elimination stage is conceptually very challenging. Usually the hazardous equipment, process, substance, etcetera, was put in place for a good reason and serves some purpose. The ideal of elimination is easily resisted because it challenges the decisions of the past. The ideal of elimination is threatening as it directs the thinking into uncharted water; unfamiliar, and uncomfortable, territory. In summary, there seems to be two main difficulties with achieving high-order risk controls: 1. The obstructing nature of victim-blaming paradigms 2 The challenging nature of the high-order mandates (such as `elimination') The first issue is worthy of discussion. However it is not addressed further here. The remainder of the paper is devoted to the challenges to thinking presented by contemporary risk control philosophies and the relationship to creative thinking.
The Relationship to Creative Thinking The challenging nature of the thinking process of achieving high-order risk control lends itself well to a comparison with the process of creative thinking. The history of inventions is saturated with regularly cited examples of events that diverted thinking from the dominant paradigm of the time. For instance in 1821 Michael Faraday invented the electric motor and made a simple working model, however the invention attracted little interest. Ten years later Faraday invented the electric dynamo without realising its similarity to
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earlier electric motor. The dynamo became very popular and was used to generate electricity from steam engines. In 1873 a technician mistakenly connected a second dynamo to one already being driven by a steam engine. The second dynamo sprung into life and the electric motor was reborn; fifty years after its invention! In hindsight it was obvious that the motor and the dynamo were the reverse of each other but this was not obvious before, even to the inventor. The diversion in this case was provided by chance, but once provided the logic of the discovery was obvious. There are many instances of chance diversion providing valuable new ideas.
Role of chance diversion
. Faraday's dynamo was mistakenly joined
to another.
. Fleming happened across penicillin by
observing mould on a culture plate.
. Archimedes' discovery of the theory of
displacement is attributed to some time spent in the bath.
These famous examples indicate a process in creative thinking. 1. Involvement and understanding in an area of study. 2. An event that diverts thinking. 3. An effort to make sense of the diversion. While being involved in an area of study is straight-forward, how do we arrange the diversions in our thinking? When should we resort to climbing into a bath? To inject some certainty into this uncertain process of creative thinking, creative thinking and problem-solving have been the subject of much discussion and research. The general problem solving process of preparation, illumination, and verification was outlined many years ago (for example Ribot 1906; Wallas 1926). However the processes of getting the illumination, of changing the paradigm, is the difficult part. Even knowing about the importance of changing out of a dominant way of thinking only goes part of the way to actually making it happen. From this need for deliberate techniques for creative thinking, we now have a number of common methods. Many years ago, Ribot (1906), and similarly Spearman (1930), suggested the use of analogies as a way to create links between the operation of one idea that might be applied to another idea. More recently, around the 1950s and 1960s, discussion of ways to provoke thinking became very popular and included the techniques of; random combinations (Mednick 1962); analogy (Ribot 1906; Gibson and Phillips 1958; Gordon
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1961; Koestler 1969); morphology (Allen 1962; Zwicky 1969) and the focusing verbs, such as reverse and magnify (Osborn 1948). These techniques remain popular today and are all ways to generate a diversion of thinking from a dominant paradigm. The basic process can be summarised as: 1. Identifying an area of interest 2. Thinking diversion techniques (such as magnify) 3. Making sense of this diversion. This process accords with the earlier outline of many great creative achievements. However, unlike the stories of fortuitous thinking diversions, the process here relies on a deliberate attempt to force our thinking out of the current concept and into a new concept. This model, now widely discussed in creative thinking closely parallels contemporary risk control philosophies that employ thinking diversions such as elimination. The purpose of the creative thinking tools is to inject diversions into thinking. However the immediate result is less likely to be enlightenment, and more likely to be nonsense. For instance, eliminate the hazard does not suit our thinking; it directs us into an area of unreasonable thinking; it often suggests the seemingly illogical and impossible. However difficult, if dominant paradigms are to be ever shifted there must be some effort to make sense of prompts, such as eliminate the hazard. The most fundamental mechanism is that judgement of ideas is deferred during the idea creating period. This principle was most widely promoted via the brainstorming model of Osborn (1948), that has been shown to be a worthwhile way of enhancing creative performance (Meadow and Parnes 1959; Meadow, Parnes and Reese 1959; Parnes and Meadow 1959; Weisskopf-Joelson and Eliseo 1961; Parloff and Hanson 1964; Reese and Parnes 1970; Baer 1988; Szymanski and Harkins 1992). Given the value of deferring judgement, others have suggested simple ways to facilitate the tendency we have toward this way of thinking. For instance, de Bono (1973) suggested that the word PO (neither yes nor no) could be a way to signal that an idea is not fully thought out and only intended as a possibility or maybe a stepping stone to a new idea. In a similar vein, Rickards (1988) suggested too often the response to a new idea is yes, but . . . The receiver of the idea immediately thinks of why the idea won't work, or is impractical, or too expensive, and so on. He suggested deliberately changing this habit to one of yes, and . . . to escape the trap of over zealous
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judgement. PO and Yes, and . . . represent ways to better employ the principle of deferring judgement, a long-standing element of effective creative thinking.
The Relationship between Risk Control and Creative Thinking The creative thinking process in risk control is as follows. 1. Identify the hazard in the system 2. Challenge the current situation (using a diversion such as eliminate ) 3. Seek ways that the system can then work (explore the idea; defer judgement) Part one is straightforward and can employ techniques such as energy analysis. Part two however as mentioned above is generally absurd. Therefore part three of the process will not happen. It's difficult to see the sense in eliminating machinery, tools, substances and so on, that were put in place deliberately to do some particular job. This first priority for risk control is likely to be too-quickly overlooked. However if efforts in risk control are to be effective and reliable in reducing risk, and to also achieve simultaneous improvements on other measures, then loworder controls will not do. Only an effort to redesign the system along the lines of highorder controls has the potential to yield benefits like cost saving, or productivity, along with reliable risk control. A practical example of this is the recent change to the design of many exercise cycles.
Case Study in Risk Control: Exercise Cycles Some time ago the ABC in Australia screened a program about the safety of exercise cycles. The main focus of the television program was the problem of children becoming caught in the moving parts. They investigated a number of exercise cycles and showed how the guarding of the wheel, chain, sprocket and so on, was often inadequate. The program pointed out common guarding problems like: 1. Guards that can be easily removed. 2. Guards that don't cover enough. 3. Guards that fingers can get through. The relevant Australian Standard, Australian Standard 4092, Exercise Cycles ± Safety Requirements, makes similar comments. The standard says that statistics show that there have been
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injuries to the fingers and hands of young children. The Standard says that injuries mainly involve `. . . chains and sprockets, flywheel spokes and loading mechanisms, and loading mechanisms associated with solid flywheels'. At this point we have identified a problem; that exercise cycles injure children's fingers. To solve the problem, there are two broad approaches that we could follow. The first is the prescriptive approach using the Standard; the standard tells us exactly what to do about the problem. The second approach is the performance-based approach that doesn't tell us what to do about the cycles but gives us a guide to the process of risk control.
1. Prescriptive Method of Risk Control The prescriptive method relies on Australian Standard 4092. On the issue of preventing injuries, the Standard says: Guards shall be provided to protect dangerous parts at all locations which constitute shear, crushing, or drawing-in hazards, giving particular attention to the following: (a) The flywheel (b) The drive train (c) The flywheel loading mechanism. (AS 4092-1993) To reduce risk according to the prescriptive approach is then simple. Guard the chains, sprockets and flywheels according to AS 4092-1993. This approach seems sensible and is indeed what has been done. Exercise cycles in the stores now would seem to be guarded according to the standard. A salesperson mentioned to me that the extra safety had a drawback; higher price. Maybe safety comes with a price tag?
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2. The Performance-Based Method of Risk Control Consider the hierarchy of control model and the first priority is the elimination of the hazard. The process of improving the safety of exercise cycles could then be as follows: 1. Hazard ( potential to cause injury): Moving Parts 2. First Priority: Eliminate Moving Parts 3. PO : Exercise cycles have no moving parts 4. Risk Control: Redesign the exercise cycle eliminating the wheel, chain and sprockets. 5. Outcome: Simpler, lighter, cheaper and inherently safer exercise machine.
