Librarian vs. Archaeologist

Michael Schrage writes at the HBR blog that getting organized is mostly a waste of time:

When it comes to investing time, thought and effort into productively organizing oneself, less is more. In fact, not only is less more, research suggests it may be faster, better and cheaper.

IBM researchers observed that email users who "searched" rather than set up files and folders for their correspondence typically found what they were looking for faster and with fewer errors. Time and overhead associated with creating and managing email folders were, effectively, a waste.

Six years ago, I would have disagreed with Schrage: I recommended that people embrace their inner Linnaeus and set up elaborate folder structures for their electronic files and their email. The goal was a comprehensive taxonomy that would allow people to locate any message in seconds. But when Google desktop can find anything within .03 seconds, why bother taking the time to do all of this organizing? Yes, you'll have to cull through some irrelevant results, but the time you spend sorting the informational wheat from the chaff is far less than the time you'd spend painstakingly cataloging and filing each individual message and file. (And that's assuming that you don't mistakenly put the Henderson invoice in the Hernandez folder; then it's gone forever.)

As Schrage points out, this approach is actually very much in keeping with lean thinking, insofar as we're moving from a "push" approach to information management -- organize now, whether or not you need it -- to a "pull" approach -- organize and sort your information when you need to find it.

What Schrage doesn't address is the reality that not all of our information is electronic and suitable for search. There's no Google search for carpet swatches and spec sheets, Etruscan pottery fragments, or pathology samples. There's also no random search for plenty of publications that aren't digitized. For these things, there really is value to "getting organized."

Even when information is electronic, sometimes it's easier to organize it than to search for it. My wife, for example, handles the scheduling for the 13 interventional radiologists in her section. Each month she sends an email to her colleagues asking them if they have any vacation requests, conference commitments, or other scheduling issues she needs to account for. She'll get responses like this:

"I'll be at the ASCO conference from Jan 22-26." "I'm taking my kids skiing from Jan 20-24." "I'm visiting Dana Farber Cancer Center Jan 18-19." "I'm taking a couple days off from Jan 25-28."

With no keywords, there's no way to search her mail for these messages. And the messages can't even be threaded, because people don't always respond to her original email. As a result, she keeps distinct mail folders to handle scheduling requests as they come in.

I think the organized vs. disorganized dichotomy is a false one. Your information takes many forms, and requires different treatment. Sometimes it's better to be a librarian , and sometimes it's better to be an archaeologist. The method you take depends on the problem you're trying to solve. That's real lean thinking.

January 2012 Newsletter: Execution & Honesty

Failure to deliver on your promises doesn't just lower your approval ratings. It seriously affects perceptions of your honesty. Download PDF

Rethinking Performance Reviews for 2012

The first chapter of my new book, A Factory of One, addresses the need to define value in your work. This is a critical first step because, in my experience, organizations often spend time, effort, and energy improving a process that creates no value -- and therefore shouldn't be done in the first place. (Incidentally, you can download a pdf of this chapter for free here.) The flood of performance reviews that come at the end of the year reminded me of how important this step is. A recent SmartBrief on Leadership survey demonstrates just how valueless performance reviews really are:

Incredible: 58% of the responders say that the reviews are pretty much worthless -- and you can bet that a significant proportion of the other 38% has no value either. As the Wall Street Journal reported,

One academic review of more than 600 employee-feedback studies found that two-thirds of appraisals had zero or even negative effects on employee performance after the feedback was given.

Samuel Culbert, professor of management at UCLA, is probably the leading voice in attacking the pointlessness, ineffectiveness, and immorality of traditional performance reviews; in his view, the performance review should be replaced by the performance preview -- which, from a lean perspective, makes total sense: after all, the PDCA cycle begins with planning, which is what the performance preview is all about.

In light of these results, you have to wonder why companies have reviews in the first place -- and why they'd want to have even more of them. Fifty-one percent of companies conduct formal performance reviews once per year, but now 41% of firms do semi-annual reviews. As Culbert tartly asks, "Why is doing something stupid more often better than doing something stupid once a year?" Or in my language, why improve a process that has no value at all?

