2009 Management Improvement Carnival

TimeBack Management is proud to be part of the 2009 Management Improvement Carnival, coordinated by John Hunter at Curious Cat. Several of us are reviewing a variety of 2009's best posts from some of the best blogs. Links to all carnival participants and the summary can be found here. I've picked posts from three of my favorite blogs: Mark Graban's Lean Blog, Jason Yip's You'd think with all my video game experience that I'd be more prepared for this (which surely sets a record for longest blog title relative to the length of the posts), and Kevin Meyer's Evolving Excellence.

From Mark's LeanBlog, I've chosen the following:

• "Love" or "Lean," This Quote Rings True: Mark explains how “respect for people" doesn’t mean being soft on people, and how accountability should be the real watchword in management.

• Where Would I Be Without Lean, by Andy Wagner, explains how the lean journey starts with the simplest step: listening to Joe (not the plumber, but the person on the front line).

• This Year’s WSJ "JIT"-Bashing Article, Again Misguided: you shouldn't talk about the Lean Blog without picking at least one post on LAME. This one explains how the Wall Street Journal (once again) gets it wrong on lean. Thanks to Mark for helping expose the mainstream media's misperception of lean.

Jason Yip's posts are generally quite short, but pithy and thought-provoking. There's always more than meets the eye.

• Productivity Is Not The Primary Goal: no, really, it's not. Read to find out what is the main goal.

• The Toyota version for Information Refrigerator: a brilliant, concise image of why a computer is not the answer for your inventory issues -- or any other problem, for that matter.

• Don't just make it visible, make it tangible: a thoughtful challenge to go beyond mere visible management.

Evolving Excellence is an awfully wide-ranging blog, but these posts are enlightening, funny, and powerful:

• When The Neck Bone Isn't Connected To The Head Bone: guest blogger Bill Waddell explains how the business school academics' devotion to "core competence" and other management theories can have devastating effects.

• 5S: Reality or Lean Illusion explains the difference between the core of 5S and the appearance of 5S, and why it's important.

• Chief Brain Officer: it would be a mistake to talk about Evolving Excellence without choosing at least one post on treating employees as more than just a pair of hands. Kevin is at his eloquent best in talking about how terminology affects the way we think about employees.

Finally, a special shout-out to Bill Waddell's masterful manifesto on the Hollowing of the American Economy, which was first introduced on the EE blog. This piece was probably the single most powerful article I read all year. Download it here.

Many thanks to all of you for entertaining, enlightening, and educating me over the past year with your wisdom and creativity.

Kaizen: it’s good for what ails you.

Breaking news from next month’s Harvard Business Review: kaizen is good for morale.

Well, HBR didn’t put it that way exactly. The (somewhat pompously titled) article, “Breakthrough Ideas for 2010,” argues that the top motivator of performance is progress, even if it’s incremental:

On days when workers have the sense they’re making headway in their jobs, or when they receive support that helps them overcome obstacles, their emotions are most positive and their drive to succeed is at its peak. On days when they feel they are spinning their wheels or encountering roadblocks to meaningful accomplishment, their moods and motivation are lowest.

Although the article doesn’t talk about kaizen or about the elements of lean leadership, many of the ideas come straight from The Gold Mine or The Lean Manager. The authors recommend that managers “scrupulously avoid impeding progress by changing goals autocratically, being indecisive, or holding up resources.” They go on to suggest that

If you are a high-ranking manager, take great care to clarify overall goals, ensure that people’s efforts are properly supported, and refrain from exerting time pressure so intense that minor glitches are perceived as crises rather than learning opportunities. Cultivate a culture of helpfulness. While you’re at it, you can facilitate progress in a more direct way: Roll up your sleeves and pitch in. Of course, all these efforts will not only keep people working with gusto but also get the job done faster.

Nothing wrong with these suggestions. I especially like the recommendation that minor glitches should be seen as learning activities. That fits nicely with lean thinking. But I can’t escape the feeling that there’s something wrong when high-ranking managers have to be told by the august HBR to, um, actually help out with some of the work. Shouldn’t this be common sense, rather than “breakthrough” managerial thinking?

The article also challenges the widely held belief that recognition is the most important factor motivating workers. According to the authors’ research, recognition ranked last. (Which makes you wonder about the methodology of all these studies if the results are so different.) But then they go on to say that

the diaries revealed that [recognition] does indeed motivate workers and lift their moods. So managers should celebrate progress, even the incremental sort. But there will be nothing to recognize if people aren’t genuinely moving forward—and as a practical matter, recognition can’t happen every day.

I’m not sure what salt mine the authors work in, but where I come from, recognition doesn’t have to be a large cash prize given out in front of the whole company. In fact, it’s quite possible to say “Thank you -- I appreciate the work you did” every day.

