What every CEO needs to know about 5S and signal to noise ratio

Ron Ashkenas tells the following story:

In one large consumer products company, the CEO insisted on having detailed operational reports rolled up every month to the corporate level, which she then used for a monthly review meeting with business heads and corporate staff. Creating these reports required a small army of corporate financial analysts while also creating a cascade of work within all of the business units. And since the financial analysts were not always busy with the monthly reports, they also generated additional activities for the businesses that they thought were value-added. When the CEO retired, her successor decided that these detailed operational reports were unnecessary since each business unit already reported its key numbers — and the big review meetings never resulted in substantial decisions anyway. In other words, he quickly determined that this form of operational roll-up was not critical to the company's success and it was eliminated (along with the small army of financial analysts and the additional work they spawned).

People commonly think about 5S (a place for everything, and everything in its place) in manufacturing terms: organizing and decluttering the physical space around you. That's too limiting. It's also the wrong focus for knowledge workers. In other words: no, it doesn't matter where you hang your damned sweater.

Factory workers manipulate and process titanium alloys or scratch-resistant iPhone glass faces. Knowledge workers manipulate and process information. Regardless of what kind of worker you are, you need 5S to provide you with quick access to what you're working on, and to allow you to spot abnormalities.

So, when the signal-to-noise-ratio approaches zero -- when there's just a little bit of information coming through the static, as at the consumer products company described above -- you know it's time for information 5S. It's time to identify what information is necessary to serve the customer, make decisions, and manage the business, and eliminate the rest. Anything else may be interesting, but is ultimately irrelevant -- and even worse, it sucks valuable resources into the giant maw of waste.

In my upcoming book (A Factory of One, out in December 2011) I tell the story of the nurses at the Covenant Health System in Texas. They analyzed their work and found that they spent 51% of each shift filling in forms (rather than doing something useful, like, say, taking care of patients). The vast majority of that time and effort was waste. An information 5S project cut that time in half.

Take a look at the information you create and ask others to create for you. How much of it is waste, and how much of it is value? How much of it is just "legacy work" -- stuff that's just always been done, and no one remembers why anymore -- and how much of it really helps you make decisions to lead the business?

Godzilla in the corner office (part 2)

John Rowe, president and CEO of Exelon, tells this story:

In my first C.E.O. job, a young woman who worked for me walked in one day and said, “Do you know that the gossip in the office is that the way for a woman to get ahead is to wear frilly spring dresses?”

And I just looked at her and asked, “Where did this come from?”

She said: “Well, you said, ‘pretty dress’ to four women who happened to be dressed that way. And so now it’s considered policy.”

I said: “Well, it’s the furthest thing in the world from policy. I was just trying to be pleasant in the elevator.”

People hang on a leader’s every word on what seems like trivia and can resist like badgers your words when you’re really trying to say something you think is important.

I wrote about this phenomenon, which I call "Godzilla in the corner office," before. Godzilla's tail alone can destroy hundreds of buildings without him even realizing it, and people high up in the food chain in an organization can wreak havoc without even realizing it. John Rowe's story is a perfect example.

You create expectations and  tacitly encourage behaviors through your own actions. Do you check your smartphone when you're talking to a direct report? Do you arrive five minutes late to all meetings? Do you send emails on Sunday afternoons? What messages are you sending to your team? Is that what you want?

It's ironic, of course, but people in your organization will attend closely to what seems like trivia, and ignore or resist what you think is important. This is the nature of hierarchical organizations. Recognize it, be alert to the messages you're sending, and periodically seek honest feedback from people throughout the company. You might be surprised at what you learn.

Go See. Ask Why. Show Respect.

In 2009 Google launched "Project Oxygen." You probably haven't heard of it, because it's not a product. It's Google's quest to build a better boss. In typical Google fashion, the company gathered enough data on managerial performance to float a battleship. They followed up with interviews, coded feedback, and ranked results in order of importance. What they found is music to any lean manager's ears. Here's how the NYTimes describes it:

Mr. Bock’s group found that technical expertise — the ability, say, to write computer code in your sleep — ranked dead last among Google’s big eight [drivers of managerial excellence]. What employees valued most were even-keeled bosses who made time for one-on-one meetings, who helped people puzzle through problems by asking questions, not dictating answers, and who took an interest in employees’ lives and careers.

“In the Google context, we’d always believed that to be a manager, particularly on the engineering side, you need to be as deep or deeper a technical expert than the people who work for you,” Mr. Bock says. “It turns out that that’s absolutely the least important thing. It’s important, but pales in comparison. Much more important is just making that connection and being accessible.”

John Shook over at the Lean Enterprise Institute has been talking about this for awhile now (most recently here). It seems so simple, doesn't it? Go see. Ask why. Show respect.

And yet.