Performance-based risk control
In hindsight this is completely logical. The wheel serves no purpose. The necessary resistance could be built into the pedal crank. This machine would seem to have potential to be cheaper and inherently safer. This example shows the power of adopting the performance based risk-control processes. The focus on high-order elimination control yielded improved safety along with simultaneous benefits such as cost savings. This contrasts with the guarding options that lead to increased costs (Figure 1).
Conclusion: Risk Control and Productivity Improvement Better safety will always be a financial burden if the risk control measures lie near the lowerorder priorities such as personal protective equipment, or even machine guarding. While the performance-based risk management legislation encourage the elimination of hazards and other higher-order controls, the imperative for implementing these controls
Safety with a price tag
Figure 1. Lateral Thinking and Exercise Cycle Safety (model from: de Bono 1973) # Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1997
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arises not only from the legislation but from the opportunity for synchronous improvements in other areas, such as productivity increases or cost reductions. There are two major obstacles to managers making use of the ideals of performance based risk control. The first is the difficulty of the popular attention given to victim blaming in the analysis of accidents. I've not explored this in detail here but it is a situation that will obstruct higher-order risk controls from the outset of the process, and one worthy of treatment in much greater detail. The second problem is the psychological and social difficulty of the thinking diversions built into the hierarchy of control model. The redesign process suggested by the performance based approach is confronting and difficult to achieve. Immediately ideas suggested by the process, like elimination, don't make any sense. They suggest eliminating a feature that is in place around for a very good reason, something that's been put in place deliberately. Suggesting that a procedure, or a piece of equipment, or a process, be eliminated is absurd and tends to be insulting to those responsible for putting those processes in place. This difficulty is one of breaking paradigms. There is a large body of knowledge and techniques in creative thinking that address this issue. Breaking paradigms had been a major purpose of creative thinking techniques for some time. It follows then that many of the tools for creative thinking are useful in the management of risk. Employing the process of creative thinking won't guarantee a great success. However not going through the process guarantees a mediocre result. The only safety measures that cease to make safety a burden is those that examine the operation of the system; add-ons like personal protection only serve to increase costs. Use of the performance based approaches with an understanding of the techniques of creative thinking have the potential to improve risk control and simultaneously improve other goals like productivity.
References Allen, M.S. (1962) Morphological Creativity: The miracle of your hidden brain power. Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, N.J. Baer, J.M., Jr. (1988) `Long-Term Effects of Creativity Training with Middle School Students', Journal of Early Adolescence, vol. 8, no. 2, 183±193. Biggins, D. and Phillips, M. (1991) `A Survey of Health and Safety Representatives in Queensland: Part 2: Beliefs about accident; comparisons of representatives and shop stewards', Journal of
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Occupational Health and Safety-Australia NZ, vol. 7, no. 4, 281±286. Brandt, A.D. (1947) Industrial Health Engineering. Wiley, New York, Chapman & Hall, London. Chapanis, A. (1965) Man-Machine Engineering. Brooks/Cole, Monterey, Cal. Cowley, S. and Else, D. (1987) Trade Union Health and Safety Representative Training Evaluation Report. Ballarat College of Advanced Education. Culvenor, J. (1997) Breaking the Safety Barrier: Engineering New Paradigms in Safety Design. PhD Thesis, University of Ballarat, in progress. de Bono, E. (1973) PO: Beyond Yes and No (rev. edn). Penguin, Harmondsworth. Gaines, J. and Biggins, D. (1992) `A Survey of Health and Safety Representatives in the Northern Territory', Journal of Occupational Health and Safety-Australia NZ, vol. 8, no. 5, 421±428. Gibson, A.B. and Phillips, A.A. (1958) Thinkers at Work, 3rd. edn. Longmans, London. Gordon, W.J.J. (1961) Synectics: The development of creative capacity. Harper & Row, New York. Haddon, W., Jr. (1963) `A Note Concerning Accident Theory and Research with Special Reference to Motor Vehicle Accidents', Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, vol. 107, 635±646. Hamilton, A. (1929) Industrial Poisons in the United States. Macmillan, New York. Health and Safety Organisation, Victoria (1995) Code of Practice for Plant. Law Press, Melbourne. Johnson, W.G. (1980) MORT Safety Assurance Systems. Dekker, New York. Johnson, W.G. (1973) The Management Oversight & Risk Tree ± MORT. The Atomic Energy Commission, Washington. Kletz, T. (1985) An Engineer's View of Human Error. Institution of Chemical Engineers, Rugby, Warwickshire. Koestler, A. (1969) The Act of Creation. Hutchinson, London. Meadow, A. and Parnes, S.J. (1959) `Evaluation of Training in Creative Problem Solving'. Journal of Applied Psychology, vol. 43, no. 3, 189±194. Meadow, A., Parnes, S.J. and Reese, H. (1959) `Influence of Brainstorming Instructions and Problem Sequence on a Creative Problem Solving Test', Journal of Applied Psychology, vol. 43, no. 6, 413±416. Mednick, S.A. (1962) `The Associative Basis of the Creative Process', Psychology Review, vol. 69, no. 3, 220±232. Occupational Health and Safety Act 1895 (Vic.). Osborn, A.F. (1948) Your Creative Power: How to use imagination. Charles Scribner's Sons, New York. Parloff, M.B. and Hanson, J.H. (1964) `The Influence of Criticalness on Creative Problem-Solving in Dyads', Psychiatry, vol. 27, 17±27. Parnes, S.J. and Meadow, A. (1959) `Effects of ``Brainstorming'' Instructions on Creative Problem Solving by Trained and Untrained Subjects', Journal of Educational Psychology, vol. 50, no. 4, 171±176. Reese, H.W. and Parnes, S.J. (1970) `Programming Creative Behavior', Child Development, vol. 41, no. 2, 413±423.
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Ribot, T. (1906) Essay on the Creative Imagination. Open Court, Chicago. Rickards, T. (1988) Creativity at Work. Gower, Aldershot. Spearman, C. (1930) Creative Mind. Nisbet, London, & Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Standards Association of Australia (1993) Exercise Cycles ± Safety Requirements (AS 4092-1993). Szymanski, K. and Harkins, S.G. (1992) `Selfevaluation and Creativity', Personality & Social Psychology Bulletin, vol. 18, no. 3, 259±265. Wallas, G. (1926) The Art of Thought. Jonathon Cape, London.
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Weisskopf-Joelson, E. and Eliseo, T.S. (1961) `An Experimental Study of the Effectiveness of Brainstorming', Journal of Applied Psychology, vol. 45, no. 1, 45±49. Zwicky, F. (1969) Discovery, Invention, Research: Through the morphological approach. Macmillan, Toronto. John Culvenor is a Faculty Member at the VIOSH-Australia, University of Ballarat, Australia.
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Meetings of the Future: Enhancing Group Collaboration with Group Support Systems Robert O. Briggs and Gert-Jan de Vreede Meetings frequently fail to meet the objectives or expectations of the participants. The factors that diminish performance, including creativity, can be addressed through the application of electronic group support systems. A brief history of group support systems is provided. Recent developments are examined, and it is suggested that the systems offer more than the earlier planning function. Specifically they permit more opportunities for designing meeting processes to meet the contingent requirements of each group of users. As such the systems do not remove the need for leadership, merely provide ways through which leadership efforts can be supported and enhanced.
Introduction
I
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magine you are in a meeting. Imagine it to be a tough meeting, with serious implications, a strategic planning meeting which is likely to result in massive redistribution of organizational resources. Dozens of people who have very little time, and who perhaps have different hopes for the outcome must work together to develop the plan. The meeting leader explains the problem. Now consider two scenarios. In the first scenario the most talkative person, the marketing VP, begins suggesting courses of action. The VP of engineering immediately interrupts to argue against the proposals. His words are a little strong, and as usual the discussion degenerates into an ego-defending turf battle. The chairman comes in and brings the meeting to order, and the production manager offers a suggestion. The marketing VP interrupts to disagree before the production manager finishes his first thought. The meeting grinds on for hours. In the end they break up, agreeing to convene again the following week to continue the work. Up to this point the group has not actually considered the exact nature of their problems, much less arrived at a consensus about what to do. Now, consider a very different scenario. After the leader charges the group on a prearranged signal, everyone starts talking at
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once. In the cacophony, everybody hears everything that is said. Nothing is forgotten. People question key points closely to be sure they understand, and yet every idea is considered strictly on its merits, regardless of who offers it. Almost all the discussion is task focused. The group proceeds through problem definition, alternative generation, selecting a course of action, then planning an implementation. People stay focused on the task at hand. Rare digressions don't sidetrack the rest of the group. People render honest and open opinions, yet nobody's feelings get hurt. Nobody feels particularly threatened that the boss is in the room. Does this sound impossible? Read on. This is only part of the support a team can get from an electronic Group Support System.
