Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog Carnival: Annual Roundup 2011

I'm very proud to say that John Hunter kindly gave me the reins (for one day, at least) for the 2011 Management Improvement Blog Carnival Annual Roundup. What I’ve tried to do this year is select posts that gave me a new perspective about the world around me, and how improvements could be made to the current state.

First up: Shmula, the blog of Pete Abila.

Zipcar Customer Experience: Variability, Utilization, and Queueing is about as dry a blog post title as you could imagine. But what a fantastic analysis of the Zipcar system! Pete lucidly explores some of the major challenges stemming from variability and utilization facing an operation like Zipcar, and addresses the three kinds of buffers that the company needs to make it work. I’m not a process engineer, but even for me, this was one of the coolest posts of the year.

Death by a Thousand Cuts highlights how organizations begin their journey toward failure through many small decisions made over a long period of time—which is, incidentally, also how culture is created.

Pete provides a nice report on a presentation by Mark Zuckerberg in Mark Zuckerberg: I’d Rather Them Believe the Company Was Broken. If you only know of Zuckerberg from the movie, The Social Network, this is a refreshingly different view. He comes across as a modest guy who’s fully aware that his team deserves the credit for making the company successful.

Finally, check out Leader Standard Work. This concept is garnering more visibility of late. Pete provides a concrete description and approach to implementing it yourself. You’ll inevitably customize it to your specific needs, but this is a great place to start.

Next up: Daily Kaizen, the blog of the improvement folks at Group Health Cooperative.

Consultant Space Kaizen: Practicing What We Teach is a beautiful—and detailed—example of eating one’s dog food. The team describes how they applied all the tools they teach to their own workspace in order to reduce their resource consumption and model the process for the future.

Connecting to the “Why” is an excellent reminder that improvement for its own sake is pointless, uninspiring, and doomed to failure. Successful, sustainable change must be linked to the “why.” If you don’t know the ultimate purpose, then your improvement is a house built on sand.

Learning to Offer Questions, Not Solutions reminds us that change management and improvement is best led by questions, not solutions—and that those questions need to engage both the head and the heart.

The “D” Word tackles the under-appreciated trait of discipline, and explores how it’s “the fuel that drives the lean engine.”

Finally, Peter Drucker’s Management Philosophy blog. Sadly, it’s not written by Drucker himself. But the author, Jorrian Gelink, does a wonderful job of channeling Drucker’s insights, connecting them to current events, and reminding us how relevant his ideas are to both lean and management excellence.

In a business world increasingly engorged with email, text messages, and IMs, Effective Communication—The Speed, Quality and Cost Triangle, higlights the very significant tradeoff between ease and quality in our communications. Read this before you send your next email.

Keeping the focus on communication, Effective Communication – Execution and Results in an Organization provides three key points to remember when communicating within an organization. Attending to these points is a good way to reduce waste and improve the quality of your communication.

How do you build trust as a leader? The Three Cores to Building Leadership Trust eloquently explains that trust relies upon execution, people development, and honesty. The are simple, but incredibly powerful truths that are too often forgotten in the drive to get through one’s email.

If you liked this curated list of links, check out the other 2011 Annual Review posts here, and the regular Management Improvement Carnival here.

The C-Suite Double Standard

When I was at the AME Conference in Dallas a couple of months ago, I started noticing what I call the C-suite double standard: leaders and executives who are ferocious about improving manufacturing processes and eliminating waste, but who passively accept waste in their office operations and individual work. Do any of these hit home?

On the shop floor: Looking for a tool is waste. In the C-suite: looking for information is part of work. We’d never accept a skilled machinist spending time looking for tools. That’s classic waste, and we’d embark on a 5S program to ensure that the worker has the tools he needs, when he needs them, in order to do his job. In the C-suite though? Who hasn’t spent 2, 3, 5 minutes—or more— looking for important information in piles of paper or long email strings? If we’re so passionate about making sure that the machinist can deploy his skills without wasting time, why aren’t we equally passionate about making sure that the VP of Marketing can do the same?

On the shop floor: Do everything possible to ensure that people can work without interruption. In the C-suite: Interruptions are so commonplace that they’re hardly even recognized. A friend of mine tells me that Toyota has andon cords hanging everywhere so that workers can get help when there’s a problem, but the company does everything possible to protect the workers from interruptions. He says it’s remarkable how hard the company works to shield them from anything that would break their focus. But between open door policies and a lack of forethought, people in the office suffer an interruption every 11 minutes, with serious consequences for the quality and efficiency of their work.

On the shop floor: Standard work is the foundation for improvement. In the C-suite: Standard what? Production workers continually create and refine their standard work processes to improve quality and safety, reduce variation, and lay the foundation for improvement. C-suite workers run from fire to fire, have no cadence or structure to their day/week, and allow themselves to be driven by external forces—often at the expense of getting to the gemba, helping people develop problem solving skills, and focusing on strategic issues.

On the shop floor: Everyone is on the lookout for the waste of waiting. In the C-suite: On-time meetings are a joke. If materials, parts, and supplies aren’t delivered on time and workers are forced to wait, the team is expected to do a 5 Why (or A3) analysis to understand and eliminate the problem. Everyone understands the waste of waiting, and uses that problem as an opportunity to improve. Now, consider meetings in the C-suite. People wait all the time for the whole group to arrive and meetings to start. This colossal waste of time and resources is viewed as natural and inevitable as a John Boehner crying, or the Cubs missing the playoffs. Even worse: executives actively create this condition by scheduling meetings back-to-back without a break to travel between rooms/floors/buildings—and unless they’ve unlocked the secret to teleportation, that’s a recipe for having people sitting around a conference table playing Angry Birds on their phones.

On the shop floor: Machines and production lines have a finite capacity. Avoid over-burdening. In the C-suite: "I need this tomorrow morning!" People accept that machines have finite production capacity. You can’t get 100 parts an hour out of a machine that can only make 70 parts per hour. Even trying to operate an assembly line at 100% capacity guarantees a longer cycle time, due to the problems that inevitably occur. But in the C-suite, there’s no hesitation to overload people: ridiculous deadlines (“I need this in an hour!”) due to lousy planning and scheduling are rife. Sometimes there are emergencies, of course, but asking people to operate this way is a recipe for slower response in the long run.

On the shop floor: Improving our processes is essential to our long-term success. In the C-suite: This is the way it's always been done. Annual performance reviews. Enough said.

