Missing the forest for the (electronic) trees.

I've written many times before (as have many others) about the perils of constant electronic connection in the workplace. Now legendary professor Henry Mintzberg has published an interesting take on this problem, in the Winter issue of Strategy+Business. Leaving aside the issue of multitasking, Mintzberg points out that information-poor media like email and text messages take away the nuance and subtleties that can only be conveyed in face-to-face conversation. Mintzberg argues that

Managers who believe that they can learn about their department through email — rarely walking down the hall, let alone getting on an airplane — may find themselves in trouble . . . By giving managers the illusion of control, the rapid flow of information through new technologies threatens to rob them of real control. As demands pile up, managing can become more frenetic and superficial.

Recently I've seen companies with processes that aren't functioning particularly well. The problem, however, isn't necessarily that the process is poorly designed or broken. Rather, the breakdowns occur during handoffs that are communicated exclusively through email or some other electronic medium. Sometimes, one party lacks perfect understanding of the process. Another time, a simple request via email is interpreted as a peremptory demand, triggering intransigence or foot-dragging. Both situations cause a process to bog down, with finger pointing and blame the ultimate result.

The demands on your time -- and your managers' time -- are formidable. Email is a necessary and valuable communications tool. But it isn't, and shouldn't be, the only tool in your armamentarium. Otherwise, as Mintzberg says, "you'll gather the facts, but you may miss the meaning."

We are creatures of our environment

Stories about rotting garbage and table scraps aren't the place you'd expect to find powerful lessons about running your business. However, a story the other day on NPR about food waste in restaurants (about 10% of the food a restaurant buys ends up in landfills) provided this interesting insight:

The hardest part for many restaurants may just be getting the workers to become aware of how much edible food they waste every day. A few years ago, when [Chris Moyer of theNational Restaurant Association] was managing a big chain restaurant, he wanted to show his cooks there were plenty of opportunities to reduce waste. So he took away the garbage can.

"You'd be surprised, once you take away the garbage cans, if people have to ask permission to throw something away how little you throw away," says Moyer. "It was really quite amazing."

Let's put aside for the moment the issue of whether taking away garbage cans demonstrates respect for people. (It doesn't.) What's striking is how behavior changes in response to environmental conditions. If taking away garbage cans results in less food thrown away, what might happen if you took away the comfy chairs in the conference room? Or required that all meetings are stand-up? Most likely they'd end on time or early. (And, in fact, there are plenty of stories about companies doing precisely that.)

What if you rearranged where people sat in an office? I've been working with a company that complains about poor communication and coordination between the various groups involved in the product development process: the R&D and manufacturing engineers get last-minute changes dropped on them by the product marketing team. Perhaps not coincidentally, the marketing team sits at the other end of the building from the engineers. While it wouldn't be a panacea, I guarantee that if they mixed the marketing and engineering teams together, communication would be better.

Many years ago when it was still in start-up mode and cash was tight, the employees at Giro bike helmets asked Jim Gentes, the founder, to install a shower in the office. Gentes was afraid that he'd pay $5000 to put in a shower, and people wouldn't use it that much. So he came up with a simple solution: he put a piece of paper next to the shower showing the cost, and told employees to put their names down when they showered, and calculate the average cost of each shower. In other words, the average cost of the first shower was $5000; the average after two showers was $2500; after three showers, $1667; etc. By making the cost and the usage of the shower, Gentes ensured that people didn't take it for granted, and probably increased the usage, as people were motivated to drive the average cost down.

Think about it: what environmental changes can you make to improve the coordination, collaboration, and effectiveness of your teams?

What problem are you trying to solve?

NPR reports that Virginia's new set of education goals are higher for white and Asian kids than for blacks, Latinos and students with disabilities. According to the story, Virginia's state Board of Education

looked at students' test scores in reading and math and then proposed new passing rates. In math it set an acceptable passing rate at 82 percent for Asian students, 68 percent for whites, 52 percent for Latinos, 45 percent for blacks and 33 percent for kids with disabilities.

Winsome Sears, one of the Board members, explained the new goals this way:

"So why do we have these different subgroups? Because we're starting with black children where they are. We can't start them at the 82 percentile because they're not there. The Asian students are there. And so the real question is why aren't black students starting at the 82 percentile? Why? Why are they not there? That's the problem the board wants to solve."