Meetings are difficult There are many things that can stifle creativity in a meeting (figure 1). Participants may lack focus, or may be focused on hidden agendas. Some people may be afraid to speak up, while others may dominate the discussion. Misunderstandings occur as people use the same words for different ideas and different words for the same ideas. The wrong people may be at the meeting, and the right information may be unavailable. The variety of problems that may bedevil a meeting process is endless. # Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1997. 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF and 350 Main St, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
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Figure 1. Meetings are difficult (based on Nunamaker et al., 1995)
Meetings are expensive Besides being difficult, meetings are expensive. Consider the salary of a senior manager. Consider the cost of a room full of senior managers wrangling about how to run a meeting. The costs can be staggering. The 3M Management Institute reports that in the United States alone there are more than 20 million formal meetings per day, more than three billion meetings per year, consuming between 30±80% of a manager's day. These numbers do not include informal discussions between colleagues in hallways and between offices. One Fortune 50 company reports losses in excess of $75 million per year due to poor meetings.
Meetings are necessary For all their difficulty and expense, meetings are essential. For many managers, they are the primary tool for dealing with people to get things done. There are many reasons why people meet when they are working together: to share information, to generate new ideas, to make decisions, to avoid decisions, to socialize, and so on. There are a number of reasons to believe that meetings will be a permanent fixture of creative problem-solving. . Complexity. Organizational problems are
often so complex that no single person has all the understanding, information, and resources to solve the problem alone. . Evaluation. A group of people is often more capable of providing a reality-check for proposed solutions than is the individual proposing the solution. . Acceptance. When all the stakeholders are represented in creative problem-solving
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activities, there is a better chance their interests will be accommodated in the solution. A choice that seems arbitrary to one participant may be of critical importance to another. Addressing the interests of the key players should lead to higher commitment when the solution is implemented. . Synergy. People involved in creative problem solving processes often build on one another's ideas leveraging their different talents and knowledge. This synergy can lead to new, rich ideas that may not have otherwise occurred.
Group Support Systems can improve team performance A new breed of computer technology has emerged that deals with many of the trouble spots for team creativity. It is called Group Support Systems. GSS can radically change the dynamics of group interactions by improving communication, by structuring and focusing creative efforts, and by establishing and maintaining an alignment between personal and group goals. This paper will describe the GSS concept and explain how leaders use it to improve creative problem solving by groups.
Changing group dynamics
What is a Group Support System? A Group Support System is a collection of computer-based meeting tools specifically designed to improve creative problem solving by teams. A GSS is typically based on a network of personal computers, usually one for each participant. Sometimes participants work in meeting rooms especially designed
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for electronically supported meetings (figures 2, 3). These facilities often have carefully arranged seating and lighting, and one or more large public display screens. Other times the participants simply move laptop computers into a standard meeting room and begin their work. Still other times the participants work from their offices, coordinating their GSS efforts via voice links and e-mail. A GSS permits all participants to ``speak at once'' by typing their ideas into the system. The system immediately makes all contributions available to the other participants on their screens. Nobody has to wait for a turn to speak, so people don't forget what they want to say while waiting for the floor. People don't forget what has been said, because there is an electronic record of the conversation on their screens. They can stop to think without losing the thread of the meeting. The GSS also allows a group to enter ideas anonymously, when it is appropriate. During the generation phase of creativity it is often useful to get every idea on the table, but people often hold back unconventional or unpopular ideas for fear of disapproval from peers or superiors. The anonymity of the GSS allows the ideas to surface without fear of repercussion. Further, because the ideas are anonymous, the team can only evaluate them on their merits, rather than their source. In labor management negotiations, for example, it is often difficult for an idea to receive a fair hearing, because if it is proposed by one side it is immediately suspect by the other. Anonymous teamwork can help overcome such impasses.
The Software Each tool in a GSS toolkit focuses and structures the thinking of the team in some unique way. An electronic brainstorming tool, for example, is designed to intentionally fragment a group's thinking and prevent them going into depth on any one topic. This kind of tool encourages them to diverge from comfortable thinking patterns, to seek farther and farther afield for new ideas. An idea organizer, on the other hand, encourages a group to converge very quickly on a few key issues. A topic-commenting tool encourages the team to explore any ideas in great depth and detail. Table 1 summarizes the tools in GroupSystems, a GSS developed by researchers at the University of Arizona. A team leader selects the tools for the team to use, depending where they are in the problem solving process, and what kind of group dynamics the leader wishes to create. Electronic polling tools provide a variety of ways to measure group consensus ± rank ordering, weighting, agree-disagree, multiple selection, pair wise comparison, and others. Electronic polling turns out to be a superb method for opening discussions that have become stalled. Once people have registered their opinions, the leader can focus discussion by saying, ``I see six people have rated Item 7 as most important, while four have rated it least important. Without telling me how you voted, can you tell me reasons that might exist for voting each way on this issue?'' Subsequent conversation is usually most illuminating. It often turns out that people use different words for the same idea, or have different meanings for the same word. Sometimes people hold information that others do not know. Other times fundamental differences in assumptions surface. Groups often vote at the beginning of a discussion, and revote periodically to see how they are doing.
Making sense of the buzzwords
Software for group productivity
Figure 2. A Portable Group Support System. Used in face-to-face mode on a standard conference table. Participants contribute through parallel electronic channels in addition to regular channels.
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Over the last decade developers have created a new class of software aimed at making groups more productive. The umbrella term for this software was coined in 1981 by Peter and Trudy Johnson-Lenz: Groupware. Group Support Systems are but one kind of groupware. They differ substantially from systems like Lotus Notes, which provides e-mail, team databases and computer conferencing systems. Where Lotus notes supports coordinated-but-independent team work, a GSS supports a concerted effort toward a plan-of-action. Where Lotus Notes offers a platform upon which any number
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Table 1. A Summary of Tools in GroupSystems for Windows. A GSS created at the University of Arizona Electronic Brainstorming allows rapid generation of a free flow of ideas. Topic Commenter permits people to generate ideas and assign them to ``file folders'' or topics. Categorizer gives structured methods for generating, synthesizing, and categorizing ideas. Group Outliner allows a group to explore issues and develop action plans using a tree or outline structure. Alternative Analyzer compares set of alternatives against a set of group-developed criteria. Vote helps evaluate ideas, measure consensus, and make choices using several voting methods. Survey allows the group to respond to a questionnaire. Briefcase provides a set of personal productivity tools, including Calendar, File Reader, Notepad, Calculator, Clipboard and Quick Vote.
Figure 3. GSS research laboratories at the University of Arizona
Table 2. Acronyms and Buzzwords surrounding Group Support Systems CAC CC CIS CMCS CS CSCW CWSS DGSS EC EMS GCSS GDSS GIS GNSS TC
Computer Assisted Communication Computer Conferencing Communication Information System Computer Mediated Communication Support Collaborative Systems Computer Supported Cooperative Work Collaborative Work Support System Distributed Group Support System Electronic Communities Electronic Meeting System Group Communication Support System Group Decision Support System Group Information System Group Negotiation Support System TeleCollaboration
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of group tools could be built, a GSS is a set of finished applications, created to structure and focus group dynamics. Indeed, one could build a GSS on top of Lotus Notes, but Notes is not, in and of itself, a GSS. Group Support Systems are now beginning to make their way from the laboratory into the workplace. As they do a dizzying array of buzzwords float around them. Originally GSS were called GDSS, or Group Decision Support System. Over time people came to realize that these systems supported much more of the team process than just decision making, and so the D was dropped. Another term, electronic meeting system (EMS) is synonymous with GSS. The term EMS appears more in trade literature, while the term GSS tends to be confined to the academic literature. Table 2 presents a host of other terms that surround GSS. Each has somewhat different connotations depending on the interests of those who coined the terms. Nonetheless Table 2 can serve as a Rosetta Stone for those interested in finding further information on the topic.
