Cardboard boxes and common sense.

“Sorry about the mess. These are just the cases that came in the last couple of days. The big pile over there? That’s the research project that I’m supposed to be working on.” Megan sighed despairingly and waved her arm, indicating piles of unread slides stacked like ziggurats on every flat surface in her office. Megan is an experienced, talented, and very hard working pathologist at a major cancer hospital. Her days are spent with her face pressed up against the viewer of her microscope, examining tissue samples for evidence of malignant tumors. I was visiting her because she seemed to have lost her ability to read cases and turn them around rapidly for the referring physicians. Megan was caught in a bind: she was feeling pressure from her boss to work faster, but she was worried that reading the slides more quickly would increase the risk that she’d incorrectly diagnose a case.

Megan went on: “I used to be able to read more cases during regular business hours, but now I have to come in earlier and stay later just to keep up—and obviously, I’m not doing a particularly good job of that. Although to be fair, no one else in the department is either. We’re all feeling swamped.”

Frankly, I wasn’t sure I’d be able to help her. I’m neither a pathologist nor a doctor. (Which, since I’m Jewish, always made my parents very sad. They weren’t exactly cheering when I took a class in the Semiotics & Hermeneutics of the Mystery Story.) I know as much about interpreting tissue samples as I do about designing sub-atomic experiments for the Large Hadron Collider.

So I spent a couple of days watching Megan work. And what I saw reminded me of what Keith Poirier wrote on Jamie Flinchbaugh’s blog recently:

Lean is nothing more than the re-introduction of ‘common sense’ into our daily work lives.

I don’t know anything about interpreting biopsies. But it turns out I didn’t need to. What I saw was a doctor who seldom got more than eight uninterrupted minutes to analyze a slide. Practically every time she nestled up against her microscope, someone came into her office and interrupted her. Following each interruption, she’d turn back to the slide, and start re-reading it from the beginning to ensure that she didn’t miss anything. As a result, reading each case took three, four, five times as long as it needed to.

What’s worse, in the two days I watched her, none of the interruptions were urgent. In fact, the most common interruption was from technicians bringing her new slides to read. They’d walk in, say hello, tell her that they have new cases, and she’d tell them to just put them on the corner of her desk.

My solution? Put a cardboard box outside of her door with a sign telling the technicians to put all new cases inside it. Megan created a fixed schedule to pick up any cases every 90 minutes. Fancy, right? She cut interruptions by two-thirds, and cut the time it took her to process her cases by 40%.

We didn’t talk about takt time, pull systems, or kanbans. As Keith Poirier wrote, it’s just common sense. You’re not going to be able to do your work—whether that’s reading pathology slides, writing ad copy, calculating force vectors on bridges, or writing a patent application—quickly or efficiently if you’re always being interrupted. So we cut down the interruptions to help her do her work a bit better.

There’s still plenty of work to be done in that hospital’s pathology department. There’s waste all over the place. But by focusing on simple, small, and rapid improvements, we made a big difference in Megan’s performance—and her happiness.

Inspiration Doesn’t Come From A Box of Cocoa Puffs

I’ll slit my wrists if I have to read one more fawning article about Google’s eleven gourmet cafeterias, on-site car washes, and dry cleaning service. Or Pixar’s cereal bar (more than 20 varieties!), its lap pool, and the jungle-like cabanas and tree houses that serve as offices. Or Nike’s Olympic-size swimming pools and hair salon. Or Zappos’ life coaches. Each of these firms was recently touted in an Amex OPEN Forum article about corporate environments that help employees thrive. And while these workplaces are indeed cool, hip, and in many respects enviable, the constant attention they receive do businesspeople everywhere a disservice. We’re deceived into thinking that we have to ply employees with free food and yoga classes if we want to create inspiring workplaces—and too bad if you work in a steel mill, or a mall-based mass merchandiser, or a donut shop, where it’s a bit more difficult to fit an Olympic-sized swimming pool.

The simple truth is that while those perks are certainly pleasant, no amount of Cocoa Puffs will make up for abusive bosses, interdepartmental bickering, chronically unrealistic deadlines, or out of touch management.

In his bestselling book, Drive, Daniel Pink argues that the traditional carrot-and-stick approach to motivation doesn’t work for knowledge workers engaged in complex tasks. Intrinsic motivation, he suggests, is unleashed by environments that address three fundamental human desires:

• autonomy (control over one’s work)
• mastery (getting better at what one does)
• purpose (being a part of something bigger)

Taking a page from Dan’s book, I propose that a truly inspiring workplace is a work environment that enables the fulfillment of these three needs —and it doesn’t require a yoga studio or a nail salon.

Consider these three examples:

Autonomy: Long before Google’s vaunted “20% time,” in which engineers get to spend 20% of their time working on their own projects, 3M gave its technical employees 15% time to do the same thing. The company combined it with “Genesis Grants,” an internal venture capital fund that distributes money to researchers to develop prototypes, and technology sharing awards, given to those who develop and share new technologies across the firm.