I think that a better approach for 2012 is to ditch the performance review and move towards employee performance PDCA:

1. Grasp the Situation: Identify the goal for the week or month 2. Plan: Make a plan for how to accomplish that goal 3. Do: Follow the plan 4. Check: Determine whether or not the plan has been achieved, and why (or why not) 5. Adjust: Make changes as needed to help the employee reach the next goal

This approach may sound mechanistic, but if you think about it, it gives you a fighting chance at achieving that things you really want: better communication. Closer cooperation. More salient feedback and mentoring. Improved performance. Attainment of key goals.

If this sounds like it's too much work, or you don't think it will fly in your organization, fine. Just stop wasting your time -- and more importantly, your employees' time -- on the traditional performance review. Your employees will thank you.

Small, Rapidly Growing 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 -- Biomedical 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 need. 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 -- Sporting Goods Manufacturer

Situation: The warranty department at a mid-sized sporting goods company was overwhelmed with product complaints. Sales had tripled over the previous four years, and the company instituted a 100% guarantee on all products, increasing the burden on the small warranty department. Turnaround time on consumer calls and emails averaged from 3-4 weeks. Consumers were frustrated, and the company was getting torched on Facebook, significantly affecting brand loyalty. Intervention: We drew a value stream map to clarify the situation and identify the root cause of the problem. In this case, the incomplete information that consumers were providing from the outset forced the warranty service reps into several rounds of email exchanges and phone calls in order to get the necessary information—essentially tripling their work. We redesigned the warranty pages of the web site and built forms that prompted consumers to provide the right information the first time. We also channeled international and military consumers into different buckets, so that they could be handled appropriately.

Resolution: Turnaround time for warranty issues was reduced from four weeks to 48 hours. (As a side project, we also reduced on-hand inventory by 80% by switching to a kanban system with frequent replenishments.)

A Factory of One is Finally Available!

I'm pleased -- giddy, thrilled, quivering -- to announce that my first book, A Factory of One, is now in stock and available to ship from Amazon. The book explores in detail a theme that I've been writing about in this blog for the past couple of years: how to apply lean concepts and tools to individual work in order to improve performance, reduce waste, and deliver more customer value. In my view, we too often focus on the entire value stream or a large process within that value stream, and ignore the way people work within that value stream.

Many bloggers and lean thinkers within this community have provided support and guidance for me during the writing of the book, and have rallied around me for the book launch as well. My thanks to all of you.

Read Matt May's recent review here, and his article on 5S and K.I.S.S. here. And, of course, you can read much more about the book and download a free chapter on the book's website, www.afactoryofone.com.

Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog Carnival: Annual Roundup 2011

I'm very proud to say that John Hunter kindly gave me the reins (for one day, at least) for the 2011 Management Improvement Blog Carnival Annual Roundup. What I’ve tried to do this year is select posts that gave me a new perspective about the world around me, and how improvements could be made to the current state.

First up: Shmula, the blog of Pete Abila.

Zipcar Customer Experience: Variability, Utilization, and Queueing is about as dry a blog post title as you could imagine. But what a fantastic analysis of the Zipcar system! Pete lucidly explores some of the major challenges stemming from variability and utilization facing an operation like Zipcar, and addresses the three kinds of buffers that the company needs to make it work. I’m not a process engineer, but even for me, this was one of the coolest posts of the year.

Death by a Thousand Cuts highlights how organizations begin their journey toward failure through many small decisions made over a long period of time—which is, incidentally, also how culture is created.

Pete provides a nice report on a presentation by Mark Zuckerberg in Mark Zuckerberg: I’d Rather Them Believe the Company Was Broken. If you only know of Zuckerberg from the movie, The Social Network, this is a refreshingly different view. He comes across as a modest guy who’s fully aware that his team deserves the credit for making the company successful.

Finally, check out Leader Standard Work. This concept is garnering more visibility of late. Pete provides a concrete description and approach to implementing it yourself. You’ll inevitably customize it to your specific needs, but this is a great place to start.

Next up: Daily Kaizen, the blog of the improvement folks at Group Health Cooperative.

Consultant Space Kaizen: Practicing What We Teach is a beautiful—and detailed—example of eating one’s dog food. The team describes how they applied all the tools they teach to their own workspace in order to reduce their resource consumption and model the process for the future.

