In order to make 5S relevant to the knowledge worker, it’s essential to translate—not transfer—5S to the world of information. Doing so avoids wasted time & effort; reduces decision paralysis; and eliminates the "frazzle factor."
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Leslie Perlow, author of the seminal study on "time famine," is at it again, this time with a new book called Sleeping with your Smartphone. The book is based on experiments that she did with the Boston Consulting Group (and which I described in an earlier blog post) to reduce the need -- or the perceived need -- to be "always on." In a new HBR blog post, Perlow points out that
accepting the pressure to be "on" — usually stemming from some seemingly legitimate reason, such as requests from clients or customers or teammates in different time zones — in turn makes us accommodate the pressure even more. We begin adjusting to such demands, adapting the technology we use, altering our daily schedules, the way we work, even the way we live our lives and interact with our family and friends, to be better able to meet the increased demands on our time. Once our colleagues experience our increased responsiveness, their requests on our time expand. Already "on," we accept these increased demands, while those who don't risk being evaluated as "less committed" to their work.
She calls this the "cycle of responsiveness (although I'd probably call it the "vicious cycle of responsiveness"), in which our willingness to respond to increased requests simply leads to increased demands. Like ocean waves gradually wearing away a sand castle, these demands end up eroding any vestige of time that we can unambiguously arrogate for ourselves.
From a lean perspective, there are two major problems with this cycle of responsiveness. First, there's the waste of overproduction. I've argued before that if the only thing you're providing your customers is a fast response, you'll soon be replaced by someone cheaper in Shenzen or Mumbai. Your job is to provide real value -- value which most of the time doesn't need to be delivered within 12 minutes of receipt of the email. In other words, being "on" all the time isn't necessarily what your customer needs. Yes, your customer may appreciate it, but that doesn't mean that they need it. And that, from a lean perspective, is overproduction.
Second, the cycle of responsiveness prevents (or at least impairs) the ability to do kaizen and reflection. If you're always "on" and responding to customers, you never have the time to stop, to reflect, to figure out how to improve your processes and systems. You end up racing faster and faster in a desperate attempt to stay in the same place on the treadmill, like George Jetson.
Perlow provides valuable suggestions for how to break the cycle. Check them out here.
I've been wondering recently why people are so busy at work. Is work really that much more demanding than it was 20, 60, or 100 years ago? Are customer demands that much more onerous? Lean thinkers spend a lot of time trying to reduce the amount of waste in a process -- an admirable goal, to be sure. But sometimes the root cause of waste lies less in the process, and more in the mindset of the people working within the process.
In a recent op-ed in the New York Times, Tim Kreider writes about the self-imposed "busyness" that afflicts so many people. They’re busy, he argues, because they’re addicted to busyness and dread what they might have to face in its absence. (To his credit, he points out that people pulling back-to-back shifts in the I.C.U. or commuting by bus to three minimum-wage jobs don't complain about being busy. Those people are tired.)
Busyness serves as a kind of existential reassurance, a hedge against emptiness; obviously your life cannot possibly be silly or trivial or meaningless if you are so busy, completely booked, in demand every hour of the day.
In my own consulting, I see an awful lot of activity that really doesn't need to be done. One client spends his time -- everyday -- creating elaborate 50-100 slide PowerPoint decks for his boss. Wouldn't a single page document, or even a meeting, be a more efficient way of communicating the ideas? I've seen HR professionals crafting policies and procedure manuals that are so verbose, turgid, and unnecessarily complex that it's a wonder they have time for any real, value-added work. I've seen engineers attending meetings from 9am-5pm, but are only relevant to them for the 30 minutes from 1-1:30pm. And I haven't even mentioned the often pointless trolling through the email inbox that consumes so much of modern work life. How much of this activity is really necessary or value-added?
Tim writes,
I can’t help but wonder whether all this histrionic exhaustion isn’t a way of covering up the fact that most of what we do doesn’t matter.
Me, too.
