One snowstorm. Three leaders. One lesson.

The snow fell again in NYC this past Friday, and with it came a new spate of commentaries about how Mayor Bloomberg mishandled the big blizzard on December 26. For those who don't know the story, in the wake of a 20" snowfall, Manhattan streets were plowed quickly, but streets in the outer boroughs (Queens, Brooklyn, the Bronx, Staten Island) remained unplowed for days. The mayor apologized, promised a thorough post-mortem to understand the root causes of the poor municipal response. . . and then demoted and reassigned three people. Thee mayor's approval ratings are now at their lowest point in his administration.

In New Jersey, where up to 31" of snow fell, Governor Chris Christie is taking heat for vacationing at Disney World with his family instead of returning to the state to help with its recovery efforts. He's made matters worse by defending his decision to put his responsibility to his family first: "I wouldn't change the decision even if I could do it right now. I had a great five days with my children. I promised that." The governor's nearly bullet-proof image, constructed during a year of tough leadership and emphasis on taking responsibility, has taken a beating.

Then there's Cory Booker, the mayor of Newark, NJ. Mayor Booker was not only present during the blizzard, he personally responded to several calls for help, showing up with a shovel to help some motorists who were stuck in the snow and bringing diapers to others. The mayor kept up a constant stream of tweets so that people knew what he was doing, even asking citizens to send him tweets letting him know where help was needed. The mayor is now a hero in Newark, where he faced a difficult re-election last year.

The PR experts will undoubtedly begin talking about best practices for crisis management (if they haven't already). But from a lean leadership perspective, what strikes me is the fact that only one of these leaders went to "the gemba" -- the streets where the work was actually being done.

You could argue that a mayor has better things to do with his or her time than shovel snow (that's why we have children, after all). But I disagree. People need to see (and in the case of Mayor Booker, hear via Twitter) that their leaders are willing and able to work in the trenches.

Of course, Mayors Bloomberg and Booker, and Governor Christie have other, higher-level, leadership tasks to ensure that these service failures don't recur. But it's important for all people in the state, the city, or any organization to see that their leaders are present and doing everything they can to help ease their pain. And if the problem is something that requires specialized skills that the leader doesn't have -- shutting down a nuclear reactor, tunneling into a mine shaft, performing surgery -- then the leader should be supporting those that do have the critical skills by bringing them coffee and donuts, or cold water, or fresh bandages.

It's no coincidence that the salient memory of Rudy Giuliani is him standing atop the World Trade Center rubble, while the lasting image of George Bush during Katrina is him peering through the window of Air Force One several thousand feet above New Orleans.

No one expected Giuliani to spend all day, everyday at the World Trade Center. No one expected Mayor Booker to spend all day, everyday shoveling snow. But people do expect their leaders to at least be present where the work is being done for some amount of time.

Lean bloggers and teachers often talk about the need to get out of the corner office and the conference room and get to the gemba as part of their standard work. That need is even greater in an emergency.

One snowstorm. Three leaders. One lesson.

It's not a Maginot Line. It's happiness.

As a strategy, building walls is frowned upon. The Great Wall of China. Hadrian's Wall. The Maginot Line. AOL's "walled garden." Defensive moves -- all failed. But maybe in certain circumstances walls can be beneficial?

A New York Times article describes how researchers used an iPhone app to contact some 2,200 individuals and get a total of roughly 250,000 replies as to how each person was feeling and what they were doing at the time they were contacted. Forty-seven percent of them reported that their minds were wandering when contacted -- in other words, half of them were not focused on whatever it was they were doing. Most interestingly, there was no correlation between the joy of the activity and the pleasantness of their thoughts.

Whatever people were doing, whether it was having sex or reading or shopping, they tended to be happier if they focused on the activity instead of thinking about something else. In fact, whether and where their minds wandered was a better predictor of happiness than what they were doing.

This finding jibes perfectly with the focused attention inherent in Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's concept of "flow," in which a person so completely immersed in a task that feelings of time, effort, and energy disappear.

The problem today, of course, is that the state of flow is increasingly difficult to achieve. Psychologist Edward Hallowell says that

30% to 40% of people's time in the workplace is spent tending to unplanned interruptions, and then reconstituting the mental focus the interruption caused. I'm sure that was not the case 20 years ago simply because the tools of interruption were not so plentiful. And all the distraction has created blocks in thinking and feeling deeply. We're being superficialized and sound-bit.

In fact, when he asks people where they do their best thinking, the most common response is, "In the shower." Apparently, the shower is one of the last places left where we're not often interrupted.

That's where the Maginot Line comes in. While it's not possible (or advisable) to completely wall off the outside world all the time (who wants to end up like France in 1940?), it's essential to recreate some boundaries around your work time so that you can think without interruption. Close the door. Go to a conference room or a coffee shop. Spend a weekend at a meditation center. Whatever works for you. But for god's sake, put away the iPhone and turn off the internet connection.