Even assuming that your managerial team is staffed by well-meaning people and not those who think that Mein Kampf is the sine qua non for leadership lessons, this simple activity is surprisingly difficult, for two reasons.

First, finding time to "go see" is absurdly hard. Managers and executives spend so much time cooped up in conference rooms that you'd think they were mapping the human genome, not setting the sales price for a new candy bar. Spending six hours a day stifling hypnagogic jerks in a Powerpoint-induced stupor isn't exactly a solid foundation for a "go see" culture.

Second, we want to help. We want to solve problems. And, frankly, we like demonstrating our smarts. But in providing answers, we undermine people's intellectual development and corrode their self-esteem, just as surely as salt air rusts the supports on a bridge. People need to stretch themselves and solve their own problems -- with guidance and instruction, yes, but largely on their own. Otherwise they neither develop the capacity for learning nor the pride of accomplishment.

Your company may not be like Google (or even aspire to be like it), but good management transcends industries and idiosyncratic corporate culture. In lean terms, go see. Ask why. Show respect. In generic terms, make yourself available. Ask questions. Take an interest.

It's really not that hard. And hey, Google has quantitative proof that it works.

Strategy lessons from septuagenarian mall-walkers.

I used to work at Asics many years ago, where the strategic direction was to focus on the serious athletic enthusiast. We made wonderful, relatively high-priced (and high-margin) shoes that addressed their needs. Unfortunately, we also wanted to chase the sales volume that major retailers like JC Penney and Kohl’s could provide. That required us to make low-priced, low margin shoes. Our designers and developers were overburdened by the need to produce great shoes for both enthusiasts and for, well, septuagenarian mall-walkers in Miami. That bifurcation of work made it impossible to handle all their responsibilities. It also confused them as to what our business strategy actually was. As a result, we missed deadlines, made product development errors, and didn’t deliver to either market terribly well.

It’s not exactly a Copernican insight to say that your strategy should match (sorry, I should use the all-important buzzword, “align” with) your daily work. If it doesn’t, you run a serious risk of overwhelming yourself and your people with pointless activity that leads nowhere—except to feelings of overwhelm, missed deadlines, and unmet commitments.

As I’ve written about before, what often manifests itself as a time management “problem” is actually a mismatch between your strategic direction and what you’re asking people to work on. Because people are being pulled in two or three different directions, they can’t get any of their important (i.e., strategically aligned) work done. They’re busy serving pretzels when they should be piloting the plane.

Asics wasn’t the only company in this boat, of course. According to data in The Strategy Focused Organization, 80% of businesses fail to accomplish their strategies because of poor execution. 65% percent don’t align budget with strategy. Less than 35% of mid-manager activity contributes directly to the execution of business strategy, and less than 10% of front-line employees can articulate the institution’s strategic imperatives.

The numbers may not have been exactly right, but that sure describes Asics when I was there: a whole bunch of activity not tied to the company’s strategy.

Next time you see overwhelmed staff and unconsummated strategy, consider those “problems” as symptoms. The real problem—the root cause—may very well be strategy that’s neither clearly defined nor clearly articulated.

At Asics, we made the tough decision to adjust our product line to match our espoused strategy. We dropped the bottom end of our product line—saying goodbye to a sizable chunk of revenue and earning the rather considerable wrath of our sales reps. It sure hurt for awhile. But it freed up our designers and developers to do the right work, and in the long run it positioned us to build a truly sustainable business that leveraged our core strengths. Three years later we had regained all the lost sales and built a rock-solid position at the high-end of the market.

Who are your septuagenarian mall-walker customers? Bringing clarity at the top level leads to focused action at the front line. And that’s your job.

When good data go bad.

Bob Lutz, longtime car guy who held senior leadership positions at GM, BMW, Ford, and Chrysler, tells a story about the feedback that David Davis, an auto industry expert, received on a speech he delivered at GM:

Sometime in the early '80s, he'd accepted a gig as speaker to a large group of GM executives. The speech appeared to go well, and the applause felt genuine. David went home pleased and thought no more about it until he received the following letter:

Dear David:

You asked for feedback on your remarks at our recent conference. The data is just now available.

The rating scale was zero to ten with ten being "best." The five non-GM speakers had scores ranging from zero to ten. Yours ranged from three to ten. The five "outside speakers'" average scores ranged from 5.25 to 8.25.

Your average was 7.35.

Two speakers had higher scores than yours. Your standard deviation from the mean was 1.719 and ranked second among the variances, showing that most people had a similar opinion about your remarks.

I personally enjoyed your remarks very much. Your refreshing candor, coupled with your broad understanding of people, product, and the market, gave us exactly what we asked you for—"widened competitive awareness."

Thank you for your participation.