Blog posts about the value of domestic manufacturing are more properly the purview of Kevin Meyer and Bill Waddell over at Evolving Excellence, but I'm not sure they read the Sunday New York Times book review. So I'm stepping in with the latest story on why it makes sense to make things at home -- this time, books. Dave Eggers's new book, A Hologram for the King, is being published by Thomson-Shore printers in Dexter, Michigan. Eggers said,
I have to admit that I had a bit of a come-to-Jesus moment when it came to the printing of McSweeney’s books [Eggers's publishing house]. Over the years, we’ve done a lot of our production in the U.S., and even more in Canada, and then, about five years ago, we started printing in Asia, too. But then, a few years ago, I got to know this printer outside Detroit called Thomson-Shore. They’d done some pro-bono work for our tutoring center nearby, 826 Michigan, so I visited the plant, and thanked them, and saw some beautiful books they’d made, and met the men and women who worked there. Walking the production floor was very much like meeting members of an extended family; most of the people at Thomson-Shore have been there for decades.... The fact that they’re in Michigan makes it easier to communicate, to reprint, and to correct problems, and the prices are close enough to China’s numbers, when you take shipping and various delays into account.
No surprise to those who have dealt with long supply chains from China: it's harder to communicate and correct problems before and during production, and the lower prices are significantly offset by the cost of shipping large batches of inventory across the Pacific.
Eggers felt so strongly about the relationship with the factory that he includes everyone at the plant in the book's acknowledgments:
When I was thinking of the acknowledgments, it made sense to thank everyone at the printing plant, given they’re a big part of getting the book out into the world.
A reader writes in:
I've been in organizations that use parking lots in their meetings. But too often, those ideas never go anywhere - the company just ends up with a bunch of flip chart sheets that contain good ideas that never get fleshed out in subsequent meetings, because they're just not "big enough to hold a meeting on" or because "we don't have enough time/resources to investigate this right now" so they're constantly de-prioritized or put on a back burner.
It's a good question. Lord knows you've probably seen more than your fair share of those flip chart sheets rolled up and lying in an unused closet like Dead Sea Scrolls. So what to do?
Given my (ahem) rather strong opinions on the need to live in your calendar (or to set up a personal kanban), it's not surprising that I advocate carving out a specific time to revisit the ideas that have been relegated to the parking lot. You can choose the first or last 10 minutes of the next meeting, or you can schedule a new meeting specifically to clear out the parking lot. It doesn't matter.
Specificity is the key to making this work. You won't just "get around" to talking about those ideas any more than you just "get around" to tackling tasks that aren't on your calendar or your task list. This doesn't mean you have to do it every week: there's nothing wrong with deciding only to review the list monthly, quarterly, or semi-annually. Just be sure to block out sufficient time for the review on your team's calendar.
It's important to bring evaluation criteria to the parking lot review. You'll undoubtedly have way too many potential projects to take them all on, so you'll need some way of selecting the winners from the losers. Some possible criteria are:
- Ease, benefit, and urgency
- Revenue vs. risk
- Alignment with organizational goals vs. departmental goals
It doesn't really matter what criteria you use, just that you have some consistent way of determining whether or not the item is worthy of your organizational time and attention.
Now, the hardest part: throw out the losers. Get rid of the flip chart sheets and move on.
The parking lot is exactly like your personal to-do list: there's an infinite amount of stuff clambering for your attention, but only a finite amount of stuff that you can actually do. With an organization, there's an infinite number of potential projects, but a finite amount of people and money to take on those projects. So you have to cull the list. You have to divest yourself of the fantasy that you might actually take advantage of the opportunities that have been previously languishing in the parking lot. After all, the company has survived this long without implementing these ideas, so clearly they aren't all that vital to its success.
If you don't cull the list, you're sowing the seeds of the parking lot's demise. The list will be 83 items long, and no one wants to attend a meeting with 83 items on the agenda. Eventually, your colleagues will all find themselves too busy visiting their customers or washing their hair, and you won't have any more parking lot reviews.