End the CEO (as we know it).

It's great to be king, isn't it? You've made it to the corner office (or the C-suite, or the VP level, or whatever position carries clout in your world), and you're feeling pretty good. Minions follow your instructions. You offload some of the scut work you've been saddled with for years. People create PowerPoint presentation for you, instead of you agonizing over Helvetica vs. Arial when creating them for others. Maybe you even have an executive dining room.

Vineet Nayar, the CEO of HCL Technologies in India, disagrees. He wants to get rid of the CEO.

Of course, as he says, he doesn't want to kick him or her out the door. He means that we should move beyond the quaint notion that the CEO should be the supreme corporate leader. As Nayar points out, in the traditional way of thinking, the CEO is expected to play the following roles: Creator of Value; Answer Machine; Strategy Wizard; Approval Granter; and Performance Reviewer/Mentor.

But in the increasingly complex and fast-moving market, when companies span the globe, it's unreasonable -- absurd, really -- to expect that one person can fulfill all these roles, no matter how talented, skilled, and experienced. More significantly, trying to do so has a toxic effect on the company:

At HCL I came to realize that, first, I could not play any of those roles and, second, none of them creates very much value for the company or the company's customers. On the contrary, the supreme CEO robs employees of initiative, stifles their passion, and inhibits their ability to do their jobs well. If employees do not have to find their own answers, develop their own strategies, formulate their own plans, and assess their own performance, what are they? Automatons.

His long-term goal is to transfer the responsibility for change to employees. By allowing the people who really create customer value -- the employees -- to drive improvement, Nayar realizes that the company can become a nimbler, faster-moving organization that reduces the amount of non-valued added activities.

Nayar goes on to list several specific steps HCL has taken to move in this direction: peers review annual business plans, making them higher quality and more easily executed. An intranet portal allows workers to ask and answer each others' questions, creating faster learning cycles and spreading ideas widely. Employee reviews and feedback are visible to everyone, helping people improve more quickly. Etc.

Now, these may not be the right tools and tactics for you and your firm. But the key idea -- that the supreme leader (whether CEO, VP, Managing Director, whatever) by definition robs employees of initiative, stifles their passion, and inhibits their ability to do their jobs well -- is worth attending to. This idea is the power behind the A3 and A3 thinking. The A3 provides a structured method for transferring responsibility and authority to the people actually doing the work of the company. In so doing, it fosters initiative, creativity, and autonomy throughout the organization. It leads to continuous improvement and greater engagement.

It also lightens your burden. After all, why should you have to be the smartest guy in the room when you've got dozens/hundreds/thousands of talented, smart, hardworking people who can help shoulder the load?

So think about abdicating the throne. See if you can become a CEO who is willing to admit he doesn't know very much, answers as few questions as possible, and is always asking for help.

Do you really want to put Steve Jobs on Mt. Olympus?

I come to bury Steve Jobs, not to praise him. Don't get me wrong: I love Apple products. I use them daily, and they’ve made my life easier, better, and more fun. Steve Jobs’ business accomplishments are truly remarkable, and will surely be taught in business schools for decades. The encomiums to him in the newspapers are fitting tribute to his life and career.

Nevertheless, for the business world to lionize him so fervently creates two significant risks for other leaders.

The first risk is that we encourage CEOs to act like him—a dangerous proposition when you’re talking about a charismatic leader. Yes, Steve was visionary, unswervingly committed to perfection, and elicited Herculean efforts from his employees. Let’s not forget, though, that he was also a micromanager and a bully. He had the final decision not just on his all-important products, but on less essential issues, such as the design of the shuttle buses that took employees to and from San Francisco, and on what food would be served in the cafeteria. He humiliated employees in public and abused those who didn’t meet his standards. He once told an engineer that he while he had “baked a really lovely cake,” he “frosted it in dog sh*t.” Edward Eigerman, a former Apple engineer, said that more than anywhere else he had worked before or since, there’s real concern about being fired.

Steve could get away with that kind of behavior both because of his charisma and because Apples was his company, with his DNA inextricably implanted in the culture. That’s not true for most CEOs, however, no matter how accomplished they are: not Sam Palmisano at IBM, not Andrea Jung at Avon, not Jim Sinegal at Costco. My guess is that if they dove as deeply into the details of every facet of the company—if Sinegal had made the decision about the exact pantone of the signs in the food court—he’d end up with a bunch of demoralized people who grumbled about absurd micromanagement. And what about the current belief that innovation depends upon the ability to “fail fast”? Good luck nurturing a creative environment when failure is stigmatized and your staff lives in fear of getting fired. Finally, consider you don’t have to be a bully to be an effective leader: as Jim Collins pointed out in Built To Last, a “humble,” “modest,” “unobtrusive and soft-spoken” gentleman named William McKnight guided 3M for 52 years and turned the company into a colossus.

The second risk is subtler, but equally pernicious. By canonizing Steve, we make ourselves feel inescapably inferior, and diminish our own ability to achieve greatness. I call this the “founding fathers” complex. Elevating the founding fathers of the United States above the status of ordinary men creates the belief that we can’t attain the same grand and noble heights that they did. We end up bemoaning the feckless, unworthy politicians that our era produces, and despair of producing leaders equal to the challenge of our times. (Although, given the failure of the latest super-committee to agree on a deficit cutting strategy, I’m beginning to wonder.)

Yet the founding fathers were human, no more nor less than we. John Adams could be petulant, petty, and prone to holding grudges. Thomas Jefferson kept slaves, had a mistress, and while serving as Adams’ vice president, did everything he could to—secretly—undermine his boss. These were great men to be sure, but they had their own faults and weaknesses that they strove mightily to overcome. If we ignore those flaws and accord them superhuman abilities, then we doom ourselves to permanently diminished expectations, cripple our faith in our own capabilities, and needlessly cap our potential accomplishments.

Steve Jobs was a consummate salesman, a remarkable CEO, and a true visionary. By all means, celebrate his accomplishments. Marvel at his performance. But he wasn’t a god. Elevating him to Mt. Olympus does both him and us a disservice.

The personal kanban: not just "vocabulary engineering."

