Sunday's NYTimes profile of Jim Collins was striking for many reasons, but for me, most notable was the way in which Collins has taken core lean concepts and applied them to his life. He's a reminder that continuous improvement doesn't have to be larded up with Japanese words and icons borrowed from Toyota to be lean.
Visual management? Check.
In a corner of the white board at the end of his long conference room, Mr. Collins keeps this short list:
Creative 53%
Teaching 28%
Other 19%
That, he explains, is a running tally of how he’s spending his time, and whether he’s sticking to a big goal he set for himself years ago: to spend 50 percent of his workdays on creative pursuits like research and writing books, 30 percent on teaching-related activities, and 20 percent on all the other things he has to do.
Notwithstanding the Wall Street Journal's recent (and frequent) misunderstandings about lean, a lot of very fine firms with enlightened leadership see lean as the road to lower costs, higher quality, and a better work environment. The investment they make and the results they achieve are impressive, and best of all, the ones that really "get it" know that they're on a never-ending road of improvement. There's always the possibility of eliminating waste from the firm's operations, of reducing wasted inputs.
But my friend Tom asks the following: how lean can a company be when it ignores the enormous amounts of time wasted by workers, managers, and executives?
I worked with an executive assistant recently who was struggling with the burden of producing meeting minutes for meetings that her boss, the CEO of the company, attended. And it wasn't just her problem, either: the team of six assistants in the executive suite were all spending inordinate amounts of time on the same task. In fact, this EA calculated that the team was spending 25% of their time -- the equivalent of 1.5 FTE months each month -- just producing meeting minutes.
Her initial approach to this problem was to sign everyone up for a SkillPath class so they could learn to take notes more quickly. In her view, EAs didn't have the skills they needed to transcribe efficiently. To be sure, with better note-taking and transcription skills, they would have speeded the process immensely.
My friend, Roger, leads the lean initiative at a health care system in Florida. Roger is a 23-year veteran of GE Healthcare, with more than his share of colored belts and fancy titles ("Quality Leader") to his name. He knows his 3 Ps, his 4Ms, his 5Ss, his 6 Sigmas, and his 7 Wastes inside and out. He's a damn nice guy, an amateur magician, and -- as I discovered over the past few weeks -- quite the philosopher about his work.
It's been a paiful three weeks of travel for me, with the result that I'm a bit shy in the clever, stunningly incisive, and trenchant blog posts you've come to know and love. Consequently, I'm scraping the bottom of the imagination barrel and referring you to a podcast I did recently with Liz Lynch.
Liz is a long-time friend, an outstanding businessworman, and a networking maven. She's also the author of Smart Networking, a wonderful book for people who get creeped out by the idea of putting on a suit and carrying a stack of business cards to a "networking function" where you shake lots of strangers' hands and exchange empty platitudes about "reaching out" and "finding synergies."
We accept certain facts as immutable laws of nature: hydrogen has a molecular weight of one. E=MC2. The Wall Street Journal will complain about the Obama stimulus package. Britney Spears will do something to land herself on the cover of People. The volume of email you get each year will inexorably increase.
I'm struck by the fatalism in this last assumption. There's a whiff of resignation, a kind of tragic foreknowledge that next year will indeed suck more than this year, at least in terms of email. (That is, unless you actually enjoy being inundated by email, because it makes you feel important. In which case skip the rest of this post and send an email to the company-wide distribution list asking for feedback on the firm's mission statement.)
I'm continually struck by the relentless, frenzied pace that people maintain at work. Whether it's an engineer at a high-tech startup in which speed is part of the company's DNA, or an attorney at a law firm who insists she has to respond immediately (if not sooner) to a client's call, or the head of a non-profit focused on building community support for the organization's mission, everyone is obsessed with speed and responsiveness.
But does a myopic focus on one aspect of performance really lead to the best results? Are we sacrificing quality on the altar of speed?