But at least you'll have a nice collection of Dead Sea Scrolls in the closet.
I was gratified to read some of the recommendations in Joann Lublin's article, "Making Sure 'Busy' Doesn't Lead to Burnout" in the Wall Street Journal last week. Turns out that a lot of people are championing the ideas that I've been preaching about for awhile:
For some time-starved managers, keeping a detailed calendar often makes more sense than making daily to-do lists.
This advice echoes my argument that to-do lists don't work because they agglomerate items with disparate urgencies and complexities, and they don't provide any context: how long will the tasks take, and how much time do you really have available.
The article also recommends that people
prepare a weekly plan for tackling tasks tracked by their boss, such as regular revenue reports—and scheduling of daily items that eventually will land them in trouble if not completed.
This advice, of course, is nothing more than my suggestion to use the calendar as kanban, which enables you to automatically "pull" work forward at the right time -- and to do so automatically, without the cognitive burden of having to remember to do something at a certain time.
The article also points out the danger of taking on too many problems that aren't your own:
Consider [urgency addict] Liz Bishop. In January 2011, the senior vice president of Heffernan Insurance Brokers in Petaluma, Calif., was juggling 280 emails a day and often distracted by colleagues' crises. "I love solving problems,'' Ms. Bishop says. "That's emotional cookies for me." Meanwhile, her customer revenue had plunged 50% during the recession, and Ms. Bishop, whose clients were mainly in the construction industry, found herself without time to bring in new clients.
This situation reminds me of Jamie Flinchbaugh's advice that our direct reports' problems are not our problems:
Your problem is why is the preventive maintenance program not working that allowed all those pieces of equipment to go down in the first place. Or why are your customers not seeing the value proposition. Or do we have a planning problem or an execution problem that allows so many projects to get behind schedule. You have unique problems, and until you understand that fact, and work on the appropriate problems for your role, little progress can be made.
There are no Copernican insights here, which is both good and bad: you don't have to spend money, buy new equipment, or hire new people. On the other hand, you have to use your calendar assiduously, delegate appropriately, and learn to address system-level issues.
Nothing new -- but not necessarily easy to do.
I'm thrilled to announce that my book, A Factory of One, has received The Shingo Research and Professional Publications Award for 2013. (Yeah, I know: it's a bit early for 2013. Probably a bit of administrative level loading on the part of the Shingo Prize committee.) This award is given to authors for their writing on operational excellence, and promotes and recognizes new knowledge and understanding. I'm honored that the committee has deemed my thinking about the application of lean principles to individual knowledge work as worthy of the award.
Cognitive systems rely on human judgment, and are therefore prone to errors. Reflexive systems rely on rules, making it easier to do the right job the right time. Transforming cognitive systems into reflexive systems improves quality and lightens the burden on your workers.
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As clear a statement as you can get, this time from Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook:
I walk out of this office every day at 5:30 so I’m home for dinner with my kids at 6:00, and interestingly, I’ve been doing that since I had kids. I did that when I was at Google, I did that here, and I would say it’s not until the last year, two years that I’m brave enough to talk about it publicly. Now I certainly wouldn’t lie, but I wasn’t running around giving speeches on it.
Dr. Deming talked about the need to drive fear out of the workplace. I think that's a key element of respect for people. An environment where people are afraid to go home so they can be with their families (or just go home so they can take care of themselves) is quite the opposite.
Here's Sheryl's video. Well worth the 57 second investment to watch.
I'm on vacation in Italy right now*, so this post feels particularly appropriate.
There are times when you have a huge project, you have quarterly earnings, I don't care what it is. And you are focused. You say to your family, "I'm not going to see you much this week or this month." And then when you go home, put the iPad away, the BlackBerry down, and be there. Don't be half anywhere. Be there. Wherever you are, be there.- Carol Bartz, former CEO of Yahoo and Autodesk
My friend Paul says that there are no rollover minutes in life. You get 1440 of them each day (if you're lucky), so use them wisely -- particularly if you're a leader. "Being there," as Carol Bartz would say, is a big step in that direction.