Michel Baudin, who most assuredly has forgotten more about lean than I’ll ever know, wrote recently about the “personal kanban” and concluded that it was much ado about nothing on three counts. First, Baudin argued that it was essentially old wine in new bottles—the Scancard System of the 1980s did much the same thing. Second, its lack of portability makes it impractical to use in meetings or with a network. Finally, it only displays the current status of a project, rather than the whole history. (In a felicitous turn of phrase of which I’m really jealous, he also   called it “a feat of vocabulary engineering,” leveraging the buzz around an aspect of Toyota’s production system to repackage ideas that have little to do with it.) Having just written about value of a personal kanban in my forthcoming book (A Factory of One, available in mid-December), and having seen many individuals apply the concept successfully, I must respectfully disagree.

He’s absolutely right that for a long time now people have known they should limit their work in process. However, the unhappy fact is, they don’t—and it’s not just because supervisors insist on piling more and more projects onto hapless subordinates, like Egyptian slave masters in The 10 Commandments. In large part, people don’t limit their WIP because they have no idea themselves of how much work they have on their plates. Particularly in a modern office, most of their work is invisible, residing in electronic files, email messages, and all manner of stray bits and bytes on their computers. As a result, people are terrible managers of their own workload, and they reflexively accept new responsibilities and commitments when they’d be far better off saying “no.” The personal kanban, like the Scancard before it, does a wonderful job of making that work visible and helping people better manage their work.

Baudin’s comment about the lack of portability is valid, but in my opinion hardly disqualifies the personal kanban as a valuable tool. Much of a knowledge worker’s time is spent in the office, not a conference room, and is therefore accessible to him or her when needed. And besides, if the kanban in the office encourages people to have their meetings where the work is done, and not in the conference room, so much the better.

His final point about the kanban only displaying the current state of a project can be easily fixed. Beneath the “Backlog/Doing/Done” section, you can map out the key steps of the entire project/value stream, as you can see in the photo below.

This section provides the context for each task—both the history and the future requirements, the latter of which the Ybry Chart can’t do.

The last thing I’ll say in defense of the “personal kanban” is this: the purpose of a kanban in a factory setting is to control WIP and pull resources forward at the right time. The personal kanban does precisely that—except that the resources in this case are the person’s time and attention. If the whiteboard and sticky note combination of the personal kanban succeeds in this goal, then I think it deserves the name kanban.

So, Michel, while the personal kanban may not be a breakthrough on the order of, say, Copernicus’s insights on planetary alignment, I maintain that it’s a valuable, capable, and flexible tool to improve knowledge worker production.

Why your meetings always suck (and what to do about it).

It’s not just your meetings that suck. I spent a week at the AME Conference in Dallas talking to continuous improvement/performance excellence/lean transformation leaders at over a dozen companies, and every one of them said their meetings suck. Mind you, these are people who are specially trained to improve quality, lower costs, and reduce waste. And yet, by their own admission, their meetings are the epitome of waste: waste of time, waste of human potential, waste of space, waste of energy.

If their meetings suck, what chance do you have?

Why are crappy meetings so pervasive? Why is it so hard to focus on value when you’re working in a group? I mean, it’s not like there’s any big secret to running a good meeting: Robert’s Rules of Order and its variants have been around practically since the Mesozoic era, and they all say the same thing. Start on time. End on time. Have an agenda. Assign a notekeeper. Etc. And yet, meetings still end up in New Yorker cartoons and Dilbert comic strips—and for good reason. They suck.

Jim Womack and Dan Jones introduced the concept of Purpose, Process, and People. I’d like to suggest that these three Ps could be applied equally well to meetings. Instead of getting bogged down in Robert’s Rules, consider:

What’s the purpose of the meeting? Can you explain it clearly, concisely, and compellingly? If not, you’re heading down the road towards a lampoon-worthy, soul-sucking time waste, because you don’t really know why you’re meeting. If all you have is a topic (“We need to talk about Project Applesauce”) without a clear goal, don’t have the meeting. I’ll go even further: if someone calls you into a meeting and it’s clear there’s no clear purpose, gracefully excuse yourself, leave, and go do something productive.

What’s the process you’ll use in the meeting to ensure that each step of the meeting is, in Womack’s and Jones’s words, valuable, capable, and adequate? Do you have the right information to fulfill the purpose of the meeting? Do you have the right format (large group free-form discussion, small-team problem solving, short stand-up meeting at the gemba, quick update around a visual management board, a series of one-on-one conversations, etc.) to accomplish the purpose? In my experience, the process is often misaligned with or inappropriate to the goal.

Who are the people you’ll have in the meeting? Who needs to be there? And the corollary: who doesn’t need to attend? These questions aren’t as simple to answer as they may seem. You’ll need to have many small discussions before the actual meting to determine who should be there. Think about all the times you’ve been halfway through a meeting and someone says, “Oh, we really need to have Susan’s input on that. She knows all about that alloy, and I’ll defer to her on the issue.” Think about all the times you’ve sat in a meeting and wondered, “Why the hell am I here? I could be drafting the marketing plan for our new line of Ibex fur mukluks.”

I’m not suggesting that making your meetings all value and no waste is any easier than making your production line of jet turbine blades, or the cardiac catheterization process at your hospital all value and no waste. But the irony of continuous improvement champions focusing all their effort on a product production line and none on their own knowledge production line is almost laughable. After all, if their days are so waste-ridden that they don’t have time to get rid of waste in the larger organization, how are they ever going to achieve their goals?

More to the point: if you're leading a company, a division, or a team, and you passively tolerate, accept, and contribute to a culture of pointless, bloated, and ineffective meetings, then you're unlikely to make the progress you desire.

Remember: the only truly non-renewable resource is time. Don’t squander it as though it’s limitless—and free.

How Broken Promises Can Benefit Your Company

My latest article for Amex OPEN Forum just posted. Here's how it begins: The world is rife with maxims that remind us to never to break our commitments: “Be a man of your word,” “Your word is your bond,” “Under-promise and over-deliver.” But while this might be good advice when dealing with your spouse (or the IRS), it’s a bad idea when it comes to your business. Broken promises provide powerful opportunities to identify and eliminate problems that keep your business from improving and growing.

Read the entire article on the Amex OPEN Forum website here.

Mise-en-place, 5S, and why tape outlines on the desk are stupid.

Karen Martin, Mark Graban, and Kevin Meyer have been tweeting over the past couple of days about a hospital in New Mexico that -- sadly -- is putting tape outlines on people's desks in a misguided implementation of 5S. This nonsense has enraged the nurses who understandably see this as irrelevant to their ability to get their jobs done. Confusion about how to apply 5S in a knowledge environment is rampant, as these stories of "lean as misguidedly executed" (LAME) attest. I believe that's because people focus on the easily visible, outward trappings of 5S without understanding the purpose of the tool.