Perhaps it's because I've spent much of the last week with a client working through A3 thinking and root cause problem solving, but the inanity of the Board of Education's decision really struck me. I mean, what problem are they trying to solve? No offense, Mr. Sears, but how exactly does lowering the bar to 45% help you fix the problem of black kids missing the 82nd percentile?

If they really want to improve educational performance, lowering the standards hardly seems like the right countermeasure. That's like lowering food safety standards and claiming that the food is now safe because only 1 out of 1000 hamburgers are tainted with salmonella instead of 1 out of 100. Or saying that a car has achieve the highest quality rating because it didn't exceed the 25 "allowable" defects.

It seems to me that the Board of Education is solving an entirely different problem: how to avoid getting penalized for failing to meet the academic goals of No Child Left Behind. If that's the case, then this countermeasure -- changing the standards -- is wonderfully effective.

Now, you can make a good argument that No Child Left Behind is a heavy-handed, poorly designed, ineffective tool for raising academic achievement. (And as a former teacher, I'm more than happy to make that argument.) However, if Winsome Sears and the rest of the Board want to solve the problem of why black kids aren't starting at the 82nd percentile, it's difficult to see how re-jiggering the standards is going to help.

The truth is that most problems have multiple root causes and require a suite of countermeasures to improve the situation. Developing those countermeasures requires a deep understanding of the true problem, and a great deal of time, effort, (and possibly) money. It's so much easier to just change the standards.

For me, one of the great powers of an A3 analysis is that the format makes it easy to read your argument "backwards." Because the analysis is laid out on one page, you can look at the proposed countermeasures, see whether they address the root causes you've identified, and decide whether they really help you close the gap you've identified in the problem statement. The Virginia Board of Education decision clearly fails that test:

Lower academic standards -> Help under-achieving kids -> Get all kids to 82nd percentile. I'm missing the logic.

And my guess is that if you look at many of the countermeasures your company puts into place, you'll see similar gaps.

November 2012 Newsletter -- Turning Strategy into Performance, Part 4

Cultural norms that promote dysfunctional behavior will torpedo your organization’s ability to execute. In fact, too many organizations reward the fire fighters who put out the fire, rather than the fire marshals who prevent the fires in the first place. Not surprisingly, this is a fool-proof recipe for more fires. Download PDF

What does your calendar say about you?

In contrast to instant messaging, text messaging, or email, communication time through traditional (snail) mail is measured in days and weeks. You'd think that too much time spent in that world would lead to a lack of sensitivity to how long things take and where time goes. (It flies, of course.) And yet Moya Green, the CEO of Britain's state-owned Royal Mail, can track the way she spends her time with a degree of precision that most businesspeople can't match.

In a McKinsey interview last month, Green demonstrates that she's cognizant of exactly where she invests her time and attention:

McKinsey: How do you strike a balance between the many demands on your time, particularly when driving change?

Moya Greene: I try to think about my agenda as divided into big blocks of time that I actively monitor. I recently did a diary analysis, which showed I spend roughly 15 percent of my time managing and understanding our employees. Another 25 percent of my time last year was devoted to changing the fundamentals of the company. . . . Next, I spent 15 percent of my time seeking to change the conversation inside Royal Mail so that we put the customer much closer to the heart of what we talk about and do. . . . A further 10 percent was taken up with what I call strategic realignment, helping people understand that we're going to make our money in future in parcels and packets, in media, and by selling our data assets in a more commercial way. That left 35 percent for everything else: organization, recruitment, managing the board, and crisis management.

I've worked with many senior leaders, and I seldom see this kind of clarity about how they spend their time. They always have a clear idea of where they want to focus their attention, but they rarely take the time to actually do a diary analysis to see whether they're acting on their intentions. In lean terms, they're excellent at the Plan-Do phases of the PDCA cycle, but not so good on the Check-Adjust phases. As a result, they have a very difficult time assessing their role in the organization's successes and failures -- did they spend too much time on a strategic initiative? Not enough time? Were there other issues? Who knows?

I've written about this topic before, of course, but I think Tom Peters says it best: you are your calendar:

"There is only one asset that you have and that asset is your time.