Thinking and creating is hard work. It requires energy. Often it isn't very much fun. The prevalence and ease of distraction -- particularly electronic -- is a seriously enticing alternative to hunkering down with your thoughts and a blank piece of paper. But if you can maintain your focus on that blank piece of paper instead of mindlessly and reflexively following another distraction, you'll be much happier.

What's your Maginot Line going to be? What kind of defensive walls will you build?

TimeBack is on vacation this week.

Happy holidays to all. I'll resume writing next week, in 2011.

Blog Carnival Annual Roundup: 2010 – Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog

I'm tickled to have the opportunity to share some of my favorite posts of 2010 for John Hunter's Management Improvement Carnival Annual Roundup. For my selections, I've strayed a bit from the core lean blogs that many of you read in lieu of posts that often embody the lean spirit, even if they don't whack you over the head with Japanese terms.

Bob Sutton is best known for his books The No Asshole Rule and Good Boss, Bad Boss, but his Work Matters blog covers a wide range of management issues that are valuable reading for anyone. Here are three posts that I really enjoyed.

• In The Better By Design Summit: Cool Things I Heard in New Zealand, Bob lists some of his favorite quotes from leaders at a meeting he attended in New Zealand. The ideas aren't earth-shaking revelations, but they can give you a fresh way of explaining things to your team or your client. One of my favorites is "If you want to change things, make hard things easier. Or raise the cost the cost of the status quo. Or do both."

• Strategy Is For Amateurs, Logistics Are For Professionals is Bob's eloquent argument that far more than the daily work done by the collection of bosses and their followers in an organization isn't as sexy as "leadership," but it's probably most crucial to success.

• It Isn't Just a Myth: A Little Thanks Goes a Long Way presents evidence that saying "thank you" really does improve performance. John Hunter has written several times about misguided incentives; this post provides an alternative way to reward people.

The folks at Behance not only developed the very interesting "Action Method" approach to project and workflow management, they write thought-provoking articles and tips (though, honestly, I'm not entirely sure how they distinguish between the two categories) for achieving greatness in what you do. Here's what I liked best this year:

• RSS Creativity: Routines, Systems, Spontaneity: (Okay, technically this was from last year, but it came in December, and I loved it.) Mark McGuinness explains how routines -- mundane, boring, routines -- are an essential component of creativity. Can you say "standard work"?

• How Analog Rituals Can Amp Your Productivity is Scott Belsky's paean to the low-tech way of getting your work done. Don't rely too heavily on technology, because, as he says, "a task left undone SHOULD be a burden."

• What Should You Start/Stop/Continue Doing? Scott Belsky's easy approach to hansei once a project is done. You might want to tweak it, but it's as good a starting point as any, and it provides a valuable framework.

Peter Bregman writes weekly for the HBR blog on productivity, leadership, creativity, and -- for lack of a better word -- humanity. He has wide-ranging interests that make for a worthwhile read.

• An 18-Minute Plan for Managing Your Day. You don't need to buy into Getting Things Done, the Action Method, the Pomodoro Technique, Inbox Zero, or Lifehacker's flavor of the week: just follow Peter's logical PDCA approach and you'll succeed.
• Why The Best Solutions Are Always Temporary Ones: Lean teaches us that there are no permanent solutions, only temporary countermeasures. But don't dismiss them just because they're not silver bullets. As Peter says, "For something to be a great success, it doesn't have to last forever."

• The Farm-to-Table Secret to Motivating People elegantly explains why involving people in the design (or redesign) of a process leads to better outcomes. Useful for both internal and external change initiatives.

If you like these posts, I encourage you to see my selections for 2009 here. Also check out the regular Management Improvement Carnival page here.

Too many "priorities."

Maggie Jackson, the author of Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age, is eloquent on the topic of multitasking. In an HBR blog interview, she explains that

It fosters a culture of lost threads, stunted thinking, and stress. When we're constantly losing the thread of what we're trying to do, it becomes difficult to define and pursue goals. New ideas get abandoned and forgotten before they have a chance to develop. . . . Hierarchies of knowledge become flattened. When what we pay attention to is driven by the last e-mail we received, the trivial and the crucial occupy the same plane.

Of course, if you've been following my blog, these ideas aren't exactly a Copernican insight. (Eloquent, yes; cosmos paradigm-shattering, no.) The reason that I bring up this topic again is that I've been thinking more about the root causes of this problem. Certainly, there are environmental issues -- visual distractions on the desk, the prevalence of cubes with low walls, and the ubiquity of technological connection. There are cultural norms at play as well: companies in which there's an expectation that emails will be responded to within five minutes, or tolerance of meetings in which people spend more time focused on their Blackberrys than on the speaker.

But recently I've been thinking that at root, one of the major culprits is management unwillingness to limit their corporate priorities. Many organizations I work with have so many "strategic priorities" that it's inevitable that there won't be time for reflection, problem-solving, and innovation. Indeed, all those priorities make it nearly impossible for any individual or team to have a prayer of executing on them.

