E9: Differentiation - And Helping Santa Deliver Packages

What if trying to innovate everywhere can hurt your innovation efforts? Welcome to Invisible Solutions. I'm your host, Steven Shapiro. Each week we tackle your most complex problems using the lenses from my book, Invisible Solutions. If you need the lenses, go to getthelenses.com with that. Let's get started with today's episode. Today is going to be a special holiday episode. We will start off answering the question about the dangers of trying to innovate everywhere. But I really want to spend a little extra time today with the problem we're going to solve. And the question comes to us from the North Pole. The question is, how can Santa deliver all of his presents in one night? Now, we know that he does, but he's looking for some new insights, new ways, new perspectives on how he might be able to deliver all of the presents as quickly as possible. Now, I think that it's timely, but also it's a challenge for all of us who have anything to do with delivery or shipping, whether it's the current vaccine and how can we deliver the vaccine as quickly as and effectively as possible. Or it might be you are a logistics company or a retail company, and you're looking for ways to deliver your products best. So even though this question was submitted from the North Pole, we're going to try to tackle a problem that I think is going to be on the minds of a lot of organizations, anybody who delivers any kind of goods. But before we get to the question on how can Santa deliver all of his presence in one night, I want to talk about this belief inside of organizations that everyone should be innovating everywhere. Now, look, I'm a big believer that we want to democratize innovation, that we want to democratize problem solving, that we want everybody inside of our organizations to be actively involved in helping to find better solutions. However, we do not want everyone solving every problem. Not all problems are equal. Some problems are more important. Some opportunities are bigger than others. And if we put all of our energies into a lot of different baskets, we spread ourselves too thin, we will end up creating an environment where we are ineffective in innovation. Therefore, it is my belief, my contention that you only want to innovate where you differentiate. Innovate where you differentiate. Now, we could spend a lot of time talking about this topic, but today I just want to talk about it briefly, which is to say that each organization needs to figure out what they do best, why people do business with them and not someone else. Then what you want to do is put your energies there. So instead of solving every problem Instead of looking at everything as an opportunity, figure out, why do customers do business with you? Why do customers do business with you and not someone else? And when it comes to innovation, if you put your energies into those areas, you will find that you get some of the greatest returns, because that's going to help you further stand out in a crowded market. Why would you innovate on areas of the business which everyone's great at? Why be great at something which is just table stakes, the entry into the industry? And why be great at something that doesn't create customer value? The question is, would you want an organization to have the best payroll system in the world? Well, if you are a payroll processing company, you do this on behalf of all other companies. Well, of course, yes, but for everyone else, why would you invest money in trying to create a great payroll system? Outsource it, partner with someone, get others to do it. The key is that you want to figure out what you do best that someone else can't do something that's desirable, something that's differentiated, something that is going to be durable, that somebody else won't be able to replicate and put your energies there. So when it comes to problem solving, not all problems are equal, not all opportunities are great ways to invest your money. If you innovate where you differentiate, if you target your energies on the areas that will create the greatest value, you will always get the greatest returns. And with that, let's turn to today's question, submitted from the North Pole. Yes, Santa actually listens to the Invisible Solutions podcast. And the elves were actually wondering, how can Santa deliver all of his presence in one night? And it's probably really, how can Santa better deliver all of his presence in one night? Because clearly he's doing a great job right now. So he probably doesn't need any advice from me. But look, he's getting a little older, he's a little tired, or he wants to find a way of maybe doing it a little more efficiently. So for this, there are a lot of different lenses. There are about eight or nine different lenses I would probably use from the book, but we're only going to use three lenses today that I think will help us rethink the way Santa could deliver his gifts. And if you're running a supply chain, it could help you rethink your supply chain. So the three lenses we're going to use are the resequence lens, the reassign lens, and the substitute lens. And these are three lenses that I really like, so let's dig into them. The resequence lens is all around timing. Now, in the case of Santa, well, clearly, everything has to be delivered on Christmas Eve so that when everybody wakes up in the morning, they have their gifts. So we don't have a lot of leeway in terms of when it actually is delivered. But there are certain things we could do beforehand that might help speed the process. So the key to the resequence lens is that we can either delay decisions until later. That is, we can postpone a decision until we have more information. We could