Do you Xerox?

I gather one must not use Xerox as a verb, ie to Xerox, or they come after you to protect their brand name.

Two major consequences of all that defensive corporate effort over several decades were:

1. to make several lawyers wealthier and

2. to take their eye off the ball, indulging in a series of expensive and irrelevant acquisitions, and losing their reputation for cutting-edge innovation in their core markets.

At one time, Xerox effectively owned the photocopier market, but then two Japanese companies ate their breakfast.

First Canon came in with the colour copier. Then Ricoh with the first digital copier. And both succeeded at Xerox’s expense with smaller machines, better attuned to customer needs.

To cap it all, as technology moved forward again, Hewlett-Packard arrived to dominate the office printer market.

So now, when you go “Xeroxing”, odds are you’ll actually be using a Canon or a Ricoh.

Luckily, a decade ago the company found a new CEO, Anne Mulcahy, who was able to re-focus and turn the business around. But even Mulcahy had a note of caution in returning Xerox to R&D-based innovation.

She said in an interview: “You can either sit and wait like Kodak or Fuji…It’s always more attractive to stay in the old technology from a profit standpoint. Always. But you’ll be going out of business.”

The need for new eyeglasses

In response to the top priority placed on innovation by senior managers, there has been a flood of new research conducted by academia over recent years around the world.

Most research shows that some 90% or more think innovation is vitally important. But when managers are asked whether their organisation is good or superior at it, less than 10% say yes. It’s a vast gap, unmatched by any other significant competency in contemporary business.

These new research studies mostly make for interesting reading and often contain useful insights. But at the same time they all suffer from a fatal flaw.

The people who are interviewed, the respondents, generally don’t know that they don’t know. It’s as though we were to ask a hundred people in engineering in 1850 how to make an airplane fly. And then to treat the response as the answer to the problem. The difference in this example, of course, is that they did know that they didn't know.

No wonder such slow progress is made in addressing the problem, especially by the larger, longer-established companies.

As John Seely Brown, once chief scientist for Xerox Research in Palo Alto, put it: “Instead of pouring knowledge into people's heads, you need to help them grind a new set of eyeglasses so they can see the world in a new way.”

Too-tight innovation strategies

A fascinating article by Stefan Stern in the Financial Times reminds us how easy it is for organisations to fall into an elephant trap formed out of their own corporate missions and strategies and operational norms.

At the heart of the article are thirty five innovations that were rejected internally by Xerox management over the years, innovations that went on to create significant wealth for other companies. In fact, it’s been estimated that the cumulative market value of ten of these rejects became worth twice that of Xerox itself.

The principle is this: if your mission/strategies/processes/norms are too tight, too specific, you’ll end up with the panflute situation.

You don’t suppose the panflute flowchart was one of Xerox’s core processes, do you?