Connecting to the “Why” is an excellent reminder that improvement for its own sake is pointless, uninspiring, and doomed to failure. Successful, sustainable change must be linked to the “why.” If you don’t know the ultimate purpose, then your improvement is a house built on sand.

Learning to Offer Questions, Not Solutions reminds us that change management and improvement is best led by questions, not solutions—and that those questions need to engage both the head and the heart.

The “D” Word tackles the under-appreciated trait of discipline, and explores how it’s “the fuel that drives the lean engine.”

Finally, Peter Drucker’s Management Philosophy blog. Sadly, it’s not written by Drucker himself. But the author, Jorrian Gelink, does a wonderful job of channeling Drucker’s insights, connecting them to current events, and reminding us how relevant his ideas are to both lean and management excellence.

In a business world increasingly engorged with email, text messages, and IMs, Effective Communication—The Speed, Quality and Cost Triangle, higlights the very significant tradeoff between ease and quality in our communications. Read this before you send your next email.

Keeping the focus on communication, Effective Communication – Execution and Results in an Organization provides three key points to remember when communicating within an organization. Attending to these points is a good way to reduce waste and improve the quality of your communication.

How do you build trust as a leader? The Three Cores to Building Leadership Trust eloquently explains that trust relies upon execution, people development, and honesty. The are simple, but incredibly powerful truths that are too often forgotten in the drive to get through one’s email.

If you liked this curated list of links, check out the other 2011 Annual Review posts here, and the regular Management Improvement Carnival here.

The C-Suite Double Standard

When I was at the AME Conference in Dallas a couple of months ago, I started noticing what I call the C-suite double standard: leaders and executives who are ferocious about improving manufacturing processes and eliminating waste, but who passively accept waste in their office operations and individual work. Do any of these hit home?

On the shop floor: Looking for a tool is waste. In the C-suite: looking for information is part of work. We’d never accept a skilled machinist spending time looking for tools. That’s classic waste, and we’d embark on a 5S program to ensure that the worker has the tools he needs, when he needs them, in order to do his job. In the C-suite though? Who hasn’t spent 2, 3, 5 minutes—or more— looking for important information in piles of paper or long email strings? If we’re so passionate about making sure that the machinist can deploy his skills without wasting time, why aren’t we equally passionate about making sure that the VP of Marketing can do the same?

On the shop floor: Do everything possible to ensure that people can work without interruption. In the C-suite: Interruptions are so commonplace that they’re hardly even recognized. A friend of mine tells me that Toyota has andon cords hanging everywhere so that workers can get help when there’s a problem, but the company does everything possible to protect the workers from interruptions. He says it’s remarkable how hard the company works to shield them from anything that would break their focus. But between open door policies and a lack of forethought, people in the office suffer an interruption every 11 minutes, with serious consequences for the quality and efficiency of their work.

On the shop floor: Standard work is the foundation for improvement. In the C-suite: Standard what? Production workers continually create and refine their standard work processes to improve quality and safety, reduce variation, and lay the foundation for improvement. C-suite workers run from fire to fire, have no cadence or structure to their day/week, and allow themselves to be driven by external forces—often at the expense of getting to the gemba, helping people develop problem solving skills, and focusing on strategic issues.

On the shop floor: Everyone is on the lookout for the waste of waiting. In the C-suite: On-time meetings are a joke. If materials, parts, and supplies aren’t delivered on time and workers are forced to wait, the team is expected to do a 5 Why (or A3) analysis to understand and eliminate the problem. Everyone understands the waste of waiting, and uses that problem as an opportunity to improve. Now, consider meetings in the C-suite. People wait all the time for the whole group to arrive and meetings to start. This colossal waste of time and resources is viewed as natural and inevitable as a John Boehner crying, or the Cubs missing the playoffs. Even worse: executives actively create this condition by scheduling meetings back-to-back without a break to travel between rooms/floors/buildings—and unless they’ve unlocked the secret to teleportation, that’s a recipe for having people sitting around a conference table playing Angry Birds on their phones.

On the shop floor: Machines and production lines have a finite capacity. Avoid over-burdening. In the C-suite: "I need this tomorrow morning!" People accept that machines have finite production capacity. You can’t get 100 parts an hour out of a machine that can only make 70 parts per hour. Even trying to operate an assembly line at 100% capacity guarantees a longer cycle time, due to the problems that inevitably occur. But in the C-suite, there’s no hesitation to overload people: ridiculous deadlines (“I need this in an hour!”) due to lousy planning and scheduling are rife. Sometimes there are emergencies, of course, but asking people to operate this way is a recipe for slower response in the long run.