Mastery: Matthew May’s book, In Pursuit of Elegance, describes how FAVI, a French designer and manufacturer of copper alloy automotive components, enables employees to strive for mastery at work. FAVI has no central departments—no HR group, no purchasing team, no organizational chart. Instead, the company is organized into teams that essentially work for an individual customer such as Fiat, Volvo, or Volkswagen. In this arrangement, equipment, tooling, workspace, and process design all rest in the hands of the front line workers, who are free (and encouraged) to experiment and innovate. And they do, often working late into the night to solve complex problems.

Purpose: Barry-Wehmiller, a $1 billion producer of capital equipment, has recorded 21 consecutive years of growth at 19 percent a year. The CEO explains that the company’s adaptation of Toyota’s lean manufacturing philosophy—the Living Legacy of Leadership program—isn’t used as a tool for profitability, but rather as a technique to engage people’s heads and hearts. He states that the company exists to inspire people to embrace their gifts and feel a sense of fulfillment in the process. As one worker says, “we are going to change the world one job at a time.”

In fact, if you look around, you’ll find plenty of companies that have created inspiring workplaces without fancy trappings. WL Gore has no titles, self-managed teams, and a deep-seated belief in the individual to do what’s right for the company. Atlassian software has “FedEx Days” every quarter, in which programmers work around the clock on any project they wish, and then compete to have it included in the company’s ongoing products. Ericsson uses a system for collaborative idea management called “IdeaBoxes” to allow employee creativity to flourish in the service of continuous improvement.

So let’s get past the gee-whiz, superficial trappings of inspiring workplaces. Sure, the free donuts and yoga classes are nice. But providing an environment that unleashes employees’ intrinsic motivation is far better. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Reprinted from the AmEx OPEN Forum Idea Hub

Saying No to 1,000 Things.

You can't open a business magazine or newspaper without reading another encomium to Steve Jobs' consummate genius or an analysis of why Apple is so successful. I'll add my two cents here: it's because he said no to a lot of products. Think how tight the Apple product line is: three desktop computers. Two laptops. One iPad. One iPhone. Three iPods. Two major bits of software (iTunes and OSX). That's not a whole lot for a $65 billion company. (Yes, I know there are other products out there, but I'm not counting the accessories, the machines that only differ by size of hard drive, or the niche software.) In fact, when Jobs returned to Apple in 1997, one of the first things he did was kill off a bunch of products, including the Newton. As he describes the situation,

There were people going off in 18 different directions doing arguably interesting things in each one of them. . . . You look at the farm that's been created with all these different animals going in different directions, and it doesn't add up. The total was less than the sum of its parts.

In an interview with Business Week back in 2004, he explained that innovation, in part, comes from

saying no to 1,000 things to make sure we don't get on the wrong track or try to do too much. We're always thinking about new markets we could enter, but it's only by saying no that you can concentrate on the things that are really important.

By saying to to all those opportunities, he not only conserved corporate resources -- people and cash -- but he conserved people's ability to do great work and create great products. I thought of this recently when reading about the recent research on "decision fatigue." The new thinking about decision-making is that people have a finite storehouse of energy to make decisions -- whether that decision is major (should you parole an inmate), or minor (do you want tartar-control or baking soda toothpaste). As John Tierney explained it in the NYTimes,

Once you’re mentally depleted, you become reluctant to make trade-offs, which involve a particularly advanced and taxing form of decision making.... You become what researchers call a cognitive miser, hoarding your energy. If you’re shopping, you’re liable to look at only one dimension, like price: just give me the cheapest. Or you indulge yourself by looking at quality: I want the very best (an especially easy strategy if someone else is paying).

The cumulative effect of these temptations and decisions isn’t intuitively obvious. Virtually no one has a gut-level sense of just how tiring it is to decide. Big decisions, small decisions, they all add up. Choosing what to have for breakfast, where to go on vacation, whom to hire, how much to spend — these all deplete willpower, and there’s no telltale symptom of when that willpower is low. In making decisions, [willpower-depleted people] take illogical shortcuts and tend to favor short-term gains and delayed costs.

This pretty well sums up most people's lives at work. You're constantly making decisions during the day, both major and minor. And that takes a toll.

Steve Jobs did a good job of reducing that cognitive burden by saying no to so many product opportunities. Saying no allowed the company to focus its cash, and  workers to focus their attention, on what's most important. It's not the sole reason Apple became the smash success it has, but it's certainly part of the puzzle.

Take a look at your organization. Are you chasing every opportunity out there? Or are you husbanding your energies to do great work on the few truly important issues? If you're not executing well, this is one place to start looking.

September 2011 Newsletter

Delegating responsibility without commensurate authority is a recipe for organizational sclerosis, more meetings, and plenty of frustration. Download PDF

Cottage cheese, and the mindless adherence to rules.

My wife got busted by the TSA yesterday. She was laboriously making her way through airport security at SFO -- shoes off, computer out, liquids in a bag -- when they busted her for her 5oz. container of cottage cheese. That's right. Cottage cheese.

TSA Agent: "It's on the FAA's list of prohibited items."

Wife: "No, it's not. I've looked at the website, and there's no mention of cottage cheese."

TSA (after convening a five minute rabbinical council of the other TSA agents): "Cottage cheese is actually a gel, and therefore subject to the 3oz rule." (No word on whether the size of the curds and the percentage of milk fat factored into their decision.)

