Saul Kaplan: The Plumber and the Police Chief

Innovation is about a better way to deliver value. Innovators are all around us. They are taking advantage of today’s technologies and creating new ways to deliver value. We can learn from them if we look up from our silos.

Sometimes the most inspiring innovators are in places we would never have thought to look. Or perhaps we just don’t notice them because our attention is focused on the inventors of new technologies or the entrepreneurs who are making progress in bringing inventions to market. Those people are important but not the whole story.

Meet the plumber and the police chief.

Anthony Gemma is president of Gem Plumbing in Lincoln, R.I. Together with his brothers, Anthony runs one of the most innovative businesses I have seen. I didn’t expect it when I first visited the company. After all, how innovative can a plumbing supply company be? The answer is very innovative.

Gem is on a mission to win the Baldrige National Quality Award. I believe they will achieve it. They have established a culture of excellence and innovation in every aspect of their regional business. They collect, analyze and share data ranging from the location of every part — from the supplier to the service truck to the home — to how long a customer waits to talk live to the dispatcher on the phone. They benchmark themselves against the best. Not the best plumbing supply company, the best companies.

Gem’s customer call and dispatch center would blow you away. It is like standing in NASA mission control. On 12-foot monitoring screens they have live feeds of real-time traffic conditions and satellite mapping of every service vehicle. If there is available capacity in the fleet, Gem is placing a customized radio ad to create tailored demand. They are so good at tracking traffic conditions they supply information to the Department of Transportation and local radio stations for traffic reports.

Their business grew from $9 million in 1999 to $40 million in 2007. They get so many businesses coming in for tours and information about their innovation programs they set up the Gem Institute for Performance Excellence. Who would have thought to look at a regional plumbing supply company as an example of innovation best practices?

Next, meet Dean Esserman, chief of police in Providence, R.I. When he was hired by Mayor David Cicilline in 2003, Esserman found a city where the crime rates were high and a force that was troubled by corruption and distrusted by the community. People were afraid to travel downtown. What he’s done since is a great story of business model innovation, and he has delivered significant value to the citizens of Providence.

In six years, Esserman transformed the Providence policing model from a centralized department where police were anonymous and came to the neighborhood after receiving a 911 call to a decentralized department with neighborhood substations and district commanders who are accountable for crime in the local community. His philosophy is that when police get out of their cars and into the life of a neighborhood they become trusted allies.

I have attended the chief’s regular Tuesday morning command meetings where a sophisticated crime tracking system displays crime statistics by district. Each commander is called upon to talk about crime activity in their district and what they are doing about it. The new business model is working, with double digit declines in the overall Providence crime rate. Who would have thought to look at a police chief as an example of innovation best practices?

The plumber and the police chief are just two examples of the innovators among us. Examples are everywhere. We just have to look in the places that we would least expect to find them.