On the shop floor: Improving our processes is essential to our long-term success. In the C-suite: This is the way it's always been done. Annual performance reviews. Enough said.

December 2011 Newsletter: The Waste of @Waiting For

If you're a fan of GTD and you use an "@waiting for" folder, you're wasting time, effort, and energy. There's a better way. Download PDF

End the CEO (as we know it).

It's great to be king, isn't it? You've made it to the corner office (or the C-suite, or the VP level, or whatever position carries clout in your world), and you're feeling pretty good. Minions follow your instructions. You offload some of the scut work you've been saddled with for years. People create PowerPoint presentation for you, instead of you agonizing over Helvetica vs. Arial when creating them for others. Maybe you even have an executive dining room.

Vineet Nayar, the CEO of HCL Technologies in India, disagrees. He wants to get rid of the CEO.

Of course, as he says, he doesn't want to kick him or her out the door. He means that we should move beyond the quaint notion that the CEO should be the supreme corporate leader. As Nayar points out, in the traditional way of thinking, the CEO is expected to play the following roles: Creator of Value; Answer Machine; Strategy Wizard; Approval Granter; and Performance Reviewer/Mentor.

But in the increasingly complex and fast-moving market, when companies span the globe, it's unreasonable -- absurd, really -- to expect that one person can fulfill all these roles, no matter how talented, skilled, and experienced. More significantly, trying to do so has a toxic effect on the company:

At HCL I came to realize that, first, I could not play any of those roles and, second, none of them creates very much value for the company or the company's customers. On the contrary, the supreme CEO robs employees of initiative, stifles their passion, and inhibits their ability to do their jobs well. If employees do not have to find their own answers, develop their own strategies, formulate their own plans, and assess their own performance, what are they? Automatons.

His long-term goal is to transfer the responsibility for change to employees. By allowing the people who really create customer value -- the employees -- to drive improvement, Nayar realizes that the company can become a nimbler, faster-moving organization that reduces the amount of non-valued added activities.

Nayar goes on to list several specific steps HCL has taken to move in this direction: peers review annual business plans, making them higher quality and more easily executed. An intranet portal allows workers to ask and answer each others' questions, creating faster learning cycles and spreading ideas widely. Employee reviews and feedback are visible to everyone, helping people improve more quickly. Etc.

Now, these may not be the right tools and tactics for you and your firm. But the key idea -- that the supreme leader (whether CEO, VP, Managing Director, whatever) by definition robs employees of initiative, stifles their passion, and inhibits their ability to do their jobs well -- is worth attending to. This idea is the power behind the A3 and A3 thinking. The A3 provides a structured method for transferring responsibility and authority to the people actually doing the work of the company. In so doing, it fosters initiative, creativity, and autonomy throughout the organization. It leads to continuous improvement and greater engagement.

It also lightens your burden. After all, why should you have to be the smartest guy in the room when you've got dozens/hundreds/thousands of talented, smart, hardworking people who can help shoulder the load?

So think about abdicating the throne. See if you can become a CEO who is willing to admit he doesn't know very much, answers as few questions as possible, and is always asking for help.

Do you really want to put Steve Jobs on Mt. Olympus?

I come to bury Steve Jobs, not to praise him. Don't get me wrong: I love Apple products. I use them daily, and they’ve made my life easier, better, and more fun. Steve Jobs’ business accomplishments are truly remarkable, and will surely be taught in business schools for decades. The encomiums to him in the newspapers are fitting tribute to his life and career.

Nevertheless, for the business world to lionize him so fervently creates two significant risks for other leaders.

The first risk is that we encourage CEOs to act like him—a dangerous proposition when you’re talking about a charismatic leader. Yes, Steve was visionary, unswervingly committed to perfection, and elicited Herculean efforts from his employees. Let’s not forget, though, that he was also a micromanager and a bully. He had the final decision not just on his all-important products, but on less essential issues, such as the design of the shuttle buses that took employees to and from San Francisco, and on what food would be served in the cafeteria. He humiliated employees in public and abused those who didn’t meet his standards. He once told an engineer that he while he had “baked a really lovely cake,” he “frosted it in dog sh*t.” Edward Eigerman, a former Apple engineer, said that more than anywhere else he had worked before or since, there’s real concern about being fired.