Wife: If I took the cottage cheese out of the container and mixed in fruit and nuts, would that be okay?

TSA: Yup. (Helpfully) You should also know that if the cottage cheese is a medical necessity, you're allowed to bring it through security."

Wife: "I'm a doctor. If I write a prescription for myself saying that cottage cheese is a dietary requirement for me, and I show it to you, you'll let me go through?"

TSA: "That's right, ma'am. Just show us the prescription and it'll be no problem."

I tell this story not because I want to highlight the lunacy of security theater and the TSA's policies. That's been done many times before. What's relevant to you, as a leader, is the danger of creating a culture of unthinking obedience to rules. In this story, you've got individual TSA agents unable to use commonsense judgement in dealing with a non-standard situation. Cottage cheese isn't quite a solid, and it's definitely not a liquid. What do we do? I know! Let's call it a gel so that we can mindlessly follow the rules and ban it! But of course if it were re-categorized as lunch (by adding fruit and nuts) or if it were medically required by a doctor, then we can follow those other rules, and allow it.

This kind of unthinking adherence to rules creates an enormous amount of waste -- not to mention extreme customer dissatisfaction. In the case of the TSA, of course, there aren't many other options. Unless you're one of the elite few, you're probably flying commercial, and Greyhound isn't a viable alternative. But in the case of your company, there probably are plenty of other firms that provide similar products or services.

I once tried to return a mattress 18 months after I bought it. It had begun to sag badly in that short time, and it seemed pretty clear to me that it was defective. Since it came with a 10 year warranty, I figured that I'd have no problem exchanging it for a new one. But when I was on the phone with customer service, they required it to be in essentially unused condition in order to validate the warranty. No stains. No abrasions. No signs of wear and tear. Proof (!) that the mattress was sitting on the right kind of bedframe all the time. More documentation than I needed when I refinanced my house. And all this despite the very obvious evidence that the mattress was simply defective. But the customer service agent was unthinkingly following the script, and that's what it told her to demand. Needless to say, I didn't get my mattress exchanged. And I've never bought a mattress from that company again.

Have you checked your returns, exchange, and warranty policy recently? Have you looked into the latitude that your customer service reps have in dealing with customer complaints? Odds are that if you looked at those policies from a customer's perspective, you might change some of them. Otherwise, you might as well start confiscating cottage cheese.

Case Study - How to Make an Office Lean

Classic Lean Techniques Worked Wonders at a New York City Government Office Originally published Wednesday, September 05, 2007, IndustryWeek

Over two months starting in March, the staff at a bureau within a large NYC municipal agency was taught how to apply lean manufacturing principles to their work. They did not make value stream maps, nor did my company try to change the system in which people worked. Rather, the focus was on improving the personal work habits of each person so that they could be as efficient as possible irrespective of the overall business process.

At the time of our continuous improvement efforts, the staff at the bureau was struggling. Mayor Bloomberg and his no-nonsense Commissioner had raised expectations for responsiveness. At the same time, unwieldy bureaucratic processes and systems slowed people down. Chronic interruptions undermined people's ability to focus on their work. And no one had an effective approach to managing the increasing burden of email. As a result, work piled up and deadlines slipped. People were overwhelmed and felt as though they had no control over their jobs.

The Discipline Of 5S

We began with rigorous application of 5S principles to each person's workspace. Just like manufacturing workers, knowledge workers need to keep their workspaces clean and organized in order to perform efficiently. This means more than just cramming papers in a filing cabinet and shoving the stapler (along with along with broken pencils, dry highlighters, disposable chopsticks and soy sauce packets) in the top drawer. They had been doing that already, and found that they were buried in an avalanche of low-value or zero-value detritus.

Instead we segregated their information into three categories -- working, reference and archive -- and culled the obsolete garbage. This structure enabled them to reduce the time wasted in looking for their work and gave them more time to actually produce value. More importantly, the staff's rigorous assessment of the information they managed enabled them to identify the activities that were just waste.

The result? A 36% reduction in time spent looking for information, and a 95% reduction in the number of emails rotting in inboxes.

Why was the trimming of the email inboxes important? When inboxes are gorged with junk like Las Vegas-era Elvis, the terrible "signal to noise" ratio makes it difficult to identify and respond to what's truly important. Moreover, each email contains information and ideas that are part of the value streams that flow through the staff. When that information gets stuck in someone's inbox -- when the value stream stops flowing -- you're looking at nothing more than another form of excess inventory.

Keeping The Value Stream Flowing

In a manufacturing environment, the assembly line keeps the work-in-process moving at a pre-determined pace. People must handle the work as it comes to them, or the line stops. But the office environment is different. There's no visible production line, and that fosters sloppy work habits.

At this bureau, receiving, processing, storing, distributing, and tracking the information that comprise each person's job is a formidable challenge. (It is the government, after all. Even under Michael Bloomberg.) Unfortunately, most knowledge workers are undisciplined in executing these tasks. They feebly push papers from one side of the desk to the other. They shuffle piles. They read emails, mark them as unread, and take no action. They start working on one thing, lose focus, and move onto something else, resulting in piles of half-completed tasks. The value stream stops flowing. As a result, deadlines slipped and coworkers waited idly for information. Muda flooded the system.