*I'm practicing what I preach. I wrote this post three weeks ago.
I love this interview with Joseph Jimenez, the CEO of Novartis. He hits on several points near and dear to my heart. 1. Simplify: Jimenez knows that elaborate strategic initiatives have zero chance of success if they're not translated to a small number of concrete actions that people can take on a daily basis:
At Novartis, our business is very complicated. But you have to distill the strategy down to its essence for how we’re going to win, and what we’re really going to go after, so that people can hold it in their heads — so that the guy on the plant floor, who’s actually making the medicine, understands the three priorities that we have as a company.
2. Identify the value: Jimenez understands that the value of one's work is ultimately decided by the customer, and that far too many corporate activities are simply empty exercises by that measure:
We needed to shift the company to become more externally focused, versus internally focused. People were proud of producing 75-page PowerPoint documents, and that was seen as a success. If the C.E.O. or the head of the division complimented you on your PowerPoint presentation, that was a good thing. And I said, forget that. We have to put the patient at the center of everything we do.
3. First, look in the mirror: Jimenez describes how at an earlier job, his division kept missing their sales forecasts. A consultant pointed out that the root cause wasn't a lack of skills or a poor planning process; it was fear: people were afraid to tell the truth. And he realized that he bore some responsibility:
We had to change the behavior in the organization so that people felt safe to bring bad news. And I looked in the mirror, and I realized I was part of the problem. I didn’t want to hear the bad news, either. So I had to change how I behaved, and start to thank people for bringing me bad news. It’s a chance to say: “Hey, thank you for bringing me that news. Because you know what? There are nine months left in the year. Now we have time to do something about it. Let’s roll up our sleeves, and let’s figure out how we’re going to make it.”
Jimenez doesn't talk about lean in this interview. But the lessons and values he discusses certainly fit in with core lean principles.
In his book Inside Apple, Adam Lashinsky writes about Apple's extreme secrecy -- both external (not letting the media know what it's working on), and internal -- not letting people inside the company know what other people and other teams are working on. As Lashinsky explains it in an interview,
Apple people below a certain level -- and that level is a very high level -- do not multitask. You have a project, you work on that project, you know what your function is.... Apple operates on a need-to-know basis. So if you're not involved in a project, you're not involved, it's not of your business, and you're encouraged to mind your own business... You work on the discrete task that you've been assigned to work on. They don't get distracted by what other people are working on.
It strikes me that Apple is engaging in a form of information 5S -- except that in this case, the "sorting" of information is externally imposed and enforced by the company. And there are real benefits to it: you're better able to focus on your work because you're not getting buried by a bunch of needless "reply all" emails, or getting roped into meetings that are only tangentially -- at best -- related to your work. By identifying the important and relevant information for each person, and by defining clearly focused responsibilities, Apple eliminates the needless cognitive load on people.
That's certainly a contributing factor that enables them to do their best work. I'm certainly not advocating that all companies follow this route. (Neither is Lashinksy, for that matter.) But it's worth considering how much unnecessary cognitive load you impose upon your people in an attempt to "keep them in the loop."
I heard it again from a client this week: "I don't have enough time to work on that." Well, let me be perhaps not the first, but certainly not the last, to call bullshit on that complaint.
There's always enough time to do what's really important to you. If your child got hit by a bus and you needed to take her to the hospital, you'd somehow find the time to do it, because it's more important than preparing your 93-slide Powerpoint deck on which color white to put into the product line next year. (And if the hospital isn't more important than your Powerpoint, then please stop reading now and go back to your well-worn copy of Mein Kampf.)
No, the issue is how you choose to allocate your attention. It's a matter of identifying what's most important. And ironically, that identification takes time.