[Imagine you're a boss of a distribution center and] you say that this is the year of extraordinary attention to quality. Then at the end of the first month, I sit down with you and we go through your monthly calendar day-by-day and hour-by-hour. And we discover that with all the meetings that occur and all the surprises that come up in the course of that month you spent 6 hours directly on the quality issue.

Well, guess what: quality is not your top priority.

The calendar never, ever, ever lies.

If you say something is a priority, then it must be quantitatively reflected in the calendar.”

Can you analyze your calendar? What does it say about you?

Less is More

My friend Matt May has just published his latest book, The Laws of Subtraction. It's a terrific read. Matt argues that decisions become exponentially easier and simpler when you focus on what to ignore, what to leave out, what to "don’t." More importantly, the results are exponentially more impactful. He goes on to explain that the key is to remove anything obviously excessive, confusing, wasteful, unnatural, hazardous, hard to use, or ugly -- or even better, avoid adding them in the first place.

Matt covers some of the ground that he explored in his earlier books, but for me, this is a more concise and powerful exploration of his recurring theme that less is more. His stories about Toyota’s youth brand Scion, the urban design that transformed London’s Exhibition Road, the power of white space in comics, and the secrets of Lockheed’s Skunk Works are compelling.

But that's not why to buy this book.

The real reason you need to buy the book is on page 64. That's the page that tells my story about how subtraction led to a far better outcome for me and my team. (I'd argue that my story is the highlight of the book, but Matt might get mad at me.)

Truth is, there are 53 individual stories of real people -- not captains of industry, not global business titans -- ordinary people doing wonderful work by subtraction. In some respects, these stories are the real joy of The Laws of Subtraction, because they're so ordinary and so easy to relate to, that you can immediately see how you can adopt Matt's six principles.

Read the book. In this case at least, more (learning) is better.

"That's just our culture, and we can't change it."

"That's just our culture, and you can't change it." Last week, while presenting a workshop based on my book, A Factory of One, at the AME Conference, I was struck by the fatalism that infected so many participants. We were talking about the impediments to individual effectiveness -- the things that create waste instead of value -- and so many people said with a resigned air, "That's just our culture, and we can't change it."

The disrespect for closed doors and interruptions by coworkers that force people to multitask? That's just our culture. The expectation that we'll respond to all emails within 10 minutes? That's just our culture. The sense of entitlement (or the ignorance) that permits executives to pile multiple projects on you, despite the inevitable explosion in lead time? That's just our culture. And there's no point in fighting it.

This passive acceptance of the status quo is shocking because it's so different from the attitude that these same people take when confronting other waste-ridden systems. I don't know any hospitals that attended AME that shrug their organizational shoulders and simply accept their ventilator-associated pneumonia rate as an unavoidable outgrowth of their "nursing culture" or systems. I didn't meet any manufacturers at AME who say, "Sure we've got a 22% defect rate on our products, but that's just the culture of our machinists." I don't know of any distribution companies in attendance that think, "It's too bad that our drivers mis-deliver packages all the time, but that's just the culture of the drivers and our lousy systems."

Ridiculous. In all of those examples, the leadership teams drive relentlessly to improve the quality, cost, and reliability of their systems and processes. Accepting the status quo is unacceptable.

So why do we have such a difficult time acknowledging both the necessity and the possibility of improvement in the way our people work? Why do we view the processes by which individuals get their jobs done as something fixed, immutable, or unworthy of improving?

The evidence is clear that, to quote Tony Schwartz, the way we're working isn't working. Whether it's the expectation that people are on call 24/7, or the design of workspaces that don't allow people to focus and concentrate on their work, or the overloaded project schedule that results in frustratingly long project lead times, we're just not being smart about how to get the best results from our people.

Why do we accept the fatalistic complaint that "it's just our culture," and there's nothing we can do about it? Just because the inefficiency and waste of our current way of working doesn't directly show up on the income statement doesn't mean that we should tolerate it any more than we should accept that patients coming to our hospital get sicker when they're with us.

It's time to view individual productivity as a non-negotiable area of improvement. That's nothing more than respect for people.

Getting the best out of your warranty department.

Warranty departments are usually poster children for the accumulation of excess parts inventory, disorganization, and lack of respect from the other upstream departments in the value stream. It doesn't have to be this way.

