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After the restructuring of IHS, I was asked to take the remaining team and stay engaged in the Connected Home space. Whirlpool was hedging its bets, after the huge writeoff they took with IHS. I had to get my people motivated again, find objectives that made sense and worked, and get the processes around them established so we could deliver.
Learning happens when reality is vastly different from the desired state. I had to deal with an absolutely dumbfounded team that just lost their drive in life. Many of them had worked on IHS products for more than 2 years. It was a hard reset we needed to survive. I had to take several steps at once. First, we needed to get working again, and fast. I developed a processed I called CDEX: 100 (Latin C) Day EXperiment. This process was aligned with the corporate decision making processes. It yielded answers to questions in a structured and manageable way, using consumer immersion and rapid prototyping. We used it to drive project and program agendas. One of the secret ingredients was the composition, which I outline in one of my articles: The Magnificient Six. Secondly, I needed to make the team understand that blaming somebody else was actually giving their power to change away. Through a series of work shops or a rather diverse reading list, I was able to get their sense of ownership back. We build a culture of accountability and drive that my supersisor at the time, Hank Marcy, used as an example for good people development. Thirdly, I needed to restore outside credibility of the team. We reached out to the marketing and technology organisations and networked agressively and extensively. We held meetings with invitees from outside the team or even the company. We worked the Internet Home Alliance through the pilots, which in turn attracted interest from groups within the company. |
