Less is More

My friend Matt May has just published his latest book, The Laws of Subtraction. It's a terrific read. Matt argues that decisions become exponentially easier and simpler when you focus on what to ignore, what to leave out, what to "don’t." More importantly, the results are exponentially more impactful. He goes on to explain that the key is to remove anything obviously excessive, confusing, wasteful, unnatural, hazardous, hard to use, or ugly -- or even better, avoid adding them in the first place.

Matt covers some of the ground that he explored in his earlier books, but for me, this is a more concise and powerful exploration of his recurring theme that less is more. His stories about Toyota’s youth brand Scion, the urban design that transformed London’s Exhibition Road, the power of white space in comics, and the secrets of Lockheed’s Skunk Works are compelling.

But that's not why to buy this book.

The real reason you need to buy the book is on page 64. That's the page that tells my story about how subtraction led to a far better outcome for me and my team. (I'd argue that my story is the highlight of the book, but Matt might get mad at me.)

Truth is, there are 53 individual stories of real people -- not captains of industry, not global business titans -- ordinary people doing wonderful work by subtraction. In some respects, these stories are the real joy of The Laws of Subtraction, because they're so ordinary and so easy to relate to, that you can immediately see how you can adopt Matt's six principles.

Read the book. In this case at least, more (learning) is better.

"That's just our culture, and we can't change it."

"That's just our culture, and you can't change it." Last week, while presenting a workshop based on my book, A Factory of One, at the AME Conference, I was struck by the fatalism that infected so many participants. We were talking about the impediments to individual effectiveness -- the things that create waste instead of value -- and so many people said with a resigned air, "That's just our culture, and we can't change it."

The disrespect for closed doors and interruptions by coworkers that force people to multitask? That's just our culture. The expectation that we'll respond to all emails within 10 minutes? That's just our culture. The sense of entitlement (or the ignorance) that permits executives to pile multiple projects on you, despite the inevitable explosion in lead time? That's just our culture. And there's no point in fighting it.

This passive acceptance of the status quo is shocking because it's so different from the attitude that these same people take when confronting other waste-ridden systems. I don't know any hospitals that attended AME that shrug their organizational shoulders and simply accept their ventilator-associated pneumonia rate as an unavoidable outgrowth of their "nursing culture" or systems. I didn't meet any manufacturers at AME who say, "Sure we've got a 22% defect rate on our products, but that's just the culture of our machinists." I don't know of any distribution companies in attendance that think, "It's too bad that our drivers mis-deliver packages all the time, but that's just the culture of the drivers and our lousy systems."

Ridiculous. In all of those examples, the leadership teams drive relentlessly to improve the quality, cost, and reliability of their systems and processes. Accepting the status quo is unacceptable.

So why do we have such a difficult time acknowledging both the necessity and the possibility of improvement in the way our people work? Why do we view the processes by which individuals get their jobs done as something fixed, immutable, or unworthy of improving?

The evidence is clear that, to quote Tony Schwartz, the way we're working isn't working. Whether it's the expectation that people are on call 24/7, or the design of workspaces that don't allow people to focus and concentrate on their work, or the overloaded project schedule that results in frustratingly long project lead times, we're just not being smart about how to get the best results from our people.

Why do we accept the fatalistic complaint that "it's just our culture," and there's nothing we can do about it? Just because the inefficiency and waste of our current way of working doesn't directly show up on the income statement doesn't mean that we should tolerate it any more than we should accept that patients coming to our hospital get sicker when they're with us.

It's time to view individual productivity as a non-negotiable area of improvement. That's nothing more than respect for people.

Getting the best out of your warranty department.

Warranty departments are usually poster children for the accumulation of excess parts inventory, disorganization, and lack of respect from the other upstream departments in the value stream. It doesn't have to be this way.

One client is doing a terrific job in redesigning its warranty department. They've replaced the piles of excess parts (except, of course, for the components that they always seem to stock out of ) with a two-bin system. Instead of haphazard ziggurats of replacement parts scattered all over the floor, they now have a clean, organized system with cardboard boxes and visual management cards containing all the necessary re-order information. They've effectively reduced their inventory by 70%. While this isn't a huge cost savings -- all their parts are pretty inexpensive -- it's a big savings in floor space and a bigger savings in time. Finding parts in the piles used to be difficult, and now they can pick, pack, and ship customer orders much more quickly.