So we refocused people's efforts on keeping the value stream moving. Staff learned to deal with the work that entered their systems -- an email, a phone call, a memo, a project, -- by taking one of four courses of action: doing it, delegating it, designating time to address it, or dumping it. These are the "4Ds." When workers rigorously applied the 4Ds, nothing returned to the inbox; value always moved forward.

The staff's new work habits led to a 40% reduction in the amount of time spent working on backlog (which is a form of excess inventory in a lean system), and a 25% reduction in time spent processing emails.

Smoothing The Flow

As in any modern organization, no one at this bureau works independently. Meetings abound, multi-tasking is rampant, and frequent interruptions make it difficult for anyone to focus on their high value activities. As a result of these interruptions, value didn't flow smoothly: people forgot critical tasks and commitments, and generally felt overwhelmed and out of control. Imagine a worker on an assembly line being pulled away from his station every 11 minutes to join a meeting or answer a question: workers would feel stressed, the line would grind to a halt, and the defect rate would skyrocket.

We countered these problems by implementing individual work habits that smoothed the flow of the value stream. Staff cut down needless interruptions (i.e., interruptions about non-urgent issues) with "meeting corridors" -- times that each employee was available for meetings or conversation. They scheduled and blocked out their own value work so that they could focus on those tasks. They established sustainable "service level agreements" for email responses, rather than supporting the expectation of instant response. And they cut down on the amount of multi-tasking in favor of "single tasking," creating the understanding that doing one task at a time is actually a faster and more efficient way of doing one's job.

These changes resulted in a 35% reduction of time lost to interruptions, and a 35% decrease in overtime -- indicating that people were getting more done in less time.

It's Not Just About The Handoffs

Most lean office initiatives are concerned exclusively with making value stream maps and creating a more efficient business process. But that's only part of the solution to reducing muda. No matter how lean the system, if the people who work within it are inefficient, you'll still have waste. It's like a relay race: you can make the baton handoffs clean, fast, and efficient, but if the runners are slow, they're going to lose.

That's where lean work habits come into play. These habits ensure that people are running fast - that when they're reconciling the budget, or planning a conference or creating a marketing plan for a new product, they're working as efficiently as possible.

Journalist Charles Fishman points out that a typical Toyota assembly line in the United States makes thousands of operational changes in the course of a single year. He comments, "that number is not just large, it's arresting, it's mind-boggling. How much have you changed your work routine in the past decade?"

Remember, lean is not just about the system. It's about the people. And isn't it time that you addressed how they -- and you -- work?

Case Study - Making Time For Business

Originally published in California Lawyer Magazine

Here's How to Find Time for Business Development You're a partner at a large firm. You do excellent work and are in demand, but you aren't building your book of business as quickly as you'd like. Even though bringing in new clients is crucial to your future success, you haven't been able to find time to focus on business development. Your daily schedule is endlessly clogged with time-sensitive client demands, partner requirements, and committee meetings. Cramming in "biz dev" seems impossible, even though it should be a high priority. Of course, when there's too much work to fit into the day, no amount of "time management" will help--no magic can turn five minutes into six. But using a system to organize your work and manage your commitments can ensure that you won't lose sight of what's really important to your career--and it can enable you to dramatically increase the time you devote to developing new business.

If You Don't See It, It's Not Important Attorneys agree that business development is vital. Yet at their offices their biz dev files are invisible, completely buried beneath piles of client matter. New prospects lie dormant among existing client demands. Even when lawyers try to begin biz dev they lose focus, as the relevant information molders beneath mounds of other documents. The solution? Create a filing architecture that separates "working" client and business development files from lower value, reference material. Note the 80/20 rule: Eighty percent of the work is done with 20 percent of the paper. Keep the important 20 percent--the working files--close at hand. Move the rest to a file cabinet or a drawer farther away. Clearing away junk and lower-value documents makes working biz dev files more visible, improves your ability to focus on that activity, and eliminates time lost searching for needed information. (As a bonus, the discipline of personal organization will help you delegate work to others.)

Put Away the Firefighter's Helmet Too many attorneys begin the day reading through their email in-box. No doubt, reputations depend on near-instantaneous client service. But that level of service comes at a cost: Attorneys become reactive rather than proactive. No matter how quickly they respond, they are always fighting fires, always behind the curve. You can focus instead on "living in the calendar." Rather than vainly hoping for a free afternoon for business development, carve out time for it. Structure your schedule each day so you stay on top of ongoing commitments while still allocating appropriate time to forging relationships with prospective clients. Additionally, set Outlook or Lotus Notes to open in the Calendar, rather than the Inbox. This one adjustment will keep you focused on daily and weekly plans. The first thing you'll see each morning is your schedule, not the avalanche of emails that poured in overnight. Of course, you still must respond to those messages, but at least now you'll be more cognizant of your daily priorities. Living in your calendar also helps you delegate work more effectively. As you become better at tracking client commitments, you can hand off work to associates with clear check-in dates and deadlines--and that means more time for business development.

