Peter Bregman, head of his eponymous management consulting company, makes a compelling case for standard work in a recent blog post at Harvard Business Publishing. He writes that recently his work day went quickly and quietly down the toilet as he was ambushed by emails, solving other people's problems, and fire-fighting, all of which kept him from getting done what was really important. He points out that even with his daily to-do lists,
the challenge, as always, is execution. How can you stick to a plan when so many things threaten to derail it? How can you focus on a few important things when so many things require your attention?
Bregman looks to Jack LaLanne for the answer:
Listening to Michael Krasny's Forum interview with David Kessler (former head of the Food and Drug Administration and author of the new book, The End of Overeating), I heard an example of visual management tools from an unlikely place -- the Google cafeteria.
Google's cafeteria is legendary for the variety, quality, and price (free!) of the food and snacks it serves. As you might imagine, with that much food there's a real danger of employees, um, overgrazing at the trough. So Google uses visual management -- red, yellow, and green placards in front of the food -- to help employees monitor what they eat. The green cards in front of fruits and vegetables mean "go crazy -- have all you want." The yellow cards mean "moderate quantities are okay." The red cards mean "just a taste," and are placed in front of the Krispy Kreme donuts and fried pork rinds.
Recently, I was struck by something that Bob Miller, Executive Director for The Shingo Prize said: "A culture of lean is present when the day to day behaviors of every person reflect a deep understanding and commitment to the principles."
I see a huge gap between this description of a lean culture and the culture in most organizations pursuing lean. In general, lean seems to be something that's done to something else, not to oneself. (If you remember your college Psych 101 class, this is called the "Other.") People are committed to making a process like strategic planning lean by moving to hoshin kanri. Or they apply lean to a production line by creating cells and pull systems.
There's nothing wrong with this, of course; that's required for eliminating waste and creating value for customers. But I'd argue that it's not enough. Lean also needs to be applied to oneself -- to the way we act and think.
Sunday's NYTimes Corner Office interview of Clarence Otis, Jr. (CEO of Darden Restaurants, which owns Red Lobster, Olive Garden and Capital Grille) made me think about an oft-forgotten element of lean: the process of hansei, or reflection. We focus so much on *doing* stuff during the day, and figuring out how to *do* even more stuff, that we often forget that the post-mortem is just as important as the project itself. After all, it's the reflection after the work is done that provides the information that enables the company to replicate success (or avoid the same failure).
In response to the interviewer's question about time management, Otis answers,
I schedule and block the calendar to have downtime, because I do think that in senior leadership positions, one of your jobs is to reflect, and you have to schedule time to do that. I try to leave a few hours a week that are unscheduled.
Last week I pointed to an interview with Jim Collins (Built to Last, Good to Great, How the Mighty Fall) to show how he not only embraces, but truly lives, key lean principles like visual management and productive maintenance. Another recent interview in Inc. demonstrates his relentless drive to eliminate waste in his core production function: processing information and creating new ideas.
Sunday's NYTimes profile of Jim Collins was striking for many reasons, but for me, most notable was the way in which Collins has taken core lean concepts and applied them to his life. He's a reminder that continuous improvement doesn't have to be larded up with Japanese words and icons borrowed from Toyota to be lean.
Visual management? Check.
In a corner of the white board at the end of his long conference room, Mr. Collins keeps this short list:
Creative 53%
Teaching 28%
Other 19%
That, he explains, is a running tally of how he’s spending his time, and whether he’s sticking to a big goal he set for himself years ago: to spend 50 percent of his workdays on creative pursuits like research and writing books, 30 percent on teaching-related activities, and 20 percent on all the other things he has to do.
Notwithstanding the Wall Street Journal's recent (and frequent) misunderstandings about lean, a lot of very fine firms with enlightened leadership see lean as the road to lower costs, higher quality, and a better work environment. The investment they make and the results they achieve are impressive, and best of all, the ones that really "get it" know that they're on a never-ending road of improvement. There's always the possibility of eliminating waste from the firm's operations, of reducing wasted inputs.
But my friend Tom asks the following: how lean can a company be when it ignores the enormous amounts of time wasted by workers, managers, and executives?
I worked with an executive assistant recently who was struggling with the burden of producing meeting minutes for meetings that her boss, the CEO of the company, attended. And it wasn't just her problem, either: the team of six assistants in the executive suite were all spending inordinate amounts of time on the same task. In fact, this EA calculated that the team was spending 25% of their time -- the equivalent of 1.5 FTE months each month -- just producing meeting minutes.
Her initial approach to this problem was to sign everyone up for a SkillPath class so they could learn to take notes more quickly. In her view, EAs didn't have the skills they needed to transcribe efficiently. To be sure, with better note-taking and transcription skills, they would have speeded the process immensely.
My friend, Roger, leads the lean initiative at a health care system in Florida. Roger is a 23-year veteran of GE Healthcare, with more than his share of colored belts and fancy titles ("Quality Leader") to his name. He knows his 3 Ps, his 4Ms, his 5Ss, his 6 Sigmas, and his 7 Wastes inside and out. He's a damn nice guy, an amateur magician, and -- as I discovered over the past few weeks -- quite the philosopher about his work.
It's been a paiful three weeks of travel for me, with the result that I'm a bit shy in the clever, stunningly incisive, and trenchant blog posts you've come to know and love. Consequently, I'm scraping the bottom of the imagination barrel and referring you to a podcast I did recently with Liz Lynch.