A brief history of GSS One of the first electronic meeting systems was conceived in the late 1970s by Jay F. Nunamaker, Jr. and his team at the University of Arizona. This system, Plexsys, was built to capture natural-language discussions of information systems requirements from many users simultaneously, so that all points of view could be considered, and so that users could negotiate their differences before information systems were built. The first prototype came on-line in the early 1980s, and was surprisingly successful. Users could say what they needed to say, build on one another's ideas, and quickly identify areas of disagreement that needed discussion, and they could do so with less than half the labor costs. Further, it became clear early on that Plexsys was not only useful for requirements definition, it was useful for any group of people expending cognitive effort to achieve a goal. In the mid 1980s the University of Minnesota also developed an electronic meeting system called SAMM (Software Aided Meeting Management). Minnesota researchers used their system in early efforts to develop a theoretical basis for explaining the successful use of electronic meeting systems (DeSanctis and Gallupe, 1987). The University of Michigan also created several GSS tools on a Macintosh platform, and conducted some of the early research into room and furniture designs for GSS environments. The late 1980s saw the birth of the commercial GSS. In 1989, the University of
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Arizona chartered Ventana Corporation to transfer the Plexsys technology to industry and government. Ventana's flagship product, which was derived from Plexsys, is called GroupSystems. Also in the late 1980s the founder of Execucom Corporation created VisionQuest, the first GSS to be developed from the start as a commercial venture. Still, GSS are one of the few examples of information technology that were conceptualized and developed by universities and made it from the academic world to industry.
Experiences from the field More than two million people world wide have now participated in GSS-supported meetings. Table 3 shows a small sample of the variety of tasks for which the technology has been used. Table 4 presents a list of some of the organizations now using GSS on a regular basis. Rigorous studies documenting the results of thousands of cases show that teams using GSS to support creative problem-solving routinely report labor cost reductions averaging 50% and reductions of project calendar days averaging 90% (see e.g. Grohowski et al., 1988; Post, 1992). How does one account for such gains? A GSS provides support to a team along four fundamental dimensions: communication, deliberation, information access, and goal congruence.
Communication support Consider first the communication possible with a GSS. In a face-to-face meeting everybody must wait for a turn to speak. Available air-time must be divided among all participants who wish to speak. When a GSS is Table 3. Examples of GSS Application Areas Business process redesign Case analysis Education and learning Gaming and training Information planning Information system development Policy formulation Process quality assessment and improvement Process modeling Product development Project design and evaluation Resource allocation Strategy planning and strategy creation
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Table 4. A selection of organizations now using GSS on a regular basis American Airlines Amsterdam Municipal Police Force Arthur Anderson AT&T Bell South Bellcore British Steel Chevron Pipeline Department of Transportation District of Columbia Public Schools Finova Corp. IBM
Intel Corporation Lloyds Bank Ministry of Finance, Finland Ministry of Housing and Spatial Planning, Netherlands Nationale Nederlanden Insurances, Netherlands Oticon Corporation Price Waterhouse Royal Dutch Telecom (KPN) U.S. Army U.S. Marine Corps U.S. Navy
added to the environment, participants may speak aloud if they wish, but when everybody wants the floor at once, they may use the GSS to achieve parallel communication. They do not have to listen to others before they can submit their own views. Participants do not have to remember their ideas and criticisms until they have the floor and can therefore spend more time on generating new ideas. Teams using electronic brainstorming are able to produce many more unique ideas of higher quality than teams working without electronic support (Dennis et al., 1991; Valacich et al., 1994). A team communicating in parallel can cover a great deal of ground in a very short time. It takes no longer to hear from everybody in the group than it does to hear from one person. However, this degree of productivity can have a down-side. A group of 15 people working for 40 minutes can easily produce 600 to 1000 lines of text. Special tools and techniques are required to prevent information overload. These will be addressed in the section on Deliberation Support. A GSS also allows for anonymous communication. Studies have shown that during idea generation activities people generate many more ideas and of higher quality if they are allowed to contribute anonymously. People need not worry about the political implications of disagreeing with others, or floating ideas that do not conform to the main-stream world view. Anonymity allows participants to criticize ideas without criticizing the people who produced them. Studies have shown that identified groups produce fewer ideas when criticism is allowed, but anonymous groups produce more when criticism is allowed (Connolly et al., 1990). People explore their ideas without becoming bogged down by slighted egos.
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On the other hand, anonymity is not an unmixed blessing. Many studies have shown that people exert less effort when they are anonymous than when they are identified. Steps can be taken to raise the effort made by anonymous workers. Moreover, people may be unwilling to share their best ideas with the rest of the group if they feel they will not get the credit for it. Also, while anonymity is useful during the idea generation phase, on some occasions it may hinder subsequent work. People who submit information anonymously may be reluctant to reveal their identity later. There have been cases where this left a group unclear about the meaning accuracy of the information. In some instances they have even deleted information that turned out to be pertinent (Vreede and Sol, 1994). Further, there are times in a meeting when it is important for participants to take responsibility, to commit to action, and to commit resources. A leader must therefore use anonymity judiciously, as a tool, not as a panacea. When first faced with the concept of GSS, some have argued that it be a poor communication medium, asserting that text-based electronic communication lacks social cues, the subtle nuances of behaviour and tone-ofvoice that make face-to-face oral communication so rich. They point out, for example, that it is difficult to tell sarcasm from serious discussion in a computer conversation. A typical comment is, ``I don't want to talk to a computer, I want to talk to my colleagues.'' However, bringing a GSS into a meeting does not eliminate any traditional meeting media. People may still speak, gesture, draw on whiteboards, pound on tables, and the like, and they can also work on-line. Rather than subtracting richness, the GSS provides yet another channel. When working on the GSS the participants do not engage the computer,
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they engage one another. The GSS gives the team more control over the richness of their media, providing orderly, anonymous, parallel communication when it is useful, but allowing free-form nose-to-nose argument when that is called for. Our experiences with teams using GSS show that they typically spend about half their time working on-line and the other half in oral discussion. Therefore, the leader and the team must choose to use the technology when it can benefit, and not use it when it would interfere.
Deliberation support
Fostering a different group dynamic
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GSS tools can often improve a group's deliberation processes as they struggle to make sense of their problems and plan their actions. The fundamental behaviors a group can execute in pursuit of their goals are a) generate ideas, b) organize ideas, and c) evaluate ideas. Subtle differences in a GSS interface can lead to substantial differences in group dynamics. During a generation task, for example, it may be important to push a group to diverge, to push beyond their normal thinking patterns. An electronic brainstorming tool provides each participant with a different electronic page. The system allows them to enter only a single, short idea before it randomly sends their page to another participant and randomly brings them a page containing someone else's idea. Such a tool fosters as many different simultaneous conversations as there are people in the room. An electronic brainstorming tool provides a good mechanism for reducing information overload faced by large groups. For each new person added to the group, the system adds a new electronic page. Thus, no matter how large the group becomes, no single page becomes excessively full of ideas. When it comes time to converge on a list of key issues, the group can work in parallel, each participant working from a single page. Key issues presented on that page can be moved to a group list. Participants can exchange pages several times to assure completeness. Hence, key issues are identified with a minimum of cognitive load on the participants. In contrast to electronic brainstorming, a topic commenting tool provides the group with a pre-set list of topics, but allows them to explore each topic in as much detail and depth as they wish. Such a tool fosters a very different group dynamic than electronic brainstorming. Idea organizing tools typically allow a group to rapidly converge on a list of key issues from the unstructured, unfocused text of their free-form brainstorming. At each phase of the problem solving process the
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leader must choose the tool that best moves the group from where they are to where they need to be next.