One other thing this department has done: they've instituted formal "close the loop" meetings with the product designers and developers. When the PD team begins planning the next round of products, they meet with the warranty team to discuss what problems they were seeing in customer returns. Design problems, durability problems, material defects, etc. -- all are brought up in a formal setting to ensure that the PD team doesn't miss the important quality "signals" amidst the larger piles of return "noise." Although it's too early to see the benefits in new product design, it's already easy to see the benefit in morale: the warranty team feels like an important part of the company and the product. They're not the tail of the dog, just another segment of the product circle. Call it respect for people.

How is your warranty department run? Are you getting the best out of them? Are they providing all the value they can?

"The signature of mediocrity is chronic inconsistency."

This is what really hit me when I listened to Dan Pink's "Office Hours" interview with Jim Collins:

The signature of mediocrity is not an unwillingness to change. The signature of mediocrity is chronic inconsistency.

This was a finding from Collins's research for his latest book, Great By Choice -- mediocre companies have no consistency in leadership, in mission, in management style, or in philosophy. They drift with the prevailing tides, unwilling (or unable) to chart a determined course.

Collins believes that great companies adhere to "SMaC" -- Specific, Methodical, and Consistent -- guidelines for their business. A SMaC recipe is a

set of durable operating practices that create a replicable and consistent success formula; it is clear and concrete, enabling the entire enterprise to unify and organize its efforts, giving clear guidance regarding what to do and what not to do.

Southwest Airlines has 10 such principles -- fly only 737s, no flight segment over two hours, stay out of food service, and stay passenger focused – no freight or mail, etc. Whereas tactics may change with the situation, SMaC practices can last for decades.

Chronic inconsistency in improvement efforts dooms companies to mediocrity as well. I've seen companies go from quality circles to TPM to business process reengineering to Six Sigma in an effort to improve quality, lower costs, and increase employee engagement. Eventually, employees become cynical, deriding each new effort as the management "flavor of the month." And they're not wrong, given that each new approach usually discredits the previous approach.

There is no magic formula for organizational greatness. But it's clear to me that consistency in improvement methods is just as important as consistency in organizational guidelines. That, I think, is one of the beauties of lean. The focus on continuous improvement and creating a community of scientists devoted to the pursuit of perfection (even while recognizing that perfection is unattainable) creates a consistency that other methods don't. Lean is a "SMaC" approach towards improvement. It's not flashy, but it provides a clear route towards organizational excellence.

Barack Obama and knowledge work kaizen

The October issue of Vanity Fair features a long article by Michael Lewis on Barack Obama -- what it's like to be him and how he deals with the burden of the presidency. One tidbit that struck me was the way that Obama has tried to improve his ability to make decisions. In keeping with recent research that shows that people have finite mental resources for decision-making, Obama has tried to eliminate the trivial decisions that most of us face on a daily basis. In an NPR interview, Lewis explains that

The president started talking about research that showed the mere act of making a decision, however trivial it was, degraded your ability to make a subsequent decision. A lot of ... the trivial decisions in life — what he wears, what he eats — [are] essentially made for him. He's actually aware of research that shows that the more decisions you have to make, the worse you get at making decisions. he analogizes to going shopping at Costco. If you go to Costco and you don't know what you want, you come out exhausted, because you're making all these decisions, and he wants to take those decisions out of his life. So he chucked out all his suits except his blue and grey suits so he doesn't have to think about what he's going to put on in the morning. Food is just arranged for him and he's not making any decisions about what he's eating. What most people spend most of their life deciding about, he's had those decisions are removed from his life. He does this so he creates an environment, a mental environment, where he's got full energy for the decisions that are really important decisions.

As I've described before, Bob Pozen (chairman emeritus of MFS Investment Management, senior lecturer at Harvard Business School, and board member of Medtronics and Nielsen) does much the same thing as Obama. When you have to make many decisions -- and what's the presidency but an unending series of very, very difficult decisions? -- you inevitably become what researchers call a cognitive miser, hoarding your mental energy. That hoarding typically leads to one-dimensional analysis, illogical shortcuts, and decisions that tend to favor short-term gains and delayed costs.

Toyota -- the high temple of lean -- gets it, too. Over at LeanBlog, our friend Mark Graban once wrote,

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

The premium that Obama, Pozen, and others -- not to mention Toyota -- place on simplification is really is another aspect of lean thinking (and probably brings a smile to Matt May's face). I'm not arguing that you have to toss out most of the clothes in your closet, or give up your cereal bar (after all, it works for Pixar). But I am suggesting that you take a hard look at the decisions you make in your daily work and eliminate as many as possible. Spreadsheet, memo, or presentation design; sales call frequency; meeting format -- all these things can be standardized so that you don't have to make decisions. And that will result in better work and better thinking for the stuff that's really important.