The Wall Street Journal recently interviewed four CEOs about time management. Jeff Weiner, the CEO of LinkedIn, talked about the value of getting away from daily problem solving and walling off time to think:
Part of the key to time management is carving out time to think, as opposed to constantly reacting. And during that thinking time, you're not only thinking strategically, thinking proactively, thinking longer-term, but you're literally thinking about what is urgent versus important, and trying to strike that right balance.
Steve Ballmer of Microsoft (not surprisingly) takes a more analytical approach: he actually builds a spreadsheet with a time budget for the year.
I budget how much time I'm going to be out of Seattle and in Seattle. I budget what I'm spending my time on -- customers, partners, etc.... I schedule formal meetings and my free time.... I'm not saying when they're going to happen, but I budget all this stuff. I try to make sure that I feel comfortable that I have enough time to...think, to investigate, to learn more, but I have to budget my time.... I give the budget allocation to my administrative assistants, they lay it all out and then anybody who asks for time, they say, '"Steve, this is in budget, it's not in budget, how do you want us to handle it?"
How do you find enough time to do the important stuff? First, make time to decide what's important. And if you don't have time to do that, you don't belong in your job.
Athletes, workers, and organizations must go through three distinct phases to achieve excellence: Association, Disassociation, and Re-association. The final phase is most often ignored, because it's easy to get stuck in the zone of complacency. Download PDF
My client yesterday showed me her to-do list. Make that her to-do lists. The handwritten one on the yellow legal pad. The messages marked as unread on her Blackberry. The meeting action items listed on her iPad. The messages she flagged for followup in her Outlook inbox. Four lists, four places to look for work that needs her attention.
As I've written about before, 5S for the knowledge worker does not mean putting tape outlines around your stapler or setting rules about how many family photos can go on your desk. That's just a mindless transfer of 5S to the office. What you need to do is translate it for the office -- and that means applying it to the information you manage.
If you're living with four to-do lists, you need 5S. You need a way to organize the tasks so that you can easily see them, assess them, and make rapid judgments about what, how, and when to handle that work. If you're embarking on a scavenger hunt every time you want to plan your day, you're in trouble.
From my perspective, the twin purposes of information 5S are (1) to help surface abnormalities (in this case, work that's not getting done), and (2) to make it easier and faster to access materials. The fewer lists you have, the more likely it is that you'll accomplish those goals.
If, for some reason, you need to work with multiple to-do lists (the iPad for meeting notes, a legal pad for things you remember at your desk, the inbox for stuff arriving via email), that's okay -- but then it's incumbent upon you to 5S those lists each day: review them, consolidate items, and schedule the work in your calendar or on a personal kanban.
You wouldn't want to do something as simple as grocery shopping with four different shopping lists. Why would you want to do something as complex as scheduling and planning your work with four lists?
Last week I recorded a webinar for my book, A Factory of One, with Gemba Academy. It's available for free till May 15. Learn why I consider knowledge workers factories, how tape outlines on your desk don't constitute 5S for you, what flow means if you work at a desk, and how you can bring visual management concepts to the bits and bytes that comprise your work.
The meat of the talk is about 45 minutes long, with a final 15 minutes of Q&A.
You can listen and watch the webinar here.
Want to make decisions faster? Want to avoid having your best people squandering their days drinking stale coffee and guiltily sneaking glances at their iPhones? You've heard it before, but here's the data: switch to stand-up meetings.
Bob Sutton recently wrote a piece on the virtues of stand-up meetings. The benefits are not just apocryphal or perceptual: a study found that groups that stood-up while making decisions took 34% less time to make the assigned decision, with no significant differences in decision quality between stand-up and sit-down groups.
Bob goes on to quote David Darragh, CEO of Reily, a New Orleans-based company that specializes in southern foods and drinks:
The importance of the stand-up meeting is that it can be accomplished efficiently and, therefore, with greater frequency. Like many areas of discipline, repetition begets improved results. The same is true with meetings. The rhythm that frequency generates allows relationships to develop, personal ticks to be understood, stressors to be identified, personal strengths and weaknesses to be put out in the light of day, etc. . . .With frequent, crisp stand up meetings, there can never be the excuse that the opportunity to communicate was not there.