In part this overburden is due to the layoffs of the past few years. Fewer staff, combined with aggressive goals, is a recipe for what Maggie Jackson calls a "culture of distraction." But it's also a result of a lack of management discipline. Two or three priorities, sure. But 16? No. You're dooming yourself (and your organization) to impotence and frustration if you fracture people's time, effort, energy, and focus among so many "priorities."

Fact is, you can't do two things at once, and you can't implement a dozen priorities at once, either. At the end of the year, the only thing that matters is execution. Your company's performance is measured not by how many priorities you have on the list in January, but on how many you've actually executed by December.

Take it from Herb Kelleher, CEO of Southwest Airlines, who once said, "Of course we have a 'strategic' plan. It's called doing things."

Sounds like he has his priorities straight.

Self-interruptions: The sneaky, silent killer.

So. You've gotten the message that multitasking is bad, that email is satan-spawn, and that you should give yourself some uninterrupted time to work. You dutifully sit down at the computer. Email alerts are off. Web browser is closed. And you start to write (or draw, or code, or dream, or whatever it is you do that creates value). And then you suddenly remember: you have to remind your wife to pick up the rhinestone-studded gerbil collar from Petsmart. It's just a quick email; no big deal. It'll take JUST A SECOND. You toggle over, write the email, and are about to go back to your work when you think that you ought tell your boss to follow up with HR about the travel expenses. So you write that, too. It only cost you another 60 seconds.

Then you see them: eleven new emails. And being an animal (bipedal, yes; opposable thumbs, yes -- but still an animal), you can't resist getting distracted by shiny (or bold) objects, and you read them. And respond. And respond to the next batch of messages that come in while you're in email. Before you know it, you've disappeared down the electronic rabbit hole. For 45 minutes.

This happens all the time with email and with web browsing. Maybe you need to quickly check Napoleon's height (5'6" or 5'7") or make sure that you when you referred to Monet, you didn't mean Manet. You get sucked into the vortex, and next thing you know, you're reading about Edward Tufte, Hitler's error in opening a second front in Russia, and the roots of Impressionism. And another 45 minutes vaporizes into nothingness.

Here's the thing: it's not enough to block out the externally imposed interruptions. You also have to guard against self-inflicted interruptions. These are sneakier, more prevalent, and more damaging than you think. It may be (relatively) easy to tell your colleagues or clients that you only check email three times per day, but it's not so simple to tell your brain to stop remembering stuff to do. Or to turn off your curiosity. Without realizing it, you're your own worst enemy.

The solution is refreshingly low-tech -- you do not need an app for it. Keep a pad of paper next to your computer as you're working. When you think of something that you have to do (make a phone call, send an email, get some information on a prospect, etc.), scribble a note to yourself on the pad and KEEP WORKING. Don't break your momentum. When you're done with that task or project, then you can follow up on the items on your note pad.

You're essentially making a holding pen for random to-dos so that you can free your brain to focus on the real work you have to do. You'll be amazed at how much less distracted you feel and how much more productive you become.

The value of monotonous rituals

Scott Belsky penned a terrific article at The 99% on how the ritual of writing out a to-do list helps some people stay productive. Here's how he describes the ritual of Bob Greenberg, the CEO of the digital agency R/GA:

Despite his digital interests, Greenberg's productivity tools are entirely analog. He uses a paper agenda with a series of lists written at the top that he writes every single day. In the morning, Greenberg will manually bump uncompleted tasks from the previous day to the current day. He also re-writes the names of key clients and other areas of focus; often transcribing the same names again and again, daily, for weeks if not months or years. . . . By manually bumping a certain task every day, he feels that it is incomplete. He is faced with the reality and forced to either complete the task, delegate it, or bump it again.

I see a clear parallel between this ritual and the process of 5S in a manufacturing environment. You can't engage in a thorough 5S program without looking at every physical item and determining its purpose and value. The same is true with the information you manage.

You need to sift through the accumulated flotsam and jetsam of your day -- the scribbled notes, the emails, phone calls, and hallway conversations, the random thoughts that occur to you while getting your coffee -- and identify what has value and what doesn't. Applying 5S to the information you handle (or, in Greenberg's world, re-writing his daily lists) means making decisions about what to do with it. Whether you choose to act upon it now, defer action for a later date, or finally give up on it, you're actively assessing your work and analyzing your needs. It's this analysis that will give you greater clarity about what's required on a daily basis to move forward with your responsibilities.

Personally, I'm not a big fan of writing and re-writing the same tasks. I think it's far better to put a stake in the ground and set a target date for action or completion. But I do respect Greenberg's focus on creating visibility for his work and forcing himself to make mindful decisions about what he's going to do. Too often we act unthinkingly, reacting in a Pavlovian fashion to the latest stimulus. And that's a recipe for failure.

Choice kills.

Choice kills. Okay, that's a bit dramatic. But as Bob Pozen (chairman emeritus of MFS Investment Management, senior lecturer at Harvard Business School, and board member of Medtronics and Nielsen) demonstrates, eliminating complexity and making choices simpler can go a long way towards keeping you focused on your strategic goals.