Absurd, right? Hopefully you didn’t snort the milk from your Cheerios out your nose as you read this. It’s a miracle that GM survived as long as it did with this kind of bureaucratic plaque clogging its organizational arteries.

But before you sprain your shoulder patting yourself on your own back for how much smarter you and your company are than big, stupid GM, think about the birth of that colossal dysfunction. At some point, a diligent, well-meaning employee—or her manager—probably wanted to help improve the quality of presentations. And he probably read in business school that what matters gets measured, so he created a simple 10-point rating scale.

[Stop here. Does your organization use one of these scales to evaluate speakers, or training sessions, or the selection of deli meats in the company cafeteria?]

It’s a short—very short—step from a 10-point rating of an individual event, to a comparison of multiple events. And an even shorter step from that comparison to a deeper, more thorough statistical analysis, replete with r²-values and more Greek letters than you’ve seen since your last purchase of foreign yogurt.

Organizations, and individuals within organizations, drive themselves to the land of absurdity all the time because they don’t ask the first question that lean thinkers focus on: What is customer value?

Learning that a speech was well received with a score of 7.35 out of 10 is valuable, important, and worthwhile for the customers (in this case, the speaker and the people who invited the speaker). The other data, not so much. The Outside Speaker Effective Analysis Group could have identified that value by simply (gasp!) asking the customers what information would be helpful for them. Hell, there probably wouldn’t even be a need for an Outside Speaker Effective Analysis Group in the first place had GM focused on this question.

In my mind, this is where traditional approaches to productivity go wrong. These approaches focus on improving the efficiency of producing these reports without considering whether or not they should be produced in the first place. The lean approach—first, identify the value—is, to me, a far better way to operate. And once you’ve identified the value, you can apply the lean tool of 5S to the information: sort the value from the waste, set it in order, systematize the delivery of the information, etc.

Of course, the waste from not focusing on customer value isn’t always as obvious as having an Outside Speaker Effective Analysis Group (The existence of a department like that is pretty much a dead giveaway.) Sometimes it’s subtler, like having the IT department generate dozens, or even hundreds, of reports per week, most of which go unread (as happened at one of my old employers).

Unless you continually evaluate your own generation of data, reports, and statistics, you run the risk of becoming the punch line to a joke and an object lesson in making good data go bad.

Tomorrow's Middle Management Challenge

Middle management has been gutted like a trout since the recession started in 2008. Unfortunately, the job growth we're seeing now isn't rebuilding this class of managers: most of the new positions are at the bottom of the pyramid, primarily minimum wage and temporary jobs. In fact, out of the 260,000 jobs created in April, 60,000 came from McDonald's. The evisceration of middle management, combined with a swelling front-line work force, means that span of control is increasing. The burden placed on the remaining managers -- already stretched thin by layoffs -- will only get heavier.

This situation will challenge their ability to work effectively and execute daily, weekly, and monthly plans. And as I wrote last week, this necessitates developing clear organizational strategy; limiting the number of priorities each person is responsible for; simplifying systems and processes; establishing manageable cultural expectations; and finely honing individual skills.

Is your organization ready for this? Are you setting your middle managers -- arguably the backbone of any organization -- up for failure or success?

The Iceberg that Sinks Performance

I'm back. The last few weeks have been hectic for me: I finished the manuscript for my book, A Factory of One, and submitted it to Productivity Press, who will be publishing it in November or December this year. Many thanks to all of you in the lean community who provided feedback, comments, stories, and challenges to my thinking along the way.

I've also spent a long week clarifying my thinking about how lean concepts and tools tie into time management and individual performance. In the spirit of visual management, I thought that drawing this relationship would be helpful. This is what I came up with:

Obviously, I'm no Rembrandt. But I think this iceberg does a pretty good job of expressing the actual situation that I've seen over the past few years when people complain that they're overwhelmed, or that their group needs time management training, or that they simply don't have enough time to do everything. Their complaint -- the visible symptom, the part of the iceberg above the water -- is not the problem at all. It's a symptom. The root cause -- the real problem -- lies below the waterline. And while it's invisible, it can -- and will -- sink the ship.

Time management "problems" are really just manifestations of dysfunction in one or more of the following areas: strategy; priorities; internal systems and processes; corporate cultural expectations; or individual skills. And this is why very often time management programs fail to improve the lives of the people who so diligently construct lists, who carefully discriminate between urgent and important, who pursue inbox zero, who never check email in the morning, etc. All those approaches -- as valuable as they are -- only address the problems in individual skills. They ignore the systemic issues that undermine individual performance. You can try not checking email till 11am, but if your boss reams you out for missing an urgent email she sent at 8:15am, you're probably not going to stick with that 11am plan for very long.

Carrying the iceberg metaphor a bit further, even if you do lop off the top -- even if you address the symptoms by adding staff, or bolstering a person's individual skills, the problem will just rise to the surface again. At some point you'll have to get to the root causes, or you'll end up sinking the ship.