Sunday's Corner Office interview in the NYTimes was striking for the assertion -- once again -- that there's nothing more important than taking time away to (gasp!) actually think. John Donahoe, CEO of eBay, says
We're accustomed to thinking of poka-yoke (error-proofing) as something for a manufacturing assembly line, or at the very least, for a machine. In this standard conception, there are fail-safe devices (some cool, some pretty basic) to ensure errors are prevented. Electric eyes in elevators keep doors from closing on people. Some hotel rooms are equipped with a room key holder that turns off the power when the key is removed to prevent electricity from flowing to the room when it's vacant. Gas caps on cars are attached with a cord to prevent drivers from leaving it on the roof. (I left a cap near Grants Pass, OR, if anyone happens to see it....)
But why not institute poka-yoke for management? Why not create systems that prevent bad management practices from taking hold?
I thought of this yesterday when reading the NYTimes interview with Kevin Sharer, chief executive of Amgen. When he ascended to the big chair, he talked to the top 150 people in the company one at a time for an hour.
I just finished reading Matt May's excellent new book, In Pursuit of Elegance: Why the Best Ideas Have Something Missing." Matt is a former Toyota University guy and the author of The Elegant Solution.
Gary Hamel's recent Management 2.0 blog at WSJ.com features his ideas for "Management Moonshots" -- 25 ambitious and radical ideas that will significantly improve business management in the future. Frankly, I wasn't terribly impressed.
Some of the ideas are important, but already widely recognized, like "expanding and harnessing diversity" and "reducing fear and increasing trust." Other ideas are just turgid, jargon-laden, consultant-speak, like "de-structuring and disaggregating the organization." (Huh? Where was he when Citigroup and AIG were building themselves into "too big to fail" institutions? Probably preaching about economies of scale.)
But what really struck me was prevalence of ideas that are a fundamental and widely-practiced aspect of lean thinking. Check out these "moonshot" ideas:
"Innovation" seems to be the buzzword of the year. (Well, after "bailout," "meltdown," and "Can you BELIEVE how much Bobby Jindal sucked?!?") You can hardly open the WSJ without someone pontificating about the need for innovation, the threat to innovation, the five keys to innovation, the hidden secrets of innovation, blah, blah, blah.
In a change from all the bloviation about innovation, Terri Kelly, the CEO of W.L. Gore (the nice folks behind Gore-Tex and Glide dental floss, among other fine products) gave a refreshingly clear, jargon-free talk at the MIT business school about how the company's culture fosters innovation. For those of you who don't know, Gore is famous for not having any titles; everyone is simply an "associate." (Well, virtually no titles. Kelly is obviously the "CEO," so there are a few. But only when necessary.)
The NYTimes reports that the flies in the men’s-room urinals of the Amsterdam airport have been enshrined in the academic literature on economics and psychology. The flies — images of flies, actually — were etched in the porcelain near the urinal drains in an experiment in human behavior. After the flies were added, “spillage” on the men’s-room floor fell by 80 percent.
According to Richard Thaler, behavioral economist at the University of Chicago and the co-author (along with Cass Sunstein) of "Nudge," the explanation is simple: men like to aim at targets. Thaler says the flies are his favorite example of a “nudge” — a harmless bit of engineering that manages to “attract people’s attention and alter their behavior in a positive way, without actually requiring anyone to do anything at all.”
Thaler and Sunstein call this type of behavioral modification “libertarian paternalism," a phrase that links the opposing concepts of freedom from constraint and firm, well-intentioned guidance.
Back in December (yes, I'm a bit slow at this stuff), Seth Godin wrote about the "High Cost of Now." He argues that there's a clear relationship between how new something is and how much it costs to discover that news. In other words, the closer you get to the source and moment of information, the more it costs.
If you want to know how the stock market did in 2006, you can spend ten seconds and find it in Wikipedia. If you want to know about today, you'll need to invest a few clicks and you'll get the delayed results. Or you could pay a lot of money for a stock market terminal and get the current prices. Or you could even risk prison and get some inside information about what's going to happen before it happens.