Taking Action The final step is creating a clearly defined plan of action. When it comes to biz dev, most lawyers don't know precisely what they'll do or when they'll do it. That's because "business development" is a squishy concept comprising many different activities. It's hard to make progress when you don't have specific tasks to complete. You can get around this problem by explicitly defining biz dev's core actions--internal networking, external networking, activities that raise your visibility--and then putting them on the calendar. Make lists of prospective clients and create recurring calendar appointments to stay in touch. Schedule time to write and edit articles for journals. Identify conferences to speak at, set specific times to contact the organizers with proposals, and connect with your associates to develop the presentations. The steady accretion of these activities will result in more biz dev activity--and it will result in winning new clients.

Achieving Measurable Results After just a few months of structured activity, you will begin to see results. I have personally seen junior partners increase their average promotional time by almost 25 percent. Although there are no guarantees, creating clarity in your workspace--both physically and mentally--will make you more effective at developing business.

Dan Markovitz is president of TimeBack Management, a consulting firm that helps lawyers make more time for business development.

Case Study - Florida Community Health System

Situation: Nurse supervisors at a six-facility community hospital in Florida were heavily involved in Lean initiatives in clinical areas of the hospital. They had made great strides in reducing clinical waste through the application of 5S principles. However, these efforts stopped at their office doors, and significant inefficiencies crept into their administrative work. These inefficiencies prevented them from spending as much time as they wanted delivering patient care. Intervention: We showed them how to apply lean principles – particularly 5S – to the information they managed. This allowed them to spot problems in existing administrative processes, and helped them to understand that 5S is a way of thinking, not just a way of organizing the supply closet. The program also helped identify opportunities for eliminating other administrative waste.

Resolution: Participants reported that the training:

• “Provided a clearer understanding of 5S, flow & purpose”
• “Provided the initial steps to an organized standardized process”
• “Helped me understand the concept of visual management”
• “Presented tools to work more efficiently and effectively”

Case Study - SF Area Law Firm

Situation: Four junior partners at a large San Francisco-area law firm did excellent work and were in high demand, but weren’t building their books of business as quickly as they wanted. Each one knew that bringing in new clients was crucial to their future success at the firm, yet none of them had been able to find the time in their days to actually focus on business development. Their daily schedules were sclerotic with non-negotiable client demands, partner requirements, and committee meetings. Cramming in business development activities seemed impossible, even though that work was arguably their highest priority. Intervention: We identified three areas in which a small change would yield large results. First, we created a filing architecture that separated the essential business development files from lower value, reference materials. Making the business development files more visible improved the partners’ ability to focus on their goals (bringing in new clients) and eliminated the time lost in searching for the information they needed. Second, we moved their daily activity focus from their email inboxes to their electronic calendars by actually scheduling their critical tasks. This shift made them more proactive rather than reactive, and ensured that they had time each week for business development. Third, they explicitly defined the core actions that comprise “business development”: internal networking, external networking, and activities to raise their visibility – and then put those on the calendar.

Resolution: After two months of training, the results were in: the four partners increased their average promotional time by 24%, from 25 hours to 31 hours per month.

Case Study - Non-Profit Organization

Situation: A NYC-based non-profit organization was growing rapidly—from 5 employees to 56 in less than one year. However, the extra staff didn’t alleviate the burden on the executive team, and in fact, decisions took longer than ever. Intervention: We realized that the new staff were unable to shoulder the operational and managerial load of daily work because there was a fundamental mismatch between their responsibility and their authority: although they were given responsibility for certain areas of operation, they didn’t have the power to make decisions. As a result, all decisions funneled up to the executive team, creating massive bottlenecks. We identified the common decisions that needed to be made in each role and defined financial parameters within which each person could make decisions without approval.

Resolution: The executive team was freed from weighing in on all decisions, staff morale increased significantly (according to internal surveys), and major initiatives in the following year were all launched on time.

Case Study - Medical Device Manufacturer

Situation: Senior members of the operations group at a major biomedical device manufacturer didn’t have time to focus on their critical work, largely because they were spending too much time in non-essential meetings. Intervention: We conducted an “A3” analysis to fully grasp the current conditions, quantify the costs to the company, identify root causes, and develop countermeasures. The analysis revealed that they were spending approximately nine hours per person per week in meetings with no real purpose, and more damagingly, that meetings were set according to a schedule, rather than in response to real customer demand. We set up a file on the shared server for information updates, initiated a system of ad hoc 1:1 meetings to address most issues, and reserved group meetings for more complex problems.

Resolution: Meeting commitments were reduced by one-third – 56.5 hours per month – and senior staff had additional time to drive projects to completion.

Case Study - NYC Municipal Agency

Situation: The staff at a bureau within a large NYC municipal agency was struggling. Mayor Bloomberg and his no-nonsense Commissioner had raised expectations for responsiveness. But people had difficulty in finding information they needed, chronic interruptions undermined people’s ability to focus on their work, no one had an effective approach to managing the increasing burden of email, and most importantly, people lacked a process for consistently and systematically dealing with incoming work. As a result, work piled up and deadlines slipped. People were overwhelmed and felt as though they had no control over their jobs.  