Nick Saban and the (lean) Crimson Tide

If you told a football coach that he could learn from Toyota's lean manufacturing methods, he'd probably tell you that a football team isn't a factory -- and then he'd have an offensive lineman throw you out of his office. But it you told that to NIck Saban, University of Alabama football head coach, he'd probably agree.

A new Fortune Magazine article on Saban describes how his "Process" has led to remarkable success in college football: 48-6 in his last 54 games and two national championships in the past three years. Recognizing that his time and attention is the critical, non-renewable resource that he brings to his work, Saban drives out inefficiency -- no matter how small -- wherever he can:

As he sits down at a small table in his expansive wood-paneled corner office, the coach grabs what looks like a garage-door opener and presses the button. Across the room, the door to his office softly whooshes shut. Boom! Nick Saban just saved three seconds. Multiply that enough times and you have a couple of extra months, or years, to recruit more high school stars.

Then there's lunch itself. He has it down to a science -- another in a series of small efficiency measures. Every day, Saban sits at this very table and works through his lunch hour while eating the same exact meal: a salad of iceberg lettuce and cherry tomatoes topped with turkey slices and fat-free honey Dijon dressing. No time wasted studying a menu.

What are these examples except eliminating non-value added activities (getting up to open and close a door, or thinking about what to eat) through the use of technology and standard work? (Bob Pozen at the Harvard Business School approaches breakfast, lunch, and even dressing for work the same way.) Saban even standardizes the overall flow of his work, reserving his mornings and afternoons for core football-related work, and scheduling meetings for the middle of the day. This is a classic time management trick, of course -- doing the most important work first.

Above all, Saban focuses on process rather than results. He believes that doing things the right way will inevitably lead to the right outcomes:

What really separates Saban from the crowd is his organizational modus operandi. In Tuscaloosa they call it the Process. It's an approach he implemented first in turnarounds at Michigan State and LSU and seems to have perfected at Alabama. He has a plan for everything. He has a detailed program for his players to follow, and he's highly regimented. Above all, Saban keeps his players and coaches focused on execution -- yes, another word for process -- rather than results.

And of course, by creating standard work for the innumerable tasks comprising the football program, Saban creates the time and mental bandwidth to engage in kaizen and improve the process:

"When you have a system, you kind of get in a routine of what's important," says Saban. "And then you spend a lot more time on thinking of things that would make it better."

Make no mistake: I'm not saying that Saban runs a "lean" program that adheres to all of the principles outlined by Toyota. I'm arguing that the disciplined focus on identifying value and waste, and the creation of standard work, can be applied to any field of activity, from manufacturing cars to running a football program to writing software. The key is to standardize the non-creative part of the job, so that there's more time and energy available for the creative components.

Your Internal Communication Stinks. Here’s Why—and What To Do About It.

I've posted another article on the HBR blog. Coming up with a title was a challenge for them, and ultimately they chose to focus on the plague of email. Frankly, I liked my original title better: "Your Internal Communication Stinks. Here's Why -- and What To Do About It." The post is really about switching communication models, from information "push" to information "pull." Here's how it starts:

How often are people’s email privileges suspended (aka, “mail jail”) because they’re inundated with a blizzard of questions, status updates, notifications, and other non-mission critical information? Most inboxes—and calendars—are gorged with junk because the dominant paradigm of communication is information “push.” This means that information is being pushed onto people when it’s ready, but not necessarily when the recipient needs it.

You can read the rest of the article on the HBR blog here.

The absurdity of the 40 hour workweek

Hopefully you read Jason Fried's (co-founder and CEO of 37signals) OpEd in Sunday's NYTimes. If you haven't, read it now. Go ahead. I'll wait. Jason advocates (compellingly) for the value of taking time off from work -- not simply to promote the squishy concept of "work-life balance" or to improve employee morale, but to improve productivity:

From May through October, we switch to a four-day workweek. And not 40 hours crammed into four days, but 32 hours comfortably fit into four days. We don’t work the same amount of time, we work less....The benefits of a six-month schedule with three-day weekends are obvious. But there’s one surprising effect of the changed schedule: better work gets done in four days than in five. When there’s less time to work, you waste less time. When you have a compressed workweek, you tend to focus on what’s important. Constraining time encourages quality time.