Liz is a long-time friend, an outstanding businessworman, and a networking maven. She's also the author of Smart Networking, a wonderful book for people who get creeped out by the idea of putting on a suit and carrying a stack of business cards to a "networking function" where you shake lots of strangers' hands and exchange empty platitudes about "reaching out" and "finding synergies."
We accept certain facts as immutable laws of nature: hydrogen has a molecular weight of one. E=MC2. The Wall Street Journal will complain about the Obama stimulus package. Britney Spears will do something to land herself on the cover of People. The volume of email you get each year will inexorably increase.
I'm struck by the fatalism in this last assumption. There's a whiff of resignation, a kind of tragic foreknowledge that next year will indeed suck more than this year, at least in terms of email. (That is, unless you actually enjoy being inundated by email, because it makes you feel important. In which case skip the rest of this post and send an email to the company-wide distribution list asking for feedback on the firm's mission statement.)
I'm continually struck by the relentless, frenzied pace that people maintain at work. Whether it's an engineer at a high-tech startup in which speed is part of the company's DNA, or an attorney at a law firm who insists she has to respond immediately (if not sooner) to a client's call, or the head of a non-profit focused on building community support for the organization's mission, everyone is obsessed with speed and responsiveness.
But does a myopic focus on one aspect of performance really lead to the best results? Are we sacrificing quality on the altar of speed?
Sunday's Corner Office interview in the NYTimes was striking for the assertion -- once again -- that there's nothing more important than taking time away to (gasp!) actually think. John Donahoe, CEO of eBay, says
We're accustomed to thinking of poka-yoke (error-proofing) as something for a manufacturing assembly line, or at the very least, for a machine. In this standard conception, there are fail-safe devices (some cool, some pretty basic) to ensure errors are prevented. Electric eyes in elevators keep doors from closing on people. Some hotel rooms are equipped with a room key holder that turns off the power when the key is removed to prevent electricity from flowing to the room when it's vacant. Gas caps on cars are attached with a cord to prevent drivers from leaving it on the roof. (I left a cap near Grants Pass, OR, if anyone happens to see it....)
But why not institute poka-yoke for management? Why not create systems that prevent bad management practices from taking hold?
I thought of this yesterday when reading the NYTimes interview with Kevin Sharer, chief executive of Amgen. When he ascended to the big chair, he talked to the top 150 people in the company one at a time for an hour.
I just finished reading Matt May's excellent new book, In Pursuit of Elegance: Why the Best Ideas Have Something Missing." Matt is a former Toyota University guy and the author of The Elegant Solution.
Gary Hamel's recent Management 2.0 blog at WSJ.com features his ideas for "Management Moonshots" -- 25 ambitious and radical ideas that will significantly improve business management in the future. Frankly, I wasn't terribly impressed.
Some of the ideas are important, but already widely recognized, like "expanding and harnessing diversity" and "reducing fear and increasing trust." Other ideas are just turgid, jargon-laden, consultant-speak, like "de-structuring and disaggregating the organization." (Huh? Where was he when Citigroup and AIG were building themselves into "too big to fail" institutions? Probably preaching about economies of scale.)
But what really struck me was prevalence of ideas that are a fundamental and widely-practiced aspect of lean thinking. Check out these "moonshot" ideas:
Do you ever wish that your meetings were actually, you know, productive?
"Innovation" seems to be the buzzword of the year. (Well, after "bailout," "meltdown," and "Can you BELIEVE how much Bobby Jindal sucked?!?") You can hardly open the WSJ without someone pontificating about the need for innovation, the threat to innovation, the five keys to innovation, the hidden secrets of innovation, blah, blah, blah.
In a change from all the bloviation about innovation, Terri Kelly, the CEO of W.L. Gore (the nice folks behind Gore-Tex and Glide dental floss, among other fine products) gave a refreshingly clear, jargon-free talk at the MIT business school about how the company's culture fosters innovation. For those of you who don't know, Gore is famous for not having any titles; everyone is simply an "associate." (Well, virtually no titles. Kelly is obviously the "CEO," so there are a few. But only when necessary.)
The NYTimes reports that the flies in the men’s-room urinals of the Amsterdam airport have been enshrined in the academic literature on economics and psychology. The flies — images of flies, actually — were etched in the porcelain near the urinal drains in an experiment in human behavior. After the flies were added, “spillage” on the men’s-room floor fell by 80 percent.
According to Richard Thaler, behavioral economist at the University of Chicago and the co-author (along with Cass Sunstein) of "Nudge," the explanation is simple: men like to aim at targets. Thaler says the flies are his favorite example of a “nudge” — a harmless bit of engineering that manages to “attract people’s attention and alter their behavior in a positive way, without actually requiring anyone to do anything at all.”
Thaler and Sunstein call this type of behavioral modification “libertarian paternalism," a phrase that links the opposing concepts of freedom from constraint and firm, well-intentioned guidance.
Back in December (yes, I'm a bit slow at this stuff), Seth Godin wrote about the "High Cost of Now." He argues that there's a clear relationship between how new something is and how much it costs to discover that news. In other words, the closer you get to the source and moment of information, the more it costs.
If you want to know how the stock market did in 2006, you can spend ten seconds and find it in Wikipedia. If you want to know about today, you'll need to invest a few clicks and you'll get the delayed results. Or you could pay a lot of money for a stock market terminal and get the current prices. Or you could even risk prison and get some inside information about what's going to happen before it happens.
Seth makes the connection to our habit of incessant grazing in the email inbox: