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Discussion on: Nightline video: IDEO & the shopping cart project Analysis

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Sachita_Bhattarai

In the above video Ideo, a product development firm are given a project to completely redesign the old shopping carts into a new model in just 5 days. Ideo has slogans like “One focus at a time” and “Encourage wild ideas.”

Ideo is a company of skilled designers who calls themselves not an ‘expert’ but ‘experts’ in the process of designing stuffs; either it is a toothbrush or a tractor. They believe in providing opportunities by applying their creating process and encouraging each team to develop an idea, which can be utilized to make something new.

Leadership is when a leader takes it upon themselves to include others as much as possible, by delegating tasks and not doing all of the ‘leader’ jobs by themselves (Banik, 2017). Here at Ideo, all the members in the team sit together and discuss on how the new design of shopping carts is to be made. The boss believes that he cannot have all the insight knowledge of designing a cart alone hence, these people are divided into the groups to see which team brings what through their innovation and observation on the uses and design of shopping carts.

They have diversified group of skilled people from all the streams like an engineer, a Harvard MBA, a linguistic, a biologist and a marketing officer. This helps them to put and examine situations from different point of view. They do not appoint people by their experience but by their capability of handling groups and decision-making abilities. For example, the Project manager here have only 6 years’ experience and only appointed because he is good with groups. This means to take advantage of the skill rather than searching for experience.

Ideo do not follow hierarchy of “the top manager and then their managers and juniors.” it’s the team who gives birth to innovations. Bosses are the faces of the organization in the market, it is impossible to have the insight knowledge and experience of everything. Hence, other members at Ideo are treated equally, inspiring others to share their ideas and strictly restrict criticisms as it restricts people from sharing their opinions freely. They always encourage teamwork. They made 4 to 5 teams and gave each team a need area. They like what they were working for which shows their belief on the job and team. For e.g. The Biologist continued working here, rejecting many offers from medical field.

The Project manager and the marketing executive believes not to follow autocratic leadership but given a time bound so that the target will be achieved in the given time. Teamwork and the joint efforts of the group are valued. They decided to take some ideas from the design of each group and make one shopping cart; as a result, it helped to foster the team working in the company.

Areas of Failure

The main areas of leadership could fail by the set time bound for designing the cart. When a certain time is set, it gives stress to the employee to finish it within a time limit. This results in sickness of employees, which will become a huge disadvantage to the team and the company. Ideas takes times to develop. As it took Sir Newton many years to understand the ‘Law of Gravitation.’

The another reason of failure could be the autocratic leadership if the Marketing Executive and Project Manager had taken all the decisions on their own not involving the team members ideas and thoughts. Then the outcome has not been achieved or the achieved result would not have been satisfactory and effective.

The team members at Ideo are from different backgrounds. There could be the possibility of disputes among the members, there could be the collision of the ideas and lead to failure of teamwork. We can observe and hear them not following hierarchical system. When there is no hierarchy followed, employees will get confuse to whom they shall report in the absence of the Project manager. They will consider all of them the boss, which leads to multiple orders and commands.

I believe criticisms lead to innovation. Until and unless someone does not criticize your work, you do not see the necessity of improving yourself. Similarly, in the case of Ideo they do not accept criticism that means they always believe whatever they do is right. This makes them rigid to their ideas and leads to dissatisfaction rather than innovation.

Here even at the end the managers were not satisfied with the results and had to collide each members output and make something of their own. We can see that the team lacks trust and confidence in what they do.

References
Banik, A. (2017, August 18). Linkedin. Retrieved from Interactive Leadership Management: linkedin.com/pulse/interactive-lea...