This result is no surprise if you're familiar with Parkinson's Law. As I've pointed out before, this approach is similar to Toyota's policy of continually reducing the resources available in order to drive improvements in their production processes.

Jason's experience at 37signals also reminds me of what Leslie Perlow discovered at Boston Consulting Group -- that eliminating the "always on" ethic drives the creation of more efficient work habits:

When people are “always on,” responsiveness becomes ingrained in the way they work, expected by clients and partners, and even institutionalized in performance metrics. There is no impetus to explore whether the work actually requires 24/7 responsiveness; to the contrary, people just work harder and longer, without considering how they could work better.

Ultimately, this ties into the frequent disconnect between "deliverables" and "value," something I've been thinking about a lot recently. Even if you're not a plumber or a lawyer, there's a tendency to focus on the amount of time you spend on a project and what the output is. But the first step in adopting a lean mindset is to identify the value of your work -- and that value is determined by what the customer wants. The customer doesn't care how many hours you work; the customer only cares whether or not you deliver the product or service that she wants.

Jason Fried has asked his programmers to deliver products that the company's customers want, irrespective of the time they spend in the office. If they can do it in 32 hours per week, great. He's overthrown the tyranny of the 40 hour workweek by decoupling the link between office time (deliverable) and meeting the customers' needs (value).

There's a huge difference between deliverables and value. Between effort and results. That's a lesson that we can all learn from.

My (one & only) obligatory "Management Lessons from the Olympics" blog post

I'm feeling a little bit lonely out here. I may be the only person in the blogosphere not to blog about the Olympics. No "Leadership Secrets from the Balance Beam."

No "Three Things You Can Learn from Sprint Cycling."

No "Teamwork Lessons from Dressage."

And no "What Synchronized Divers can Teach You about Innovation."

But now that the Olympics are over and the Olympic-related posts are (mercifully) dying down, I'll give it a shot. I think we can learn a lot from the track & field events. (Of course, I'm a former competitive track and field runner (and coach), so what did you expect?)

The Value of Consistency and Patience: Galen Rupp (silver medal, 10,000m) is the first American medalist in the event since Billy Mills in 1964. Rupp is supremely talented and worked his ass off over the past four years to get to the medal stand. However, there was absolutely no magic to his training program -- he repeats the same workouts every 8-12 weeks during his training cycle. The repetition of the same workouts provide consistency, a clear benchmark for improvement, and the ability to adjust (in the PDCA cycle) his training if needed. Lesson for businesses: don't abandon your tactics or approach to the market if they don't yield results in the first quarter. It's the steady accretion of your activities that leads to long-term success, especially when consistency allows you to engage in PDCA along the way.

Play to your Strengths: Usain Bolt (triple gold medalist in the 100m, 200m, and 4x100m relay) isn't the fastest guy out of the blocks. At 6'5" he's much taller than the average sprinter (who's usually about 5'9"-5'11"), so it takes him longer to uncoil at the start and accelerate to top speed. However, Bolt does have the highest top end -- and that's what he focused on in his training, not his start. Lesson for businesses: emphasize your strengths rather than trying to shore up your weaknesses. If quality is your strong point (Whole Foods, Amazon), then push your quality so far beyond your competitors' that their products and services look second-rate. If service is your bailiwick (Nordstrom, Zappos), then make your standard the gold standard.

Believe in your Strategy. And Stick with It: David Rudisha (gold medal, WR in 800m) is a rarity among middle distance runners: in big races he doesn't run "tactically," lurking in the back or middle of the pack and waiting to kick in the last 200m. He runs *his* race: he takes it out hard from the start and forces everyone to run on his terms. (Rudisha developed this approach after he lost a major race because he was boxed in at the end and couldn't accelerate to the front.) This tactic isn't without risk: if he goes out too hard, or if he's not in peak form, he could easily get outkicked by a fresher competitor who conserved his strength. But Rudisha would rather lose on his terms than on someone else's. And in fact he hasn't lost -- the tremendous pace he sets from the beginning takes the sting out of others' kicks. Lesson for businesses: you've got to stick with the strategy you believe in and execute it. Properly formulated strategy will leverage your strengths and unique capabilities. Don't change it because other companies are taking a different approach. Have faith in it, and don't run other people's races. Otherwise you might get boxed in.

What will you be judged on?

