The NYTimes reported that Barack Obama met Tory leader David Cameron during his visit to England last week. Cameron asked Obama if he will be taking any time off for a vacation this summer:
Mr. Cameron: Do you have a break at all?
Mr. Obama: I have not. I am going to take a week in August. But I agree with you that somebody, somebody who had worked in the White House who — not Clinton himself, but somebody who had been close to the process — said that should we be successful, that actually the most important thing you need to do is to have big chunks of time during the day when all you’re doing is thinking. And the biggest mistake that a lot of these folks make is just feeling as if you have to be ...
Mr. Cameron: These guys just chalk your diary up.
Mr. Obama: Right. ... In 15 minute increments and ...
As I've written about many times before, one of the principles of lean manufacturing is making work visible. Of course, on a production line it's easy to see the toaster go past your station. It's not always so easy for the knowledge worker, whose work goes by in a blast of bits and bytes. But it's no less important. Seeing the flow of the value stream enables you to plan your work, spot places where things are going awry, and focus more clearly on the ultimate goal. This point was made abundantly clear in a recent profile of Steve Schmidt, who recently took charge of John McCain's presidential campaign.
The Wall Street Journal describes Schmidt as a hard-driving, intense man (Sgt. Schmidt is his nickname), who makes everything visible:
I've squandered countless electrons on this blog presenting ideas for working more efficiently. And yet, for all the time I've invested in these posts and in one-on-one coaching of clients, making real, sustainable, behavioral change is difficult. No matter how simple the concepts, getting people to work differently -- to change their behaviors -- is not easy. Let's face it: if it were, there'd be no fat people waddling into Cold Stone Creamery for a triple scoop of Rocky Road ice cream with Milk Duds mixed in.
But what if the key to behavioral change lies in the marketing of the new habits, and changing the environment, rather than in simply teaching the habits themselves?
An article in the NYTimes last week discussed the challenge that Dr. Val Curtis, an anthropologist, faced in getting residents of Ghana to wash their hands after going to the bathroom. Her goal was to reduce the spread of diseases and disorders (like diarrhea) caused by dirty hands.
"Standard Work" is one of the key principles of lean, because it helps to eliminate waste and allows problems to be identified quickly. Knowledge workers often bristle at the notion that their complex and highly variable jobs can be described by standard work. But as I've written before, much of the variability and complexity that we assume is intrinsic to our jobs isn't. With a bit of creativity (here, for example), we can begin to create standard work for many of the processes that we didn't think could be standardized.
I just got back from Germany, where I spoke to the European subsidiary of a large U.S. manufacturing company. The audience was composed of both individual contributors and managing directors, and although the speech was well received, it was clear that the managing directors were a bit disappointed: they wanted me to talk more about big-picture strategic issues, rather than on the mundane details of keeping their desks clean, or dealing with emails, or managing meetings.
I could understand their feelings -- they figured that the banality of keeping their desks clean and their inboxes empty had little or nothing to do with the challenges they face on a daily basis. (How do we winnow down the 153 product initiatives we're considering? How do we raise revenue per employee? Should we exit a market we've been in for 15 years but that has diminishing profit potential?)
Yesterday's NYTimes featured an article addressing the steps that some of the biggest technology firms, including Microsoft, Intel, Google, and I.B.M., are taking to stanch the overwhelming flood of email. Last week they formed a nonprofit group to study the problem, publicize it and devise ways to help workers — theirs and others — cope with the digital deluge.
And why are they taking this step?
Their effort comes as statistical and anecdotal evidence mounts that the same technology tools that have led to improvements in productivity can be counterproductive if overused.
The big chip maker Intel found in an eight-month internal study that some employees who were encouraged to limit digital interruptions said they were more productive and creative as a result.
James Surowiecki of The New Yorker recently wrote about Toyota's astonishing success since the end of World War II. Central to his article is the Japanese concept of kaizen, or incremental improvement. As he describes it,
Garr Reynolds' excellent blog, Presentation Zen, points out that the president of Toyota Motor Company is urging employees to stop using Powerpoint for the creation of documents. (By the way, if you want to learn how to make better presentations, you can't do better than to read Garr's blog and buy his book. You'll never think about Powerpoint the same way again. And your audiences will thank you for it.) Garr writes,
Last week I wrote about the need to treat your time as a limited resource, like your salary. As with your income, you have to spend it wisely -- you don't want to squander your time playing Howard Carter on an archaeological dig for the latest version of a budget when you could be doing something important, like actually solving a customer's problem.
You can take the metaphor (about money and time, not the one about Howard Carter) one step further: just as you have to save money for unanticipated emergencies -- a root canal, a new transmission, hospitalization for your dog -- so too do you have to save time for the unanticipated crises at work. Perhaps the CEO needs a new headcount reduction plan, or the dye in your new product is bleeding, or someone finds PCB's in the caulk surrounding the windows in the public schools -- you may not know what the precise emergency is, but you can be pretty sure that you're going to lose 30-40% of each day to putting out these fires.
The NYTimes's Shifting Careers column addressed the problem of information overload last Friday. The column reminded me of a fundamental reality: that although our time is finite, the demands on our time are infinite. Whether we work 40, 50, or 100 hours per week, there's a definite limit to what we can accomplish.