In his book Kitchen Confidential, chef Anthony Bourdain explains the function of a cook's mise-en-place. His description gets at the heart of 5S better than anything I've read by any lean consultant:

Mise-en-place is the religion of all good line cooks. Do not f**k with a line cook’s “meez”—meaning their set-up, their carefully arranged supplies of sea salt, rough-cracked pepper, softened butter, cooking oil, wine, back-ups and so on. As a cook, your station, and its condition, its state of readiness, is an extension of your nervous system—and it is profoundly upsetting if another cook or, God forbid, a waiter—disturbs your precisely and carefully laid-out system. The universe is in order when your station is set up the way you like it: you know where to find everything with your eyes closed, everything you need during the course of the shift is at the ready at arm’s reach, your defenses are deployed. If you let your mise-en-place run down, get dirty and disorganized, you’ll quickly find yourself spinning in place and calling for back-up. I worked with a chef who used to step behind the line to a dirty cook’s station in the middle of the rush to explain why the offending cook was falling behind. He’d press his palm down on the cutting board, which was littered with peppercorns, spattered sauce, bits of parsley, breadcrumbs and the usual flotsam and jetsam that accumulates quickly on a station if not constantly wiped away with a moist side-towel. “You see this” he’d inquire, raising his palm so that the cook could see the bits of dirt and scraps sticking to his chef’s palm, “That’s what the inside of your head looks like now. Work clean!”

Want to know what 5S is and why it's important, without resorting to all those difficult-to-pronounce Japanese words? It’s mise-en-place. (Of course, I’ve just substituted French for Japanese, so this may not be an improvement.)

Doctors and nurses (mostly) embrace 5S when it comes to the tools of their care-giving trade. Take a look at any surgical tray, and you'll see that's true. Physical organization -- 5S -- is essential to being able to deliver care smoothly and efficiently. Supply closets are perfect examples of places that benefit from 5S. But organizing the stapler and 3-hole punch on the desk? That's asinine and pointless. No one needs to find the stapler with their eyes closed.

When it comes to the office environment, it's more important to apply 5S to the information people manage, not the tools they use. The issue isn't where the stapler sits; the issue is where critical information resides. Can people find it quickly and easily on the file server -- or on medical forms?

Making information flow faster, with less waste and greater clarity -- that's how 5S should be applied in the knowledge workplace. The nurses at the Covenant Health System in Texas understand that. They didn't mess around putting tape outlines on their desks. But they did reduce the amount of time they spent filling out paperwork by 50% by simplifying, standardizing, redesigning, and eliminating all their forms. That's 5S intelligently applied to a real problem.

Tape outlines around the stapler? Diktats concerning the maximum number of pens a person can have at his desk? Please. They're not going to get rid of the mental equivalent of peppercorns, spattered sauce, bits of parsley, and breadcrumbs that litter the brains of knowledge workers.

The gemba for a knowledge worker is inside her head. Let's make sure that the information that goes in there is well-organized and easily accessible.

5S in Three Bullets

A few months ago, Mark Rosenthal boiled 5S down to three key points:

• You have everything you need.
• You need everything you have.
• You can see everything clearly belongs where it is.

There's a lot to be said for the simplicity of this description. But how does it apply to knowledge workers?

Too often, 5S is transplanted -- not translated -- from the factory floor to the office cube without considering its purpose. That leads to ridiculous situations such as the one at Kyocera America, where there's an internal 5S cop yelling at people for putting sweaters on the backs of their chairs.

Knowledge workers traffic in information, not materials. So for a knowledge worker, Mark's points can be rewritten as:

• You have all the information you need.
• You need all the information you have.
• You can see  that all the information clearly belongs where it is.

From this perspective, it doesn't matter where you hang your sweater, put your stapler, or keep the picture of your dog. None of those affect your ability to access the information you need to do your job. As long as your electronic and paper filing systems allow you to quickly and easily retrieve information, you're okay.

That doesn't obviate the need for visible management tools. Particularly because the information you receive is increasingly electronic, it's difficult to assess at a glance what you have. When you look at a product development spec package, a legal brief, or a pile of papers, can you easily tell whether you have all the required information? If not, some sort of signaling system -- a kanban, checklist, post-it notes, etc. -- is needed.

Mark goes on to say:

As the work is done, the moment someone discovers something else is needed, THAT is the time to deal with the issue. Ask, “Is this something we should need in the normal course of the work?”

If so, then you learned something that you didn’t know or didn’t remember when you first organized the area. Add that item, find a place for it, and establish a visual control. Right now.

If not, then “Why did we need it this time?” What broke the normal pattern of work? This is where 5S breaks down – when we don’t discriminate between something that is needed in the normal course of work, and something that is needed as an exception.

This process is just as important for the knowledge worker. When we don't ask these questions, we end up buried in piles of papers, in stray files on the computer desktop, and random emails that have been ambiguously flagged for "followup," even though the flags don't really tell us anything about the process. Once all those bits of information start to accumulate, we no longer have just what we need and need just what we have. That leads to errors, rework, waiting, and all kinds of wasted effort.

Think about it.

The siren song of technology.

My friend Kyle works at an insurance adjuster that's the corporate equivalent of Andy Griffith's Mayberry, RFD. According to Kyle, everyone is just so nice to each other that they can hardly get any work done. Every birthday, anniversary, child's graduation, promotion, deal closing, hand-knit scarf, and new haircut gets noticed and praised. Usually through a blast email that everyone in the company receives. The company is awash in messages providing feedback, coaching, and thank-yous, and Kyle says it's a small miracle anyone can find important customer communication amidst the deluge. The CEO is very proud of the tight-knit culture he's created, but recently he noticed the downside: people were spending inordinate amounts of time reading and writing emails of questionable utility, while responsiveness to internal and external customers declined. So he bought and installed Rypple, a "social performance platform built for teams to share goals, recognize great work, and help each other improve" (according to their website). Surely, he thought, this would keep people from spending so much time on email. And it did. People's email usage plummeted.

Unfortunately, they put all that time into communicating via the Rypple interface, so there was no improvement in customer service.