Okay, now that I’ve got that off my chest, let me go back to the key premise: that improvement and progress aren’t just good for the company, they’re good for the workers. And that’s a virtuous circle we can all benefit from.

Are you making your work easier?

Over at The Lean Edge, Orry Fiume wrote something that really got me thinking: Productivity gains do not automatically reduce costs, they just free up capacity. The actions that management had to take to actualize productivity gains include. . . reducing overtime.

Okay, this is obvious stuff, I suppose. But let's transfer this idea from the production line to the managerial class, and all of a sudden you've got a problem: most, if not all, managers and supervisors are exempt employees, which means there's no overtime pay. If they don't get their work done on time, they come in earlier, stay later, or work on weekends, and the company bears no financial burden. The wife might not see her husband at dinner, the father may not make it to his son's baseball game, but the company? No cost, no loss.

So what's the driving motivation, and what's the metric for lean work applied to managers? There's no cost-reduction incentive, the work is difficult (or impossible) to standardize, and, well, let's face it: we're just used to applying lean thinking to repetitive tasks like those found on an assembly line or a repetitive business process.

Orry goes on to say that

Employees also tend to interpret the statement “improve productivity” as “work harder”. The reality is that you can’t have annual double-digit productivity gains without making the work easier to do. So here's the question for you: has your work gotten easier to do? What have you done anything to make it easier? When I think about the eight years I spent in product design and marketing in the footwear and outdoor goods industries, I can safely answer that in two words: very little. In general, I worked the same way as my predecessor, and my successor worked the same way as I did. That meant far too many last minute (read: expensive) flights to customers for feedback, a lot of late nights finalizing product specs, and a god-awful number of pointless, stupid meetings that chewed up time without adding any value to anyone. (I'd mention email, but this was in the days before we used email too much. We did run up quite a bill sending overnight FedEx packages to Taiwan, however.)

My point is simply this: you should be thinking about how to make your work -- no matter how variable, unpredictable, irregular, and creative it is -- easier. If you're not, you're probably not realizing the productivity gains that you could.

You can see it in the eyes.

It was his eyes that I noticed first. Totally focused. Intent. Piercing. No, I'm not talking about the guy I sat next to on the plane yesterday. I'm talking about a worker attaching handles to mugs at the Heath Ceramics factory.

Heath Ceramics is one of the few remaining mid-century American potteries still in existence in the U.S. They've been making tableware and tile for over fifty years in their factory in Sausalito, CA. They employ a crew of 60 people and make every product right on the premesis.

I was on a factory tour of Heath last week when I saw the guy attaching mug handles. As I said, his eyes told the story of how deeply he was concentrating on his task. The company has exacting standards for everything they produce, and the attachment between handle and mug body is one of the most critical -- and difficult -- joins in ceramic tableware. (It has to be strong and look seamless at the same time. Not an easy trick in a fully manual operation.)

The guy attaching handles was the living definition of what psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls "flow," the feeling of energized focus and positive feelings that come from being fully immersed in what you're doing.

It's also the polar opposite of what you see everyday in offices around the country.

I mean, the contrast couldn't have been clearer. On the one hand, the guy attaching handles, totally focused on his job, clearly energized by the work he was doing. On the other hand, tens of millions of office workers frustrated, stressed, and demotivated by their work.

You could argue pretty persuasively that some of the difference is due to the nature of the work. In his book Shopcraft as Soulcraft (and his shorter essay here), Matthew Crawford argues that "manual competence" -- the ability to make and fix things with your own hands like fixing a carburetor or attaching a mug handle -- is in many ways intrinsically more rewarding than pasting formulas into a spreadsheet or assembling a marketing plan.

But I think there's more to it than simply working with something physical. Stephen King doesn't make things with his hands like Matt Crawford, but I bet that he feels as energized and rewarded when he writes. (Or at least after he's done writing.) Ditto Judith Jamison, the director of the Alvin Ailey Dance Theater, when she choreographs a dance. Or Merly Streep, when she's preparing for a role. And probably the same is true for you, when you've had a chance to really immerse yourself in a "knowledge work" project, whether that's coordinating logistics for a shipment of goods or analyzing the latest public health data on teen pregnancy. So the work doesn't have to be manual to be intensly rewarding and to bring you to Csikszentmihalyi's state of "flow."

But you do need an environment that allows for flow. As I've written about before (here, here, and here), constant interruptions (both self-imposed and externally inflicted) prohibit that. Unrealistic or impossible deadlines that take no account of managerial production capacity prohibit the attainment of flow as well. In fact, the social and physical work environment for most of us white-collar types stack the deck against us, and pretty much guarantee that we'll never get there during regular work hours. You'll have better luck late at night and on weekends, which is why you see so many people working then. ("It's the only time I can actually get anything done!")