Those BHAGs Will Kill You.

Jim Collins and Jerry Porras coined the term BHAG (“big, hairy, audacious goal”) in their article, Building Your Company's Vision, back in 1996. Since that time it’s become so much a part of the lingua franca of business that you practically can’t call yourself a leader if you haven’t set some BHAGs for your company, your team, or yourself. It’s fascinating, though, to see just how many BHAGs are entombed in 2” D-ring binders collecting dust on people’s bookshelves, with pretty much zero chance of actually being implemented. There are all kinds of reasons—you don’t have the time or money or people, for example, or first you have to take care of your boss’s stupid pet project, or you’re trapped in too many meetings—but regardless of the excuse, those BHAGs are joining flying pigs in the list of things you won’t see in this life.

Now Shawn Achor, author of The Happiness Advantage: The Seven Principles of Positive Psychology that Fuel Success and Performance at Work, explains why in an article in CIO:

Goals that are too big paralyze you. They literally shut off your brain, says Achor.

Here's what happens to your brain when faced with a daunting goal or project: The amygdala, the part of the brain that responds to fear and threats, hijacks the "thinker" part of the brain, the prefrontal cortex, says Achor. The amygdala steals resources from the prefrontal cortex, the creative part of the brain that makes decisions and sees possibilities.

"We watch this on a brain scan," he says. "The more the amygdala lights up, the less the prefrontal cortex does."

Breaking a big goal into smaller, more achievable goals prevents the fear part of your brain from hijacking your thinking cap and gives you victories.

Don’t get me wrong: I don’t think your lizard brain (in Seth Godin’s term) is the only reason that so many organizations fail to achieve their BHAGs. Corporate inertia has a thousand fathers—reading any Dilbert is proof of that. But the daunting prospect of a BHAG, combined with a lack of clarity of how, precisely, to get from here to there, often plays a role in paralysis at the individual level.

In companies that struggle to realize their BHAGs, it’s frequently because no one has taken the time to map out precisely what small steps are needed to reach them. When I worked at Asics years ago, we set ourselves a goal to dethrone Nike as the number one brand among running enthusiasts. (To put this goal in perspective: Nike was a $4 billion company at the time. Asics was $180 million.) Pretty ambitious stuff for us.

We laid out a careful roadmap to reach this goal: recasting our running product line by eliminating lower-end shoes and building our first legitimate high-end shoe; providing special sales and customer service support to specialty running stores; creating special sales programs; focusing our advertising on the core running enthusiast; and having the product marketing and development teams spend more time visiting specialty running retailers during the product development stage. No step by itself would have done the job, but the steady accretion of these moves eventually toppled Nike among these customers.

We didn’t talk about BHAGs then. (That was before Collins’ article, for one thing.) But we did achieve one, by rigorously implementing a series of small steps. And because we were dealing with small steps, we didn’t have to worry about illuminated amygdalae, or struggle to clarify the vacuous ambiguities that too often paralyze good people.

Why is (business) execution so hard?

Why is business execution so hard? Why are offices littered with the dessicated carcasses of strategic plans? Why can small companies work miracles with a tiny staff, but large organizations can't even get out of their own way? I don't have all the answers to those questions. But I do have some of the questions that you should be asking to get to the bottom of this issue. I just co-authored an article at Fast Company that might help you think about the problem more clearly. Read "Are You Excited About Your Business Execution & Collaboration?" here.

Reducing the communication burden.

Exhibit 1: Computer consulting firm Atos Origin announces that it’s abandoning email within three years. The CEO says that “information pollution” burdens managers with an unsustainable load of 5-20 hours of email per week (and climbing), so the company is shifting to social media in order to lighten the load. Exhibit 2: Google announces that for part of each day, new CEO Larry Page and other top executives will sit and work together in an area of the company's headquarters that's accessible to all employees. As part of the effort to recapture some of the nimbleness and entrepreneurial speed of a smaller company, he’s also encouraged employees to pitch him new product ideas in emails of 60 words or less.

I think we’re seeing a trend here. As organizations grow in size and complexity, the volume of communication (via email or meetings) explodes. But it’s becoming painfully obvious that the use of meetings and email just doesn’t scale very well. Past a certain point, the very tools that expedited communication at a smaller scale begin to throttle it. Organizations sclerose under the weight of their tools – too many emails, too many formal meetings. The attempt to communicate crowds out all other work -- even the value-creating work. Nothing gets done, and people bemoan the hulking, slow-moving battleship their company has become.