In a recent HBR blog piece, Pozen explains how he makes he reduces the number of choices he has to make.

On a daily basis, I try to keep the material aspects of life as simple as possible. I get up every morning around 7 a.m., shave, shower and dress by 7:15 a.m. Then I read two newspapers while having breakfast and leave around 7:30 a.m. The night before I set out what I'm going to wear. I have five winter outfits and five summer outfits to simplify my life. I get up, take a shower the same way, and sit in the same place to tie my shoes. I basically eat the same thing for breakfast every morning in the same place at our kitchen table. I'm very boring in the morning.

This is a common theme among prolific people. I've written before about the way Stephen King gets himself ready for work:

There are certain things I do if I sit down to write. I have a glass of water or a cup of tea. There’s a certain time I sit down, from 8:00 to 8:30, somewhere within that half hour every morning. I have my vitamin pill and my music, sit in the same seat, and the papers are all arranged in the same places.

Sheena Iyengar, Columbia University professor and author of The Art of Choosing, designed a famous study in which she demonstrated that too much choice is paralyzing: after we hit about seven items, it's too difficult for our brains to sift through the competing options. As a result, we default to the easiest choice: doing nothing. And since doing nothing at the office is usually frowned upon by your boss, the default choice usually ends up being email, instead of real work. (Incidentally, this is another reason why I'm not a big fan of the infinite to-do list: too many options makes it difficult to settle upon the things you really need to do.)

Mark Graban once wrote that

I've heard Toyota people say you want to eliminate the hundreds of LITTLE repetitive decisions so that the person involved can focus on the FEW major decisions with a fresh mind that's not fatigued from constant decision making.

You may not want to go to Pozen's extremes -- you may want to have more options in the morning than Cheerios or Life cereal -- but it's worth thinking about what you can do to reduce choice, routinize what can be routinized, and free yourself up to make complex decisions.

Hacking Work

Stop doing stupid stuff because that's the way it's always been done. Stop using crappy tools because that's what the company offers. Stop following inane rules because that's the policy. Over at AMEX Open Forum, Matt May brought the concept of "hacking work" to my attention. He interviewed Bill Jensen (author of Hacking Work) about this idea -- because let's face it: in a lousy economy where people feel lucky just to have a paycheck, breaking corporate rules doesn't seem like the smartest thing to do.

Jensen explains that

overall, the design of work sucks, and a lot of stupid rules persist. The tools we use in life have leapfrogged over the ones we use at work. What available for people to do their work is out of sync with what they really need to do their best. . . . People are being asked to do their work with a massive anchor wrapped around their leg. In today’s economy, that anchor—the corporate-centered design of work—is making it really hard for everyone to keep their jobs, let alone do their best work.

Jensen provides two examples of hacking that illustrate his idea:

we know of one manager couldn’t get her customer-focused project approved, even though the senior team declared customer focus as a strategic priority. So she secretly videotaped customer complaints (that her project would address) and posted them on YouTube. The public outcry was so huge that the senior team quickly reversed their decision, not only approving her project, but they actually increased her budget.

Or take the trainer that told all her trainees that she knew her mandatory courses “sucked” due to circumstances beyond her control—several years of zero funding—so she sent everyone to free online courses outside of the company, tested them on what they learned, and validated their certificates in courses they never attended.

Jensen is passionate about hacking. He believes that it's practically a moral imperative for the engaged employee to try to improve his or her work. Doing stupid stuff and following pointless rules is a soul-sucking waste of time and energy.

A few months ago, I started an online "community A3" project to figure out how to eliminate the waste of crappy meetings. One of the participants figured out that their team (like groups in most companies) had their meetings on a "push" basis: they scheduled meetings with a certain frequency and followed that schedule regardless of need. They shifted to a "pull" mode -- meetings were only held when needed to solve customer problems -- and reduced their collective meeting burden by 1/3. It wasn't the "way things are done here," but they freed up 56 hours per month to actually solve problems.

Matt points out that the hacker spirit is really another way to describe the mindset at Toyota, where people are constantly trying to find ways to banish waste and unnecessary work. So whether you call it "hacking work," or "A3 thinking," or "kaizen," the point is to stop doing stupid stuff so that you can do great work.

"A wealth of information creates a paucity of attention."

Tachi Yamada, the president of the Gates Foundation’s Global Health Program, mentioned last year how important it is to be 100% present when you're with someone:

I don’t have a mobile phone turned on because I’m talking to you. I don’t want the outside world to impinge on the conversation we’re having. I don’t carry a BlackBerry. I do my e-mails regularly, but I do it when I have the time on a computer. I don’t want to be sitting here thinking that I’ve got an e-mail message coming here and I’d better look at that while I’m talking to you. Every moment counts, and that moment is lost if you’re not in that moment 100 percent.