One client is doing a terrific job in redesigning its warranty department. They've replaced the piles of excess parts (except, of course, for the components that they always seem to stock out of ) with a two-bin system. Instead of haphazard ziggurats of replacement parts scattered all over the floor, they now have a clean, organized system with cardboard boxes and visual management cards containing all the necessary re-order information. They've effectively reduced their inventory by 70%. While this isn't a huge cost savings -- all their parts are pretty inexpensive -- it's a big savings in floor space and a bigger savings in time. Finding parts in the piles used to be difficult, and now they can pick, pack, and ship customer orders much more quickly.

One other thing this department has done: they've instituted formal "close the loop" meetings with the product designers and developers. When the PD team begins planning the next round of products, they meet with the warranty team to discuss what problems they were seeing in customer returns. Design problems, durability problems, material defects, etc. -- all are brought up in a formal setting to ensure that the PD team doesn't miss the important quality "signals" amidst the larger piles of return "noise." Although it's too early to see the benefits in new product design, it's already easy to see the benefit in morale: the warranty team feels like an important part of the company and the product. They're not the tail of the dog, just another segment of the product circle. Call it respect for people.

How is your warranty department run? Are you getting the best out of them? Are they providing all the value they can?

October 2012 Newsletter -- Turning Strategy into Performance: Part 3

Your systems and processes are an essential component of performance. When they work against the smooth flow of work, your people have virtually no chance of accomplishing their goals and executing the organizational strategy. When was the last time you assessed and mapped out your processes? Download PDF

"The signature of mediocrity is chronic inconsistency."

This is what really hit me when I listened to Dan Pink's "Office Hours" interview with Jim Collins:

The signature of mediocrity is not an unwillingness to change. The signature of mediocrity is chronic inconsistency.

This was a finding from Collins's research for his latest book, Great By Choice -- mediocre companies have no consistency in leadership, in mission, in management style, or in philosophy. They drift with the prevailing tides, unwilling (or unable) to chart a determined course.

Collins believes that great companies adhere to "SMaC" -- Specific, Methodical, and Consistent -- guidelines for their business. A SMaC recipe is a

set of durable operating practices that create a replicable and consistent success formula; it is clear and concrete, enabling the entire enterprise to unify and organize its efforts, giving clear guidance regarding what to do and what not to do.

Southwest Airlines has 10 such principles -- fly only 737s, no flight segment over two hours, stay out of food service, and stay passenger focused – no freight or mail, etc. Whereas tactics may change with the situation, SMaC practices can last for decades.

Chronic inconsistency in improvement efforts dooms companies to mediocrity as well. I've seen companies go from quality circles to TPM to business process reengineering to Six Sigma in an effort to improve quality, lower costs, and increase employee engagement. Eventually, employees become cynical, deriding each new effort as the management "flavor of the month." And they're not wrong, given that each new approach usually discredits the previous approach.

There is no magic formula for organizational greatness. But it's clear to me that consistency in improvement methods is just as important as consistency in organizational guidelines. That, I think, is one of the beauties of lean. The focus on continuous improvement and creating a community of scientists devoted to the pursuit of perfection (even while recognizing that perfection is unattainable) creates a consistency that other methods don't. Lean is a "SMaC" approach towards improvement. It's not flashy, but it provides a clear route towards organizational excellence.

Barack Obama and knowledge work kaizen

The October issue of Vanity Fair features a long article by Michael Lewis on Barack Obama -- what it's like to be him and how he deals with the burden of the presidency. One tidbit that struck me was the way that Obama has tried to improve his ability to make decisions. In keeping with recent research that shows that people have finite mental resources for decision-making, Obama has tried to eliminate the trivial decisions that most of us face on a daily basis. In an NPR interview, Lewis explains that

The president started talking about research that showed the mere act of making a decision, however trivial it was, degraded your ability to make a subsequent decision. A lot of ... the trivial decisions in life — what he wears, what he eats — [are] essentially made for him. He's actually aware of research that shows that the more decisions you have to make, the worse you get at making decisions. he analogizes to going shopping at Costco. If you go to Costco and you don't know what you want, you come out exhausted, because you're making all these decisions, and he wants to take those decisions out of his life. So he chucked out all his suits except his blue and grey suits so he doesn't have to think about what he's going to put on in the morning. Food is just arranged for him and he's not making any decisions about what he's eating. What most people spend most of their life deciding about, he's had those decisions are removed from his life. He does this so he creates an environment, a mental environment, where he's got full energy for the decisions that are really important decisions.