Information access support Every phase of the thinking process (idea generation, idea organization, and idea evaluation) requires information gathering. A GSS can improve information access by enabling larger groups and by creating a group memory. Using a GSS a team of 24 can work with the same dynamics as a group of five. Because large meetings can be effective, many more people can be included in a process. Researchers in the field have observed that GSS groups have many fewer instances of breaking off a meeting because people holding key information were not present. This factor accounts for a large percentage of the reduction in project days. All ideas, comments, and votes that are entered during a meeting are stored electronically, creating a group memory. The results of previous meetings are readily available when a group reconvenes, or when another group tackles a similar problem. For instance, one avionics manufacturer was having a serious quality control problem. They searched their electronic meeting transcripts for the previous two years for further information. They discovered that there had never been a meeting to deal with this particular problem, but that it had come up in 19 other meetings. Further, in every case the products of one particular vendor were mentioned in connection with the problem. Armed with the record, they approached the vendor and resolved the quality problem. Electronic group memory differs from `traditional' minutes in several important aspects (Culnan and Markus, 1987). First, as minutes are traditionally written by a single individual, they are likely to reflect that individual's understanding of the meeting outcome. The electronically generated group memory gives an objective history. Second, minutes do not often describe the participant's initial positions or their interim postures. Group memory depicts the evolution of the group's position over time. Finally, group memory makes each comment during a meeting public, to which others can refer at a later stage. On the other side of the coin, the amount of information may become so large that special support is necessary to retrieve the relevant pieces of information. Furthermore, people may hesitate to contribute to electronic transcripts if everything is permanent. Some teams working on sensitive issues prefer not
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to have their processes documented. Such teams often delete their sessions as soon as they finish work. One military organization went as far as to physically shred a hard disk at the conclusion of an important session. However, other teams have used the group memory to document the validity of their deliberations. One university, feeling sensitive to issues of affirmative action, conducted all hiring decision making on line to prove that bias was not a part of their decision making.
Alignment of goals People always bring personal goals into a team effort. The team can only be productive to the degree that the goals of the team are congruent with the goals of the individuals on the team. Over the long term, people will not work against their perceived self-interest. There are a number of features and functions in an electronic meeting system that encourage the alignment of group and individual goals. Some tools permit anonymous input, which encourages people to speak up immediately if they perceive their ox is about to be gored. Because larger numbers of people can work together effectively, the whole group can learn about individual constraints early in the process, rather than having concerns fester under the surface, only to bring a project down after the investment of much time and expense. Some EMS tools specifically ask team members to identify the stakeholders in a project and to explicitly state their assumptions about each of them. This activity often surfaces misconceptions and unrealistic expectations, permitting a realignment of group and individual goals.
The group setting for GSS The setting in which a group uses a GSS is likely to affect their success. Facilitation, room lay-out, group size, and organizational culture can all play a role.
Facilitation Facilitation is a set of activities carried out before, during, and after a meeting to help the group achieve its outcomes. GSS teams often rely on the services of a facilitator to help improve their productivity (Bostrom et al., 1993). The facilitator typically makes no contribution to the content of the meeting, and has no stake in the outcome. Rather, the facilitator serves as a moderator and guide, monitoring group processes carefully
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to keep the group moving toward its goal. It is often the responsibility of the facilitator to design the structure of the meeting where messy problems are defined and handled. As a part of this design the facilitator recommends when technology should be used. The facilitator often runs the technology on behalf of the team. Note that also most traditional meetings are likely to benefit from conscious a-priori planning and agenda design. Studies have shown that facilitation per se does not guarantee improved meeting process and outcome. Rigid facilitation, for example, does not seem to fit judgmental task situations, i.e. decision making tasks without right answers, such as multi-criteria decision making sessions (Dickson et al., 1993). In a later study, Dickson c.s. have shown that facilitation has a significant positive effect on meeting outcomes when a) facilitation is harmonized with the task the group is performing, and b) facilitation is flexible, i.e. the behavior and actions of the facilitator depend on what happens during the meeting. A particular drawback of facilitation may be that it can dictate rigid structure to an extent that some groups may feel uncomfortable working under such an imposed structure. Some researchers are now working to automate certain facilitation functions to reduce the vagaries of human intervention (Limayen et al., 1993).
Room layout If the GSS team is to work face-to-face in the same room, special consideration must be given to room layout. Perhaps the most important consideration is that the computers must be placed in such a fashion that the participants can see one another (figure 4). They are likely to spend half their time in verbal discussions, which will be sadly hampered if the participants sit behind a wall of monitors. One must also arrange lighting so as not to cause undue glare on the computer monitors. Sufficient table surface should be available to allow participants to work with papers as well as with computers, and it is often useful if the room has a public screen projecting the facilitator's workstation, so as to focus group discussion from time to time.
Group size It is important to select the GSS technology appropriate to the group. There is some evidence that groups larger than seven or eight people benefit more from electronic brainstorming than do smaller groups
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Left: The Former President of Slovenia (third from left) in a room with monitors lowered into the table top to allow face-to-face discussion.
Right: A room at ITESM in Monterey, Mexico with monitors completely buried in table tops for maximum eye contact, but glare from florescent lights makes it hard to see monitors.
Figure 4. Allowing for Eye Contact in Electronic Meeting Rooms (Dennis 1994). In real life settings, technology may be the only way to bring a very large, diverse group. The Jimmy Carter Foundation in Atlanta, Georgia, used a GSS to support a meeting of more than 200 people from all sectors of the community, from bank presidents to homeless people. The group generated ideas to improve economic and social conditions in the community. Groups with more diversity of knowledge and experience also benefit more from electronic brainstorming than groups where everybody has the same knowledge base. On the other hand groups as small as two or three appear to benefit greatly from shared outlining and shared drawing tools. Large groups also do very well with shared outlines, but do poorly with shared drawings. It becomes clear that a meeting leader or facilitator must understand not only how to work a GSS tool but what group dynamics it can create.
Culture
GSS and differing cultures
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Finally, an important attribute that until recently has not received much GSS research attention, concerns the culture of the group. Most GSS research has focused on American organizations. Yet, research shows that groups from different cultural backgrounds prefer different situations, see e.g. (Hofstede 1980). A great deal of work has yet to be done to discern what benefits of GSS will transfer European, South American, Asian, and African cultures and what special arrangements need to be made to make the application of GSS successful in these environments.
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Meeting environments of the future Early GSS research and development focused on supporting teams that were working in the same place at the same time. Recent advances, however, are causing many people to explore the frontier of distributed teamwork ± collaboration among people who may be in the next office or may be around the globe. The communication and coordination difficulties posed by geographical separation are much more severe than for face-to-face groups. Present GSS technology serves distributed teams well for on-line activities, but offers little support for the 50% of the time teams need oral communication. New work is under way to integrate video and voice technology with Internet-based GSS in an effort to overcome the loss of face-to-face discussion. A prototype of such an environment is shown in figure 5. Researchers are also beginning to investigate the use of special-purpose GSS environments to support particular kinds of problemsolving. For example, groups at the University of Arizona and Delft University of Technology have developed GSS tools and methods to support business process reengineering using the IDEF method (Dean et al., 1994) and object oriented process modeling and simulation (Vreede 1995).
Conclusion To summarize, meetings are difficult and expensive, but they are essential for teams that cooperate on complex creative problem-
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Figure 5. A Prototype Distributed Collaborative Environment (Romano et al., 1997) solving tasks. Group Support Systems can be used by teams to significantly reduce their labor costs and to vastly reduce the calendar days required to complete a project. Technology is no panacea, nor is it a substitute for leadership. However, it can be useful for tasks that require joint cognitive effort to find a creative solution to a complex problem. GSS is not a replacement for oral meetings, but an additional set of methods. When GSS is used conscientiously, experiences from the field and the laboratory environment show that it can produce higher productivity, higher quality output, and highly satisfied groups. A GSS is more than just software for electronic brainstorming and electronic voting. A GSS includes not only the software, but also the processes and methods to accompany the use of the tools as well as the environment in which the tools are used. Handled with skill, a GSS can enhance group productivity dramatically. GSS is a new paradigm for collaborative work. The experience of doing
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business with a GSS is so different from conventional group work that many people have difficulty understanding why they would ever want to use it until they have experienced it personally. Having tried it, many people feel thwarted if they have to return to conventional group work methods. Key benefits many participants identify are the ability to contribute ideas and preference anonymously and in parallel, while having to consciously use a meeting structure that helps the group to stay focused. GSS tools appear to be changing the reasons groups meet. Instead of just meeting to plan their work, the tools allow many groups to actually do the work together, in the meeting. This once again stresses the most important critical success factor for electronic meetings: planning ahead. The design of the electronic meeting is critically important. There is a saying among woodworkers, ``An apprentice ruins both the wood and the tool.'' Even so, a GSS must be wielded with intelligence and skill. An unsupported team
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can wander around for three hours before they figure out they don't know where they are headed. A team using computer-based support can turn a meeting into a train wreck within 10 minutes if team process has not been planned ahead of time. Hence, the key issue is not what the GSS technology can do, but rather how a meeting process can be designed to maximum advantage, while recognizing and minimizing potential risks.