actually make decisions earlier in the process before we have all the necessary information. So we'd be predicting at some level, and in some cases, we can do things in parallel. And I think Santa could probably take advantage of the parallel and the prediction aspects of resequencing. So, for example, maybe Santa has to wait until he's got his list where he knows who's naughty and who's nice. But maybe he can make some predictions. Maybe he can just assume that everybody's going to be nice and actually start the preparation of building the toys and getting the toys closer to the final destination. Because the way Santa does it right now is actually a little crazy. Everything goes from the North Pole on December 24th and is distributed that one night. But what if he had locations where he could stage the items, actually have things delivered throughout the entire year, things that aren't perishable, things that will last, have them sent to a distribution center where they sit and wait closer to the destination? So we are resequencing, and at the same time, we're actually relocating, because what we're doing is we're moving that final leg closer to the customer. So how could we potentially. And that's really the rephrasing here, is how can we predict which items could be shipped in advance so that we can stage them at a location close to the final destination, so that when December 24th comes, instead of going thousands of miles, they might only have to go a couple of miles. And it's a completely different game then, because now we're spreading out the distribution over the course of 365 days. So that's one option with the resequence to predict. Predict who's gonna get things and when they're gonna get them so that we can have a staging center. Now, the other thing, what you might also want to do, is try to figure out what can we do in parallel, what are the things that we can be doing at the same time, and to do things in parallel, like right Now Santa's the bottleneck. You got one Santa, one sleigh, and a whole bunch of deer running around the world trying to solve this problem of getting everything delivered. But maybe the way that we can do things in parallel is by reassigning. And we know Santa has a lot of helpers, and we know that Santa, you know, if you go to the mall, Santa's helpers are there. But even with the distribution, what if instead of Santa delivering everything, what if he reassigned distribution? What if Santa only delivered a small percentage of the gifts and he partnered with other distribution companies to deliver everything else? Now, that would be a really interesting way to do it. Why is Santa doing everything that is absolutely crazy? So he could partner with others, reassign the work. The reassign lens, which IS lens number 12, is really about who else could perform this task. Now, maybe there are some aspects of the delivery that only Santa can do, but my guess is Santa could partner with UPS or Amazon or any number of other shipment companies to help get those products delivered. Now, that allows us to do it in parallel. So instead of Santa delivering every single gift that one night in sequence, because you can only deliver to one house at a time now, you could have millions of people delivering packages in parallel at the same time. That, to me, seems like a much better solution to be able to drive this. And the last lens that we'll talk about today is the substitute lens. Now, there is an assumption here in terms of the sequencing, so this actually goes back to the resequence lens a little bit. There is a bit of an assumption that the gifts are made in the North Pole. And then on December 24, Santa loads up the sleigh and flies around the world and starts to deliver them. Let's change one of the words in that, which is the substitute lens. And let's go from how can Santa deliver all of the presents in one night? To maybe how could Santa manufacture all of the presents in one night? How could Santa print all of the presents in one night? Okay, well, that's a slightly different question now. So instead of everything being manufactured in advance in the North Pole and then delivered, what if we had 3D printers in every house in the entire world? And on New Year's Eve, Santa pushed a button and boom, those 3D printers printed everything around the world. Now there's no distribution, there's no delivery. But we're printing again. We're starting to shift the process. And so you can see, look, I'm having a little bit of fun here with this because it is Christmas time. And I just thought it'd be fun to use a fun, generic example like this. But it really, I think, helps illustrate some of the challenges we have when we're trying to solve problems, is we make so many assumptions. We make assumptions if we're dealing with a supply chain about who actually has to manufacture the product, who has to distribute the product, when the product's distributed, how it's distributed. And if we can start questioning all of those different assumptions along the way now, we can all of a sudden unleash new perspectives, new ways to look at the problem. And so with that, we will wrap up our holiday edition of the Invisible Solutions podcast. I am so thrilled that you are with me here today. If you have a problem that you would like to submit, go to invisiblesolutionspodcast.com where you can submit your problems, submit your opportunity, submit your questions. You can do it as a text message, an email, or you could even leave a voice message, which we could then use on the show. Regardless of what you decide to do, I hope you all have an incredible holiday season. It has been so great being with you, and I look forward to being with you next week here on Invisible Solutions. Happy holidays. Sam.