As I've described before, Bob Pozen (chairman emeritus of MFS Investment Management, senior lecturer at Harvard Business School, and board member of Medtronics and Nielsen) does much the same thing as Obama. When you have to make many decisions -- and what's the presidency but an unending series of very, very difficult decisions? -- you inevitably become what researchers call a cognitive miser, hoarding your mental energy. That hoarding typically leads to one-dimensional analysis, illogical shortcuts, and decisions that tend to favor short-term gains and delayed costs.

Toyota -- the high temple of lean -- gets it, too. Over at LeanBlog, our friend Mark Graban once wrote,

I’ve heard Toyota people say you want to eliminate the hundreds of LITTLE repetitive decisions so that the person involved can focus on the FEW major decisions with a fresh mind that’s not fatigued from constant decision making.

The premium that Obama, Pozen, and others -- not to mention Toyota -- place on simplification is really is another aspect of lean thinking (and probably brings a smile to Matt May's face). I'm not arguing that you have to toss out most of the clothes in your closet, or give up your cereal bar (after all, it works for Pixar). But I am suggesting that you take a hard look at the decisions you make in your daily work and eliminate as many as possible. Spreadsheet, memo, or presentation design; sales call frequency; meeting format -- all these things can be standardized so that you don't have to make decisions. And that will result in better work and better thinking for the stuff that's really important.

Nick Saban and the (lean) Crimson Tide

If you told a football coach that he could learn from Toyota's lean manufacturing methods, he'd probably tell you that a football team isn't a factory -- and then he'd have an offensive lineman throw you out of his office. But it you told that to NIck Saban, University of Alabama football head coach, he'd probably agree.

A new Fortune Magazine article on Saban describes how his "Process" has led to remarkable success in college football: 48-6 in his last 54 games and two national championships in the past three years. Recognizing that his time and attention is the critical, non-renewable resource that he brings to his work, Saban drives out inefficiency -- no matter how small -- wherever he can:

As he sits down at a small table in his expansive wood-paneled corner office, the coach grabs what looks like a garage-door opener and presses the button. Across the room, the door to his office softly whooshes shut. Boom! Nick Saban just saved three seconds. Multiply that enough times and you have a couple of extra months, or years, to recruit more high school stars.

Then there's lunch itself. He has it down to a science -- another in a series of small efficiency measures. Every day, Saban sits at this very table and works through his lunch hour while eating the same exact meal: a salad of iceberg lettuce and cherry tomatoes topped with turkey slices and fat-free honey Dijon dressing. No time wasted studying a menu.

What are these examples except eliminating non-value added activities (getting up to open and close a door, or thinking about what to eat) through the use of technology and standard work? (Bob Pozen at the Harvard Business School approaches breakfast, lunch, and even dressing for work the same way.) Saban even standardizes the overall flow of his work, reserving his mornings and afternoons for core football-related work, and scheduling meetings for the middle of the day. This is a classic time management trick, of course -- doing the most important work first.

Above all, Saban focuses on process rather than results. He believes that doing things the right way will inevitably lead to the right outcomes:

What really separates Saban from the crowd is his organizational modus operandi. In Tuscaloosa they call it the Process. It's an approach he implemented first in turnarounds at Michigan State and LSU and seems to have perfected at Alabama. He has a plan for everything. He has a detailed program for his players to follow, and he's highly regimented. Above all, Saban keeps his players and coaches focused on execution -- yes, another word for process -- rather than results.

And of course, by creating standard work for the innumerable tasks comprising the football program, Saban creates the time and mental bandwidth to engage in kaizen and improve the process:

"When you have a system, you kind of get in a routine of what's important," says Saban. "And then you spend a lot more time on thinking of things that would make it better."

Make no mistake: I'm not saying that Saban runs a "lean" program that adheres to all of the principles outlined by Toyota. I'm arguing that the disciplined focus on identifying value and waste, and the creation of standard work, can be applied to any field of activity, from manufacturing cars to running a football program to writing software. The key is to standardize the non-creative part of the job, so that there's more time and energy available for the creative components.