Certainly, there’s no panacea for this problem. Atos Origin has taken a technological approach, while Google has taken a physical approach. W.L. Gore has, since 1965, taken an entirely different path: no teams bigger than 200 people, so as to ensure that it will be free of stifling bureaucracy. I worked with one client that used to hold an unending string of formal (and time-consuming) status update meetings to ensure that product development teams would cross-pollinate ideas. They eventually gave up those meetings and just bought the teams pizza for lunch every other month. That worked better and eliminated the time suck of needless meetings.  Other firms are adopting visual management systems—often, low-tech whiteboards or corkboards—to communicate important information quickly and efficiently. Still other organizations are now using A3s to not only aid problem solving, but also to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of communication.

If the goal of lean is to provide the greatest value at the lowest possible cost, then there’s plenty of room for improvement in our communication. But the first step is to realize that the status quo just isn't good enough, that the way we communicate is needlessly costly and inefficient. Atos Origin, Google, and Gore are taking steps to eliminate that waste. What about you?

Chinese acrobats, Italian judges, and traffic jams.

You might want to reconsider saying yes to the latest project that your boss drops on your desk like a side of beef. Saying no might help you do a better -- or at least a faster -- job. Turns out that managing so many concurrent projects that you're the white-collar equivalent of a Chinese acrobat spinning dishes doesn't work so well.

A study of Italian judges who were randomly assigned cases and who had similar workloads found that those who worked on fewer cases at a time tended to complete more cases per quarter and took less time, on average, to complete a case. The authors concluded that

Individual speed of job completion cannot be explained only in terms of effort, ability and experience: work scheduling is a crucial “input” that cannot be omitted from the production function of individual workers.

The problem is that too much work-in-process causes a system -- whether machine or human -- to bog down.  In a phrase that will likely make Jim Benson and Tonianne deMaria Barry smile (or call their lawyers), the MIT Sloan Management Review draws the analogy that

excessive multitasking may result in the workflow equivalent of a traffic jam, where projects get backed up behind other projects much the way cars get stuck in traffic when there are too many on a highway at once.

If this phrasing rings a bell, it should: here's how Jim and Tonianne made this point visually (check out slide #7):

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the need to use your calendar as a tool to assess your daily production capacity, but not with the goal of filling up every minute of each day. Overloading the system writ small -- stacking up tasks during the day like 747s over LaGuardia -- is a bad idea. But overloading the system writ large -- scheduling too many legal cases or too many projects at one time -- is also a recipe for slow turnaround, frustrated customers, sub-optimal performance, and probably premature hair loss.

Remember, you're not a circus performer. Neither your boss nor your customers "ooh" and "ahh" because you're juggling 26 projects at once. They ooh and ahh when you deliver the goods quickly and with perfect quality.

What are 3 minutes good for?

You're on line (not online) at Starbucks for your iced skinny half-caf semi-grande caramel macchiato with soy whip on top. You've got about three minutes from where you are now to picking up your drink. What do you do? Pull out your Droid and check email, of course. After all, you've got three minutes. Why waste them? That's what the mobile internet is for.

But here's a suggestion: instead of filling your brain, why don't you try emptying it?

Let's face it. In the three minutes you've got to look at your inbox, you really can't get much of anything done. Sure you can skim some of your new email, and you might even be able to answer a couple of the easy ones. ("Yes." "No." "Chicken.") But for the most part, you're pre-ordaining yourself to seeing a bunch of subject lines or messages that you can't do anything about at that moment. Not when you've got to elbow your way from the pick-up counter to the Splenda dispenser.

That's a recipe for stress. You know you have to respond to a customer or to your boss, but you don't have the time right now. It's festering in your inbox. And you know it. Enjoy the macchiato, bub.

So, a modest proposal. Next time you have three extra minutes, instead of filling up your mind with stuff you can't do anything about, why not empty it? Take a notebook and write down stray ideas that have come to you, to-dos that you've forgotten about, questions you need to ask, whatever. Use the time to empty your head of the flotsam that washes up on the shores of your consciousness so that you can actually do something about them later.

Last week I wrote about why you need slack in a system. Filling every minute with work guarantees that your throughput will decrease. My modest proposal to empty your head, rather than fill it, is, I think, a related concept. Giving yourself more work (more email busy-ness) just because you have a few minutes of unbooked time in your day is utterly counter-productive.

Yes, this means that you'll have to stop mainlining the internet for just. Three. Minutes. And you may suffer from some withdrawal symptoms. But you're likely to become more relaxed. More focused. Less frazzled.

Now, enjoy your coffee.

It's about throughput, not capacity.

For a long time now, I've advocated "living in your calendar" in order to, among other reasons, understand your production capacity. Mapping out your work on a calendar helps prevent you from taking on more commitments than you have the time to handle. I was wrong. (Sort of.)