References Bostrom, R.P., Anson, R. and Clawson, V.K. (1993) `Group Facilitation and Group Support Systems.' In L.M. Jessup and J.S. Valacich (eds), Group Support Systems ± New Perspectives (pp. 146±168), Macmillan Publishing Company, New York, USA. Connolly, T., Jessup, L.M., and Valacich, J.S. (1990) `Effects of anonymity and evaluative tone on idea generation in computer-mediated groups', Management Science, Vol. 36, 689±703. Culnan, M.J. and Markus, M.L. (1987) `Information Technologies'. In F.M. Jablin, L.L. Putnam, K.H. Roberts and L.W. Porter (eds), Handbook of Organizational Communication ± An Interdisciplinary Perspective (pp. 420±443), Sage Publications, London, United Kingdom. Dean, D., Lee, J., Orwig, R. and Vogel, D. (1994) `Technological Support for Group Process Modeling', Journal of Management Information Systems, Vol. 11, 43±63. Dennis, A.R. (1994) `Electronic Support for Large Groups', Journal of Organizational Computing, Vol. 4, 177±197. Dennis, A.R., Nunamaker, J.F. Jr. and Vogel, D.R. (1991) `A Comparison of Laboratory and Field Research in the Study of Electronic Meetings Systems', Journal of Management Information Systems, Vol. 7, 107±135. DeSanctis, G. and Gallupe, R.B. (1987) `A Foundation for the Study of Group Decision Support Systems', Management Science, Vol. 33, 589±609. Dickson, G.W., Lee-Partridge, J.E. and Robinson, L.H. (1993) `Exploring Modes of Facilitative Support for GDSS Technology', MIS Quarterly, Vol. 17, 173±194. Grohowski, R., McGoff, C., Vogel, D.R., Martz, B. and Nunamaker, J.F. Jr. (1990) `Implementing Electronic Meeting Systems at IBM: Lessons Learned and Success Factors', MIS Quarterly, Vol. 14, 369±384. Hofstede, G. (1980) Culture's consequences: International differences in work-related values. Sage, Beverly Hills, USA.
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Limayem, M., Lee-Partridge, J.E., Dickson, G.W. and DeSanctis, G.D. (1993) `Enhancing GDSS Effectiveness: Automated versus Human Facilitation.' In J.F. Nunamaker Jr. and R.H. Sprague (eds), Proceedings of the 26th Hawaiian International Conference on System Sciences (Volume IV, pp. 95±101). IEEE Computer Society Press, Los Alamitos, CA, USA. Nunamaker, J.F., Briggs, R.O. and Mittleman, D. (1995) `Ten Years of Lessons Learned with Group Support Systems.' In D. Coleman and R. Khanna (eds), Groupware: Technologies and Applications (pp. 146±193). Prentice Hall, Saddle River, NJ, USA. Romano, N.C. Jr., Nunamaker, J.F. Jr., Briggs, R.O. and Vogel, D.R. (1997) `Architecture, Design, and Development of an HTML/Javascript WebBased Group Support System.' Submitted to the Special Issue of JASIS on Artificial Intelligence Techniques for Emerging Information Systems Applications, 1997. Valacich, J.S., Dennis, A.R. and Connolly, T. (1994) `Idea Generation in Computer Based Groups: A New Ending to an Old Story.' Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Vol. 57, 448±467. Post, B.Q. (1992) `Building the Business Case for Group Support Technology.' In J.F. Nunamaker Jr. and R.H. Sprague (eds), Proceedings of the 25th Hawaiian International Conference on System Sciences (Volume IV, pp. 34±45). IEEE Computer Society Press, Los Alamitos, CA, USA. Vreede, G.J. de (1995) Facilitating Organizational Change ± The Participative Application of Dynamic Modelling. Doctoral Dissertation, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands. Vreede, G.J. de and Sol, H.G. (1994) `Combating Organized Crime with Groupware ± Facilitating User Involvement in Information System Development.' In D. Coleman and P.R. Huckle (eds), Proceedings of the GroupWare'94 Europe Conference (pp. 105±118). The Conference Group, Hants, United Kingdom.
Robert O. Briggs is a Faculty member at the University of Arizona, the Center for the Management of Information, Arizona, USA. Gert-Jan de Vreede is a Lecturer at the Delft University of Technology, School of Systems Engineering, Policy Analysis and Management, Delft, The Netherlands.
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Book of the Quarter Reviewed by Tudor Rickards Built to last: Successful habits of visionary companies, by James C. Collins and Jerry I. Porras, Century Business Edition, 1996 (Random House, 1994), ISBN 0 7126 7795 X, 322pp, appendices and annotated chapters.
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uilt To Last is a deceptively easy read. It might at first glance be taken for yet one more set of truisms, with the extra paradox here that such books themselves have little prospects of being built to last. Yet there are clear signs that the authors have carried out a careful piece of research, and arrived at conclusions that deserve to be taken seriously. There are echoes of Moss Kanter's influential book The Change Masters. Like Kanter, Collins and Porras give sufficient details for their approach to be understood and evaluated by interested readers. Like Kanter, they show their grasp of research methodology, without ever losing the reader in a welter of statistical detail. In one respect they score over most books seeking to understand corporate success. The companies are named, so that others can evaluate, and even replicate the work. There were names given in In Search of Excellence for subsequent researchers to have a field day over the fate of the outstanding companies nominated by Peters and Waterman in that monumentally successful book. Such courageous transparency is to be admired. In the work reported here, a large number of American Chief Executives were polled to provide personal nominations of highly visionary companies. Care was taken to balance the sampling. Eighteen companies were eventually identified as a set that stood out above any other combination of companies. Each company was then matched carefully with a comparison company that had as many points of similarity in origins and market focus as could be found. Thus the comparison companies were not selected as being unsuccessful, or even as being unvisionary. They were simply not rated as highly in the nominations. # Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1997. 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF and 350 Main St, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
The financial payoff The clear evidence is that the set of visionary companies became financially more successful than the set of control companies. There is no doubt that someone investing in them, over a long period of time, would be considerably better off than someone investing in the controls. And yet over the short-term the control companies tended to secure better financial returns. This raises interesting questions. Might a short-term period of financial profit-taking produce a more limiting strategic orientation? Before readers dash off to invest in visionary companies, a cautionary note might be heeded. The manner of selecting the companies leads to the possibility that the nominations were influenced by a halo effect. The financially successful companies would be more immediately recalled by the CEOs. In a mental search for visionary companies, there is a strong possibility that the more financially successful ones will come to mind. Track record may well be an indicator of future performance but there are several reasons why it is not easy to make money out of that piece of information. Stock markets have already discounted future performance in the share value, which is why the share value is a good indicator of past performance in the first place.
How visionary is visionary? The visionary companies have considerable face validity. Such lists do prompt the game of suggesting weaknesses of inclusion and exclusion. This one is no exception, but the authors make a reasonable point that there could certainly be other visionary companies
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excluded, and these could be tested by anyone who wants to do so. The pairings, however, are rather more tricky to defend except as illustrative and exploratory. Some comparisons (American Express and Wells Fargo; Boeing and McDonnell; Citicorp and Chase) seem more convincing than others (IBM and Burroughs; Motorola and Zenith; Marriott and Howard Johnson), and studies across samples of equivalently successful organizations historically might be an interesting follow-up. Any selected method of study is a trade off between its imposed constraints, and the focus gained on the issue under consideration. Here, the selection method by CEOs, and the subsequent pairing decisions, produce biases as indicated. In return, the procedures offer potentially valuable conclusions.