September 2012 Newsletter -- Turning Strategy into Performance: Part 2

Time. Money. People. Attention. These most precious resources are severely constrained in any organization. And yet most treat them as though the supply is as abundant as trucker caps at a NASCAR event. That’s the road to lousy performance and execution.

Download PDF

Your Internal Communication Stinks. Here’s Why—and What To Do About It.

I've posted another article on the HBR blog. Coming up with a title was a challenge for them, and ultimately they chose to focus on the plague of email. Frankly, I liked my original title better: "Your Internal Communication Stinks. Here's Why -- and What To Do About It." The post is really about switching communication models, from information "push" to information "pull." Here's how it starts:

How often are people’s email privileges suspended (aka, “mail jail”) because they’re inundated with a blizzard of questions, status updates, notifications, and other non-mission critical information? Most inboxes—and calendars—are gorged with junk because the dominant paradigm of communication is information “push.” This means that information is being pushed onto people when it’s ready, but not necessarily when the recipient needs it.

You can read the rest of the article on the HBR blog here.

The absurdity of the 40 hour workweek

Hopefully you read Jason Fried's (co-founder and CEO of 37signals) OpEd in Sunday's NYTimes. If you haven't, read it now. Go ahead. I'll wait. Jason advocates (compellingly) for the value of taking time off from work -- not simply to promote the squishy concept of "work-life balance" or to improve employee morale, but to improve productivity:

From May through October, we switch to a four-day workweek. And not 40 hours crammed into four days, but 32 hours comfortably fit into four days. We don’t work the same amount of time, we work less....The benefits of a six-month schedule with three-day weekends are obvious. But there’s one surprising effect of the changed schedule: better work gets done in four days than in five. When there’s less time to work, you waste less time. When you have a compressed workweek, you tend to focus on what’s important. Constraining time encourages quality time.

This result is no surprise if you're familiar with Parkinson's Law. As I've pointed out before, this approach is similar to Toyota's policy of continually reducing the resources available in order to drive improvements in their production processes.

Jason's experience at 37signals also reminds me of what Leslie Perlow discovered at Boston Consulting Group -- that eliminating the "always on" ethic drives the creation of more efficient work habits:

When people are “always on,” responsiveness becomes ingrained in the way they work, expected by clients and partners, and even institutionalized in performance metrics. There is no impetus to explore whether the work actually requires 24/7 responsiveness; to the contrary, people just work harder and longer, without considering how they could work better.

Ultimately, this ties into the frequent disconnect between "deliverables" and "value," something I've been thinking about a lot recently. Even if you're not a plumber or a lawyer, there's a tendency to focus on the amount of time you spend on a project and what the output is. But the first step in adopting a lean mindset is to identify the value of your work -- and that value is determined by what the customer wants. The customer doesn't care how many hours you work; the customer only cares whether or not you deliver the product or service that she wants.

Jason Fried has asked his programmers to deliver products that the company's customers want, irrespective of the time they spend in the office. If they can do it in 32 hours per week, great. He's overthrown the tyranny of the 40 hour workweek by decoupling the link between office time (deliverable) and meeting the customers' needs (value).

There's a huge difference between deliverables and value. Between effort and results. That's a lesson that we can all learn from.

My (one & only) obligatory "Management Lessons from the Olympics" blog post

I'm feeling a little bit lonely out here. I may be the only person in the blogosphere not to blog about the Olympics. No "Leadership Secrets from the Balance Beam."

No "Three Things You Can Learn from Sprint Cycling."

No "Teamwork Lessons from Dressage."

And no "What Synchronized Divers can Teach You about Innovation."

But now that the Olympics are over and the Olympic-related posts are (mercifully) dying down, I'll give it a shot. I think we can learn a lot from the track & field events. (Of course, I'm a former competitive track and field runner (and coach), so what did you expect?)

The Value of Consistency and Patience: Galen Rupp (silver medal, 10,000m) is the first American medalist in the event since Billy Mills in 1964. Rupp is supremely talented and worked his ass off over the past four years to get to the medal stand. However, there was absolutely no magic to his training program -- he repeats the same workouts every 8-12 weeks during his training cycle. The repetition of the same workouts provide consistency, a clear benchmark for improvement, and the ability to adjust (in the PDCA cycle) his training if needed. Lesson for businesses: don't abandon your tactics or approach to the market if they don't yield results in the first quarter. It's the steady accretion of your activities that leads to long-term success, especially when consistency allows you to engage in PDCA along the way.