I just finished reading Jim Benson and Tonianne DeMaria's book, Personal Kanban, in which they point out that capacity is irrelevant. It's about throughput. No one -- not your boss, not your customers, not your family -- cares about how much capacity (hours) you have each day to work. They care about how quickly that work gets done, whether it's preparing next year's budget or cleaning the garage.

What's the lead time? What's the cycle time? How long do I have to wait? These are the key questions they want answered. (Well, only engineers ask the first two questions. But everyone asks the last one.) And those are the key questions you should be asking yourself. Not, "How much time do I have to work this week?", but "How can I get this work done most quickly?"

To shamelessly steal an analogy from Personal Kanban, no one cares what the capacity of a freeway is. In fact, it's completely irrelevant to you how many cars can be packed into one stretch of asphalt. What's really important is how long it takes to move down the road and whether you'll make it home in time to watch reruns of "Webster." And as any urban planner or operations manager will tell you, once your system exceeds 65-70% of maximum utilization, you're guaranteed to reduce throughput and increase cycle time.

This is why living in the calendar can be dangerous. There's a tendency to look at empty space on the calendar as something to be filled up with some ostensibly productive work. After all, if you're not filling those minutes and hours, then clearly you're either a lazy slacker or you're just terribly inefficient. With unemployment at 9%, who wants to be accused of either?

But how fast would traffic move if every square foot of the freeway was occupied by cars? How fast will your work move if every moment of your day is occupied by some pre-planned task or meeting? It wouldn't move at all. Just look at the cars around you at rush hour -- or look at the crap that's been piled up on your desk and your inbox for a few weeks. That tells you all you need to know about throughput.

So, by all means live in your calendar. Use it to assess your production capacity. But remember that 100% utilization of that capacity is ultimately self-defeating. You need slack in the system, because throughput is what counts. Not capacity.

Apparently, you're in the same boat as the White House.

Think your company's meetings suck? Well, it may be cold comfort, but you're in good company. Apparently the Bush White House's meetings stunk, too. This is an excerpt from Donald Rumsfeld's memoir -- an extended gripe session about Condeleeza Rice's NSC meetings.

I had other issues with [Condeleeza] Rice's management of the NSC process. Often meetings were not well organized. Frequent last-minute changes to the times of meetings and to the subject matter made it difficult for the participants to prepare, and even more difficult, with departments of their own to manage, to rearrange their full schedules. The NSC staff often was late in sending participants papers for meetings that set out the issues to be discussed.

At the conclusion of NSC meetings when decisions were taken, members of the NSC staff were theoretically supposed to write a summary of conclusions. When I saw them, they were often sketchy and didn't always fit with my recollections. Ever since the Iran-Contra scandal of the Reagan administration, NSC staffs have been sensitive to written notes and records that could implicate a president or his advisers. Rice and her colleagues seemed concerned about avoiding detailed records that others might exploit. This came at the expense of enabling the relevant executive agencies to know precisely what had been discussed and decided at the NSC meetings. Attendees from time to time left meetings with differing views of what was decided and what the next steps should be, which freed CIA, State, or Defense officials to go back and do what they thought best.

In one August 2002 memo to Rice, I raised this lack of resolution. "It sometimes happens that a matter mentioned at a meeting is said to have been 'decided' because it elicited no objection," I wrote. "That is not a good practice. Nothing should be deemed decided unless we expressly agree to decide it." Rice started putting a note at the bottom of draft decision memos: "If no objections are raised by a specific deadline, the memo will be considered approved by the principals." That, too, was impractical. [Secretary of State Colin] Powell and I were frequently traveling. I did not want to have others assume I agreed with something simply because I missed an arbitrary deadline.

Happy Thursday.

Going to the email gemba.

One of the core principles of lean is the notion of going to the gemba -- the place where the actual work is being done, so that you can see for yourself what the situation really is. This principle is particularly powerful when you're trying to solve problems. Why discuss a manufacturing failure while sitting in a conference room when you could go to the actual production line and watch the process? What's the sense in developing plans to spur sales of a new running shoe without first actually hanging out at the store and watching customers try it on? I thought about this principle when I read this article by Michael Schrage: To Improve Performance, Audit Your Employees' Emails. Schrage argues that

Because the rhythm and rhetoric of effective email exchange is a critical success factor in business performance, mismanagement of email may in fact be a symptom of other weaknesses in your organization.

Okay, okay, I know the title of the article sounds (more than) a bit Big Brother-ish. But Schrage isn't advocating that you actually monitor all the messages they read and write. That's insane. Rather, he suggests that you should make email an intrinsic part of performance reviews.

Ask people to present three sets of correspondence that demonstrate how well they've used the medium to manage successful outcomes. In other words, have them select examples illustrating their own email "best practices" for results. You, and they, will find this review and prioritization process revealing.