How were the visionary companies different? The authors differentiate between the visionary companies and the controls at the most fundamental level through a metaphor. The visionary company is the outcome of leaders who are more concerned with `building a clock than telling the time'. In other words, a great deal of effort is devoted to understanding and working towards a future state for the company. Product innovation, market strategies, short-term financial gains are more likely to be regarded as means to an end. Although the authors did not make this connection it seems a good one to me: the visionary companies give us a clue about how we might want to characterise the creative organisation. There is a focus on the creation of the desired future organisation. The primary focus of its innovation is the organisation itself. Some of the associated characteristics of visionary companies will be familiar to any reader who has studied the literature of creativity. Inevitably the companies demonstrated their capacity to be inspired by a relatively long-term vision. However, this need not be conducted with adherence to a mission statement. Some of the companies encapsulated their goal as a mission statement others did not. The point seems to be that the statement may embody the values of the company ± or it may be rhetoric that gets not much more than lip service. The researchers detected a capacity to escape the either-or trap, and work towards
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both-and outcomes.1 `Both short-term and long-term gains'; `low cost and high quality'; `planning and flexibility'. In short, the values and actions seem aligned at a corporate level with the vital creative attitude for dealing with ambiguity ± not to deny it, but to work with its tensions. The rather mystical statement in Tom Peters becomes clearer. His version was the importance of `loosetight' behaviours in excellent companies. The visionary companies did not have a superiority through the presence and impact of charismatic, visionary leaders. Nor did they have a surplus of brilliant ideas at the time of their formation. When a great business idea cropped up it was as part of a whole series of other activities. In the vocabulary of strategy, the ideas were emergent and turned out to be great after the event. These were but two of a dozen propositions presented as falsified by the research. The entire list is interesting, although I retain reservations about it. Is it a widely held belief that `most successful companies focus primarily on beating the competition', for example? Or that `The most successful companies exist first and foremost to maximise profits'? It is now rather well-known that such bits of management folk-lore always seem to stop short of being an inviolable law, and more often than not reflect a half truth.2 Indeed, the whole point of the rest of the book is that the creative organisation avoids thinking in such an absolutist manner. Despite these reservations I believe this book sets a high standard of scholarship that has been translated into the most userfriendly terms. The result can stand alongside the blockbusters produced by Kanter, and Peters & Waterman. For researchers, the naming of specific companies means that it can be a source of empirical trials in the future so we have a way of connecting the literature of visionary organisations with that of creative ones.
Notes 1. For a technique for managing Both And see the review of Barry Johnson's Polarity Management in CAIM, Vol. 2 No. 2, p. 110, 1993. Other writers including De Bono could also be cited as regarding Both And or its close relative Yes And thinking as vital as a creative orientation as well as a technique. 2. For a good account of the nature of corporate myths see Controversies in Management by Alan Thomas, published by Routledge, London, 1993.
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Book Reviews Walter Wehrmeyer, ed., 1996, Greening People: Human Resources and Environmental Management, Greenleaf Publishing, Sheffield, UK, hardback, 409 pages, £29.50/US $52, ISBN 1-874719-1-52.
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nvironmental management literature is often technically focused on tools and techniques being used in companies to reduce their impact on the natural environment. This edited volume, however, takes a different approach and focuses on human resource issues regarding the change processes that are occurring in companies. The contributors concentrate on the role and needs of the employee in the process of their organisation becoming more environmentally-aware. There are four major sections in this volume: 1. Environmental Management and Human Resources Management (HRM); 2. Managing People; 3. Training and skills towards Environmental Improvement; 4. Case Studies. There is a wide selection of topics covered in each section with a variety of both organisational- and individual-level descriptions. With 19 different contributions, only some of the highlights can be included in this review. The first section has primarily an organisation level focus. The topics covered include: Total Quality Environmental Management, a description of the best environmental HRM practices in the USA, managing corporate environmental policy, Local Agenda 21 (the initiative which came out of the Rio environmental summit conference), and industrial relations and the environment. In this section, I found James' chapter connecting Total Quality Management (TQM) with environmental management to be a clear and concise description of the parallels between these two management approaches. From his discussion, expanding TQM to include green issues appears to be a logical progression. From an examination of best environmental HRM practices, Milliman and Clair emphasise that training, incentives and evaluation are among the most important aspects of an effective environmental man# Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1997. 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF and 350 Main St, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
agement programme. Barret and Murphy's discussion of managing environmental policy, highlights the importance of the individual who is an environmental policy champion. They also mention that the company culture is also an important factor and that what works in one company may not work in another company. This conclusion is quite different from the lists of Best Practices and ``how to implement a successful environmental management programme'' advice that are typically found in the literature. It is interesting to note the similarities between this environmental management policy discussion and the topics Dodgson and Bessant (1996) focus on in their discussion of innovation policy, specifically the role of `innovation agents' and the steps in implementing a successful innovation policy. The second section examines HRM and environmental management from primarily an individual level. The subjects include: European environmental executives, roles of the personnel practitioner, women, and general employee participation in corporate environment programs. In this section, I found two empirical studies to be particularly interesting: James and Stewart's chapter profiling European environmental executives from 32 leading European companies and Wehrmeyer and Parker's chapter identifying and describing environmental corporate cultures. In James and Stewart's contribution, they identify three major components of an environmental executive's background: business awareness, environmental knowledge and scientific/technical background. Using these components to develop a model, they propose an equilateral triangle with the three elements defining the three corner positions of the triangle. They use the model to speculate on the positioning within the triangle of the ideal position of combination of these characteristics for the environmental executive in the chemical and consumer
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products industries. From this research, they conclude that environmental executives are not just technical, environmental specialists but they also need to have general managerial experience and skills. In Wehrmeyer and Parker's contribution, they develop a green corporate culture survey instrument which tap into employee attitudes across four different green dimensions. Using this inventory, they aggregate the data and map the characteristics of 5 companies onto a series of two-dimensional plots to show the variation of the different company climates. Their results show that there are different green organisational cultures. One weakness of this study is that the sample is too small to identify groupings of companies and a second weakness is that all of the dimensions are newly developed so connections to the established culture/climate literature, inventories and dimensions are not possible. The third section focuses on the topic of training. These contributions are primarily descriptions regarding the approaches and content of environmental management (EM) training programs used at various organisations. These descriptions are useful for practitioners and educators in terms of checking the content and approach for EM training. The final section includes four case studies which illustrate some of the points that have been brought out in the earlier sections of the book. The description of Cable & Wireless is interesting because this company has located its group level environmental management
within its HRM group rather than in the technical group as is the approach of most other companies. Having these vignettes at the end of the volume provides illustrations of how organisations are taking action regarding the environment. This volume is a welcome addition to the environmental management literature because it emphasises a major component that has been vastly ignored. This volume, however, is comprised of both research and practitioner literature which are difficult to assemble into a coherent unit. By combining both of these perspectives into one volume, a wide variation in the content and style of the chapters results. However, given the current lack of research and focus on this particular element of environmental management, there is no other alternative for the editor. Depending on whether your interest is research based or practitioner focused, there will be some chapter in this volume that will intrigue you and broaden your views regarding environmental management. Julie L. Hass, Doctoral Researcher Manchester Business School
Reference Dodgson, M. and Bessant, J. (1996) Effective Innovation Policy: A New Approach. International Thomson Business Press, London.
Jones, T. (1997) New Product Development: an introduction to a multifunctional process, Butterworth Heinemann, ISBN 0 7506 2427 2, paperback, pp. 134, indexed, £17.99 This book addresses four key areas of concern in product development programmes. A Fellow in the Research Institute for Design, Manufacture and Marketing at the University of Salford, Jones employs a case study approach to examine new product development strategy, innovation, organising for the process and the procedures for rapid product development He divides the development process into three distinct phases, composed of a number of component stages: 1. The inception phase covers the pre-development activities which are undertaken before a product concept is visualised. 2. The creation phase including the core development stages are associated with generating a product concept and taking it through to a working prototype.
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3. The realisation phase deals with taking the final design, putting it into manufacture and launching it on to the market. (Page xi.) Each phase is characterised by individual processes and management and control issues. Jones argues that across all industries the development process is increasingly the concern of many professional and functional groups and that successful cooperation between these constituents is vital for successful completion of a project. The role of design is often pivotal in this process. In considering new product development strategy he draws attention to the need for alignment with core technological, organisational and intellectual competences, and uses the case of the development of the Rover 600 car series to illustrate these points.