Play to your Strengths: Usain Bolt (triple gold medalist in the 100m, 200m, and 4x100m relay) isn't the fastest guy out of the blocks. At 6'5" he's much taller than the average sprinter (who's usually about 5'9"-5'11"), so it takes him longer to uncoil at the start and accelerate to top speed. However, Bolt does have the highest top end -- and that's what he focused on in his training, not his start. Lesson for businesses: emphasize your strengths rather than trying to shore up your weaknesses. If quality is your strong point (Whole Foods, Amazon), then push your quality so far beyond your competitors' that their products and services look second-rate. If service is your bailiwick (Nordstrom, Zappos), then make your standard the gold standard.

Believe in your Strategy. And Stick with It: David Rudisha (gold medal, WR in 800m) is a rarity among middle distance runners: in big races he doesn't run "tactically," lurking in the back or middle of the pack and waiting to kick in the last 200m. He runs *his* race: he takes it out hard from the start and forces everyone to run on his terms. (Rudisha developed this approach after he lost a major race because he was boxed in at the end and couldn't accelerate to the front.) This tactic isn't without risk: if he goes out too hard, or if he's not in peak form, he could easily get outkicked by a fresher competitor who conserved his strength. But Rudisha would rather lose on his terms than on someone else's. And in fact he hasn't lost -- the tremendous pace he sets from the beginning takes the sting out of others' kicks. Lesson for businesses: you've got to stick with the strategy you believe in and execute it. Properly formulated strategy will leverage your strengths and unique capabilities. Don't change it because other companies are taking a different approach. Have faith in it, and don't run other people's races. Otherwise you might get boxed in.

August 2012 Newsletter -- Turning Strategy into Performance: Part 1

The first step in ensuring that you can execute on your lovingly crafted strategic plan is to ensure that it's clear. Crystal clear. Sounds easy, but it's not. Look at Walmart, Reebok, or any other brand that lost its way. Download PDF

What will you be judged on?

Tony Blair recently told the Stanford Graduate School of Business that one of the most important things he learned during his time in office was the need to set a schedule that's aligned with one's real priorities. He related a memorable story about his first meeting with President Bill Clinton in 1996. Clinton said that he wanted to talk to him about a critical issue. Blair expected some extraordinary piece of geopolitical insight, but instead, as he relates it,

Clinton said to me, "I'm going to talk to you about something really important: scheduling. You will find that one of the hardest things when you get into government is finding the time to think strategically. . . . The system will take you over, and you'll be in meetings from 8 in the morning to 10 at night, and you'll think you're immentsely busy, but actually the tactics and strategy have all gotten mixed together."

I've opined on this issue before, but it's got more clout when you hear it from Tony Blair. In fact, he goes on to say that he did an analysis for one president on how he used his time, and found that less than 5% of his time was spent on his priorities.

Blair's not naive. He knows that crises erupt, and that it's the leader's job to deal with it. But he points out that those crises are seldom what's really important in securing the long-term success and reputation of the government:

If you're not careful, something happens -- there's some crisis, and you spend time dealing with it. You lose your strategic grip on what's going to determine whether you're a successful government or not. Now these crises are real; you've got to deal with them. But actually, when you then judge a government -- you know, when I think of the things that I lost sleep on, some of the crises that suddenly came -- foot and mouth disease, we had a fuel strike -- nowadays, nobody even remembers these things.

These lessons are as true for you and your executive team as they are for a prime minister and his government. Think about the crises that you've dealt with -- an angry customer (or customers), a problem with product profit margins, negotiations with a logistics company, whatever. Sure, they're all important to your organization. But we're not talking the BP oil spill, the Challenger explosion, or the TEPCO Fukushima nuclear meltdown. We're talking about crises that, if they consume your day, will inevitably lead to sub-optimal performance and long-term decline.

When "the system takes over" and your time is consumed by daily tactical issues, you don't have the space for the essential act of thinking. Blair says that

you've got to create the space to be thinking strategically all the time. One of the things I always ask is, 'Where's your thinking time?'"

