“When you come up with hundreds of little innovations, and do it regularly, it adds up to big changes,” said Gerry Smith, who is Lenovo’s executive vice president and chief operating officer of the company’s PC and Enterprise Business Groups. “Every day, we get better.”
The company’s unique approach to innovation is based in part on the “Work-Out” pioneered by Jack Welch at GE in the 1980s. Smith and his team adapted the process for Lenovo’s unique global culture.
“When I joined the company in 2006, we initiated a supply chain integration project that yielded immense improvements,” Smith explained. “But we reached a point when tech couldn’t do any more. We needed people involved in improving processes. Smith, with the help of Dick Jelinek, an advisor with CEO.Works and former GE executive, chose to adapt GE’s Work-Out, which had yielded significant and continuous improvements that supported the company’s Six Sigma philosophy.
The BOLD team in 2012
They first put it to test with the manufacturing of Lenovo’s desktop towers, which faced a market that was shifting to all-in-ones that took twice as long to build. To compete in that emerging market, the company needed to achieve radical improvements in two core production metrics: Increases in units/hour, but decreases in people time/units/hour.
As the name suggests, a Work-Out is unlike the freewheeling approach to innovation that’s most popular these days. It doesn’t involve big, “fun” spaces filled with people encouraged to think creatively, nor does it depend on finding change via outsiders rethinking someone else’s business. It is designed to promote active leader engagement and investment, employee involvement and empowerment, and accountability for real-time decision-making.
“We got in front of the team and told them we needed to speed up production by 70 or 80%,” Smith said, remembering the look on the factory manager’s face that could be politely called disbelief.
What followed were sessions, now renamed BOLDs to make them sound less like a punishment, which consisted of putting decision makers and staff in a room that they had to keep returning to until they figured out how to reach their targets. The first BOLD resulted in a two-fold increase in manufacturing productivity for all-in-ones, not only reducing the time differential with traditional desktops, but helping to achieve cost parity.
“We didn’t expect this, but due to the culture many of the people working on the floor had never had the opportunity to be heard,” Smith said. “Getting them involved in the process was itself a transformational act.”
The result wasn’t just a program to vastly improve operational efficiency, but a team pre-sold on implementing it. It not only gave Lenovo a competitive advantage on price that it enjoys to this day, but there are videos of employees tearing up with emotion because they found the process so engaging and empowering.
There are now close to 100 BOLD facilitators who not only help facilitate the sessions, but also leverage the techniques and skills and incorporate them into their daily business. Its use has expanded to white collar departments, like sales, finance, HR and supply chain logistics where there have been more than 50 BOLDs implemented to date.
The innovation results just keep coming: The sales team, for example, tackled the special bids process for North America, and was able to dramatically reduce the time spend in order to delivery cycle, customer response, and sales rep work on even the thorniest bids.
In another example, an old process for assigning numbers to parts was reduced from 45 days to 2. The most recent BOLD event in Shenzhen, China yielded over 700 ideas that resulted in 30 different actions and fixes. Factories have gotten competitive with one another, with employees are going home in the evenings and designing improvements on their own time.
Smith summarized the approach: “It’s focused on specific goals and outcomes, it involves the people who will deliver those results in inventing how they’ll do it, and everyone knows that the purposes are business-critical, not just in hopes of doing things differently.”
“I’m always looking for practical innovation,” he continued. “If the people who have responsibility for driving business have ownership of innovation, you have the capacity to change the very fabric of your business.”
“It might sound like a cliché, but innovation happens one person at a time.”