Intervention: We introduced a comprehensive organizational system for both paper and electronic files that reduced the time wasted in looking for information. This enabled staff to spend more time creating value. We also introduced a simple system for dealing with the daily inflow of work, especially email. We taught fundamental work habits that created uninterrupted “space” for people to focus and concentrate on their critical tasks. Finally, we gave the staff a simple planning tool that helped them track their projects and ensure that they were moving forward.

Resolution: Post-training surveys revealed dramatic improvements: a 36% reduction in time spent looking for information, a 25% reduction in time spent processing emails, a 35% reduction of time lost to interruptions, and a 40% reduction in the amount of time spent working on backlog. The vast majority of participants (91%) reported at least a 10% increase in productivity. One participant said, “I am now able to manage discrete pieces [of work] better, see progress, and not feel overwhelmed. Moreover, I am able to spot possible barriers to forward motion better.”

Stop demotivating your employees.

In my September newsletter (sign up for it here), I write about the bottlenecks that occur when a manager delegates responsibility for a job without delegating the authority to actually get that job done. It occurs to me that this kind of mismatch between authority and responsibility creates bigger problems throughout the organization.

Low Responsibility, Low Authority: here’s the classic recipe for apathetic, demotivated workers. Customer service people who don’t have the power to solve problems. Assistants who don’t get one-on-one time with their execs. These are the people with glazed eyes waiting for the five o’clock bell to ring, who have no energy or desire to help improve the company.

High Authority, Low Responsibility: here’s the blueprint for installing a tyrant of minutiae. The person in finance who insists that you fill out your travel expense form in blue ink, not black – or for that matter, that you use their form, instead of your spreadsheet version of it that does the math for you. The person at the DMV counter who sends you to the back of the line because you forgot to put your middle initial on form 2976A/3. These people make life miserable for everyone and will never leave, because they’ve built a comfortable empire.

High Responsibility, Low Authority: this is the grey world of the frustrated strivers. Nurses who can’t make changes to procedures that would allow them to spend more time with patients. Product developers who are told to just make what the sales department demands. You can find these people polishing their resumes as they look for another job.

High Responsibility, High Authority: this is where you want your people to be. They have responsibility for a job, and the authority to accomplish it. These people are able to contribute to growth, improve performance, and move the organization forward.

Here’s the thing: the apathetic, the tyrants, and the frustrated—they could be anyone in the company. The engaged, committed workers are no better than the others. They’re just in jobs that allow them to exercise autonomy, achieve their goals, and strive for greatness.

Or, as David Sirota, Louis A. Mischkind, and Michael Irwin Meltzer wrote back in 2006:

Most companies have it all wrong. They don’t have to motivate their employees. They have to stop demotivating them.

Limits are good

Kurt is the COO of an innovative non-profit that marshals corporate resources to address problems in its greater municipal area -- education, pollution, transportation etc. Business is good for Kurt, and opportunities abound. He's been to Shanghai twice in the past year to coordinate with businesses there; he's leading an exciting new cyber-security initiative between government and industry; he's involved with an program to improve outreach to existing member corporations; and he's leading the charge to recruit new corporate members. There's only one problem: corporate membership is down. Attrition is high, because member companies feel that they don't get enough attention. In fact, it's only increased since the non-profit started pursuing some of its new programs. Which is sort of like saying that your bank does a great job of providing free wi-fi and donuts in the lobby, but it has an unfortunate tendency to lose track of your money.

You see this problem all the time. Companies can't execute on the simplest and most critical tasks, because they're trying to do everything. They pour resources into entering a new market but neglect their existing customers. They develop sexy new products but forget to update and improve their current products. Individuals do the same thing: they take on high-profile new projects but stop attending to their existing responsibilities. Reach > grasp.

Jeffrey Pfeffer, professor at Stanford University's business school, tells this story:

Gary Loveman, CEO of Harrah's Entertainment, is someone who gets this. Visiting Stanford one day, he told my class that when he entered the company as COO he reduced most executives' job scope, because he believes that people don't do very well processing complex agendas and that success mostly comes from effort focused on the most critical and achievable objectives.

Your most limited resource isn't money. It's time and mental focus. Not only are there a finite number of hours in a day, there's a finite amount of processing and decision-making power in a day. As an individual, that means that you've got to ruthlessly prioritize the areas in which to pour your attention. As a leader, that means that you must constrain the job scope of each person on your team, like Gary Loveman.

Kurt isn't to blame for the high attrition rate at his non-profit. It's his CEO's fault. He's a brilliant thinker who discovers opportunities all the time. . . and then dumps responsibility for executing them upon Kurt. Without the discipline to say no to some of them, or the willingness to match managerial resources to his agenda, the CEO is dooming the organization to a future of unrealized expectations, half-baked initiatives, and a declining membership.

Limits are real. Acknowledging them is not a sign of weakness or timidity. It's a sign of pragmatism that will help you get to where you want to go.

A life preserver for drowning rats.

