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A Step-by-Step Approach to the Federal Acquisition Marketplace
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Fire the CEO
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he Top 10 Strategies for the Positioning of Success
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You have permission to publish this article electronically or in print as long as the resource box is included. Please notify me of publication by sending a website link or copy of your publication to claudette@metavoice.org. Word Count: 771 words,...
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The Cure for the Highway Hi-Fi Blues
The other morning I was driving to an appointment, inserting a
CD into the player, and I couldn't help smiling. I was thinking
about my father and his career as a mechanical design engineer
for RCA. After the war, he helped design the innards of the
first record players RCA mass produced.
Remember the plastic cylinder you stacked 45's onto, that
slipped over the 78 spindle, and dropped records down one at a
time to be played? Well, my dad holds the patent on that handy
little device. Because of his ingenuity, teens all over America
could dance or make out uninterrupted for a whole evening.
One of the neatest things he worked on at RCA was a record
player for cars. The year was 1958. Our '57 Plymouth Fury was
one of only two test cars in the whole country retro-fitted with
a record player. It played 45's only and was mounted upside down
beneath the dash, just over the transmission hump. You first had
to push a stack of records up into place, and then the
diamond-tipped arm came in from underneath to play them.
The record player was set in a terrific suspension system,
allowing you to drive over railroad tracks and potholes without
causing Peggy Lee to skip a beat. I remember how cool I felt as
we drove through town secretly playing the Everly Brothers on a
record player and not the radio. "You watch, in a few years ever
car in the country will have one of these in it," my dad would
tell anyone who would listen. "This is going to be big."
Chrysler Corporation, RCA's partner in the project, went on to
feature the "Highway Hi-Fi" in their Plymouth and DeSoto models
in 1960 and 1961. But after only two years on the market the
whole concept of car record players quickly fizzled out, mostly
for technical reasons.
My dad was pretty disappointed. His invention wasn't holding up
to the rigors of daily use in a moving automobile. (For a brief
history of car record players: ).
So how has the market treated your genius? Have you and your
design team ever worked long and hard on a project, really put
your heart into it, only to have it bomb in the market place, or
get buried by senior management for any number of good or bad
reasons?
Here's my real question: how do you keep your own and your
team's morale level and creativity from sagging when that
happens? How do you keep your team from singing the Highway
Hi-Fi blues or getting
Associated Websites
as cynical as Dilbert?
T., one of my coaching clients, created a fresh vision of
success for her human factors software design team after several
marketing disappointments. Their previous two designs were not
embraced by customers due to financial considerations despite
the high quality of their end product.
They were beginning to feel that they weren't making a
difference. Her plan was to separate their sense of achievement
from the market's response to their final designs.
She accomplished this by emphasizing her team's overall value to
the company and to their industry as a whole. In other words,
she shifted their paradigm for "making a difference"--based on
actual facts that they weren't seeing because of their
single-minded focus on the end result.
One of the things she did was to demonstrate to her team how
they gave the company a high degree of credibility in the
industry. Their forward thinking was gradually having an impact,
and she reminded them of this fact as often as she could.
For instance, whenever one of her people went to an industry
conference, she had that person give a report to the whole team
on how their ideas were being slowly embraced by others. They
really loved hearing that, she said.
So the skill I'm stressing here for maintaining morale in the
fickle world of new product development is to broaden your
team's definition of success. Shake up their paradigm.
Try to identify the actual value your team is adding, such as
giving the company credibility in its industry, a reputation for
innovation, being perceived as a leader of technological change
within the company, etc. These perceptions alone can attract new
customers and qualified new employees.
So with the advantage of 20/20 hindsight, I can see how my dad's
work with the primitive Highway Hi-Fi in-car audio system paved
the way for my simple act of inserting a plastic disk into a CD
player while driving. He helped open a technological door.
In 1965, just four years after the car record player, Ford
introduced the 8-track system into their new models. You know
the rest.
About the author:
Joe DiSabatino helps individusl leaders and organizations build
high levels of employee commitment and morale by creating
high-trust work environments. For more information and support
visit: www.phoenixleaderrship.com
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