Tony Blair recently told the Stanford Graduate School of Business that one of the most important things he learned during his time in office was the need to set a schedule that's aligned with one's real priorities. He related a memorable story about his first meeting with President Bill Clinton in 1996. Clinton said that he wanted to talk to him about a critical issue. Blair expected some extraordinary piece of geopolitical insight, but instead, as he relates it,

Clinton said to me, "I'm going to talk to you about something really important: scheduling. You will find that one of the hardest things when you get into government is finding the time to think strategically. . . . The system will take you over, and you'll be in meetings from 8 in the morning to 10 at night, and you'll think you're immentsely busy, but actually the tactics and strategy have all gotten mixed together."

I've opined on this issue before, but it's got more clout when you hear it from Tony Blair. In fact, he goes on to say that he did an analysis for one president on how he used his time, and found that less than 5% of his time was spent on his priorities.

Blair's not naive. He knows that crises erupt, and that it's the leader's job to deal with it. But he points out that those crises are seldom what's really important in securing the long-term success and reputation of the government:

If you're not careful, something happens -- there's some crisis, and you spend time dealing with it. You lose your strategic grip on what's going to determine whether you're a successful government or not. Now these crises are real; you've got to deal with them. But actually, when you then judge a government -- you know, when I think of the things that I lost sleep on, some of the crises that suddenly came -- foot and mouth disease, we had a fuel strike -- nowadays, nobody even remembers these things.

These lessons are as true for you and your executive team as they are for a prime minister and his government. Think about the crises that you've dealt with -- an angry customer (or customers), a problem with product profit margins, negotiations with a logistics company, whatever. Sure, they're all important to your organization. But we're not talking the BP oil spill, the Challenger explosion, or the TEPCO Fukushima nuclear meltdown. We're talking about crises that, if they consume your day, will inevitably lead to sub-optimal performance and long-term decline.

When "the system takes over" and your time is consumed by daily tactical issues, you don't have the space for the essential act of thinking. Blair says that

you've got to create the space to be thinking strategically all the time. One of the things I always ask is, 'Where's your thinking time?'"

John Donahoe, CEO of Ebay, adheres to the same precept. He says

I take days away. . . . I find that very hard to do in the office or in a familiar environment. I find that if I don’t schedule a little bit of structured time away, where there’s no interruption, that it’s very hard to get the kind of thinking time and reflection time that I think is so important.

Here's the challenge for you: build some of this thinking time into your week or month. Make it part of your standard work. It's easy to be lulled into the safety of immediate action, particularly when a crisis hits. But thinking time is critical to ensuring that the actions you take are actually of value, and are spent on the activities that posterity will actually judge you for.

Donahoe knows that. Blair knows that. You should know it too.

Open doors and closed minds

I am not making this up. A network admin in a class I taught was complaining that she can't focus on her work because it's so noisy at her desk. Her office is right next to the main conference room, so there's a lot of traffic and noise from the meetings held there. Moreover, the company president has decreed an open door policy -- to the point that no one (at least at her level) is allowed to close their doors. Ever. And people don't like to close the door to the conference room either.

She asked the president if she could close her door. No.

She asked if she could wear headphones. No.

She asked if she could work at another desk. No.

She asked if she could close the conference room door. Yes, but it's politically difficult for her to ask execs to close the door because it's too noisy.

I repeat: I am not making this up.

Consider the organizational culture that would not only allow this situation to happen, but would make it difficult or impossible to improve it. I mean, who really thinks that an open door policy means that a door must be open *all* the time? That's insane.

This situation reminds me of the problems that companies have when they adopt 5S or other lean concepts. Management adopts the tools without understanding the problems they're intended to solve, so they end up with LAME instead of lean. (Or see my piece on Kyocera's pathetic 5S implementation.)

At the risk of stating the painfully obvious, an open door policy does not actually require everyone's door to be open all the time. It's a mindset, an attitude, and a culture. It's not the physical position of a piece of wood. Any organization that is willing to sacrifice not only the productivity but the well-being of a worker, has a lot to learn about the oft-forgotten pillar of lean -- respect for people.

I won't bother listing all the possible ways a company can maintain an open-door mind-set without critically undermining people's ability to concentrate and focus on their work. (But if you're interested, feel free to contact me.)

But I would love to know: where do people come up with these moronic ideas?

First, identify the value.

If you want to improve the effectiveness of your organization, start focusing on value, not on deliverables. When you look at job descriptions or examine organizational expectations, you see that they're usually driven by a focus on deliverables, not value. To wit:

• you need to be at the office from 9-5
• we have an open door policy, and expect you to keep your door open at all times
• everyone must attend the monthly all-day, division-wide meeting

Notice that the focus isn't on the value you're providing, it's on the deliverable of your presence during certain periods of time. But if you focus on the value your customer wants, you can remove the manacles of arbitrary expectations.

