Disrespectful communication

Lean Communication

  Microsoft's announcement that it will lay off 18,000 employees is a brilliant example of how not to show people respect in communication. Stephen Elop took 11 paragraphs (!) in his internal email to finally get to the point that, you know, 18,000 people were about to be sacked. Brevity is not only the soul of wit, and plain, direct speech is a key element of respect for people. Less than One Paragraph: This is Donald Trump territory. "You're fired!" hardly constitutes respectful communication.

Eleven Paragraphs: To go this far, you have to bury the lede behind an awful lot of turgid business bloviation. While employees are anxiously looking for information about their jobs, they have to trudge through a bog of business jargon ("financial envelope," "accruing valuing to our strategy," "right-size operations," etc.). If your corporate environment permits emails like this to go out, it's probably ridden with what Bob Emiliani calls "fat behaviors," that create fear, uncertainty, and mistrust. Good luck establishing any sort of continuous improvement culture in that environment.

The alternative to the cruel bluntness of Donald Trump and the clueless circumlocution of Stephen Elop is direct and empathetic communication. State the facts honestly. Be humble. Bring humanity into your conversation. Remember that at the other end of your bloated strategy email is a real human being nervous about losing her job because she doesn't make a seven figure salary, or have millions in stock options, or have the security of a corporate pension.

If you still don't know how to communicate with a little more respect, read Bob Emiliani's work, or talk to Liz Guthridge. And if you want some entertainment, read Kevin Roose's hilarious evisceration of the Microsoft memo here.

Kaizen Lies Between Frustration & Seagulls

Knowledge vs Authority

Continuous improvement requires the coupling of authority to make changes and knowledge about what to change.

Authority without knowledge creates that pernicious breed, the "seagull manager," who, in the words of Ken Blanchard, flies in, makes a lot of noise, dumps on everyone, then flies out.

Knowledge without authority leads to frustrated workers who know what changes to make, but lack the authority to do so without the approval of at least one layer of management.

A structured problem solving approach like A3 thinking creates overlap in these two zones. As John Shook argues in his book Managing to Learn, the A3 creates "pull-based authority," such that the person with the greatest knowledge earns the authority to make decisions and improvements. That's fertile soil for kaizen.

Say ACK! for Kaizen

Courage Autonomy Knowledge

I've noticed recently that even in the presence of obvious problems and easy improvements, people often don't engage in kaizen. They just muddle through their work, wishing it were easier, and resigning themselves to the fact that it's not. But why? I think that kaizen activities flourish at the intersection of Autonomy, Courage, and Knowledge.

• Autonomy: the ability for a person to act without seeking permission. Many organizations are so sclerotic as to require workers to get approval for any change they want to make. Example: Rich Sheridan, president of Menlo Innovations, allows (expects!) people to sit where they need to sit and form the teams they need in order to create the right products for customers. Or any organization that eschews suggestion boxes in favor of improvement boards on the walls.
• Courage to Experiment: the confidence that making mistakes is natural, expected, and -- as long as it doesn't cripple the company -- welcome. Example: Grey Advertising (NY) bestows a "Heroic Failure" award. SurePayroll actually gives a cash award for errors that lead to significant learning. WL Gore distinguishes between "above the waterline" and "below the waterline risks" -- only the latter need approval from the senior team.
• Knowledge: understanding one's work well enough to be able to improve the way things are done. Example: This is the easiest criteria to meet, because anyone who does a job with some modicum of self-awareness has the necessary knowledge to improve the work. In other words, *everyone* has the knowledge they need to make improvements.

Having just one or two of the elements won't create an environment conducive to kaizen. Without all three, you end up with passive bystanders, frustrated innovators, or wasted effort.

July 2014 Newsletter -- Unleashing Kaizen Creativity

Anyone else who keeps digging when they’re at the bottom of the hole instead of figuring out a better way to do their job, is handicapped by poor leadership. Poor leadership stunts innate “kaizen creativity” as surely as poor soil and drought stunt the crops on a farm. . . . Download PDF to read the full article

Don't confuse posters with action.