I think that lean principles can help create this environment. By implementing 5S and by standardizing the stuff that can be standardized, we can improve the (fortuitously named) "flow" of our work. With root cause problem solving we can reduce or eliminate the interruptions that keep us from creating flow -- for us and for our customers.

With lean, we can get those same eyes that the craftsman at Heath Ceramics has. The alternative is more of the same stress, anxiety, and lack of productivity that sucks the soul out of your work.

Standardized Work: The Source of Creativity

Knowledge workers often push back against the adoption of lean by claiming that their work is fundamentally creative and unpredictable, and therefore unsuited to the standardization that lean requires. That complaint is legitimate when it comes to the actual creative work. And yet, standardized routines are necessary (or at least helpful) underpinnings for the flowering of your creative genius.

There's a terrific article at the99percent.com that explains this concept. It points out that the magic of creative inspiration is more likely to occur when you have routines built into your daily work process. This is what Steven King says about the importance of routines in his writing:

There are certain things I do if I sit down to write. I have a glass of water or a cup of tea. There’s a certain time I sit down, from 8:00 to 8:30, somewhere within that half hour every morning. I have my vitamin pill and my music, sit in the same seat, and the papers are all arranged in the same places. The cumulative purpose of doing these things the same way every day seems to be a way of saying to the mind, you’re going to be dreaming soon.

Notice the elements of 5S and standardized work at play here, even though his job -- dreaming up fiction -- is the epitome of creative work.

Steven King's approach ties in nicely with what the psychologist William James said about the importance of habit:

The more of the details of our daily life we can hand over to the effortless custody of automation, the more our higher powers of mind will be set free for their proper work. There is no more miserable person than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision….

Toyota gets this idea, too. Our friend Mark Graban at the Lean Blog says that

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.

Obviously, this kind of control over daily workflow is more difficult to exert if you're working in a cubicle in a large organization. But there are ways to absent yourself from the chaos around you -- park yourself in a conference room, go to another floor or department in the building where no one needs you, run out to a local coffee shop, put on headphones, whatever.

Consider it a kaizen opportunity to find a way to bring some semblance of routine to the hectic frenzy of your day. (One caveat: don't make reading email first thing in the morning a routine. That's the road to disaster.)

Thomas Edison said that genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. The perspiration will more likely lead to inspiration if you create some standardized work to structure it.

In Search of Metrics.

Persuading people to trade French fries and doughnuts for kale and quinoa is much easier said than done. Market researchers in the food industry have long known that people often say they will eat healthier or exercise more but never get around to it.

The New York Times reports that participation in workplace weight management programs is surprisingly low, especially given the incidence of obesity and the fact that the programs free to employees. Despite people's best intentions, it's hard for them to change long-established behaviors.

As a result, some companies are beginning to look at more innovative methods to improve worker health (and lower health care costs). I.B.M., for example, provides rebates on health insurance premiums for completing online programs in physical activity, nutrition and preventive care, along with online support groups and monitoring. At Safeway, employees can save up to $800 on their health care contributions.

Helen Darling, president of the National Business Group on Health, which represents large employers on health care matters, says that

A lot of us have piles in our homes and our offices that we’ll get to when we can, and changing how you eat is often a bit like that. I don’t think you could possibly overestimate how hard this stuff is.

And that made me think: why is it so tough for people to apply 5S to the information they manage? Why is it so tough for them to change work habits (e.g., not checking email all the time, using the calendar as a kanban to drive their activity, etc.) to improve the flow of the value streams in which they work? And it hit me: there's no support for these changes. In fact, the organizational inertia to keep doing things the same way fights against any effort to change.

So how can you create supports for these changes? Extrinsic incentives -- financial or otherwise -- are not a terribly good idea, as Mark Graban, John Hunter, and others (including me) have pointed out numerous times. The willingness to look for problems and the desire for kaizen has to be intrinsic.

Perhaps the answer is measurement. Maybe the key to this kind of improvement is in finding clearly understood metrics that can make the waste visible. But what are those measurements? I have some ideas that I'll share later, but I'd like to hear your thoughts. Please let me know what metrics you'd use to sustain lean in the office.

Production goals, Feedback, and Finding Nemo

I was halfway to nodding off while reading another turgid ("Lean is one of the very effective ways to actually mitigate operational risk") and obvious ("Involve frontline employees in problem solving") report from the Boston Consulting Group and Wharton on the value of lean when I read something that was actually interesting: Part of what helps Pixar succeed is a model of working in which the individual is as valuable to the team as the team is to the individual. To help structure fruitful interactions, Pixar has instituted a system of daily meetings where team members talk about what they have or have not accomplished each day and others provide feedback.The point is not to track people. “In a creative world you often hit roadblocks, and team-based collaboration is critical,” [Wharton professor Kartik Hosanagar] explains. “People might discuss work that is clearly in an incomplete stage; they don’t have to feel embarrassed.” Hmm. . . lean as applied to non-repetitive, creative work? How many times have you heard from people that their work is different, can't be standardized, and doesn't lend itself to lean principles?