When you think about it, the concept actually makes sense. It's kind of like going to the "email gemba." It gives you a chance to deal with concrete communication examples, rather than vague abstractions, like, "Your direct reports say that your feedback and suggestions are confusing." Examining these self-selected emails may also reveal that the employee does a poor job of analysis, or excels at building teamwork.

To be sure, this tool is as compromised as any performance review by the delay between writing the email and the date you actually review it. But as a tool for seeing the actual work and helping to spur self-reflection and improvement, it's actually a pretty good idea.

Do you have a story to add to my book?

I'm writing a book for Productivity Press about how individuals can apply lean principles to improve their personal performance and productivity. Call it a cross between Getting Things Done and lean. I'm looking for stories of people -- and you don't have to be a Sixteen Sigma Master Ultraviolet Belt -- have used lean ideas to help them eliminate waste in their work and be more efficient.

The book is focused on improvement in the workplace, so I don't need stories about how you've brought 5S to your sock drawer, and now it takes you 16 seconds less to put away your laundry. Or how you've alphabetized the spice rack in your kitchen, so you immediately know that you've run out of curry powder.

But I do want to hear how you use checklists for yourself to reduce the likelihood of errors. Or how you've created standard work for your very non-routine job. Or how you're using visual controls (like Tim McMahon and Jon Miller have done with their personal kanbans) to improve your focus on value-creating activity. Or how you've applied 5S to the information you manage (as the nurses at Virginia Mason Medical Center did to reduce and simplify the number of forms they dealt with). Or how you've applied A3 thinking and 5-Whys to solve problems.

Your stories will either be woven into the text of the book, or featured as case studies in a sidebar. If you or your company would prefer to remain anonymous, that's no problem.

My time frame fairly short: I'd like to get your feedback before March 10.

Questions? Comments? Stories? Contact me here: dan [atsign] timebackmanagement [dot] com.

Thanks!

Unfortunately, the medium is the message.

I recently endured a turgid, three-hour meeting at a client's office. It stretched on for three hours, engorged by a seemingly endless series of PowerPoint slides, and it was all I (or anyone else) could do to hide the hypnic jerks that demonstrate, beyond a shadow of any doubt, that the meeting has gone on far too long. Marshall McLuhan's famous insight that "the medium is the message" wasn't targeted at PowerPoint presentations, but lord does it ever apply. His point was that

"we largely miss the structural changes in our affairs that are introduced subtly, or over long periods of time. Whenever we create a new innovation - be it an invention or a new idea - many of its properties are fairly obvious to us. We generally know what it will nominally do, or at least what it is intended to do, and what it might replace. We often know what its advantages and disadvantages might be. But it is also often the case that, after a long period of time and experience with the new innovation, we look backward and realize that there were some effects of which we were entirely unaware at the outset."

It's fascinating, really: when you give people a clicker and a PowerPoint deck, they stop talking to their audience and begin talking at them. Instead of communicating in a normal, information-rich manner, they begin to break their thoughts and ideas into micro-chunks that are so laborious and time-consuming to process that you might as well be dealing with a reading primer book. Except in this case, instead of getting "See Dick. See Jane. See Dick and Jane," you get something like this:

"We have a huge opportunity in front of us. But there are at least two serious competitive threats. First there is Acme Manufacturing. They have Wile E. Coyote as a well-known spokesman. He embodies determination. Second, there is Pillsbury. The doughboy has a high Q-Score. Plus, he's well-fed and has a great laugh."

Of course, there's a bullet point for each of these sentences, just in case you didn't get it -- and as a result, the meeting goes on and on and on. This meeting could easily have been cut by one-third had the presenters dispensed with the PowerPoint and instead simply talked to the audience.

Garr Reynolds writes extensively and compellingly about what he calls "naked" presentations -- presentations that are stripped of artifice, and that present ideas in a simple, powerful, and fresh manner. Naked communication is effective because the message can be communicated without the medium getting in the way. Naked communication also avoids the waste of unnecessary processing that PowerPoint almost always entails -- both in preparing the slides, and then in making the audience listen to you slowly read through them.

Do yourself a favor: make the message the message.

Building consensus? Try standard work.

I recently visited a company that's almost totally consensus-driven. Virtually every decision that influences other groups or functional silos is made through consensus; no one makes decisions by fiat. This is neither good nor bad -- the world is full of successful organizations that are run autocratically. People self-select to work in that kind of environment, and they accept the benefits (speed, autonomy, a sense of progress) as well as the drawbacks. For this company, it works: it's a vital part of their culture, and while it does slow them down a bit, when they actually decide to move, everyone is on board.

But here's the thing: gaining consensus is a grueling process. Meeting after meeting after meeting, usually ending ambiguously with no clear direction and no clear action items to move forward. A nearly unending string of email conversations that are frustrating at best and confusing at worst. Two steps forward and one step back.

