Chapter four: Dynamics
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develop a new gas turbine engine. Compressing the time for new product development has many interesting facets, and we will rehearse some of these later in the book, but one of them appears to be the emergence of “crisis heroism.” What we mean by this is the phenomenon of someone or some elite group of people cutting a swathe through corporate bureaucracy and conventional practice in order to get the job done, when time is of the essence and typically the project is massively behind schedule. Such heroes are often known as firefighters. But it came to our attention that while Rolls-Royce has some of the finest firefighters in the world, it also has some of the world’s most able arsonists! How so? Because the company breeds a culture of firefighting and crisis heroism, and what better way of propelling yourself to the top as a firefighter than by starting the fire in the first place? Now arson is a pretty strong word, but fires can start simply by neglecting precautions to make sure they do not start, or if they do, that they are quickly extinguished without heroics being necessary. In this instance the burden of dealing with the complex problem of time compression for new product development has been shifted to the simpler situation of a quick fix (see Figure 4.4).
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Figure 4.4 Shifting the burden.
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