For example, a woman in a class I recently taught told me that her boss expects her to keep her door open all the time. In this case, the "deliverable" is the open door. Of course, that makes it difficult for her to get her own work done, because she's constantly interrupted by her team. But what's the value she's providing? Her team needs her to answer questions and solve problems as they arise -- and if you've ever managed a team, you know that many of the questions are the same ones, over and over. So why can't she put up a list of FAQs on the server, or post videos answering the most common questions, so that her team can access the answers when they need it, without interrupting her? Of course, she'd be available for more complex issues, but at least this method provides the value while improving her ability to do her own job.

Another example: a company I worked with used to have a quarterly, all-day meeting for its 75 directors and VPs. No one wanted to be there for the full 8 hours -- the "deliverable" -- but it was mandatory because the exec team wanted ideas to cross pollinate throughout the company. Once they focused on the value, however -- the cross-pollination -- they saw that there were other ways to accomplish the same goal. Now they have a much smaller, much shorter meeting, and the company pays for a giant pizza lunch once a quarter where  everyone can exchange ideas about what they're working on and why it's interesting.

It's often difficult to see the distinction between the value and the deliverable, because we're so used to thinking about (and being rewarded for) the latter and not the former. So try focusing on the problem you're trying to solve, rather than the format of the solution. Then consider multiple solutions to the problem. You'll likely find that within that solution set lies a better method for delivering the value to your customer.

Sowing the seeds of our own demise

Leslie Perlow, author of the seminal study on "time famine," is at it again, this time with a new book called Sleeping with your Smartphone. The book is based on experiments that she did with the Boston Consulting Group (and which I described in an earlier blog post) to reduce the need -- or the perceived need -- to be "always on." In a new HBR blog post, Perlow points out that

accepting the pressure to be "on" — usually stemming from some seemingly legitimate reason, such as requests from clients or customers or teammates in different time zones — in turn makes us accommodate the pressure even more. We begin adjusting to such demands, adapting the technology we use, altering our daily schedules, the way we work, even the way we live our lives and interact with our family and friends, to be better able to meet the increased demands on our time. Once our colleagues experience our increased responsiveness, their requests on our time expand. Already "on," we accept these increased demands, while those who don't risk being evaluated as "less committed" to their work.

She calls this the "cycle of responsiveness (although I'd probably call it the "vicious cycle of responsiveness"), in which our willingness to respond to increased requests simply leads to increased demands. Like ocean waves gradually wearing away a sand castle, these demands end up eroding any vestige of time that we can unambiguously arrogate for ourselves.

From a lean perspective, there are two major problems with this cycle of responsiveness. First, there's the waste of overproduction. I've argued before that if the only thing you're providing your customers is a fast response, you'll soon be replaced by someone cheaper in Shenzen or Mumbai. Your job is to provide real value -- value which most of the time doesn't need to be delivered within 12 minutes of receipt of the email. In other words, being "on" all the time isn't necessarily what your customer needs. Yes, your customer may appreciate it, but that doesn't mean that they need it. And that, from a lean perspective, is overproduction.

Second, the cycle of responsiveness prevents (or at least impairs) the ability to do kaizen and reflection. If you're always "on" and responding to customers, you never have the time to stop, to reflect, to figure out how to improve your processes and systems. You end up racing faster and faster in a desperate attempt to stay in the same place on the treadmill, like George Jetson.

Perlow provides valuable suggestions for how to break the cycle. Check them out here.

Emails & meetings, signifying nothing.

I've been wondering recently why people are so busy at work. Is work really that much more demanding than it was 20, 60, or 100 years ago? Are customer demands that much more onerous? Lean thinkers spend a lot of time trying to reduce the amount of waste in a process -- an admirable goal, to be sure. But sometimes the root cause of waste lies less in the process, and more in the mindset of the people working within the process.

In a recent op-ed in the New York Times, Tim Kreider writes about the self-imposed "busyness" that afflicts so many people. They’re busy, he argues, because they’re addicted to busyness and dread what they might have to face in its absence. (To his credit, he points out that people pulling back-to-back shifts in the I.C.U. or commuting by bus to three minimum-wage jobs don't complain about being busy. Those people are tired.)

Busyness serves as a kind of existential reassurance, a hedge against emptiness; obviously your life cannot possibly be silly or trivial or meaningless if you are so busy, completely booked, in demand every hour of the day.