I know a lot of people who've been involved in a stand-up meeting that over time devolves into a leaning meeting, then a slouching meeting, and then finally a sit-down meeting. (Kind of like a reverse "evolution of man" cartoon.) The Wall Street Journal reported on some of the creative countermeasures that people have developed to avoid this problem:
- at Hashrocket, a team passes around a 10-pound medicine ball during stand-ups.
- at Steelcase, they play Elvis's "A Little Less Conversation" as a reminder to keep meetings brief
- at Facebook, one team holds 15-minute stand-ups at noon, sharp: the proximity to lunch serves "as motivation to keep updates short"
- at Microsoft, one group convenes stand-ups in an unheated stairwell
Obviously, there's still a need for longer meetings to address critical strategic issues. But the stand-up is a powerful way to identify problems early, strengthen relationships, and maintain alignment within a team. It's easy to default to the standard way of working (weekly, one-hour sit-down meetings). It's even easier to claim that you don't have the time for daily stand-up meetings. But why would you? I'm willing to bet that most people in your company aren't particularly satisfied with the flaccid, bloated, soul-sucking meetings that devour their calendars each week.
Try something different. Follow Jason Yip's guidelines. See if you don't make decisions faster, and drink less crappy coffee.
If you haven't yet done so, read the NYTimes interview with Phil Libin, the CEO of Evernote. Phil's focus on value, rather than form, eliminates waste, shows respect for people, and leads to better results. For example, there are no offices or trappings of seniority at the company. In Phil's view, they're not only wasteful, they have a negative effect on people's work:
Nobody has an office. In fact, there are no perks that are signs of seniority. Obviously, there are differences in compensation, but there are no status symbols. You certainly don’t get a better seat or any of that kind of stuff, because they’re just unnecessary. They create artificial barriers to communication. They create artificial things that people focus on rather than just getting their job accomplished. We try to have an organization that just helps you get your work done, and then it’s my job to eliminate all of the risks and all the distractions so you can just focus on achieving. That attracts people who are primarily motivated by how much they achieve.
Phil's effort to improve communication extends to the uprooting any sort of email culture:
We strongly discourage lengthy e-mail threads with everyone weighing in. It’s just not good for that. Plus, it’s dangerous, because it’s way too easy to misread the tone of something. If you want to talk to somebody and you’re a couple floors apart, I kind of want you to get up and go talk to them.
I'm most impressed by Phil's approach to vacations. If you think about the real value of a vacation, it's to enable people to refresh and recharge. The typical fixed two week vacation policy is more about the form than the real value. After all, if your job requires insanely hard bursts of work, or if you're having health problems, you might need more time off. Here's how Evernote handles it:
We recently changed our vacation policy to give people unlimited vacation, so they can take as much time as they want, as long as they get their job done. If you want to take time off, talk to your team, but we’re still measuring you on the same thing, which is, did you accomplish something great? Frankly, we want to treat employees like adults, and we don’t want being in the office to seem like a punishment. We always try to ask whether a particular policy exists because it’s a default piece of corporate stupidity that everyone expects you to have, or does it actually help you accomplish something? And very often you realize that you don’t really know why you’re doing it this way, so we just stop doing it.
(N.B. This vacation policy warms the cockles of my heart, because it's the way I managed my team years ago. It told them to take time off when they needed it, and not to bother reporting it to the HR department. Like Phil, I wanted to treat them like adults.)
It's the "default piece of corporate stupidity" that infects most organizations -- things that exist because that's just the way it's always been done: report and presentation formats, agendas and participants at those giant standing meetings, certain expectations, etc. And it's often the "default piece of corporate stupidity" that saps motivation, leeches passion, and inspires cynicism.
Focus on the purpose and the value. Then figure out how to deliver it. You might be surprised at how much easier it is.