Seth makes the connection to our habit of incessant grazing in the email inbox:
[corrected spelling of the Nielsen Company amended; thanks Robert]
The Nielsen Company has just deleted the "Reply All" button on the computers of their 35,000 employees worldwide.
IORG (via TechCrunch) reports that the giant research company, fed up with the deluge of irrelevant email messages and the waste of time they cause,
has finally come up with an adequate solution to cluttered e-mail inboxes and inefficiency in office environments: [removing] the reply-to-all button from the messaging software.
Monday's Wall Street Journal had a fascinating article on how companies are using "social-network analysis" to understand communication patterns within the firm. A software program shows the informal ties among employees by creating a map of their interactions.
As global organizations struggle to improve cooperation between geographically disparate teams and also among the functional silos that often don't communicate well, this kind of tool might be valuable. The engineering firm MWH, for example found that communication flowed well within offices, but not between them. To break open those bottlenecks, one of the company's executives
sent U.S. workers to fill vacation openings in the U.K., because the analysis showed those groups didn't talk much. He hired executive coaches for his top managers to help them become less authoritarian and more collaborative. When the director of the Pasadena group resisted, he re-assigned her engineers to others.
The maps help individuals adjust and improve their own performance as well:
I recently worked with the director of a large research institution. He's a brilliant scientist, one of those guys with a brain the size of a planet, enough advanced degrees to wallpaper a small office, and memberships in all the clubs for super-smarty-pants. As an administrator, however, he's not quite in the same league.
Although he has an extremely competent assistant, he refuses to dedicate time to meeting with her. Often they'll go two or three days without talking to each other. When it's a choice between talking to one of his scientists about the latest research project or meeting with his assistant, it's a no-brainer: cool science always trumps administrative responsibilities.
Unfortunately, this has a cost. Sometimes they miss deadlines. In once case, it was for a very large government grant. Often, the assistant has to spend much of her day chasing him around the 12-story building, trying to get his signature on a form or a decision on a commitment. And then there's the issue of what she could be accomplishing instead of engaging in her daily scavenger hunt for the boss.
Conductor and music teacher Benjamin Zander is an unlikely source for lean lessons. In his increasingly high profile role as corporate speaker on leadership, however, he shows that the lessons of lean leadership applies to the orchestra pit every bit as much as to the factory floor and the accounting office.
A common description of the lean approach to leadership is to lead as though you have no authority. This approach eliminates the traditional "command and control" method of management. Instead, it necessitates leaders to acquire knowledge and experience that will enable them to *earn* the respect, loyalty, and support of their staff.
Zander's approach to conducting an orchestra is strikingly similar. He says that the great conductors are like any other great leader: they understand that because they don't make a sound (only the musicians actually make music), their true power “derives from [their] ability to make others powerful.” From Zander's perspective, in this model of leadership
Tim Walker, from the Business Insight Zone blog, tagged me with this meme: seven things about business and my own career that you (probably) don't know. Tim's blog is one that I read regularly for both his clarity of thought and his stimulating questions, so although there are other things I could be doing today (planning for 2009, vacuuming up cat fur, procrastinating, etc.), I figure that I owe him at least this much for a year's worth of brain food.
1. I'm a Stanford MBA, have been laid off twice, and fired twice. Why is this important? Because I've seen plenty of organizations get by without my services. No matter how important I thought I was, no matter how inconceivable the prospect that these firms could survive without my brilliant contribution, they did. And this experience has changed my perspective towards email/phone responsiveness within a company. The truth is, no one is so important that they need to answer every email, every phone call, every knock on the cubicle wall immediately. Life -- and the company -- will most likely get by without your input. At least for an hour.
"The basic unit of knowledge is a question." This is a common saying at Toyota, where hierarchical, authority-based leadership is eschewed in favor of responsibility-based leadership. Which is to say that people at the top of the corporate food-chain don't drive all the decisions just because they sit in an Aeron chair and have a big desk.
Rather, people throughout the organization, using the A3 process (excellent description and case study available here) are not only given the responsibility, but are EXPECTED -- to solve problems by asking questions, and developing and testing possible solutions. As John Shook explains,