In my own consulting, I see an awful lot of activity that really doesn't need to be done. One client spends his time -- everyday -- creating elaborate 50-100 slide PowerPoint decks for his boss. Wouldn't a single page document, or even a meeting, be a more efficient way of communicating the ideas? I've seen HR professionals crafting policies and procedure manuals that are so verbose, turgid, and unnecessarily complex that it's a wonder they have time for any real, value-added work. I've seen engineers attending meetings from 9am-5pm, but are only relevant to them for the 30 minutes from 1-1:30pm. And I haven't even mentioned the often pointless trolling through the email inbox that consumes so much of modern work life. How much of this activity is really necessary or value-added?

Tim writes,

I can’t help but wonder whether all this histrionic exhaustion isn’t a way of covering up the fact that most of what we do doesn’t matter.

Me, too.

Printing comes back home.

Blog posts about the value of domestic manufacturing are more properly the purview of Kevin Meyer and Bill Waddell over at Evolving Excellence, but I'm not sure they read the Sunday New York Times book review. So I'm stepping in with the latest story on why it makes sense to make things at home -- this time, books. Dave Eggers's new book, A Hologram for the King, is being published by Thomson-Shore printers in Dexter, Michigan. Eggers said,

I have to admit that I had a bit of a come-to-Jesus moment when it came to the printing of McSweeney’s books [Eggers's publishing house]. Over the years, we’ve done a lot of our production in the U.S., and even more in Canada, and then, about five years ago, we started printing in Asia, too. But then, a few years ago, I got to know this printer outside Detroit called Thomson-Shore. They’d done some pro-bono work for our tutoring center nearby, 826 Michigan, so I visited the plant, and thanked them, and saw some beautiful books they’d made, and met the men and women who worked there. Walking the production floor was very much like meeting members of an extended family; most of the people at Thomson-Shore have been there for decades.... The fact that they’re in Michigan makes it easier to communicate, to reprint, and to correct problems, and the prices are close enough to China’s numbers, when you take shipping and various delays into account.

No surprise to those who have dealt with long supply chains from China: it's harder to communicate and correct problems before and during production, and the lower prices are significantly offset by the cost of shipping large batches of inventory across the Pacific.

Eggers felt so strongly about the relationship with the factory that he includes everyone at the plant in the book's acknowledgments:

When I was thinking of the acknowledgments, it made sense to thank everyone at the printing plant, given they’re a big part of getting the book out into the world.

The use -- and abuse -- of parking lots

A reader writes in:

I've been in organizations that use parking lots in their meetings. But too often, those ideas never go anywhere - the company just ends up with a bunch of flip chart sheets that contain good ideas that never get fleshed out in subsequent meetings, because they're just not "big enough to hold a meeting on" or because "we don't have enough time/resources to investigate this right now" so they're constantly de-prioritized or put on a back burner.

It's a good question. Lord knows you've probably seen more than your fair share of those flip chart sheets rolled up and lying in an unused closet like Dead Sea Scrolls. So what to do?

Given my (ahem) rather strong opinions on the need to live in your calendar (or to set up a personal kanban), it's not surprising that I advocate carving out a specific time to revisit the ideas that have been relegated to the parking lot. You can choose the first or last 10 minutes of the next meeting, or you can schedule a new meeting specifically to clear out the parking lot. It doesn't matter.

Specificity is the key to making this work. You won't just "get around" to talking about those ideas any more than you just "get around" to tackling tasks that aren't on your calendar or your task list. This doesn't mean you have to do it every week: there's nothing wrong with deciding only to review the list monthly, quarterly, or semi-annually. Just be sure to block out sufficient time for the review on your team's calendar.

It's important to bring evaluation criteria to the parking lot review. You'll undoubtedly have way too many potential projects to take them all on, so you'll need some way of selecting the winners from the losers. Some possible criteria are:

• Ease, benefit, and urgency
• Revenue vs. risk
• Alignment with organizational goals vs. departmental goals

It doesn't really matter what criteria you use, just that you have some consistent way of determining whether or not the item is worthy of your organizational time and attention.

Now, the hardest part: throw out the losers. Get rid of the flip chart sheets and move on.

The parking lot is exactly like your personal to-do list: there's an infinite amount of stuff clambering for your attention, but only a finite amount of stuff that you can actually do. With an organization, there's an infinite number of potential projects, but a finite amount of people and money to take on those projects. So you have to cull the list. You have to divest yourself of the fantasy that you might actually take advantage of the opportunities that have been previously languishing in the parking lot. After all, the company has survived this long without implementing these ideas, so clearly they aren't all that vital to its success.