Steve could get away with that kind of behavior both because of his charisma and because Apples was his company, with his DNA inextricably implanted in the culture. That’s not true for most CEOs, however, no matter how accomplished they are: not Sam Palmisano at IBM, not Andrea Jung at Avon, not Jim Sinegal at Costco. My guess is that if they dove as deeply into the details of every facet of the company—if Sinegal had made the decision about the exact pantone of the signs in the food court—he’d end up with a bunch of demoralized people who grumbled about absurd micromanagement. And what about the current belief that innovation depends upon the ability to “fail fast”? Good luck nurturing a creative environment when failure is stigmatized and your staff lives in fear of getting fired. Finally, consider you don’t have to be a bully to be an effective leader: as Jim Collins pointed out in Built To Last, a “humble,” “modest,” “unobtrusive and soft-spoken” gentleman named William McKnight guided 3M for 52 years and turned the company into a colossus.

The second risk is subtler, but equally pernicious. By canonizing Steve, we make ourselves feel inescapably inferior, and diminish our own ability to achieve greatness. I call this the “founding fathers” complex. Elevating the founding fathers of the United States above the status of ordinary men creates the belief that we can’t attain the same grand and noble heights that they did. We end up bemoaning the feckless, unworthy politicians that our era produces, and despair of producing leaders equal to the challenge of our times. (Although, given the failure of the latest super-committee to agree on a deficit cutting strategy, I’m beginning to wonder.)

Yet the founding fathers were human, no more nor less than we. John Adams could be petulant, petty, and prone to holding grudges. Thomas Jefferson kept slaves, had a mistress, and while serving as Adams’ vice president, did everything he could to—secretly—undermine his boss. These were great men to be sure, but they had their own faults and weaknesses that they strove mightily to overcome. If we ignore those flaws and accord them superhuman abilities, then we doom ourselves to permanently diminished expectations, cripple our faith in our own capabilities, and needlessly cap our potential accomplishments.

Steve Jobs was a consummate salesman, a remarkable CEO, and a true visionary. By all means, celebrate his accomplishments. Marvel at his performance. But he wasn’t a god. Elevating him to Mt. Olympus does both him and us a disservice.

The personal kanban: not just "vocabulary engineering."

Michel Baudin, who most assuredly has forgotten more about lean than I’ll ever know, wrote recently about the “personal kanban” and concluded that it was much ado about nothing on three counts. First, Baudin argued that it was essentially old wine in new bottles—the Scancard System of the 1980s did much the same thing. Second, its lack of portability makes it impractical to use in meetings or with a network. Finally, it only displays the current status of a project, rather than the whole history. (In a felicitous turn of phrase of which I’m really jealous, he also   called it “a feat of vocabulary engineering,” leveraging the buzz around an aspect of Toyota’s production system to repackage ideas that have little to do with it.) Having just written about value of a personal kanban in my forthcoming book (A Factory of One, available in mid-December), and having seen many individuals apply the concept successfully, I must respectfully disagree.

He’s absolutely right that for a long time now people have known they should limit their work in process. However, the unhappy fact is, they don’t—and it’s not just because supervisors insist on piling more and more projects onto hapless subordinates, like Egyptian slave masters in The 10 Commandments. In large part, people don’t limit their WIP because they have no idea themselves of how much work they have on their plates. Particularly in a modern office, most of their work is invisible, residing in electronic files, email messages, and all manner of stray bits and bytes on their computers. As a result, people are terrible managers of their own workload, and they reflexively accept new responsibilities and commitments when they’d be far better off saying “no.” The personal kanban, like the Scancard before it, does a wonderful job of making that work visible and helping people better manage their work.

Baudin’s comment about the lack of portability is valid, but in my opinion hardly disqualifies the personal kanban as a valuable tool. Much of a knowledge worker’s time is spent in the office, not a conference room, and is therefore accessible to him or her when needed. And besides, if the kanban in the office encourages people to have their meetings where the work is done, and not in the conference room, so much the better.