What's striking about Pixar's approach isn't just the idea of collaboration -- plenty of people at plenty of companies collaborate. What's really interesting is the notion of production goals for people doing non-repetitive, creative work. And further, the notion of airing production problems in front of others to garner ideas on how to overcome them.

No matter what your role is in an organization, you have to account for the very real limits on your production capacity. That means taking a gimlet-eyed view at how your time is spent, and identifying what obstacles and inefficiencies keep you from reaching "full production." Institutionalizing feedback and learning from colleagues in a non-threatening environment, as Pixar has done, is a huge step in the right direction. It leads to the continuous improvement and growth -- kind of like the hero's journey of Marlin the Clownfish.

THE WASTE OF MEETINGS: A MODEST PROPOSAL

American workers spend somewhere between five and 15 hours per week (depending on what source you believe) in meetings. Whatever the actual number is, it's big. And as near as I can tell, much of that time is largely waste. So with due respect to Jonathan Swift, I have a modest proposal to end the pain of ineffective, bloated, and often pointless get-togethers that masquerade as work. Try visual management for knowledge work.

A few weeks ago, Jon Miller coined the "Non-Invisibility Law." He wrote,

If need to ask > 0, then visual management = 0.

This is simply an if-then statement to the effect that formalizes the gemba kanri [workplace management] truism "If you have to ask, you don't have visual management of your operations." Visual management must leave no doubt. Nothing that is important should be invisible if true management by fact is to be practiced on the gemba.

This got me to thinking: why can't we use the same principle in the conference room (viz., the "meeting gemba")? Why can't we use visual management to improve the effectiveness of meetings -- to keep them on track, to keep them on time, to keep them from degenerating into a colossal waste of resources and energy?

What if. . . there was a posted agenda on a flip chart (or projected on the wall), so that anyone walking past could see not only the purpose and desired outcome of the meeting, but also what stage of the meeting the discussion was at? Wouldn't that drive behavior that would avoid many of the problems besetting meetings today? People would have to have an agenda and a goal, and they'd have to appoint a moderator to keep it on track. Not quite poka-yoke, but close.

What if. . . there was a timer to help keep people focused on the critical resource -- i.e., time -- being consumed? Many meetings at Google feature a four-foot tall timer projected on the wall, counting down the minutes left for a particular meeting or topic.

What if. . . meeting notes and action items were transcribed in one-piece flow during the meeting (rather than batch & queue afterwards), and projected on the wall, so that errors and inconsistencies could be spotted right then and there by the participants? This is another technique that Google uses to ensure that meetings are effective.

If you think about it, the agenda, combined with the timer and real-time meeting notes, is exactly like the visual management boards in a factory. They're tools to drive the right behavior by participants, and they make the work (production) visible to outsiders.

Jon Miller says that "Visual management must leave no doubt. Nothing that is important should be invisible." I'd argue that as long as the time spent by employees in meetings consumes company resources -- and it most assuredly does -- then it's important, and therefore it damn well better be visible.

After all, your customers aren't paying you to sit in stupid meetings.

Work Standards = Fresh Mind = Better Decisions

Mark Graban, a good friend of this blog, commented on the NYTimes report about the steps that Intermountain Health is taking to lower costs while improving patient outcomes. Mark's entire post is well-worth reading, even if you're nothing more than a consumer of health care. What most struck me, however, was this bit near the end:

A final idea is that using standardized methods as much as possible is a way of freeing the mind up to think about the truly important things (which Toyota preaches, by the way, for assembly workers):

[James] adds that he is simply trying to focus that resource [physician's thinking abilities] on the problems where it is most needed: those for which data does not have an answer.

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.

This is something I've talked about frequently. I believe that to-do lists don't work because they force you to constantly choose among the options on your list, a process that is itself both time-consuming and fatiguing. (Do I answer email now or later? Do I start Sarah’s performance review, review the latest budget numbers, or change the toner in the copier?) When you're constantly spending time and energy making choices, when you never have the option of running on autopilot, you impair your ability to think creatively. You get so mired in making small decisions that you can’t free your mind to attack the big stuff. As the psychologist William James wrote,

The more of the details of our daily life we can hand over to the effortless custody of automation, the more our higher powers of mind will be set free for their proper work. There is no more miserable person than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision…. Whether you're in health care, advertising, or production engineering, there's real value in automating tasks through standardized work (or even, as Jon Miller points out, work standards). Give it a try.