Recently I gave a presentation to the MBAs at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. I was amazed by the pressure the students felt to be constantly connected and to respond instantly to email messages. And remember, these were students, not heart surgeons.

Why is it so difficult for us to simply be in the moment, wherever we are? (Incidentally, I'm not setting myself above the rest of humanity here, by the way -- I fight the same urge to continually play with my iPhone and check email as everyone else.) But as Marty Neumeir, author of The Designful Company says,

A wealth of information creates a paucity of attention.

Dr. Yamada's point about every moment counts reminds me of my friend Paul's comment that there are no rollover minutes in life. When that moment is gone, it's gone. With so much information around us, it's terribly easy to stop paying attention to what's in front of us.

What would happen if you played with Barbies?

I'm working with a company whose managers regularly put in 12 or 14 hour days. They stay at the office till late or bring home a big pile of work. No choice about it, they say -- there's just too much to do. That made me think (again) about Terry Gross's interview with Jon Stewart. Stewart not only explained how he and his team use a seriously structured process to plow through the vast quantities of media and write all those jokes each day, he also talked about how he places a hard stop at the end of each day when he goes home.

Terry Gross: You work so hard on the show. It's so obvious how much work you put into writing and performing it and how long your day must be and how it probably never ends, particularly doing an event like this rally [the Rally to Restore Sanity].

Jon Stewart: You'd be surprised how easily I turn it off when I go home.  I've gotten really good at when I go home, the kids and I watch "Wizards of Waverly Place," and I don't think about it again.

TG: Have you changed the amount of time you're willing to devote to the show and to work now that you're the father of two?

JS: What I have decided is when I'm home, I'm home. And to me, that's the difference. You know, I can't not be at work but the real challenge is when I'm at work, I'm at work. I'm locked in, I'm ready to go, I'm focused. When I'm at home, I'm locked in and I'm ready to go and I'm focused on home. And we don't watch the show. We don't watch the news. We don't do any of that stuff. I sit down, I play Barbies, and then sometimes the kids will come home and play with me and then….

So here's Stewart -- a comedian -- with both a rigorous process to write jokes and a total focus on the job at hand. "Locked in, ready to go." And that combination allows him to go home and play with Barbie dolls (with or without his kids).

How about your day? My guess is that you don't have such a structured process for your work, nor do you have such single-minded focus on your job. (I know that I don't.) And as a result, when you go home, you bring your work with you. At the very least, you check email at night -- and you probably do a whole lot more.

Okay, I know that your job is so different from Stewart's, that you get urgent emails that have to be answered at once, that the company will very likely collapse without a steady stream of your trenchant business insights.

And yet.

Isn't it possible that the very reason you need to handle email at 11:30pm is because you're not totally focused during the day? Or conversely, isn't is possible that your willingness (even if it's somewhat reluctant) to answer email at 11:30pm is part of the reason that you don't have that focus?

I've written before (here and here) about what Toyota calls "lowering the water level" -- reducing the inventory/resources in a system to expose the problems. What would happen if you lowered the water level by reducing the time you spent at work, and instead committed to getting locked in, ready to go, and totally focused on being home?

Isn't worth an experiment?

If Jon Stewart can do it, so can you.

To paraphrase the US Army, you're a factory of one. Stuff lands in your inbox, or on your desk, or is handed to you in a meeting -- market research, budgets, trend forecasts, lots of venti soy half-caf pumpkin lattes -- and out pops beautiful, creative, groundbreaking solutions. Answers to all the biggest questions your organization faces: should we expand into Latvia or Estonia? Should we extend our lobster bib product line by adding oyster bibs? How can we convince our CFO that we really need the Aeron chair "true black" colorway?

And if you're a factory of one producing this stellar work, like any other factory, you should have a process.

But what I hear all the time is, "My work is too unpredictable to define a process." Or, "My work is different. I'm not like the sales admin staff processing invoices, or the mail room guy whose job is just to send out letters. My work is creative."

Yeah.

Of course it's creative. But even so, you can define a process. In fact, I'll go so far as to quote W. Edwards Deming:

If you can't describe what you are doing as a process, you don't know what you are doing.

Yeah, yeah, I know -- you're not a factory drone, stamping out widgets. But there's a process, a system -- standard work --  for everything that's done well. Even comedy.

Don't believe me? Here's Jon Stewart, explaining to Fresh Air's Terry Gross how he and his team of writers produce their comedy:

You'd be incredibly surprised at how regimented our day is, and just how the infrastructure of the show is very much mechanized.

People always think "The Daily Show," you guys probably just sit around and make jokes. We've instituted -- to be able to sort of wean through all this material and synthesize it, and try and come up with things to do -- we have a very, kind of strict day that we have to adhere to. And by doing that, that allows us to process everything, and gives us the freedom to sort of improvise.

I'm a real believer in that creativity comes from limits, not freedom. Freedom, I think you don't know what to do with yourself. But when you have a structure, then you can improvise off it.

