[corrected spelling of the Nielsen Company amended; thanks Robert]
The Nielsen Company has just deleted the "Reply All" button on the computers of their 35,000 employees worldwide.
IORG (via TechCrunch) reports that the giant research company, fed up with the deluge of irrelevant email messages and the waste of time they cause,
has finally come up with an adequate solution to cluttered e-mail inboxes and inefficiency in office environments: [removing] the reply-to-all button from the messaging software.
Monday's Wall Street Journal had a fascinating article on how companies are using "social-network analysis" to understand communication patterns within the firm. A software program shows the informal ties among employees by creating a map of their interactions.
As global organizations struggle to improve cooperation between geographically disparate teams and also among the functional silos that often don't communicate well, this kind of tool might be valuable. The engineering firm MWH, for example found that communication flowed well within offices, but not between them. To break open those bottlenecks, one of the company's executives
sent U.S. workers to fill vacation openings in the U.K., because the analysis showed those groups didn't talk much. He hired executive coaches for his top managers to help them become less authoritarian and more collaborative. When the director of the Pasadena group resisted, he re-assigned her engineers to others.
The maps help individuals adjust and improve their own performance as well:
I recently worked with the director of a large research institution. He's a brilliant scientist, one of those guys with a brain the size of a planet, enough advanced degrees to wallpaper a small office, and memberships in all the clubs for super-smarty-pants. As an administrator, however, he's not quite in the same league.
Although he has an extremely competent assistant, he refuses to dedicate time to meeting with her. Often they'll go two or three days without talking to each other. When it's a choice between talking to one of his scientists about the latest research project or meeting with his assistant, it's a no-brainer: cool science always trumps administrative responsibilities.
Unfortunately, this has a cost. Sometimes they miss deadlines. In once case, it was for a very large government grant. Often, the assistant has to spend much of her day chasing him around the 12-story building, trying to get his signature on a form or a decision on a commitment. And then there's the issue of what she could be accomplishing instead of engaging in her daily scavenger hunt for the boss.
Conductor and music teacher Benjamin Zander is an unlikely source for lean lessons. In his increasingly high profile role as corporate speaker on leadership, however, he shows that the lessons of lean leadership applies to the orchestra pit every bit as much as to the factory floor and the accounting office.
A common description of the lean approach to leadership is to lead as though you have no authority. This approach eliminates the traditional "command and control" method of management. Instead, it necessitates leaders to acquire knowledge and experience that will enable them to *earn* the respect, loyalty, and support of their staff.
Zander's approach to conducting an orchestra is strikingly similar. He says that the great conductors are like any other great leader: they understand that because they don't make a sound (only the musicians actually make music), their true power “derives from [their] ability to make others powerful.” From Zander's perspective, in this model of leadership
Tim Walker, from the Business Insight Zone blog, tagged me with this meme: seven things about business and my own career that you (probably) don't know. Tim's blog is one that I read regularly for both his clarity of thought and his stimulating questions, so although there are other things I could be doing today (planning for 2009, vacuuming up cat fur, procrastinating, etc.), I figure that I owe him at least this much for a year's worth of brain food.
1. I'm a Stanford MBA, have been laid off twice, and fired twice. Why is this important? Because I've seen plenty of organizations get by without my services. No matter how important I thought I was, no matter how inconceivable the prospect that these firms could survive without my brilliant contribution, they did. And this experience has changed my perspective towards email/phone responsiveness within a company. The truth is, no one is so important that they need to answer every email, every phone call, every knock on the cubicle wall immediately. Life -- and the company -- will most likely get by without your input. At least for an hour.
"The basic unit of knowledge is a question." This is a common saying at Toyota, where hierarchical, authority-based leadership is eschewed in favor of responsibility-based leadership. Which is to say that people at the top of the corporate food-chain don't drive all the decisions just because they sit in an Aeron chair and have a big desk.
Rather, people throughout the organization, using the A3 process (excellent description and case study available here) are not only given the responsibility, but are EXPECTED -- to solve problems by asking questions, and developing and testing possible solutions. As John Shook explains,
Last week I wrote about the difficulty people have in unplugging from their email:
I've preached the gospel of setting aside uninterrupted work time to my clients, but with limited success. Environmental factors -- among them, the (perceived) need to seem immediately responsive, the fear of missing an urgent email, the desire to have one's direct reports jump when called -- and long-established work habits overwhelm the new ideas.
So what is to be done?
That's not a simple question to answer. There are many ways to improve the situation, depending on your particular work environment, your particular work requirements, and -- most importantly -- your idiosyncratic personal needs.
“In the information society, nobody thinks. We expected to banish paper, but we actually banished thought” – Michael Crichton
NY Times columnist Tom Friedman looks forward to it. The VP of product development at a large software company looks forward to it. My wife looks forward to it. So do a host of other businesspeople. Despite the TSA check-in hassle, the cramped seats, the lousy service, and the inevitable delays, all these folks -- and probably you, too -- look forward to business travel. And it ain't for the free pretzels.
It's for the hours of uninterrupted work time. No cell phones, no email, no pop-ins to see if you if you want to join the baby shower for Laura in the break room. It's remarkable how much work people seem to get done during this time -- and how much they treasure it.
If it's so important and so rewarding, why do we find it so difficult to make that time for ourselves (and our colleagues) during the work day? Why do we foster environments in which interruptions are the norm, while the uninterrupted blocks of quiet work time are rarer than a Coelacanth?
Due to some hectic travel this past week, I didn't have time to write one of my long, elegant, beautifully reasoned blog posts. However, Mark Graban, a good friend of this blog and a mentor of mine, has done a wonderful job of making me sound moderately intelligent with a podcast on his website. Check it out here.
