NASCAR Fun: Kick-off for an Executive Program on Customer-Focused Innovation

How is that for hands-on executive education?

As I mentioned in an earlier post, Huggy Rao and I, along with a great team from the Stanford d.school and Graduate School of Business, just completed a week-long executive program on Customer-Focused Innovation.  This year, we got the program off with a bang: Andy Papa (really Andy Papathanassiou, but he uses Papa because his last name is hard to remember) from Hendrick Motor Sports led the group of 35 executives in a competitive team building exercise where they learned how to change tires quickly on a real NASCAR racing car.  Hendrick is one of the biggest names in NASCAR and fields multiple teams at every event. Their cars are driven by some of the most famous names in the business including Jeff Gordon, Kyle Busch, and Jimmie Johnson.

Andy Papa makes a point.

The competition between the teams is about to start.

Andy did a similar kind of thing a few months back in d.school class that Michael Dearing and I taught on innovation in organizations -- see this post.  Andy knows what he is talking about as, after graduating from Stanford (he was on the football team) he was taken with the NASCAR scene and started working on pit crews at Hendrick, then work his way up to managing one pit crew, to head of all pit crews, to head of personnel at Hendrick.  He is also serving as the Executive Director of the North Carolina Motorsports Association these days -- NASCAR's main industry association.

d.school coaches Adam French and Alex Ko admire the machine.

As the pictures show, the executives had a great time, and also, the teaching team led an interesting conversation about how much innovation and learning occurs at NASCAR despite (and perhaps because) of the severe constraints -- rules, time pressure, and constrained resources.  Perry Klebahn -- d.school stalwart and CEO of Timbuk2 -- wrote me a few days ago that I HAD TO blog about this and put some of pictures up because it was one the coolest design thinking exercises he had ever been part of because they learned to much so fast, it was so much fun, and Andy did such a fantastic job of leading them through the exercises.  We are doing all we can to get Andy back to Stanford as often as we can for executive programs and d.school classes -- he is fantastic.

Now that is teamwork!

Comments

[Chris DiCicco]

What can I say...I Love Nascar! The race just finished and Jimmie Johnson just won the Subway Fresh Fit 500 at Phoenix. Dale almost got his first win in some 70 races. Mark Martin also had a chance to pull this one out but ended up in 5th. I think Carl Edwards had a phenomenal race going form 34th and finishing in 4th. I cannot wait until the next race!

[Perry]

My name is Perry and I worked with Bob on this exercise.

This was a great exercise.

Having taught at the d.school with Bob in the past, and having been through a few kick off sessions for these kinds of sessions. I found this exercise was very successful in two dimensions:

1. A hands on experience in design thinking - the exercise drove home a few points very clearly -' speed wins, 'teams that iterated the most did the best, 'thinking through doing' the second the teams got their hands dirty they sorted it out (trust me, many teams tried to talk it through first), and finally this exercise taught that teams that failed early did better (teams that made the most mistakes at the start had the fastest times at the end)

2. This exercise was a terrific one at forming a design team. No one was an expert, no one can look good moving a 65 lbs tire around, and there was no room for a manager (by design teams were small) - it was a hands on effort. The teams were forced to work with no status, and a shared leadership model. It was terrific in this respect as a teaching exercise, but in principle applies to management training as well.

I also must complement Andy and his team as they brought a lot of energy to this and at the close of the exercise demo'd a NASCAR pit crew tire change (they were quite a bit faster then any of us could imagine was possible).

P.