What this company is crying out for is a process for building consensus. In fact, let's call it by its lean name: standardized work: a clear method by which a person can build a case for the initiative, communicate it to colleagues, incorporate their feedback, gain their support, and thereby move forward. Slowly, perhaps, but consistently.

Sound familiar? Maybe a bit like an A3?

In fact, I think the A3 is a perfect structure for building consensus. It replaces difficult-to-schedule, bloated meetings with shorter 1:1 meetings between stakeholders. It eliminates turgid Powerpoint decks with a concise story told on one page. And it structures a dialog so that people don't have an opportunity (or at least, less of an opportunity) to climb up on their favorite soapbox and air their grievances about the proposed initiative. In other words, the A3 can help mitigate the downside of consensus-building.

This company -- or any consensus-driven company, for that matter -- probably won't ever be the fastest to market. But once they have a decision, they can act with overwhelming discipline and coordination. And that spells success.

Decision Sclerosis

Recently I've been hearing companies lament that they're no longer as nimble as they once were. Decisions require more meetings and take longer. People at all levels are frustrated because they can't implement new ideas quickly. Even the simplest issues seem to require endless rounds of discussion and debate. Eventually, the organization is either outflanked in the market, or talented people leave to find opportunities with faster-moving companies. I see at least two causes creating this problem. First, as companies get bigger and there are more zeroes attached to their budgets, the risks inherent in any decision seem to grow. It's one thing to screw up the colors on a running shoe when it only sells 8,000 pairs; it's quite another to screw it up when it accounts for 800,000 pairs. You really want to be sure that the fluorescent colors of the 80s are back before plastering them all over your new high-end shoe, and as a result, you end up consulting with sales, marketing, manufacturing, account management, IT -- pretty much anyone who has even the most tangential relationship to the product.

The fallacy here is that compared to the scale of the business, that product or initiative isn't really any more significant or risky. It's not the absolute number that's important; it's the relative number. A $5000 investment decision for a start-up is just as meaningful and fraught with danger as a $5 million decision for GE -- maybe even more so, since GE can absorb that loss without going out of business.

Second, as organizations get bigger, consensus rather than action becomes the driving force. When companies are small, everyone either sees eye-to-eye (that's why they're there, after all), or they're at least comfortable with the inevitable interpersonal conflict. But as organizations grow, employee diversity grows, and management is increasingly sensitive to the need for harmony and agreement. People may have the titular authority to make decisions, but in reality they don't: they have to gain consensus before acting. If one group doesn't agree, nothing proceeds.

The problem here is that when no one has the power to make a decision, either nothing gets done, or everything gets pushed up the the CEO for a judgment. Neither option is acceptable. Decision-making authority must reside with individuals within an organization, not be diffuse within a group.

So what is to be done? Establishing clear decision-making criteria is an important start. Set thresholds based on money, say, or risk for involving other groups. Also, allow some decisions to be made by majority, rather than consensus. Neither of these are easy changes to make, but if you don't want to become a sclerotic, lumbering dinosaur, you'll have to pursue these changes at some point.

Getting back to your roots.

The Daily Show's John Oliver was interviewed on KQED's Forum a few weeks ago. Along with some very clever observations, he mentioned how he loves doing stand-up comedy and tries to perform a few times per year. He also mentioned that Jon Stewart -- despite the administrative and creative burdens of producing four shows per week, to say nothing of writing a book and organizing the Rally to Restore Sanity -- also goes on the road to do stand-up. (Again with Jon Stewart? What's with me and Jon Stewart?) And that's nothing compared to Jay Leno, who still does about 150 nights of stand-up each year on the road. All three of these comedians have their roots in stand-up. Going back on stage is a way to refresh themselves, challenge themselves, develop new ideas, and perfect their art.

If you're an engineer, or a doctor, or an architect, and you've moved out of your area of specialty into "management," are you still in touch with the techniques needed in your field? Or have you lost a feel for what it takes to get the job done?

In most organizations that I've seen, many of the managers and executives no longer have a feel for how long it takes or how difficult it is to do something. As a result, strategic initiatives from management are often divorced from the reality of actually getting the task done. This leads to unrealistic timelines, missed deadlines, overburden, stress, and frustration.

Getting out of the corner office and into the gemba on a regular basis means that you see and learn what it takes to accomplish daily work. You'll know how long it takes to perform preventative maintenance on a machine, how difficult it is to update a critical spreadsheet, or how time-consuming writing a proposal can be. And that knowledge will either lead you to help figure out how to do the job more quickly and easily, or, at the very least, will give you an appreciation for how the sausage is made.

Whether you want to call it getting back to your roots or simply going to the gemba, the act of seeing (and if possible, doing some of) the work will sharpen your skills and help you to execute on your strategy more effectively.