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When dealing with the subject of innovation, Jones distinguishes between breakthrough, major changes in technology, and the incremental improvements in products already in existence. After considering the factors characterising and necessary for both these processes to take place, the invention of the Flymo Gardenvac, an innovative garden tidy product, is described. The unusual aspects of this process are that the idea was developed by a sole individual, acquired by an established manufacturer (Flymo) and subsequently successfully developed and launched into the marketplace. The chapters dealing with the organisation for new and rapid product development (chapters 3 and 4), address the issues involved in setting up multifunctional project teams, the role of the team leader and the importance of using relevant technologies creatively and efficiently. Case studies de-
scribing the development of the Mouseman 2 range by Logitech and the Polaroid Spectra are used to highlight the points made in these chapters. There is a growing emphasis in management education upon the integration of the study of innovation and new product development with other managerial disciplines. One of the difficulties with this approach is the dearth of texts accessible to a nonspecialist audience. For this reason, this book is to be highly recommended for managerial and student readers at under- and postgraduate levels, including MBA candidates, interested in this topic. The comprehensive survey of the subject, and the up-to-date case studies, make it particularly suitable for this purpose. Susan Moger
Paul Birch and Brian Clegg, 1996, Imagination Engineering, The Toolkit For Business Creativity, Pitman Publishing, ISBN 0-273-624064-9 Imagination Engineering has been written by two former managers of British Airways who have clearly gained valuable experience of applying creativity techniques in a large organisation. The purpose of the book is ``to provide a simple, memorable and enjoyable approach for applying creativity.'' The book is divided into two distinct parts. The first part presents a framework for the creative process using familiar sequences from problem definition to implementation but with new labels such as ``surveying'' and ``navigating''. The second part of the book provides six short chapters on various aspects related to creativity from ``making work fun'' to ``the future ± beyond techniques.'' The most evident new contribution in the book is the explanation of what is involved in Imagination Engineering. The authors describe this as a process that involves four stages: surveying, building, waymarking and navigating. The engineering metaphor is continued for identifying a number of techniques that can be applied at each stage. For example, at the building stage the following are recommended: ± The tunnel: ± The bridge:
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Techniques which push through the obstacle. Techniques that look at the problem from a different direction.
± The by-pass:
Using a secondary destination to get around the blockage. ± The new destination: Sometimes it is more effective to go to another destination altogether.
Whilst some readers may tire from the extent to which the engineering metaphor is used, I felt this type of labelling will be of benefit as an effective learning tool for those new to creativity because of the relative ease with which these expressions or labels can be recalled from memory in comparison to more formally defined techniques. Also, the engineering metaphor works well as a means of encouraging one to visualise what the technique is essentially about and how it differs from other techniques. This framework therefore does seem to meet the authors' objectives of providing a simple and being memorable approach quite well. The other adjective the authors used in setting out their aim for the book was enjoyable. The toolkit orientation of the book provides an informal style which lends itself well to supporting the enjoyment factor. By using an array of techniques such as wide margins that allow key messages to be highlighted and separated from the blocks of main text, examples depicted under a different shading, creative asides inserted as ``tales pieces'' at the end of each chapter (some of these being quite personal and high on the
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imagination scale, see ``Death of Sleep'' at the end of chapter 5) a rich variation of material is supplied which effectively maintained my attention span. Some readers may, however, find this style awkward because it limits the development of detailed discussion ± but, this is not a book which is aiming to provide that type of read. The second part of the book contains the following chapters: Institutionalising Creativity, Making Work Fun, Computer Supported Creativity, Group Creativity, The Future ± Beyond Techniques and Go Forth and Create! These headings sound interesting and build up expectations, however, I found they provided a less memorable experience than the first part of the book with some of the chapters being extremely short and lacking in substance. I found the chapter on computer supported creativity of most interest. A number of suggestions are given about how popular software packages such as Word can be used to prompt creative thoughts and advice is given on some useful
references to look up on the Internet including a newsgroup dedicated to creativity at: misc.creativity. An invitation is also offered to look at the author's own web sites for those interested in seeing how the Web can be used. Overall, I feel this book achieves its objectives. The book is in my view most suitable as a support for introductory courses. Those who have already studied creativity will probably not find it sufficiently penetrating, however, it has a good stock of practical examples which I feel anyone would find useful. Finally, it provides an easy read and a memorable framework for the creative process at a basic level. Whether the book becomes a success in the long run could well hinge on the extent to which the phrase Imagination Engineering is popular with trainers and trainees. Richard Hudson-Davies Manchester Metropolitan University Doctoral Researcher Manchester Business School
Jens Laage-Hellman (1997) Business Networks in Japan: supplier-customer interaction in product development, ISBN 0-415-14869-3, hardback, 164 pages, Routledge Advances in AsiaPacific Business, Routledge, London and New York, £35.00. The topic of business networks in product development/innovation has come to the forefront of the literature in the last few years. Customer±supplier marketing relationships have also been the focus of various international bodies of research; for example, the International Marketing and Purchasing Group. The novelty of this book, as the author pledges, is to provide an insight into the content and process of inter-firm networks, an undertaking which is somewhat scant in current literature. Chapters one and two were essentially a literature review which includes most of the seminal works in the area of innovation (e.g. Von Hippel; the SAPPHO studies) and customer-supplier networks (Hakansson) and deal with most aspects of this form of organising, such as resource dependencies, organisational and strategic fit and the exchange process. The references, however, suggest that the author reviewed only those seminal articles which relate specifically to this field and related authors such as Harrigan (1990) and Jarillo (1991) are excluded from the review. Not surprisingly the author concludes the review with yet another `summary of the conceptual framework for analysis of
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inter-company relationships in industrial networks'. The case studies of Toshiba and Nippon Steel make up almost half the length of the book. Hence, there is a lot of technical detail and historical description which although exhaustive was, at times, unnecessary. These lengthy descriptions do not really add value to the more interesting, final two chapters which discuss the analysis and conclusions. It is possible that previous studies have not tackled the area of the content of networks because, as the case studies here illustrate, it demands long, descriptive paragraphs of the history and technicalities of the product development. It has to be said, this does not make for the most stimulating of reading material. On the other hand, the occasional glimpse into the long-term systemic attitude of Japanese banking and government institutions towards funding and support of long-term research and development is inspiring. It is hardly surprising that this long term outlook helps to stimulate a collaborative and innovative environment in Japan. These parables also provide valuable lessons for the short-termism of western financial institutions which has contributed to the
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suppression of an innovative climate in the past. Indeed the author does include these cultural dimensions in his `groups of factors influencing the interaction and networking behaviour of Japanese companies' in the final chapter. He also discusses the importance of Japanese keiretsu in technological innovation and the contribution of industrial policy to the area of science and technology which, although similar programmes exist in other countries, are more extensively and consciously used in Japan. An historical example of these cultural differences is apparent in the evolution of the Japanese and American steel industries. When the author finally gets round to analysis it is short but sweet. The latter chapters are inspiring as the author widens the discussions to include the wider industrial networks which impacted the relationships in the case studies. The analysis and findings are related to the theoretical framework proposed in the opening chapters which is always uplifting. The author does not explicitly state the target readership, although I would hazard a guess that practitioners would benefit more from this overview than academics. The review of literature and the methodology is not sufficiently reflective to be of much value to academics. Secondly, practitioners, and possibly even policy makers, will find one
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or two chapters of interest as an introduction to the issues raised ± for example, networks and Japanese industrial policy. However, as the author points out, the findings and discussions are not new, which, to some extent, excludes academics from the reading arena. And at the grand price of £35.00 one would have to assume that the publishers did not have graduate researchers in mind when price setting. Bernice Pacitti Doctoral Programme Manchester Business School
References Hakansson, H. (1989) Corporate Technological Behaviour: Cooperation and Networks. London: Routledge. Harrigan, K.R. and Newman, W.H. (1990) `Bases of Interorganisation Co-operation: Propensity, Power, Persistence', Journal of Management Studies 27, 4: 417±434. Jarillo, J.C. and Stevenson, H.H. (1991) `Co-operative Strategies ± The Payoffs and the Pitfalls', Long Range Planning Review 24, 1: 64±70. Rothwell, R., Freeman, C., Horsley, A., Jervis, P., Robertson, A.B., and Townsend, J. (1974) `SAPPHO Phase II', Research Policy, 3: 258±91. Von Hippel, E. (1988) The Sources of Innovation. New York: Oxford University Press.
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