His final point about the kanban only displaying the current state of a project can be easily fixed. Beneath the “Backlog/Doing/Done” section, you can map out the key steps of the entire project/value stream, as you can see in the photo below.

This section provides the context for each task—both the history and the future requirements, the latter of which the Ybry Chart can’t do.

The last thing I’ll say in defense of the “personal kanban” is this: the purpose of a kanban in a factory setting is to control WIP and pull resources forward at the right time. The personal kanban does precisely that—except that the resources in this case are the person’s time and attention. If the whiteboard and sticky note combination of the personal kanban succeeds in this goal, then I think it deserves the name kanban.

So, Michel, while the personal kanban may not be a breakthrough on the order of, say, Copernicus’s insights on planetary alignment, I maintain that it’s a valuable, capable, and flexible tool to improve knowledge worker production.

Why your meetings always suck (and what to do about it).

It’s not just your meetings that suck. I spent a week at the AME Conference in Dallas talking to continuous improvement/performance excellence/lean transformation leaders at over a dozen companies, and every one of them said their meetings suck. Mind you, these are people who are specially trained to improve quality, lower costs, and reduce waste. And yet, by their own admission, their meetings are the epitome of waste: waste of time, waste of human potential, waste of space, waste of energy.

If their meetings suck, what chance do you have?

Why are crappy meetings so pervasive? Why is it so hard to focus on value when you’re working in a group? I mean, it’s not like there’s any big secret to running a good meeting: Robert’s Rules of Order and its variants have been around practically since the Mesozoic era, and they all say the same thing. Start on time. End on time. Have an agenda. Assign a notekeeper. Etc. And yet, meetings still end up in New Yorker cartoons and Dilbert comic strips—and for good reason. They suck.

Jim Womack and Dan Jones introduced the concept of Purpose, Process, and People. I’d like to suggest that these three Ps could be applied equally well to meetings. Instead of getting bogged down in Robert’s Rules, consider:

What’s the purpose of the meeting? Can you explain it clearly, concisely, and compellingly? If not, you’re heading down the road towards a lampoon-worthy, soul-sucking time waste, because you don’t really know why you’re meeting. If all you have is a topic (“We need to talk about Project Applesauce”) without a clear goal, don’t have the meeting. I’ll go even further: if someone calls you into a meeting and it’s clear there’s no clear purpose, gracefully excuse yourself, leave, and go do something productive.

What’s the process you’ll use in the meeting to ensure that each step of the meeting is, in Womack’s and Jones’s words, valuable, capable, and adequate? Do you have the right information to fulfill the purpose of the meeting? Do you have the right format (large group free-form discussion, small-team problem solving, short stand-up meeting at the gemba, quick update around a visual management board, a series of one-on-one conversations, etc.) to accomplish the purpose? In my experience, the process is often misaligned with or inappropriate to the goal.

Who are the people you’ll have in the meeting? Who needs to be there? And the corollary: who doesn’t need to attend? These questions aren’t as simple to answer as they may seem. You’ll need to have many small discussions before the actual meting to determine who should be there. Think about all the times you’ve been halfway through a meeting and someone says, “Oh, we really need to have Susan’s input on that. She knows all about that alloy, and I’ll defer to her on the issue.” Think about all the times you’ve sat in a meeting and wondered, “Why the hell am I here? I could be drafting the marketing plan for our new line of Ibex fur mukluks.”

I’m not suggesting that making your meetings all value and no waste is any easier than making your production line of jet turbine blades, or the cardiac catheterization process at your hospital all value and no waste. But the irony of continuous improvement champions focusing all their effort on a product production line and none on their own knowledge production line is almost laughable. After all, if their days are so waste-ridden that they don’t have time to get rid of waste in the larger organization, how are they ever going to achieve their goals?

More to the point: if you're leading a company, a division, or a team, and you passively tolerate, accept, and contribute to a culture of pointless, bloated, and ineffective meetings, then you're unlikely to make the progress you desire.

Remember: the only truly non-renewable resource is time. Don’t squander it as though it’s limitless—and free.