The CEO fell into one of the oldest traps in the book: he assumed that technology would be a panacea for his problems. Just slap some fancy hardware or software on the problem, and it will go away. But as Kevin Meyer & Bill Waddell have noted many times before, and as Mark Graban pointed out recently, automation is seldom the answer. Add technology to a broken process and all you get is a faster and more expensive broken process.

In the case of Kyle's company, the culture valued and promoted that kind of close interaction. In fact, the quantity of "Attaboy! Nice job!" emails was part of the annual performance review! It's no wonder that installing Rypple had zero effect on time spent e-schmoozing.

Kyle has gotten permission to disable Rypple for his team of adjusters, and now he's trying to revamp the criteria used in performance evaluations. He's not trying to turn the company into a Dickensian sweatshop, but he is trying to get the underlying process right -- in this case, the measures used to track real performance as valued by the customer.

Next time you consider buying a fancy new toy, remember: buying software for your process problem is like buying a bigger pair of pants for your weight problem.

Cardboard boxes and common sense.

“Sorry about the mess. These are just the cases that came in the last couple of days. The big pile over there? That’s the research project that I’m supposed to be working on.” Megan sighed despairingly and waved her arm, indicating piles of unread slides stacked like ziggurats on every flat surface in her office. Megan is an experienced, talented, and very hard working pathologist at a major cancer hospital. Her days are spent with her face pressed up against the viewer of her microscope, examining tissue samples for evidence of malignant tumors. I was visiting her because she seemed to have lost her ability to read cases and turn them around rapidly for the referring physicians. Megan was caught in a bind: she was feeling pressure from her boss to work faster, but she was worried that reading the slides more quickly would increase the risk that she’d incorrectly diagnose a case.

Megan went on: “I used to be able to read more cases during regular business hours, but now I have to come in earlier and stay later just to keep up—and obviously, I’m not doing a particularly good job of that. Although to be fair, no one else in the department is either. We’re all feeling swamped.”

Frankly, I wasn’t sure I’d be able to help her. I’m neither a pathologist nor a doctor. (Which, since I’m Jewish, always made my parents very sad. They weren’t exactly cheering when I took a class in the Semiotics & Hermeneutics of the Mystery Story.) I know as much about interpreting tissue samples as I do about designing sub-atomic experiments for the Large Hadron Collider.

So I spent a couple of days watching Megan work. And what I saw reminded me of what Keith Poirier wrote on Jamie Flinchbaugh’s blog recently:

Lean is nothing more than the re-introduction of ‘common sense’ into our daily work lives.

I don’t know anything about interpreting biopsies. But it turns out I didn’t need to. What I saw was a doctor who seldom got more than eight uninterrupted minutes to analyze a slide. Practically every time she nestled up against her microscope, someone came into her office and interrupted her. Following each interruption, she’d turn back to the slide, and start re-reading it from the beginning to ensure that she didn’t miss anything. As a result, reading each case took three, four, five times as long as it needed to.

What’s worse, in the two days I watched her, none of the interruptions were urgent. In fact, the most common interruption was from technicians bringing her new slides to read. They’d walk in, say hello, tell her that they have new cases, and she’d tell them to just put them on the corner of her desk.

My solution? Put a cardboard box outside of her door with a sign telling the technicians to put all new cases inside it. Megan created a fixed schedule to pick up any cases every 90 minutes. Fancy, right? She cut interruptions by two-thirds, and cut the time it took her to process her cases by 40%.

We didn’t talk about takt time, pull systems, or kanbans. As Keith Poirier wrote, it’s just common sense. You’re not going to be able to do your work—whether that’s reading pathology slides, writing ad copy, calculating force vectors on bridges, or writing a patent application—quickly or efficiently if you’re always being interrupted. So we cut down the interruptions to help her do her work a bit better.

There’s still plenty of work to be done in that hospital’s pathology department. There’s waste all over the place. But by focusing on simple, small, and rapid improvements, we made a big difference in Megan’s performance—and her happiness.

Inspiration Doesn’t Come From A Box of Cocoa Puffs

I’ll slit my wrists if I have to read one more fawning article about Google’s eleven gourmet cafeterias, on-site car washes, and dry cleaning service. Or Pixar’s cereal bar (more than 20 varieties!), its lap pool, and the jungle-like cabanas and tree houses that serve as offices. Or Nike’s Olympic-size swimming pools and hair salon. Or Zappos’ life coaches. Each of these firms was recently touted in an Amex OPEN Forum article about corporate environments that help employees thrive. And while these workplaces are indeed cool, hip, and in many respects enviable, the constant attention they receive do businesspeople everywhere a disservice. We’re deceived into thinking that we have to ply employees with free food and yoga classes if we want to create inspiring workplaces—and too bad if you work in a steel mill, or a mall-based mass merchandiser, or a donut shop, where it’s a bit more difficult to fit an Olympic-sized swimming pool.

The simple truth is that while those perks are certainly pleasant, no amount of Cocoa Puffs will make up for abusive bosses, interdepartmental bickering, chronically unrealistic deadlines, or out of touch management.

In his bestselling book, Drive, Daniel Pink argues that the traditional carrot-and-stick approach to motivation doesn’t work for knowledge workers engaged in complex tasks. Intrinsic motivation, he suggests, is unleashed by environments that address three fundamental human desires:

• autonomy (control over one’s work)
• mastery (getting better at what one does)
• purpose (being a part of something bigger)

Taking a page from Dan’s book, I propose that a truly inspiring workplace is a work environment that enables the fulfillment of these three needs —and it doesn’t require a yoga studio or a nail salon.

Consider these three examples:

Autonomy: Long before Google’s vaunted “20% time,” in which engineers get to spend 20% of their time working on their own projects, 3M gave its technical employees 15% time to do the same thing. The company combined it with “Genesis Grants,” an internal venture capital fund that distributes money to researchers to develop prototypes, and technology sharing awards, given to those who develop and share new technologies across the firm.

Mastery: Matthew May’s book, In Pursuit of Elegance, describes how FAVI, a French designer and manufacturer of copper alloy automotive components, enables employees to strive for mastery at work. FAVI has no central departments—no HR group, no purchasing team, no organizational chart. Instead, the company is organized into teams that essentially work for an individual customer such as Fiat, Volvo, or Volkswagen. In this arrangement, equipment, tooling, workspace, and process design all rest in the hands of the front line workers, who are free (and encouraged) to experiment and innovate. And they do, often working late into the night to solve complex problems.