Get it? It's a process. Even for something as creative as writing jokes, there's a structure to follow. And by establishing that structure, they can unleash their comedy. Without it, they'd probably be a bunch of unfunny fat guys eating donuts and wondering why their show just got canceled.

Now, take another look at your work. Sure, you have to be creative. But whether you'd a doctor in an emergency department, the marketing director for a shoe company, or the coach of a professional football team, you can define a process. I'll go even further: you can create standard work.

Of course there will be variability: the doctor never knows whose going to walk through the hospital doors, the marketer doesn't know what customer will complain about an ad campaign, the coach doesn't know which player will get injured (or in the case of the NY Jets, get arrested for stupidity). But these cases are the exceptions, not the rule.

If you try to manage your work for the exceptions, you'll never get anything done. Jon Stewart said that it took him six years to write his first 45 minutes of material. Now, with a rigidly defined process (and, to be fair, a team of writers), he creates 30 minutes every single day. The structure, and the standard work you define, enable you to manage the unpredictable crises.

If something as evanescent as comic inspiration can be turned into a process, there's no excuse for you to not create a process for your own work.

24/7 availability does not create peak performance.

Mark Graban's latest post on Chrysler's CEO, Sergio Marchionne, reminded me of a recent visit to a client's R&D facility. Two of the managers bemoaned the incessant demands on their teams. Even as recently as a few years ago they would have downtime after the completion of a project when staff could go on vacation, work shorter hours, and generally refresh themselves. But no more. Layoffs and increasing pressures from the executive team means no more breathers. It’s constant pressure year-round now. Unfortunately, as psychiatrist Edward Hallowell says,

Making yourself available 24/7 does not create peak performance. Recreating the boundaries that technology has eroded does.

In an interview with CNET earlier this year, Hallowell explainted that “attention deficit trait” is

sort of like the normal version of attention deficit disorder. But it’s a condition induced by modern life, in which you’ve become so busy attending to so many inputs and outputs that you become increasingly distracted, irritable, impulsive, restless and, over the long term, underachieving. In other words, it costs you efficiency because you’re doing so much or trying to do so much, it’s as if you’re juggling one more ball than you possibly can.

Organizations are sacrificing their most valuable asset, namely the imagination and creativity of the brains they employ, by allowing ADT to infest the organization.

Pick up any business journal this year and at least once a week you’ll read about the need for innovation. Companies hire consultants, conduct off-site retreats, install “chief innovation officers” (whatever that means — probably a sign of a non-innovative company), and give employees toys from the Fisher Price catalog in an effort to spur innovative thinking.

But maybe they’re missing the mark. (In the case of the “chief innovation officer,” there’s no maybe about it.) Maybe what the staff needs is some time away from the office, away from the Blackberries, away from meetings. Maybe they need to go hiking and rafting away from their electronic tethers.

Of course, you don’t have to go that far. As Hallowell says,

It’s not that hard to deal with, once you identify it. You need to set limits and preserve time to think. Warren Buffett sits in a little office in the middle of nowhere and spends a lot of his time just thinking.

Back to Sergio Marchionne: you could make a powerful argument that his job above all requires innovation, creativity, and imagination. Does answering his six Blackberries within minutes or seconds, 24/7, have a negative effect on his own performance? (And for that matter, the fact that so many decisions are funneled through him surely has negative consequences. The always-available executive subtly undermines the people around him by telegraphing that his team is incapable of running things on their own. A good question might be why Marchionne has to make all of these decisions at all times.)

Think about it: getting more with less — less energy, less time, less effort. If we can apply lean thinking (creating more value with fewer resources) at the macro-level to manufacturing and services, why can’t we apply it at the micro-level to individual output?

Improve morale: go to the gemba.

A McKinsey survey last year revealed that non-cash motivators -- praise from immediate managers, attention from leaders, and a chance to direct projects -- are at least as effective as the three most highly rated monetary ones. My first reaction was to add this research into the Gobsmackingly Obvious Business "Insight" Hall of Fame. I mean, really? McKinsey needed a survey of 1000 businesspeople to learn that praise and attention from the CEO is motivational?

But then I realized that McKinsey is only mirroring the pervasive cluelessness of most corporations. The study goes on to explain:

Why haven’t many organizations made more use of cost-effective non-financial motivators at a time when cash is hard to find? One reason may be that many executives hesitate to challenge the traditional managerial wisdom: money is what really counts. While executives themselves may be equally influenced by other things, they still think that bonuses are the dominant incentive for most people. “Managers see motivation in terms of the size of the compensation,” explained an HR director from the financial-services industry.

Another reason is probably that nonfinancial ways to motivate people do, on the whole, require more time and commitment from senior managers. One HR director we interviewed spoke of their tendency to “hide” in their offices—primarily reflecting uncertainty about the current situation and outlook. This lack of interaction between managers and their people creates a highly damaging void that saps employee engagement.

Interestingly, lean management provides the opportunity to institutionalize all of these things: praise; attention from leaders; the chance to direct projects; plus autonomy, mastery, and purpose.