November 2011 Newsletter: You Are a Monument Machine

"Single minute exchange of die" (SMED) isn't just for machines. Your brain is as much an expensive, complex piece of equipment as a traditional factory "monument machine." Take all possible steps to reduce the downtime due to changeovers. Download PDF

How Broken Promises Can Benefit Your Company

My latest article for Amex OPEN Forum just posted. Here's how it begins: The world is rife with maxims that remind us to never to break our commitments: “Be a man of your word,” “Your word is your bond,” “Under-promise and over-deliver.” But while this might be good advice when dealing with your spouse (or the IRS), it’s a bad idea when it comes to your business. Broken promises provide powerful opportunities to identify and eliminate problems that keep your business from improving and growing.

Read the entire article on the Amex OPEN Forum website here.

Mise-en-place, 5S, and why tape outlines on the desk are stupid.

Karen Martin, Mark Graban, and Kevin Meyer have been tweeting over the past couple of days about a hospital in New Mexico that -- sadly -- is putting tape outlines on people's desks in a misguided implementation of 5S. This nonsense has enraged the nurses who understandably see this as irrelevant to their ability to get their jobs done. Confusion about how to apply 5S in a knowledge environment is rampant, as these stories of "lean as misguidedly executed" (LAME) attest. I believe that's because people focus on the easily visible, outward trappings of 5S without understanding the purpose of the tool.

In his book Kitchen Confidential, chef Anthony Bourdain explains the function of a cook's mise-en-place. His description gets at the heart of 5S better than anything I've read by any lean consultant:

Mise-en-place is the religion of all good line cooks. Do not f**k with a line cook’s “meez”—meaning their set-up, their carefully arranged supplies of sea salt, rough-cracked pepper, softened butter, cooking oil, wine, back-ups and so on. As a cook, your station, and its condition, its state of readiness, is an extension of your nervous system—and it is profoundly upsetting if another cook or, God forbid, a waiter—disturbs your precisely and carefully laid-out system. The universe is in order when your station is set up the way you like it: you know where to find everything with your eyes closed, everything you need during the course of the shift is at the ready at arm’s reach, your defenses are deployed. If you let your mise-en-place run down, get dirty and disorganized, you’ll quickly find yourself spinning in place and calling for back-up. I worked with a chef who used to step behind the line to a dirty cook’s station in the middle of the rush to explain why the offending cook was falling behind. He’d press his palm down on the cutting board, which was littered with peppercorns, spattered sauce, bits of parsley, breadcrumbs and the usual flotsam and jetsam that accumulates quickly on a station if not constantly wiped away with a moist side-towel. “You see this” he’d inquire, raising his palm so that the cook could see the bits of dirt and scraps sticking to his chef’s palm, “That’s what the inside of your head looks like now. Work clean!”

Want to know what 5S is and why it's important, without resorting to all those difficult-to-pronounce Japanese words? It’s mise-en-place. (Of course, I’ve just substituted French for Japanese, so this may not be an improvement.)

Doctors and nurses (mostly) embrace 5S when it comes to the tools of their care-giving trade. Take a look at any surgical tray, and you'll see that's true. Physical organization -- 5S -- is essential to being able to deliver care smoothly and efficiently. Supply closets are perfect examples of places that benefit from 5S. But organizing the stapler and 3-hole punch on the desk? That's asinine and pointless. No one needs to find the stapler with their eyes closed.

When it comes to the office environment, it's more important to apply 5S to the information people manage, not the tools they use. The issue isn't where the stapler sits; the issue is where critical information resides. Can people find it quickly and easily on the file server -- or on medical forms?

Making information flow faster, with less waste and greater clarity -- that's how 5S should be applied in the knowledge workplace. The nurses at the Covenant Health System in Texas understand that. They didn't mess around putting tape outlines on their desks. But they did reduce the amount of time they spent filling out paperwork by 50% by simplifying, standardizing, redesigning, and eliminating all their forms. That's 5S intelligently applied to a real problem.

Tape outlines around the stapler? Diktats concerning the maximum number of pens a person can have at his desk? Please. They're not going to get rid of the mental equivalent of peppercorns, spattered sauce, bits of parsley, and breadcrumbs that litter the brains of knowledge workers.

The gemba for a knowledge worker is inside her head. Let's make sure that the information that goes in there is well-organized and easily accessible.

