Christensen and Raynor’s RPV Framework is summarized in the following article: A Framework for Choosing Organizational Structure and Home. The topic of this article is people – people are part of the R (Resources) in the RPV Framework. People can be one of the most valuable components of the innovation process, particularly when they develop skills in developing disruptive businesses which can then be transported to other areas within the organization. Conversely, people can be one of the weakest links in the innovation process.
Christensen and Raynor have examined innumerable failed efforts to create new-growth businesses. According to their estimates, the efforts failed because the “wrong people” had been chosen to lead the venture. Most managers will immediately conclude that “wrong people” means inadequate skills in the traditional sense of “the right stuff attributes” – such as results oriented, a string of past successes, people skills – this is exactly the type of thinking that led to selecting the wrong person. Common logic would suggest that a string of past successes will predict future success – this is wrong. According to Christensen and Raynor, it is folly to conclude that past success predicts future success, right-stuff thinking gets the categories wrong. Managers should look to circumstance-based attributes, or “schools of experience” criteria to guide the selection process.
Schools of Experience Hiring Method
Professor Morgan McCall articulates a circumstance-based theory which serves as a much more reliable guide for executives who wish to place the “right people” in the “right positions” when launching a new growth businesses. The remainder of this post has been excerpted from The Innovators Solution.
McCall asserts that the management skills and intuition that enable people to succeed in new assignments are shaped through their experiences in previous assignments in their careers. A business unit therefore can be thought of as a school, and the problems that managers have confronted within it constitute the “curriculum” that was offered in that school. The skills that managers can be expected to have and lack, therefore, depend heavily upon which “courses” they did and did not take as they attended various schools of experience.
For instance, a senior manufacturing executive would likely be weak in starting a new plant because his experience is in running a well-tuned plant – he has never encountered the type of problems, which are very different, in starting a new plant.
How to select a candidate based on “Schools of Experience”
In order to be confident that managers have developed the skills required to succeed at a new assignment, managers should examine the types of problems they have wrestled with in the past. It is not as important that managers have succeeded with the problem as it is for them to have wrestled with it and developed the skills and intuition for how to meet the challenge successfully the next time around. We often learn more from our failures than successes. A manager can achieve this in three steps:
Step 1: List the Problems and Challenges
The first step is to list what types of problems or challenges you might expect that the venture might encounter.
Step 2: Which Courses
Using McCall’s Theory as our guide, list the “courses” that we would want members of the team to have taken in earlier career assignments in the school of experience – experiences through which they would have developed the intuition and skill to understand and manage this set of foreseeable problems. This listing of experiences should constitute a “hiring specification” for the senior management team. Rather than specifying a set of right-stuff attributes, the first step specifies the circumstances in which the new team will be asked to manage. The second step matches those circumstances against the problems and challenges with which the managers of the new venture need already to have wrestled.
Step 3: Compare
Our third step would be to compare that set of needed experiences and perspectives with the experiences on the resumes of the candidates. Finding managers who have been appropriately schooled is a critical first step in assembling the capabilities required to succeed.
Source: The Innovators Solution