Purpose: Barry-Wehmiller, a $1 billion producer of capital equipment, has recorded 21 consecutive years of growth at 19 percent a year. The CEO explains that the company’s adaptation of Toyota’s lean manufacturing philosophy—the Living Legacy of Leadership program—isn’t used as a tool for profitability, but rather as a technique to engage people’s heads and hearts. He states that the company exists to inspire people to embrace their gifts and feel a sense of fulfillment in the process. As one worker says, “we are going to change the world one job at a time.”

In fact, if you look around, you’ll find plenty of companies that have created inspiring workplaces without fancy trappings. WL Gore has no titles, self-managed teams, and a deep-seated belief in the individual to do what’s right for the company. Atlassian software has “FedEx Days” every quarter, in which programmers work around the clock on any project they wish, and then compete to have it included in the company’s ongoing products. Ericsson uses a system for collaborative idea management called “IdeaBoxes” to allow employee creativity to flourish in the service of continuous improvement.

So let’s get past the gee-whiz, superficial trappings of inspiring workplaces. Sure, the free donuts and yoga classes are nice. But providing an environment that unleashes employees’ intrinsic motivation is far better. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Reprinted from the AmEx OPEN Forum Idea Hub

Saying No to 1,000 Things.

You can't open a business magazine or newspaper without reading another encomium to Steve Jobs' consummate genius or an analysis of why Apple is so successful. I'll add my two cents here: it's because he said no to a lot of products. Think how tight the Apple product line is: three desktop computers. Two laptops. One iPad. One iPhone. Three iPods. Two major bits of software (iTunes and OSX). That's not a whole lot for a $65 billion company. (Yes, I know there are other products out there, but I'm not counting the accessories, the machines that only differ by size of hard drive, or the niche software.) In fact, when Jobs returned to Apple in 1997, one of the first things he did was kill off a bunch of products, including the Newton. As he describes the situation,

There were people going off in 18 different directions doing arguably interesting things in each one of them. . . . You look at the farm that's been created with all these different animals going in different directions, and it doesn't add up. The total was less than the sum of its parts.

In an interview with Business Week back in 2004, he explained that innovation, in part, comes from

saying no to 1,000 things to make sure we don't get on the wrong track or try to do too much. We're always thinking about new markets we could enter, but it's only by saying no that you can concentrate on the things that are really important.

By saying to to all those opportunities, he not only conserved corporate resources -- people and cash -- but he conserved people's ability to do great work and create great products. I thought of this recently when reading about the recent research on "decision fatigue." The new thinking about decision-making is that people have a finite storehouse of energy to make decisions -- whether that decision is major (should you parole an inmate), or minor (do you want tartar-control or baking soda toothpaste). As John Tierney explained it in the NYTimes,

Once you’re mentally depleted, you become reluctant to make trade-offs, which involve a particularly advanced and taxing form of decision making.... You become what researchers call a cognitive miser, hoarding your energy. If you’re shopping, you’re liable to look at only one dimension, like price: just give me the cheapest. Or you indulge yourself by looking at quality: I want the very best (an especially easy strategy if someone else is paying).

The cumulative effect of these temptations and decisions isn’t intuitively obvious. Virtually no one has a gut-level sense of just how tiring it is to decide. Big decisions, small decisions, they all add up. Choosing what to have for breakfast, where to go on vacation, whom to hire, how much to spend — these all deplete willpower, and there’s no telltale symptom of when that willpower is low. In making decisions, [willpower-depleted people] take illogical shortcuts and tend to favor short-term gains and delayed costs.

This pretty well sums up most people's lives at work. You're constantly making decisions during the day, both major and minor. And that takes a toll.

Steve Jobs did a good job of reducing that cognitive burden by saying no to so many product opportunities. Saying no allowed the company to focus its cash, and  workers to focus their attention, on what's most important. It's not the sole reason Apple became the smash success it has, but it's certainly part of the puzzle.

Take a look at your organization. Are you chasing every opportunity out there? Or are you husbanding your energies to do great work on the few truly important issues? If you're not executing well, this is one place to start looking.

Cottage cheese, and the mindless adherence to rules.

My wife got busted by the TSA yesterday. She was laboriously making her way through airport security at SFO -- shoes off, computer out, liquids in a bag -- when they busted her for her 5oz. container of cottage cheese. That's right. Cottage cheese.

TSA Agent: "It's on the FAA's list of prohibited items."

Wife: "No, it's not. I've looked at the website, and there's no mention of cottage cheese."

TSA (after convening a five minute rabbinical council of the other TSA agents): "Cottage cheese is actually a gel, and therefore subject to the 3oz rule." (No word on whether the size of the curds and the percentage of milk fat factored into their decision.)

Wife: If I took the cottage cheese out of the container and mixed in fruit and nuts, would that be okay?

TSA: Yup. (Helpfully) You should also know that if the cottage cheese is a medical necessity, you're allowed to bring it through security."

Wife: "I'm a doctor. If I write a prescription for myself saying that cottage cheese is a dietary requirement for me, and I show it to you, you'll let me go through?"

TSA: "That's right, ma'am. Just show us the prescription and it'll be no problem."

I tell this story not because I want to highlight the lunacy of security theater and the TSA's policies. That's been done many times before. What's relevant to you, as a leader, is the danger of creating a culture of unthinking obedience to rules. In this story, you've got individual TSA agents unable to use commonsense judgement in dealing with a non-standard situation. Cottage cheese isn't quite a solid, and it's definitely not a liquid. What do we do? I know! Let's call it a gel so that we can mindlessly follow the rules and ban it! But of course if it were re-categorized as lunch (by adding fruit and nuts) or if it were medically required by a doctor, then we can follow those other rules, and allow it.

This kind of unthinking adherence to rules creates an enormous amount of waste -- not to mention extreme customer dissatisfaction. In the case of the TSA, of course, there aren't many other options. Unless you're one of the elite few, you're probably flying commercial, and Greyhound isn't a viable alternative. But in the case of your company, there probably are plenty of other firms that provide similar products or services.

I once tried to return a mattress 18 months after I bought it. It had begun to sag badly in that short time, and it seemed pretty clear to me that it was defective. Since it came with a 10 year warranty, I figured that I'd have no problem exchanging it for a new one. But when I was on the phone with customer service, they required it to be in essentially unused condition in order to validate the warranty. No stains. No abrasions. No signs of wear and tear. Proof (!) that the mattress was sitting on the right kind of bedframe all the time. More documentation than I needed when I refinanced my house. And all this despite the very obvious evidence that the mattress was simply defective. But the customer service agent was unthinkingly following the script, and that's what it told her to demand. Needless to say, I didn't get my mattress exchanged. And I've never bought a mattress from that company again.

