TEI061: Product managers are uniquely prepared to transform organizations for greater success – with John Latham, PhD

Summary: Most people, when asked, would share they want to work in a better organization. And, most organizational leaders would like to improve their company. How to accomplish both objectives is answered by organizational design. Product managers and innovators have an important role in this. The cross-functional nature of product management uniquely equips product managers to make significant impacts not only on product strategy but the organization as a whole. For those who desire organizational-level influence, product managers need to become organization architects.<br> To learn about becoming an organizational architect, I interviewed John Latham, who is a social scientist and organizational architect with over 35 years of experience helping organizations improve their performance. Some of his clients include Boeing, Kawasaki, Tata, The Ritz-Carlton, British Airways, Motorola, Department of Energy and Lockheed Martin. John has deeply researched leadership and organizational design. His award-winning research has appeared in several journal articles including IDSA’s Innovation journal and the American Society for Quality.<br> In this interview, you will learn:<br> <br> * what it means to be an organizational architect,<br> * why product managers are uniquely equipped to become organizational architects, and<br> * how to accomplish this.<br> <br>  <br> Practices and Ideas for Product Managers, Developers, and Innovators<br> Summary of questions discussed:<br> <br> * What has been your path to helping organizations transform for higher performance and to become the organization the leaders and employees really want? There’s really no established career path for transforming organizations and that’s one of the many parallels with the listeners who are product managers. There’s no established career path or university degree that you can go get. My first interest in these kinds of things – the interaction between people, processes and technology was when I was teaching at a flight simulator and we were tasked with developing a cockpit resource management training program, which essentially was the combination of leadership, team dynamics, and problem solving in a high-speed environment with both a technical system (the airplane) and an external environment which was often unpredictable. I became very interested in team dynamics and leadership and how all that interacted with the situation.  After that I became interested in organizations in general and encountered the same issues. I was involved with process improvement initiatives back in the quality movement in the ’80s and ’90s and this led me pretty quickly to overall organization assessment and improvement using performance excellence models like the Baldrige Criteria and other models that address everything from leadership and strategy and customer market focus to people processes and information and analysis.  I also spent a lot of time working with and researching successful organizations and how they did the transformation and sustained it.<br> <br> <br> * You’ve written several books and articles – including ones that have won prominent awards for their contributions to this area of organizational transformation. In an article published  in “Innovation” from the Industrial Designers Society of America (IDSA), you shared “Most organizations are like VCR’s blinking 12:00. They are poorly designed, out of date, and ill-prepared to survive, let alone thrive, in the modern environment.” What did you mean by that statement? There’s plenty of great organizations out there, but I’ve seen many that have a ton of documents, procedures, and artifacts that nobody really reads or pays attention to. It reminded me of all the features and functions that used to be on the VCR that didn’t get used. We used play, stop, record, and rewind.