The Assembly Line Versus The Concept Car

Maybe it’s because I was Creative Director with Volvo for 8 years. Maybe it’s because I went to high school in Oshawa, Ontario (Canada’s version of Flint, Michigan). But when I want to frame up innovation, I often think of what the car folks do. With that in mind, there are two critical parts to your business and career.

1. The Assembly Line

Let’s face it, whatever product or service you deliver has a series of activities done in succession that generate a “thing” at the end of a literal or metaphorical assembly line.

The assembly line is where your profit comes from because you’ve stripped out every single ounce of inefficiency. Each employees’ role on the assembly line is very clearly defined and their actions are meant to be repeatable. When they’re executed the same way every single time, quality is maintained, costs are contained, and the margin is consistent.

As any spot welder knows, there’s no collaboration on the assembly line. No one stops the line to blue sky concepts and brainstorm alternative methods of delivery. Everyone does their job, they pass it off to the next person, and the line continues with peak efficiency. In my business we say, “Kill it and bill it.” Put your head down. Get it done. And move on to the next task.

The first step of innovation is putting what you currently do on the assembly line. Make low value activities low effort activities so that you can save time, money, and energy for new innovations that will truly make a difference.

2. The Concept Car

No car manufacturer can just focus on the assembly line, either. Every once in a while, you need to lift your head up and look at the world around you. When automotive manufacturers want to explore new ideas to topple their own established ways of thinking, they create a concept car.

The concept car is built off the assembly line. There’s no hope or expectation that the concept car will ever go into production. Auto manufacturers just do it to do it and to see what they can learn. Sometimes, through that innovation journey, they’ll discover that one unique component or process of the concept car can be easily integrated into the assembly line. Over time, with enough concept car-inspired components, the assembly line innovates responsibly because of the experimental components that feed it.

The assembly line is where you make your money.

The concept car is where you spend your money.

Most start-ups are really just focused on building concept cars. Most established organizations, on the other hand, are just focused on assembly lines. The best type of organization is the one that can have a healthy balance of the two. Efficient production. Healthy innovation.

Some other things to consider:

1. With intense pressure to innovate, many organizations are trying to build multiple concept cars in the middle of the assembly line. The result? Absolute chaos. No one is exactly sure what they’re supposed to do or how their success will be evaluated, and morale craters over the uncertainty. There’s no repeatable behaviour, so quality goes down, costs go up, and the margin is eroded. The result is that the skeptics take a look at the numbers and grumble, “I told you we should have just done it the old way.”
2. The first step to innovation is improving the efficiency of what you already do. There are things that you do as an individual that can be done far more efficiently than you do them right now. The original HP Way was “Management by Walking Around”. Sadly, for many leaders, that has become “Management by Reply-All”. Many of you are trying to inspire your teams by writing Outlook novellas and then, surprise, there’s no time at the end of the day to try something new. Get efficient. Then start exploring.
3. I was in a group conversation with a famous CEO of a global disruptor at an event in Sarasota earlier this year. When talking about innovation, he pointed out the difficulty of developing “concept cars” for established organizations: When a start-up has a great idea, they can pitch twenty VCs in a row, getting a “no” every time. But if the twenty-first VC says YES, they can go to market. Within established organizations, if someone has a great idea, they have to pitch it up a long line of bosses and get a “yes” every single time. The first “no” they encounter kills the idea. Start-ups only need one YES to take out the establishment. Established organizations only need one NO and the idea is dead.

Many will hop up nodding their heads and reciting the Innovation Mantra from memory, “Ya, a… To succeed, we must embrace failure”. Not so fast.

I don’t really love the phrase “embrace failure” because there are times when we should definitely not embrace failure. At no point should you embrace failure on your assembly line. I’m sorry, but there is no room for failure there. You’ve done it a million times, and anything that veers from repeatable behavior is not to be embraced.

Failure should be embraced only on things that you’ve never done before. And if you’ve never done them before, can they really be considered failures? An experiment doesn’t fail. It produces a result that you learn from. Concept car failure should be expected and accepted. Assembly line failure should be penalized. The automotive industry is changing faster than ever. Let’s just hope they can apply their approach to production to their approach to innovation.

Zoom Zoom.

Ron Tite is a best-selling author, speaker, producer, and entrepreneur. He has been named one of the “Top 10 Creative Canadians” by Marketing Magazine and speaks to leading organizations about leadership, disruption, branding, and creativity.

Ron Tite, Dr. Steven Stein, and Peter Hall will be the keynote speakers at our virtual Innovators Exchange taking place on October 15, 2020, discussing Re-Imagining in a Post Pandemic World.

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