John Donahoe, CEO of Ebay, adheres to the same precept. He says

I take days away. . . . I find that very hard to do in the office or in a familiar environment. I find that if I don’t schedule a little bit of structured time away, where there’s no interruption, that it’s very hard to get the kind of thinking time and reflection time that I think is so important.

Here's the challenge for you: build some of this thinking time into your week or month. Make it part of your standard work. It's easy to be lulled into the safety of immediate action, particularly when a crisis hits. But thinking time is critical to ensuring that the actions you take are actually of value, and are spent on the activities that posterity will actually judge you for.

Donahoe knows that. Blair knows that. You should know it too.

Open doors and closed minds

I am not making this up. A network admin in a class I taught was complaining that she can't focus on her work because it's so noisy at her desk. Her office is right next to the main conference room, so there's a lot of traffic and noise from the meetings held there. Moreover, the company president has decreed an open door policy -- to the point that no one (at least at her level) is allowed to close their doors. Ever. And people don't like to close the door to the conference room either.

She asked the president if she could close her door. No.

She asked if she could wear headphones. No.

She asked if she could work at another desk. No.

She asked if she could close the conference room door. Yes, but it's politically difficult for her to ask execs to close the door because it's too noisy.

I repeat: I am not making this up.

Consider the organizational culture that would not only allow this situation to happen, but would make it difficult or impossible to improve it. I mean, who really thinks that an open door policy means that a door must be open *all* the time? That's insane.

This situation reminds me of the problems that companies have when they adopt 5S or other lean concepts. Management adopts the tools without understanding the problems they're intended to solve, so they end up with LAME instead of lean. (Or see my piece on Kyocera's pathetic 5S implementation.)

At the risk of stating the painfully obvious, an open door policy does not actually require everyone's door to be open all the time. It's a mindset, an attitude, and a culture. It's not the physical position of a piece of wood. Any organization that is willing to sacrifice not only the productivity but the well-being of a worker, has a lot to learn about the oft-forgotten pillar of lean -- respect for people.

I won't bother listing all the possible ways a company can maintain an open-door mind-set without critically undermining people's ability to concentrate and focus on their work. (But if you're interested, feel free to contact me.)

But I would love to know: where do people come up with these moronic ideas?

First, identify the value.

If you want to improve the effectiveness of your organization, start focusing on value, not on deliverables. When you look at job descriptions or examine organizational expectations, you see that they're usually driven by a focus on deliverables, not value. To wit:

• you need to be at the office from 9-5
• we have an open door policy, and expect you to keep your door open at all times
• everyone must attend the monthly all-day, division-wide meeting

Notice that the focus isn't on the value you're providing, it's on the deliverable of your presence during certain periods of time. But if you focus on the value your customer wants, you can remove the manacles of arbitrary expectations.

For example, a woman in a class I recently taught told me that her boss expects her to keep her door open all the time. In this case, the "deliverable" is the open door. Of course, that makes it difficult for her to get her own work done, because she's constantly interrupted by her team. But what's the value she's providing? Her team needs her to answer questions and solve problems as they arise -- and if you've ever managed a team, you know that many of the questions are the same ones, over and over. So why can't she put up a list of FAQs on the server, or post videos answering the most common questions, so that her team can access the answers when they need it, without interrupting her? Of course, she'd be available for more complex issues, but at least this method provides the value while improving her ability to do her own job.

Another example: a company I worked with used to have a quarterly, all-day meeting for its 75 directors and VPs. No one wanted to be there for the full 8 hours -- the "deliverable" -- but it was mandatory because the exec team wanted ideas to cross pollinate throughout the company. Once they focused on the value, however -- the cross-pollination -- they saw that there were other ways to accomplish the same goal. Now they have a much smaller, much shorter meeting, and the company pays for a giant pizza lunch once a quarter where  everyone can exchange ideas about what they're working on and why it's interesting.

It's often difficult to see the distinction between the value and the deliverable, because we're so used to thinking about (and being rewarded for) the latter and not the former. So try focusing on the problem you're trying to solve, rather than the format of the solution. Then consider multiple solutions to the problem. You'll likely find that within that solution set lies a better method for delivering the value to your customer.