5S in Three Bullets

A few months ago, Mark Rosenthal boiled 5S down to three key points:

• You have everything you need.
• You need everything you have.
• You can see everything clearly belongs where it is.

There's a lot to be said for the simplicity of this description. But how does it apply to knowledge workers?

Too often, 5S is transplanted -- not translated -- from the factory floor to the office cube without considering its purpose. That leads to ridiculous situations such as the one at Kyocera America, where there's an internal 5S cop yelling at people for putting sweaters on the backs of their chairs.

Knowledge workers traffic in information, not materials. So for a knowledge worker, Mark's points can be rewritten as:

• You have all the information you need.
• You need all the information you have.
• You can see  that all the information clearly belongs where it is.

From this perspective, it doesn't matter where you hang your sweater, put your stapler, or keep the picture of your dog. None of those affect your ability to access the information you need to do your job. As long as your electronic and paper filing systems allow you to quickly and easily retrieve information, you're okay.

That doesn't obviate the need for visible management tools. Particularly because the information you receive is increasingly electronic, it's difficult to assess at a glance what you have. When you look at a product development spec package, a legal brief, or a pile of papers, can you easily tell whether you have all the required information? If not, some sort of signaling system -- a kanban, checklist, post-it notes, etc. -- is needed.

Mark goes on to say:

As the work is done, the moment someone discovers something else is needed, THAT is the time to deal with the issue. Ask, “Is this something we should need in the normal course of the work?”

If so, then you learned something that you didn’t know or didn’t remember when you first organized the area. Add that item, find a place for it, and establish a visual control. Right now.

If not, then “Why did we need it this time?” What broke the normal pattern of work? This is where 5S breaks down – when we don’t discriminate between something that is needed in the normal course of work, and something that is needed as an exception.

This process is just as important for the knowledge worker. When we don't ask these questions, we end up buried in piles of papers, in stray files on the computer desktop, and random emails that have been ambiguously flagged for "followup," even though the flags don't really tell us anything about the process. Once all those bits of information start to accumulate, we no longer have just what we need and need just what we have. That leads to errors, rework, waiting, and all kinds of wasted effort.

Think about it.

October 2011 Newsletter

If your team is bogged down in a morass of email and endless meetings, you'll need to change the culture before you can improve performance and productivity. Download PDF

The siren song of technology.

My friend Kyle works at an insurance adjuster that's the corporate equivalent of Andy Griffith's Mayberry, RFD. According to Kyle, everyone is just so nice to each other that they can hardly get any work done. Every birthday, anniversary, child's graduation, promotion, deal closing, hand-knit scarf, and new haircut gets noticed and praised. Usually through a blast email that everyone in the company receives. The company is awash in messages providing feedback, coaching, and thank-yous, and Kyle says it's a small miracle anyone can find important customer communication amidst the deluge. The CEO is very proud of the tight-knit culture he's created, but recently he noticed the downside: people were spending inordinate amounts of time reading and writing emails of questionable utility, while responsiveness to internal and external customers declined. So he bought and installed Rypple, a "social performance platform built for teams to share goals, recognize great work, and help each other improve" (according to their website). Surely, he thought, this would keep people from spending so much time on email. And it did. People's email usage plummeted.

Unfortunately, they put all that time into communicating via the Rypple interface, so there was no improvement in customer service.

The CEO fell into one of the oldest traps in the book: he assumed that technology would be a panacea for his problems. Just slap some fancy hardware or software on the problem, and it will go away. But as Kevin Meyer & Bill Waddell have noted many times before, and as Mark Graban pointed out recently, automation is seldom the answer. Add technology to a broken process and all you get is a faster and more expensive broken process.

In the case of Kyle's company, the culture valued and promoted that kind of close interaction. In fact, the quantity of "Attaboy! Nice job!" emails was part of the annual performance review! It's no wonder that installing Rypple had zero effect on time spent e-schmoozing.

Kyle has gotten permission to disable Rypple for his team of adjusters, and now he's trying to revamp the criteria used in performance evaluations. He's not trying to turn the company into a Dickensian sweatshop, but he is trying to get the underlying process right -- in this case, the measures used to track real performance as valued by the customer.

Next time you consider buying a fancy new toy, remember: buying software for your process problem is like buying a bigger pair of pants for your weight problem.