There's a lesson here: go to the actual place where your people are working. Talk to them. Say thank you. And find out what's important.

You are your calendar.

Andy Robinson over at Career Success Partners put up a great video by Tom Peters called "You Are Your Calendar." Peters is legendary (infamous?) for his long and winding Powerpoint presentations, but this is a wonderfully succinct video (2:28), that's as direct as could be. Peters says that

"There is only one asset that you have and that asset is your time.

[Imagine you're a boss of a distribution center and] you say that this is the year of extraordinary attention to quality. Then at the end of the first month, I sit down with you and we go through your monthly calendar day-by-day and hour-by-hour. And we discover that with all the meetings that occur and all the surprises that come up in the course of that month you spent 6 hours directly on the quality issue.

Well, guess what: quality is not your top priority.

The calendar never, ever, ever lies.

If you say something is a priority, then it must be quantitatively reflected in the calendar."

I've harped on this point many times before on this blog (here, here, and here, for starters): the calendar is the best tool you have to allocate your scarcest and most valuable resource: your time and attention. From a lean perspective, the calendar also enables you to level the load of work. And finally, diligent use of the calendar makes it possible to engage in PDCA -- without the calendar, you can't "Check," and therefore you have no way to Adjust.

I've been working recently with an administrative group at a major medical center. They complain that there's not enough time in the day to handle all their incoming work, and yet they have no idea where their day goes. (Which is to say, they have no idea where they spend their time and attention.) They get steamrolled by the tyranny of the urgent, and they neglect to spend time on what (is ostensibly) their real value-creating activities.

"The calendar never, ever, ever, lies." All you need to do is give it a voice by using your calendar diligently for all your work. You may be surprised at what it tells you.

Godzilla in the corner office.

Ever see an old Godzilla movie where the monster roams around Tokyo and wipes out buildings, ships, and train lines accidentally, just by waving his tail? I've got that image stuck in my head recently. I've been working at an organization that's grown from five people to 55 in the past 18 months. Kudos to them: they're doing great work, making a real difference in their market, and continuing to grow. The staff is focused, dedicated to the mission, and very hard working.

They're also frustrated at the number of urgent, drop-everything-and-get-this-done-now, orders from the president. Or more precisely, they're frustrated by the number of *perceived* urgent, drop-everything-and-get-this-done-now, orders from the president.

In fact, when you watch the president in her daily work, you realize that most of her requests are actually not urgent orders. She's asking for some information or some task to get done, but it's almost never urgent.

The problem is, the staff *thinks* those requests are urgent, get-it-done-now issues because they're coming from the president.

When the organization was smaller -- and in more humble offices -- the atmosphere was more casual. A five- or eight-person organization doesn't really have much (or much need for) hierarchy. But when you've got 55 people, nice offices, and the president sits in a glass corner office, you've got a different atmosphere and different implicit assumptions. Now, a simple request from the big cheese becomes an urgent order.

There's an apocryphal story I once heard about the CEO of a Fortune 100 firm who was visiting one of his company's plants. He asked an idle question about their production statistics compared to one of their competitor's. When he came back for a visit four months later, the plant manager handed him an enormous 3-ring binder with a full production analysis and comparison with the other firm.

Problem was, the CEO didn't care about the report at all. He asked an idle question. He didn't expect or want a full report on the issue. But when the CEO asks a question, it's easy to take is as an order.

When you're in the corner office, you've got incredible power. People think your requests are orders. At the very least, your staff wants to please you. Like Godzilla, you've got enormous power -- even your tail swishing behind you can cause enormous damage, without you even realizing it. You've got to be very careful about what you ask for.

If it's not something urgent, let people know. If you have a time frame for a request, tell them what it is. Otherwise, your team will assume that it's urgent and will drop all their other work to make you happy. Specificity and clarity will keep you from being Godzilla.

Why not just add a video game to your car's GPS?

Microsoft just introduced "Outlook Social Connector" for all versions of Outlook. This nifty little bit of software will enable you to integrate  and view updates from your various networks like Facebook, LinkedIn, and MySpace from the convenience of your Outlook inbox.

As you read an email from a friend or colleague, Outlook Social Connector shows you real-time updates about their activities on Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, or Windows Live Messenger. You can also add contacts and expand your social and business networks directly from the Outlook People Pane.

I don't get it. I mean, I understand the appeal of social media, and I think that in many situations it has real value, but to integrate it into your Outlook? Like you're not getting enough garbage pumped into your inbox already?

Most people I know already complain that the volume of email they deal with is an impediment to getting their real jobs done. And the highly addictive nature of email is mirrored by that of social media feeds. So adding more tasty distractions to one of your primary work environments (your computer) seems like a really bad idea to me. Kind of like moving your office into a bar, or a playground, or a museum. Or putting a miniature version of Tetris or Asteroids on your car's GPS. Sure, you could try restricting  your attention to your budget spreadsheet or the road ahead, but you'll probably fail. Pretty soon you'll be checking out the blonde at the table next to you, or trying to kill alien invaders during your next drive across Wyoming.

