Book Extract: A successful launch story

Though a launch requires coordination among many departments, it is generally done like any other marketing activity - in a siloed, process-heavy fashion. Here's how Volkswagen redefined its launch st

Luca De Meo changed the way his group did its ongoing work, like developing and executing the launch strategy for new VW cars. Though launches required coordination with virtually every other department, and with countless field operations, they had always been done like any other marketing activity - in a siloed, linear, process-heavy fashion. Yet, because they required so many separate groups to work together, de Meo considered them golden opportunities for marketing to practice and improve cross-group collaboration and create a more powerful, consistent VW brand worldwide.

So, less than a year after arriving at VW, he created a cross-functional team to manage the launch of the next car in the up! series. A relatively new concept for Volkswagen, the up! was a city car for everyday use that competed with Daimler's Smart car and the Fiat 500.

During his time at Fiat, de Meo had often relied upon the energy and fresh perspectives of young people to come up with innovative high-impact marketing, including what were some of the earliest online efforts in the industry to codesign cars with customer. For the up! launch team, de Meo selected a core group of young marketers and added others from other functions, for a total of eleven members. He gave this group responsibility for all 360 degrees of the launch, which meant it had to develop an integrated marketing strategy for the car's entire life cycle, not just its introduction.

The team reported directly to him, and he located it in an area next to his own office where he expected members to work full-time for the duration of the project. "We need to recreate the spirit of a small company within a large organization," he said. Then he shocked the group by saying, "I'm not going to tell you how to do it. You'll have to do it. See you in a month." This was not how their bosses usually acted. "They had never experienced anything like this before," he said. "The rule was that the boss came in and told them exactly what to do - this, this, and this."

One team member remembered the kickoff meeting: "We said, 'Okay, when do you want us to start?' He said, 'Right now!' A few hours later, de Meo looked in the room and said, 'Where are you guys?' because no one was there. We had to finish our work before we left our departments."

  Without providing specific direction, de Meo set high expectations, which he communicated by spontaneously dropping in for coffee and looking over the team's work "in an unstructured way," as he described his approach. He might "nudge them in this or that direction" but generally encouraged them to play out their own ideas. He urged them to take risks and reassured them that mistakes were part of the process. He "preferred that they try."

Afterward, de Meo recalled that the team floundered at times and had endless discussions about the important and difficult issues. He felt their thinking was good, much of it out of the box, and he was satisfied that many of them were discovering the benefits of working in a diverse group.

Unfortunately, the group was unable to reach final conclusions on its own. With a presentation to the company's board of management only two months away, de Meo finally granted the team's request for a formal leader. But, instead of naming a senior manager or leading it himself, he picked someone from outside the group who was also young but had experience with other launches and with presenting to the board. This leader, whom de Meo told to think of himself as "the first among peers," found that the group had already developed good data and "worked absolutely in the right direction. We only had to proof it," he said, "reduce the complexity, bring it to the point, and 'sell' it in the company."

The board was impressed by the up! team's 130-page launch plan- "probably one of the most integrated launch strategies done recently at Volkswagen," de Meo said. Though the up! team had struggled a bit, he continued to believe that launches were a perfect opportunity to test continually "that the different pieces are able to work together ... a kind of acid test... real life stuff... not theory." He took the same approach with the launch of the new twenty-first-century Beetle.

Pushing people together
Eight months after joining VW, de Meo took over product marketing, as well as marketing communications, and thus became responsible for all Volkswagen marketing. (He would be named chief marketing officer a few months later in 2010.) He felt he'd made progress in creating a more collaborative marketing community that thought about not just process but innovation and creating the premier auto brand. More and more, he heard people refer to the "marketing team" and the "marketing community." People understood that they were expected to collaborate, learn, discover, and decide together.

Reprinted with permission of Harvard Business Review Press. Excerpted from 'Collective Genius: The Art and Practice of Leading Innovation' by Linda A. Hill, Greg Brandeau, Emily Truelove, and Kent Lineback. Copyright 2014. All rights reserved.

COLLECTIVE GENIUS: THE ART AND PRACTICE OF LEADING INNOVATION
Authors: Linda A Hill, Greg Brandeau , Emily Truelove, Kent Lineback
Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press
Price: Rs 1,250
ISBN: 9781422130025

Developing a sense of community facilitates innovative problem-solving: Linda A Hill

The top-down leadership approach isn't effective because innovation involves collaboration and integration of ideas, Hill tells Ankita Rai

Please explain the concept of 'collective genius'. Why isn't the top-down approach to leadership effective in fostering innovation in a company?

By collective genius, I mean leadership for innovation. This requires that the leader of innovation see his or her role not as setting a direction and inspiring others to follow but as shaping an environment in which others are willing and able to do the hard work of innovation. The role of an innovation leader is to create a community that is willing and able to innovate over time.

The top-down approach to leadership isn't effective because innovation involves collaboration, discovery-driven learning and integration of ideas.

How can a leader build a culture of innovation in his company?

The key imperatives to build a culture of innovation in an organisation are 'willingness' and 'ability' to innovate over time.

To build willingness, leaders must create communities that share a sense of purpose (why we exist), values (what we agree is important) and rules of engagement (how we interact with one another and think about problems). Developing a sense of community facilitates innovative problem-solving.

An organisation's willingness is not sufficient for innovation to flourish: It also needs three key organisational capabilities: creative abrasion (the ability to generate ideas through discourse and debate), creative agility (ability to test and experiment through quick pursuit, reflection and adjustment) and creative resolution (the ability to make integrative decisions that combine disparate or even opposing ideas).

The willingness, however, is the foundation, the most important thing. Unless people are willing to innovate, they won't endure the hard work and inevitable discomforts in the process (for instance, fierce debate, uncertainty).

Linda a Hill
Wallace Brett Donham Professor of Business Administration, Harvard Business School