Even if we were physically able to work 24 hours a day, everyday, we'd never get to the bottom of our to-do list (or our email inboxes). There will always be one more call to make, one more problem to solve, one more email to write. We have to abandon the fantasy that staying at the office later, or working weekends, is the solution to getting to the bottom of the inbox or the to-do list.
We have to treat our time like we treat our money: as a limited resource that must be budgeted. And just as we first allocate money to the most important things in life -- food & shelter -- so, too, must we allocate our time to the most important stuff in our work.
Last week I worked with a group of R&D engineers at a high-tech company. As for so many others, the blessing of email has turned into the bane of their existence. Each person gets a minimum of 200 emails per day (the vast majority of which aren't terribly important or relevant), and the burden of reading all that email keeps them from spending time on the stuff that's really important to their customers.
After I pointed out that email is nothing more than the high-tech equivalent of two dixie cups and a string -- just a way of transmitting information, but not actually one's job -- one of the engineers wondered how NASA's engineers managed to put a man on the moon without tools like email. His point, of course, was that despite the problems caused by email, in the end there's a net gain in productivity.
An article in yesterday's Wall Street Journal identified the current breed of hot business gurus. For $50,000-75,000 a speech, they'll help you and your company address the challenges of globalization, motivation, and innovation.
Harvard professor Gary Hamel is one of the gurus profiled. His latest book, The Future of Management, strives to help companies create a culture of innovation. In his words,
It seemed to me that getting large organizations to be persistently innovative was akin to getting a dog to walk on its hind legs. The moment you turned your back, it was down on all fours again.
I've been working this week with the finance department of an $18 billion company. They're creating value stream maps of their forecasting process in order to reduce the time it takes to roll up the financials from the 100 countries in which they do business. As with most companies, an internal process like this has grown without much planning, and it's now pretty damn messy. People spend days gathering data, inputting into Excel spreadsheets, then uploading to an SAP system. . . all for internal customers (the CFO, investor relations, and to some extent, the country managers) who don't really need all that data.
Yesterday I met a woman who worked as the head fundraiser for a state senator. Talented, skilled, driven, and sharing a political vision with the senator, she seemed to have been in the ideal job. She quit after six months.
Conflict of ideology? Sex scandal? Financial shenanigans? Nope, nope, and nope.
Disorganization. She left because the senator's chief of staff couldn't manage the workflow in the office and organize the commitments that needed to be fulfilled. It wasn't the chief of staff's messy desk that was the problem, either. It's that the chief of staff had a nasty habit of handing off work that needed to be done by the next morning around 6pm the night before -- because she wasn't on top of her work. Faced with a non-stop series of "emergencies" that forced her to stay late at the office, the fundraiser quit. And she was followed by several more staffers over the next few months, because the environment had grown so toxic and stressful.
I've been writing a lot recently about standard work, and how it can reduce waste and improve efficiency. But knowledge workers often feel that standard work isn't applicable to their jobs, because they're so highly variable and unpredictable. This simply isn't true.
Let's take meetings (please). If your meetings are like those in most organizations, they're flaccid, bloated, puffy things have half the attendees struggling to control hypnic jerks and the other half checking their Blackberries.
Use this template to start creating standard work for meetings.
Since the 1930s, conventional managerial wisdom held that seven to 10 direct reports was optimal. However, the Wall Street Journal reports that this notion is being challenged.
Assigning more workers to each boss started catching on during the corporate restructuring pushes of the late 1980s and early 1990s, when flatter organizational models took hold. Now some consultants are urging companies to loosen their views of supervising, so organizations can run with fewer bosses. Research in Europe suggests that a manager can oversee 30 or more employees, in part by using technology to communicate and help monitor work. . . . The researchers offered several possible reasons for managers' increased span of control, the technical term for how many workers are being supervised. Improved communications techniques may "help managers leverage their knowledge, solve more problems and supervise larger teams," they wrote.
The magnetic pull to check your email every 10, or 5, or 2 minutes will kill you. Not literally, of course. As far as I know, your personal health won't suffer from peering into your inbox like a cat into a fish tank. But the relentless pull of the inbox on your attention will almost certainly prevent you from attending to what's really important to your customers and your company.
It's important to realize that processing email is a piece of work in and of itself. As Merlin Mann elegantly expressed it, processing is more than just checking, but less than responding, to every email. You have to read and assess each email, and then determine what you're going to do with it. That may mean replying, but also may mean deleting, or filing, or designating time at a later date to deal with it. "Processing" takes time.
I've just returned from the Lean Enterprise Institute's Lean Transformation Summit where I ran two workshops on applying lean ideas to the individual desktop. I've covered many of those topics in this blog before, but the discussions with the participants got me thinking: maybe my approach is wrong.
For example, I've spilled a lot of electronic ink (fortunately, electrons are cheap) telling you how to manage email. But I'm now wondering whether my advice has merely been addressing the symptoms, and not the actual problem. Which is to say, I'm giving advice on how to handle email once it's hit your inbox. But perhaps I should be focusing more on the root cause of all those emails.