Have you checked your returns, exchange, and warranty policy recently? Have you looked into the latitude that your customer service reps have in dealing with customer complaints? Odds are that if you looked at those policies from a customer's perspective, you might change some of them. Otherwise, you might as well start confiscating cottage cheese.

Stop demotivating your employees.

In my September newsletter (sign up for it here), I write about the bottlenecks that occur when a manager delegates responsibility for a job without delegating the authority to actually get that job done. It occurs to me that this kind of mismatch between authority and responsibility creates bigger problems throughout the organization.

Low Responsibility, Low Authority: here’s the classic recipe for apathetic, demotivated workers. Customer service people who don’t have the power to solve problems. Assistants who don’t get one-on-one time with their execs. These are the people with glazed eyes waiting for the five o’clock bell to ring, who have no energy or desire to help improve the company.

High Authority, Low Responsibility: here’s the blueprint for installing a tyrant of minutiae. The person in finance who insists that you fill out your travel expense form in blue ink, not black – or for that matter, that you use their form, instead of your spreadsheet version of it that does the math for you. The person at the DMV counter who sends you to the back of the line because you forgot to put your middle initial on form 2976A/3. These people make life miserable for everyone and will never leave, because they’ve built a comfortable empire.

High Responsibility, Low Authority: this is the grey world of the frustrated strivers. Nurses who can’t make changes to procedures that would allow them to spend more time with patients. Product developers who are told to just make what the sales department demands. You can find these people polishing their resumes as they look for another job.

High Responsibility, High Authority: this is where you want your people to be. They have responsibility for a job, and the authority to accomplish it. These people are able to contribute to growth, improve performance, and move the organization forward.

Here’s the thing: the apathetic, the tyrants, and the frustrated—they could be anyone in the company. The engaged, committed workers are no better than the others. They’re just in jobs that allow them to exercise autonomy, achieve their goals, and strive for greatness.

Or, as David Sirota, Louis A. Mischkind, and Michael Irwin Meltzer wrote back in 2006:

Most companies have it all wrong. They don’t have to motivate their employees. They have to stop demotivating them.

Limits are good

Kurt is the COO of an innovative non-profit that marshals corporate resources to address problems in its greater municipal area -- education, pollution, transportation etc. Business is good for Kurt, and opportunities abound. He's been to Shanghai twice in the past year to coordinate with businesses there; he's leading an exciting new cyber-security initiative between government and industry; he's involved with an program to improve outreach to existing member corporations; and he's leading the charge to recruit new corporate members. There's only one problem: corporate membership is down. Attrition is high, because member companies feel that they don't get enough attention. In fact, it's only increased since the non-profit started pursuing some of its new programs. Which is sort of like saying that your bank does a great job of providing free wi-fi and donuts in the lobby, but it has an unfortunate tendency to lose track of your money.

You see this problem all the time. Companies can't execute on the simplest and most critical tasks, because they're trying to do everything. They pour resources into entering a new market but neglect their existing customers. They develop sexy new products but forget to update and improve their current products. Individuals do the same thing: they take on high-profile new projects but stop attending to their existing responsibilities. Reach > grasp.

Jeffrey Pfeffer, professor at Stanford University's business school, tells this story:

Gary Loveman, CEO of Harrah's Entertainment, is someone who gets this. Visiting Stanford one day, he told my class that when he entered the company as COO he reduced most executives' job scope, because he believes that people don't do very well processing complex agendas and that success mostly comes from effort focused on the most critical and achievable objectives.

Your most limited resource isn't money. It's time and mental focus. Not only are there a finite number of hours in a day, there's a finite amount of processing and decision-making power in a day. As an individual, that means that you've got to ruthlessly prioritize the areas in which to pour your attention. As a leader, that means that you must constrain the job scope of each person on your team, like Gary Loveman.

Kurt isn't to blame for the high attrition rate at his non-profit. It's his CEO's fault. He's a brilliant thinker who discovers opportunities all the time. . . and then dumps responsibility for executing them upon Kurt. Without the discipline to say no to some of them, or the willingness to match managerial resources to his agenda, the CEO is dooming the organization to a future of unrealized expectations, half-baked initiatives, and a declining membership.

Limits are real. Acknowledging them is not a sign of weakness or timidity. It's a sign of pragmatism that will help you get to where you want to go.

A life preserver for drowning rats.

In last week's blog post, I wrote that Jeff Kindler, the former CEO of Pfizer, was

thoughtless about the demands his communication style placed on his team and the results of that style. By making all his questions a matter of supreme urgency for his team — and let’s face it, communicating via BlackBerry at all hours of the night screams, "PAY ATTENTION! I’M IMPORTANT!" — he sowed the seeds of his own demise. Part of your role as a leader is to help people distinguish among levels of urgency and importance. Cramming everything through one communication channel — whether that’s email, IM, text message, or meetings — is a recipe for disaster.

One of my clients has taken this concept to heart. They don't have a leader who abuses his BlackBerry, but they do have an awful lot of engineers who are drowning like rats in the flood of communication -- particularly phone calls and emails --  within and between their teams. As a result, they can't distinguish between critical and time-sensitive issues like a major product flaw, and trivialities like the new flavor of coffee that they company has put in the machines.

Their situation is hardly unique, of course. But unlike most groups who simply wave their hands inertly and bemoan their fate, they're actually doing something about it. This is their new communication protocol:

Okay, this protocol isn't a breakthrough along the lines of, say, cold fusion. (Or duct tape. Or Oreos, for that matter.) But it does create clear expectations and guidelines to help the engineers manage the communication and information flow that was previously threatening to inter them.

Pay attention to one critical consequence here: everyone has agreed that email is NOT to be used for urgent or complex issues. This agreement really is significant, because it unshackles people from their BlackBerries during meetings, or product development work, or strategic planning. Or their kids' soccer games. Or dinner. Or sex. Which means that there's now a fighting chance to have some uninterrupted time to, you know, think.

This protocol might not work for you. Every company has an idiosyncratic culture and needs. The important thing isn't how you define your communication protocol, but that you define it. And while this might not be perfect, so far it's been a pretty good life preserver for all those drowning rats.