You don't see games and distractions right next to a table saw. Why would you want to add that to your email?

Getting to the root cause.

While out for a bike ride with a friend of mine today, we talked about the class on A3 thinking that I'll be teaching this fall at the Stanford Continuing Studies Program. As I described the importance of finding the root cause, he told me about a fascinating example of root cause analysis by the National Park Service. (My source for this story is here.)

There was excessive wear on the Lincoln Memorial from all the cleaning it was getting because of bird droppings. The Park Service experimented with different cleaners and brushes to cut down on the wear. That didn't work so they looked at it differently and asked "Why are we cleaning it so much?" Because of all the bird droppings.

They put up nets to keep the birds out and it worked some but not well enough and the tourists complained about them. They went one step further and asked "Why do we have so many birds coming to this monument?" After studying it they determined it was because of the insects that swarmed the monument in the evenings. They tried different types of insecticides but nothing seemed to work for long. So they asked "Why do we have so many insects swarming the monument?"

They determined the bright lights that illuminated the monument in the evenings were drawing the insects. They found out that by turning on the lights 1 hour later each evening they could eliminate over ninety percent of the insects and the resulting bird droppings. The brushes and cleaners, nets, and insecticides all addressed symptoms of the root cause. The Root Cause was the lighting and once it was addressed the problem went away.

This story really exemplifies lean thinking at its best. The Park Service solved a major problem without spending large amounts of money or reallocating huge numbers of resources. By taking the time to understand the problem instead of jumping to solutions, they were able to institute a cheap, effective countermeasure.

As you know, I'm fascinated by the dysfunctional relationship people have with email, and the waste that it often creates. This story makes me think of all the technological solutions that companies are peddling to fix the email blight. Yes, they may work. But I'm not sure that they're really addressing the root cause of the problem. You can categorize, prioritize, analyze, sort, thread, and color-code your messages all you want -- but you're still going to spend a preposterously large amount of time dealing with mail. Perhaps it would be better to figure out why you're getting so much, and how you can prevent its creation in the first place.

How are you going to stop the (metaphorical) bird crap from invading your office?

TimeBack Goes Live! August 30, 4pm: The Lean Nation Radio Show

I'll be a guest on The Lean Nation radio show on August 30 from 4-5pm on 790 AM Talk and Business, hosted by (the always dapper) Karl Wadensten. This is a reschedule of my earlier appearance, when the Yankee game preempted my interview. We’re going to discuss how lean principles translate to good leadership. This topic was inspired by a guest post I did for Mark Graban’s Lean Blog, titled “You Don’t Have to be Lean to be Good.”

You can listen to my appearance live on 790AM in Providence, RI. The show is also globally available via a live audio stream at 790business.com. I would love to hear your opinions and answer your questions on this topic or others, so feel free to call in to the show. The call-in number is 401-437-5000 or toll free at 888-345-0790.

Can’t tune in live? The podcast will be available after the show, so you can have my dulcet tones put you to sleep while you’re sitting on the airport tarmac.

MBA case studies teach the wrong things

A couple of months ago, Steve Spear wrote that C-level and other senior leaders usually don’t embrace lean as a strategic concern, because their training has been focused on making decisions about transactions, rather than making discoveries through experimentation. As he describes it,

Business managers are not trained to learn/discover.  Rather they are trained to decide about transactions.  Consider the MBA curriculum core:

• Finance–how to value transactions
• Accounting–how to track transactions
• Strategy–taught as a transactional discipline of entering or exiting markets based on relative strength and weakness
• OM courses–heavily pervaded by analytical tools (in support of decisions)

Largely absent: scientific method, experimentation, exploration, learning methods, teaching methods, etc.

I couldn't agree more. When I think back to my MBA classes (1990-92), I remember wading through case studies in all my classes that ostensibly taught me something about business. But the truth is that these simplified, post-hoc analyses really didn't do a great job in teaching any useful information (at least for me). The eventual business success achieved by the heroic managers in times of crisis were attributed to brilliant insight, or "leveraging core competencies," or some other management buzzword of the day. I can't think of a single case where the leadership team said, in effect, "Well, we're screwed. Now what do we do? How about if we try a few countermeasures and see what works?"

Even worse, the great insight was almost always a major -- even revolutionary -- idea springing fully-developed from the forehead of the brilliant leader in isolation. No incremental steps or improvements that, over time, lead to a successful shift. No input or ideas from the workforce, who, as Kevin Meyer always reminds us, is composed of more than just pairs of hands. No guidance on how to understand the real problem, rather than simply leaping to solutions. No lessons on how to work through PDCA cycles in an effort to make real, lasting improvement.

The truth is that the corporate ecosystem is enormously complex. Presenting a simplified view of that ecosystem may seem to make pedagogical sense, but it leads to the false belief that problems are easily understood, that there is one "right" answer, and that there's no need for experimentation. And that's a tremendous disservice to future business leaders.