If you don't cull the list, you're sowing the seeds of the parking lot's demise. The list will be 83 items long, and no one wants to attend a meeting with 83 items on the agenda. Eventually, your colleagues will all find themselves too busy visiting their customers or washing their hair, and you won't have any more parking lot reviews.

But at least you'll have a nice collection of Dead Sea Scrolls in the closet.

Busy, not burned-out

I was gratified to read some of the recommendations in Joann Lublin's article, "Making Sure 'Busy' Doesn't Lead to Burnout" in the Wall Street Journal last week. Turns out that a lot of people are championing the ideas that I've been preaching about for awhile:

For some time-starved managers, keeping a detailed calendar often makes more sense than making daily to-do lists.

This advice echoes my argument that to-do lists don't work because they agglomerate items with disparate urgencies and complexities, and they don't provide any context: how long will the tasks take, and how much time do you really have available.

The article also recommends that people

prepare a weekly plan for tackling tasks tracked by their boss, such as regular revenue reports—and scheduling of daily items that eventually will land them in trouble if not completed.

This advice, of course, is nothing more than my suggestion to use the calendar as kanban, which enables you to automatically "pull" work forward at the right time -- and to do so automatically, without the cognitive burden of having to remember to do something at a certain time.

The article also points out the danger of taking on too many problems that aren't your own:

Consider [urgency addict] Liz Bishop. In January 2011, the senior vice president of Heffernan Insurance Brokers in Petaluma, Calif., was juggling 280 emails a day and often distracted by colleagues' crises. "I love solving problems,'' Ms. Bishop says. "That's emotional cookies for me." Meanwhile, her customer revenue had plunged 50% during the recession, and Ms. Bishop, whose clients were mainly in the construction industry, found herself without time to bring in new clients.

This situation reminds me of Jamie Flinchbaugh's advice that our direct reports' problems are not our problems:

Your problem is why is the preventive maintenance program not working that allowed all those pieces of equipment to go down in the first place. Or why are your customers not seeing the value proposition. Or do we have a planning problem or an execution problem that allows so many projects to get behind schedule. You have unique problems, and until you understand that fact, and work on the appropriate problems for your role, little progress can be made.

There are no Copernican insights here, which is both good and bad: you don't have to spend money, buy new equipment, or hire new people. On the other hand, you have to  use your calendar assiduously, delegate appropriately, and learn to address system-level issues.

Nothing new -- but not necessarily easy to do.

Self-Congratulatory Blog Post of the Week

I'm thrilled to announce that my book, A Factory of One, has received The Shingo Research and Professional Publications Award for 2013. (Yeah, I know: it's a bit early for 2013. Probably a bit of administrative level loading on the part of the Shingo Prize committee.) This award is given to authors for their writing on operational excellence, and promotes and recognizes new knowledge and understanding. I'm honored that the committee has deemed my thinking about the application of lean principles to individual knowledge work as worthy of the award.

For god's sakes, go home. (Part 2)

As clear a statement as you can get, this time from Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook:

I walk out of this office every day at 5:30 so I’m home for dinner with my kids at 6:00, and interestingly, I’ve been doing that since I had kids. I did that when I was at Google, I did that here, and I would say it’s not until the last year, two years that I’m brave enough to talk about it publicly. Now I certainly wouldn’t lie, but I wasn’t running around giving speeches on it.

Dr. Deming talked about the need to drive fear out of the workplace. I think that's a key element of respect for people. An environment where people are afraid to go home so they can be with their families (or just go home so they can take care of themselves) is quite the opposite.

Here's Sheryl's video. Well worth the 57 second investment to watch.

For god's sakes, go home.

I'm on vacation in Italy right now*, so this post feels particularly appropriate.

There are times when you have a huge project, you have quarterly earnings, I don't care what it is. And you are focused. You say to your family, "I'm not going to see you much this week or this month." And then when you go home, put the iPad away, the BlackBerry down, and be there. Don't be half anywhere. Be there. Wherever you are, be there.

-  Carol Bartz, former CEO of Yahoo and Autodesk

My friend Paul says that there are no rollover minutes in life. You get 1440 of them each day (if you're lucky), so use them wisely -- particularly if you're a leader. "Being there," as Carol Bartz would say, is a big step in that direction.

*I'm practicing what I preach. I wrote this post three weeks ago.