Now, what are your guidelines?

What's your Batphone?

Would Jeff Kindler, Pfizer's fired CEO, have been able to keep his job if he had a Batphone?

Calls coming through the Batphone have the highest priority. The signal is unambiguous: if the Batphone rings, it must be important, and Bruce Wayne stops everything to answer it. But this system only works if there's an agreement that the caller only uses the Batphone for urgent issues.

Compare this mutually respectful agreement with how Jeff Kindler handled his communication with his staff. According to a terrific Fortune magazine article, Kindler

bombarded [his executive team] with long BlackBerry messages filled with questions at all hours of the day and night. He regularly scheduled conference calls on weekends. He seemed oblivious to executive vacations. He expected immediate responses to his questions, making no distinctions between urgent matters and routine ones.

All that didn't just make life miserable for Kindler's team; it also clogged the company's decision-making process. Kindler was a voracious consumer of information -- often a strength but increasingly a weakness. "Jeff heard something or read something," one former HR executive recounts, "and there would be a barrage of e-mails in the middle of the night." The next morning, staffers would have to divvy up the directives. "It was triage."

Kindler was guilty of doing something that all of us do at times: ignoring the distinction between urgent and routine issues, and choosing the appropriate communication channels. That overwhelmed his staff and slowed down their ability to respond to truly important matters.

As a leader, it's incumbent upon you to be extraordinarily careful about what you say. As I've written about before, your words -- your casual requests, your idle comments -- have enormous impact on your team. The communication medium you choose is nearly as consequential. In the story above, Jeff Kindler seriously degraded his executive team's ability to act because he was careless.

"Careless" may seem an odd word choice to describe someone who obviously cared intensely about the success of the company. Nevertheless, that's the right word. He was careless in *how* he communicated. He was thoughtless about the demands his communication style placed on his team and the results of that style. By making all his questions a matter of supreme urgency for his team -- and let's face it, communicating via BlackBerry at all hours of the night screams, "PAY ATTENTION! I'M IMPORTANT!" -- he sowed the seeds of his own demise.

Part of your role as a leader is to help people distinguish among levels of urgency and importance. Cramming everything through one communication channel -- whether that's email, IM, text message, or meetings -- is a recipe for disaster. Consider setting general policies around communication: how will you and your team handle urgent issues? How will you handle important (but not urgent) matters? What kind of service level agreements pertain to each form of communication?

The Batphone only works if there's a mutual understanding of its purpose and respect for the person on the other end. Jeff Kindler didn't understand or respect the power of his BlackBerry. That failure of understanding wasn't the only reason he was sacked. But it certainly didn't help.

When all you have is a hammer...

...everything looks like a nail. Even if it's an ice cream sandwich. According to Bloomberg Business Week, the failure of the Chevy Volt to win over consumers is due to the mismatch between the "green" image of the car and the decidedly non-green image of General Motors. The author of the article, who is a brand and marketing consultant with a long background at Clorox, and who bought his car in December 2010, says that

most of my "Green" friends are uninterested [in the Volt]. They’d rather own a Toyota Prius—or await for a plug-in from some other company. Why? Because the Volt is made by General Motors and they just can’t believe GM’s heart is in it.

The author goes on to explain that consumers want to buy a product from a company that shares their values:

Toyota has long supported fuel-efficient vehicles. If Toyota had launched the Volt, chances are it would already be a runaway success. But GM? It’s hard to associate the company that brought us the Hummer with a green image. How could GM executives possibly care about fuel efficiency? Or even get it right? Are they doing this only to look like good corporate citizens?

I suppose there's some merit to this argument. It would seem weird if Payless Shoe Stores starting selling high-end performance running shoes. Except that ascribing the Volt's struggles to GM's non-green image is like saying the Titanic sank because the dining room menu didn't include a porterhouse.

Consider the following:

1. As of mid-July, there are only about 200 Volts available nationwide.
2. There will only be about 10,000 units available for sale in the U.S. by the end of 2011.
3. The Volt starts at $40,000. The Prius starts at $23,500. The Nissan Lean starts at $32,800.
4. It takes 10-12 hours to recharge the car with a standard outlet. Good luck if you live in an apartment building that doesn't have electrical outlets near the parking spaces.

Maybe it's just me, but those seem to be far more salient facts than whether or not GM has a sufficiently green image. Who wants to pay twice as much for a car that they probably won't get for months and that might not be easily rechargeable, when they can get a Prius or a Leaf?

This is what happens when your article is written by a consultant who specializes in branding.

Missing the boat like this isn't a mortal sin when the product is an article in a weekly magazine. But it could be catastrophic when the product is a new corporate strategy. Or a succession plan. Or the roadmap for international expansion in China.

Everything we do is colored by our experiential filters. Those experiences shape our views and give us tools with which to address our organizational challenges. That's human nature. And therefore it's incumbent upon you to know what experiences and biases an employee, a writer, or a consultant brings to the table.

Because if the only tool on his belt is a hammer, you damn well better have a bunch of nails.

Monkey bars physics

Kyle is a VP at a large manufacturing firm. His ascent up the organizational food chain has been fast and impressive, and now he's reaping the financial rewards of all his hard work. Kyle also works horrific hours, between 90 and 100 hours per week. He doesn't spent nearly as much time with his family as he'd (or they'd) like. More importantly, he's got a pile of strategic initiatives and projects as long as his arm that are lying moribund on his desk. He knows they're important to both his and the company's future success, but right now they've got about as much chance of completion as Transformers 3 does of winning the best picture Oscar. It just ain't gonna happen.

Kyle's obviously competent, but he's being held back by his own proficiency. He's still doing work that he did earlier in his career because he's really, really good at it. He's forgotten the essential physics of monkey bars that he learned on the playground: you can't move forward until you let go of previous bar.

Kyle is holding onto work that should be -- must be -- delegated to others. It's almost certain that it won't get done the way that he would have done it. And it's possible that it won't be done as well as he would have done it. If that's an issue, then it's his responsibility to create standard work to ensure that it's done his way. In any event, he can't keep doing it. If he's holding onto those lower value activities, he can't turn his attention to the bigger picture issues that the company needs him to address.

I often see companies struggle with execution because managers and executives aren't able to devote the time and attention to the critical initiatives facing their firms. They haven't internalized the physics of monkey bars. They have to let go before they can move forward.