In last week's blog post, I wrote that Jeff Kindler, the former CEO of Pfizer, was

thoughtless about the demands his communication style placed on his team and the results of that style. By making all his questions a matter of supreme urgency for his team — and let’s face it, communicating via BlackBerry at all hours of the night screams, "PAY ATTENTION! I’M IMPORTANT!" — he sowed the seeds of his own demise. Part of your role as a leader is to help people distinguish among levels of urgency and importance. Cramming everything through one communication channel — whether that’s email, IM, text message, or meetings — is a recipe for disaster.

One of my clients has taken this concept to heart. They don't have a leader who abuses his BlackBerry, but they do have an awful lot of engineers who are drowning like rats in the flood of communication -- particularly phone calls and emails --  within and between their teams. As a result, they can't distinguish between critical and time-sensitive issues like a major product flaw, and trivialities like the new flavor of coffee that they company has put in the machines.

Their situation is hardly unique, of course. But unlike most groups who simply wave their hands inertly and bemoan their fate, they're actually doing something about it. This is their new communication protocol:

Okay, this protocol isn't a breakthrough along the lines of, say, cold fusion. (Or duct tape. Or Oreos, for that matter.) But it does create clear expectations and guidelines to help the engineers manage the communication and information flow that was previously threatening to inter them.

Pay attention to one critical consequence here: everyone has agreed that email is NOT to be used for urgent or complex issues. This agreement really is significant, because it unshackles people from their BlackBerries during meetings, or product development work, or strategic planning. Or their kids' soccer games. Or dinner. Or sex. Which means that there's now a fighting chance to have some uninterrupted time to, you know, think.

This protocol might not work for you. Every company has an idiosyncratic culture and needs. The important thing isn't how you define your communication protocol, but that you define it. And while this might not be perfect, so far it's been a pretty good life preserver for all those drowning rats.

Now, what are your guidelines?

August 2011 Newsletter

Rush hour syndrome: when you cram more stuff into your day, less stuff comes out. Download PDF

What's your Batphone?

Would Jeff Kindler, Pfizer's fired CEO, have been able to keep his job if he had a Batphone?

Calls coming through the Batphone have the highest priority. The signal is unambiguous: if the Batphone rings, it must be important, and Bruce Wayne stops everything to answer it. But this system only works if there's an agreement that the caller only uses the Batphone for urgent issues.

Compare this mutually respectful agreement with how Jeff Kindler handled his communication with his staff. According to a terrific Fortune magazine article, Kindler

bombarded [his executive team] with long BlackBerry messages filled with questions at all hours of the day and night. He regularly scheduled conference calls on weekends. He seemed oblivious to executive vacations. He expected immediate responses to his questions, making no distinctions between urgent matters and routine ones.

All that didn't just make life miserable for Kindler's team; it also clogged the company's decision-making process. Kindler was a voracious consumer of information -- often a strength but increasingly a weakness. "Jeff heard something or read something," one former HR executive recounts, "and there would be a barrage of e-mails in the middle of the night." The next morning, staffers would have to divvy up the directives. "It was triage."

Kindler was guilty of doing something that all of us do at times: ignoring the distinction between urgent and routine issues, and choosing the appropriate communication channels. That overwhelmed his staff and slowed down their ability to respond to truly important matters.

As a leader, it's incumbent upon you to be extraordinarily careful about what you say. As I've written about before, your words -- your casual requests, your idle comments -- have enormous impact on your team. The communication medium you choose is nearly as consequential. In the story above, Jeff Kindler seriously degraded his executive team's ability to act because he was careless.

"Careless" may seem an odd word choice to describe someone who obviously cared intensely about the success of the company. Nevertheless, that's the right word. He was careless in *how* he communicated. He was thoughtless about the demands his communication style placed on his team and the results of that style. By making all his questions a matter of supreme urgency for his team -- and let's face it, communicating via BlackBerry at all hours of the night screams, "PAY ATTENTION! I'M IMPORTANT!" -- he sowed the seeds of his own demise.

Part of your role as a leader is to help people distinguish among levels of urgency and importance. Cramming everything through one communication channel -- whether that's email, IM, text message, or meetings -- is a recipe for disaster. Consider setting general policies around communication: how will you and your team handle urgent issues? How will you handle important (but not urgent) matters? What kind of service level agreements pertain to each form of communication?

The Batphone only works if there's a mutual understanding of its purpose and respect for the person on the other end. Jeff Kindler didn't understand or respect the power of his BlackBerry. That failure of understanding wasn't the only reason he was sacked. But it certainly didn't help.

When all you have is a hammer...

...everything looks like a nail. Even if it's an ice cream sandwich. According to Bloomberg Business Week, the failure of the Chevy Volt to win over consumers is due to the mismatch between the "green" image of the car and the decidedly non-green image of General Motors. The author of the article, who is a brand and marketing consultant with a long background at Clorox, and who bought his car in December 2010, says that

most of my "Green" friends are uninterested [in the Volt]. They’d rather own a Toyota Prius—or await for a plug-in from some other company. Why? Because the Volt is made by General Motors and they just can’t believe GM’s heart is in it.

The author goes on to explain that consumers want to buy a product from a company that shares their values:

Toyota has long supported fuel-efficient vehicles. If Toyota had launched the Volt, chances are it would already be a runaway success. But GM? It’s hard to associate the company that brought us the Hummer with a green image. How could GM executives possibly care about fuel efficiency? Or even get it right? Are they doing this only to look like good corporate citizens?