After delving into the meaning of Dr. Shingo's oft-cited quote about the purpose of improvement, and pontificating about the role of transparency in leadership, I figured I'd lighten it up a bit. And what better subject and spokesmodel for lightening up the mood than Sir Richard Branson? Aside from his well-known business bona-fides, and his irreverent attitude towards accepted business standards, he's not a big fan of neckties:
I don’t know why the tie was ever invented. It’s about one of the few things that Britain has exported successfully.... I often have a pair of scissors in my top pocket to go cutting people’s ties off.
I do think that ties most likely are still inflicted on people because the bosses, they had to wear it for 40 years and when they get into positions of responsibility they’re damned if they’re going to not have the next generation suffer. So ties continue to exist. My lifelong campaign to get rid of the tie has failed miserably.
(Before you inundate me with comments about how cutting off someone's tie might not really be the pinnacle of respect -- please don't. It's a joke.) But I do think Mr. Branson is onto something in his efforts to make people comfortable at work.
I have a nearly pathological aversion to ties myself, but sadly, they tend to be de rigueur in the business world. So I'll continue to cheer Mr. Branson on in his quixotic journey to rid the world of this useless (anachronistic?) item of haberdashery.
"We never should've put this [story] on the air. In the end, this was our mistake. We're horrified to have let something like this onto public radio.”
These are the words of Ira Glass of This American Life, who on March 16, retracted a show called “Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory” that had aired earlier in the year.
After the show aired, another journalist pointed out inconsistencies in Daisey’s story, and further investigation proved that it contained significant fabrications. Unable to vouch for the accuracy of the report, Glass issued a press release saying, in part,
Daisey lied to me and to This American Life producer Brian Reed during the fact checking we did on the story, before it was broadcast. That doesn't excuse the fact that we never should've put this on the air. In the end, this was our mistake. We're horrified to have let something like this onto public radio.
In addition to the unambiguous press release, This American Life ran an entire one-hour show retracting Daisey’s story. To me, this is a model demonstration of leadership.
Speaking with Clarity: Glass is absolutely clear about the mistake: “We never should have put this on the air.” He doesn’t mince words or place conditions on the apology, as you often hear (“We didn’t intend to offend anyone by goose-stepping past Temple Beth Israel wearing swastikas and carrying signs that said 'Honk if you love eugenics!,' but if anyone took it the wrong way, we apologize.”)
Accepting Responsibility: Glass accepts full responsibility for the error: “In the end, this was our mistake.” There’s no finger pointing, no blaming of extenuating circumstances, and no passing the buck. He doesn't rely on the classic "past exonerative" formulation that "mistakes were made" He acknowledges that Daisey lied to him, but blames himself for not fulfilling his fact checking duty.
Exposing the Errors: Glass spends about 20 minutes of the retraction show detailing all the inconsistencies and outright lies in the story. He doesn’t settle for a blanket explanation that buries the errors. Rather, he exposes each and every one of them.
Telling the Truth: It’s one thing to retract the story on the basis of fabrications. It’s quite another to take the time to explain what the actual truth is, so as to ensure that people are clear about the truth. Glass does this as well, employing other journalists with deep experience in China to describe what factory conditions are really like.
For his part, in the retraction show Daisey comes across as an attention-seeking muckraker with the spine of an anemone. He barely acknowledges his lies, tries to justify many of them, and through it all, obfuscates his responsibility for misleading the audience. Here's Daisey responding to Ira Glass's point that people assume Daisey's show is fact, not fiction, because that's how Daisey presents it:
Well, I don’t know that I would say in a theatrical context that it isn’t true. I believe that when I perform it in a theatrical context in the theater that when people hear the story in those terms that we have different languages for what the truth means.
The way Glass and the team from This American Life handled the situation reminds me of Johnson & Johnson's handling of the Tylenol scare in 1982: swift, clear, unambiguous -- clearly placing the interests of the consumer first. It's a model of crisis management. And a model of leadership.