And if you'd rather read than listen, Simpleology is running an article I wrote on three things you can do to help you focus on what's really important. (Hint: it's not checking email.) Simpleology is an interesting site with some wonderful tools and advice to help you crawl out of the morass of your day. It's worth poking around for awhile.
Now, go out and vote.
Poor Dan Brown. He's the "5S Cop" at Kyocera, responsible for hounding employees into compliance with the company's "Perfect 5S" policies. Unfortunately, the way Kyocera implements 5S is, in the words of Mark Graban, more LAME than Lean.
Yesterday's Wall Street Journal featured a disappointingly credulous and simplistic article on Kyocera's 5S initiative that completely missed the fact that what Kyocera is doing is not, in fact, 5S. It's obnoxious, anal-retentive rule enforcement that breeds resentment, frustration, and cynicism among workers.
5S is a philosophy and an organizational tool to improve efficiency by reducing waste in the workspace. It is not simply neatness for the sake of neatness. But you know you've got problems when Kyocera policy
One-piece flow (or single-piece flow) is one of the core concepts of lean manufacturing. The idea is that we should produce one item at a time, when the customer needs it. This concept stands in opposition to batch-and-queue production, in which we make a whole bunch of one thing, then make a bunch of the next thing, etc. A lean car factory might make one green Corolla, then one blue Camry, then one red Yaris, for example, while a mass production factory would make 100 black Wranglers, then 100 purple Cherokees. For many reasons, it's way more efficient to run the factory the first way rather than the second.
But while batch-and-queue production isn't the best way to run a factory, in many respects it is the best way for you to work. Why? Because unlike the single-task machines on a production line, you perform many types of operations: talking on the phone, writing emails, building spreadsheets, reviewing proposals, solving a problem with one of your colleagues, dunking Krispy Kremes in your latte, etc. The need (and ability) to do so many types of things makes you a "monument machine."
Today's post is a question that I'm grappling with, rather than an answer (or any theoretically profound advice).
As I've written about before (here and here), 5S is fundamental to a lean transformation. A lot of people who wear more expensive suits than I do would probably go further, and say that it's the most important step: without the discipline of 5S embedded within the workplace, there's no hope of creating a sustainable improvement.
A very thought-provoking quote from Toyota's president, Katuaki Watanabe in HBR (via Mark Graban, via The Association Renewal blog):
There’s no genius in our company. We just do whatever we believe is right, trying every day to improve every little bit and piece. But when 70 years of very small improvements accumulate, they become a revolution.
In lean terms, there are two kinds of improvement. The familiar one is kaizen, which refers to steady but incremental improvement. The other is kaikaku, which means revolution, or radical improvement.
Kaizen is boring and laborious. Kaikaku is sexy and exciting. Kaizen is your spouse of 15 years. Kaikaku is the smoking hot blonde on the barstool next to you.
Value stream mapping (VSM) is a Lean technique used to analyze the flow of materials and information required to bring a product or service to a consumer. Companies use VSM to help them identify and eliminate waste and inefficiency in a process. If you've ever wondered why it takes four weeks for your company to reimburse your travel expenses, or why you have to give your bank account number to a customer service rep after you've already keyed it in on your phone, you're looking at processes that could seriously benefit from value stream mapping.
Long-time readers of this blog understand the connection I draw between Lean manufacturing and methods for making knowledge workers more efficient. A key element of lean is the elimination of waste in all forms -- from the trivial (the waste of paper clips) to the major (the waste of repairing defective products) to the tragic (the waste of human potential).
A recent interview with Professor John Kotter in strategy+business highlights just how important the elimination of waste really is. In talking about Lou Gerstner's early days at IBM, Kotter says,
I often see people at their desks, struggling to make progress on their large projects. Every time they hunker down to start working on one, they get pulled away by something more urgent ("Hurry! The boss needs you to change the spreadsheet font to Geneva!"), and they don't get back to the project. Or they despair at the enormity or complexity of the project, and they don't get started at all. Or they haven't clearly defined the specific steps involved in driving the project to a successful conclusion, and they wallow in a morass of ambiguity, unable to make any progress. In so doing, they're dooming themselves to a (metaphorical) all-nighter right before the project is due -- and imposing a real burden on their coworkers.
As I've said many times before, you're on a production line every bit as real as one in a Toyota plant. Except that you're not making cars; you're making ideas. (Carbon neutral, and with much better gas mileage.) And this is no way to run a production line.
Use this template to create standard work for project planning.
I see it all the time, and you probably do, too: workers complaining that they can't get everything done. They have too many projects, too many tasks, too many emergencies that need to be handled. The result? They're stressed, anxious, and overwhelmed. They miss dinner with their families. They work on weekends. They miss milestones. And inevitably, some of their work responsibilities just drop off the radar and don't get done.
In lean terms, this is called muri. Literally, muri means "impossible" or "unreasonable." In the context of lean production, muri takes on the meaning of "overburden," as in asking workers to do too much in too little time, or making them comply with onerous policies or practices, or not giving them the tools or the staff to accomplish their work. (Here are two excellent and more detailed descriptions of muri: 1, 2)
Lee Gomes, one of the technology columnists for the Wall Street Journal, wrote a piece last week pleading for the next president to avoid spending too much time on a computer. He poses a succinct, powerful question that all of use would do well to consider: Does anyone who spends all day in front of a PC, forging a river of data posing as information, have any time to think?
He relates the following story:
A group of technology reporters once received the CEO of a midsize, low-tech company eager to impress his listeners with his connectedness. He described his day as one long session checking emails and news alerts, save for the occasional interruption of a staff meeting or a sales call.