I suppose there's some merit to this argument. It would seem weird if Payless Shoe Stores starting selling high-end performance running shoes. Except that ascribing the Volt's struggles to GM's non-green image is like saying the Titanic sank because the dining room menu didn't include a porterhouse.

Consider the following:

1. As of mid-July, there are only about 200 Volts available nationwide.
2. There will only be about 10,000 units available for sale in the U.S. by the end of 2011.
3. The Volt starts at $40,000. The Prius starts at $23,500. The Nissan Lean starts at $32,800.
4. It takes 10-12 hours to recharge the car with a standard outlet. Good luck if you live in an apartment building that doesn't have electrical outlets near the parking spaces.

Maybe it's just me, but those seem to be far more salient facts than whether or not GM has a sufficiently green image. Who wants to pay twice as much for a car that they probably won't get for months and that might not be easily rechargeable, when they can get a Prius or a Leaf?

This is what happens when your article is written by a consultant who specializes in branding.

Missing the boat like this isn't a mortal sin when the product is an article in a weekly magazine. But it could be catastrophic when the product is a new corporate strategy. Or a succession plan. Or the roadmap for international expansion in China.

Everything we do is colored by our experiential filters. Those experiences shape our views and give us tools with which to address our organizational challenges. That's human nature. And therefore it's incumbent upon you to know what experiences and biases an employee, a writer, or a consultant brings to the table.

Because if the only tool on his belt is a hammer, you damn well better have a bunch of nails.

Monkey bars physics

Kyle is a VP at a large manufacturing firm. His ascent up the organizational food chain has been fast and impressive, and now he's reaping the financial rewards of all his hard work. Kyle also works horrific hours, between 90 and 100 hours per week. He doesn't spent nearly as much time with his family as he'd (or they'd) like. More importantly, he's got a pile of strategic initiatives and projects as long as his arm that are lying moribund on his desk. He knows they're important to both his and the company's future success, but right now they've got about as much chance of completion as Transformers 3 does of winning the best picture Oscar. It just ain't gonna happen.

Kyle's obviously competent, but he's being held back by his own proficiency. He's still doing work that he did earlier in his career because he's really, really good at it. He's forgotten the essential physics of monkey bars that he learned on the playground: you can't move forward until you let go of previous bar.

Kyle is holding onto work that should be -- must be -- delegated to others. It's almost certain that it won't get done the way that he would have done it. And it's possible that it won't be done as well as he would have done it. If that's an issue, then it's his responsibility to create standard work to ensure that it's done his way. In any event, he can't keep doing it. If he's holding onto those lower value activities, he can't turn his attention to the bigger picture issues that the company needs him to address.

I often see companies struggle with execution because managers and executives aren't able to devote the time and attention to the critical initiatives facing their firms. They haven't internalized the physics of monkey bars. They have to let go before they can move forward.

What every CEO needs to know about 5S and signal to noise ratio

Ron Ashkenas tells the following story:

In one large consumer products company, the CEO insisted on having detailed operational reports rolled up every month to the corporate level, which she then used for a monthly review meeting with business heads and corporate staff. Creating these reports required a small army of corporate financial analysts while also creating a cascade of work within all of the business units. And since the financial analysts were not always busy with the monthly reports, they also generated additional activities for the businesses that they thought were value-added. When the CEO retired, her successor decided that these detailed operational reports were unnecessary since each business unit already reported its key numbers — and the big review meetings never resulted in substantial decisions anyway. In other words, he quickly determined that this form of operational roll-up was not critical to the company's success and it was eliminated (along with the small army of financial analysts and the additional work they spawned).

People commonly think about 5S (a place for everything, and everything in its place) in manufacturing terms: organizing and decluttering the physical space around you. That's too limiting. It's also the wrong focus for knowledge workers. In other words: no, it doesn't matter where you hang your damned sweater.

Factory workers manipulate and process titanium alloys or scratch-resistant iPhone glass faces. Knowledge workers manipulate and process information. Regardless of what kind of worker you are, you need 5S to provide you with quick access to what you're working on, and to allow you to spot abnormalities.

So, when the signal-to-noise-ratio approaches zero -- when there's just a little bit of information coming through the static, as at the consumer products company described above -- you know it's time for information 5S. It's time to identify what information is necessary to serve the customer, make decisions, and manage the business, and eliminate the rest. Anything else may be interesting, but is ultimately irrelevant -- and even worse, it sucks valuable resources into the giant maw of waste.

In my upcoming book (A Factory of One, out in December 2011) I tell the story of the nurses at the Covenant Health System in Texas. They analyzed their work and found that they spent 51% of each shift filling in forms (rather than doing something useful, like, say, taking care of patients). The vast majority of that time and effort was waste. An information 5S project cut that time in half.

Take a look at the information you create and ask others to create for you. How much of it is waste, and how much of it is value? How much of it is just "legacy work" -- stuff that's just always been done, and no one remembers why anymore -- and how much of it really helps you make decisions to lead the business?