 

I have a new theory: the more posters, stickers, and banners promoting 5S, the lower the level of adherence to 5S principles. You can extend this idea to pretty much anything a company deems important: if leadership is promoting respect, or innovation, or safety, you'll probably find sexual harassment charges, me-too products, and lots of worker's comp claims.

Point #10 of Dr. Deming's 14 Points states, "eliminate slogans, exhortations, and targets for the work force." (Yes, I'm selectively quoting. This point is in reference to defects and productivity, but I think that the basic argument holds true.) Instead, "institute leadership" (point #7) to get the results you're looking for.

People are social animals. We take our behavioral cues by observing leaders' actions, not from reading the wallpaper. If you want 5S, you've got to live 5S. I know of no better example than the president of a $100M contract manufacturer of electronics boards, who gets on his hands and knees and cleans the floors of his company. Every. Single. Morning. (Check out this photo from Kevin Myer's excellent post):

If you want 5S -- or respect, or cost savings, or safety, or whatever -- first, get on your knees and start doing it yourself.

More steps, more waste.

The more steps you have in a process, the more waste you'll have. No matter how smooth, efficient, and well-designed the process, more steps (and more people) means more waste. Why? More steps means work is most likely waiting in more queues. It also means that you have more opportunities for miscommunication between people -- as Karen Martin (along with Mike Rother and Drew Locher) demonstrates, the compounding effect of even small errors in communication and handoffs causes an explosion of waste, as measured by the percent complete and accurate (%C&A) quality metric. Finally, the inevitable friction of coordinating multiple steps -- think of the emails that must be read, the low value meetings that people attend -- reduces overall efficiency.

The antidote: Cross-train people to do more than one job. Redesign processes to remove steps. Create standard work with templates, models, and checklists to reduce the errors in the remaining steps.

Standard work, creativity, and Apple

I've written before how checklists are a valuable element of standard work, and certainly the use of checklists in the military, aviation, and healthcare has reduced errors and improved outcomes. But did you know that checklists lie at the heart of Apple's new product development process? When we look at an iPhone, it's easy to get seduced into thinking that its creation was a magical piece of genius, that it sprang full-grown from Steve Jobs' forehead like Athena from Zeus. However, according to a recent post on Quartz (and Leander Kahney's book about Jony Ive) the iPhone -- and all other Apple devices -- are the result of a rigorously detailed product development process.

Embodied in a program that runs on the company’s internal network, the ANPP [Apple new product process] resembled a giant checklist. It detailed exactly what everyone was to do at every stage for every product, with instructions for every department ranging from hardware to software, and on to operations, finance, marketing, even the support teams that troubleshoot and repair the product after it goes to market. "It’s everything from the supply chain to the stores," said one former executive. "It’s hooked into all the suppliers and the suppliers’ suppliers.Hundreds of companies. Everything from the paint and the screws to the chips.”

Now obviously, the ANPP is much more than a simple checklist. At the same time, however, it's also much more useful than one of those coma-inducing, 500-line Gantt charts that many companies use to drive and monitor projects. The ANPP ensures that standards are followed, that silly mistakes are avoided, and most of all, that knowledge becomes explicit and reusable, rather than tacit and tribal.

When you have an ANPP, you eliminate the non-value-adding drag on people's time and attention caused by rework, loopbacks, and superfluous confirmations and approvals. You give people the time and space they need to create something genuinely wonderful.

June 2014 Newsletter -- Becoming the CEO of Your Problems

A few years ago, the NY Times interviewed Mark Pincus, founder and recently-replaced chief executive of Zynga. Pincus told the interviewer that one of his key methods of leadership is to make everyone into a CEO in the company. Making a person the CEO of a problem is, I think, very much in keeping with the idea of granting ownership via A3. It ensures that something—and very likely the right thing—will get done. . . . Download PDF to read the full article

Don't confuse "lean cream cheese" with "lite cream cheese"

Ben's Cream Cheese has a bit of a cult following in New York. Food writers love it, Murray's Cheese shop (the city's temple to all things fromage) stocks it, and the good bagel shops swear by it. No one knows exactly how they do it -- the owners keep the recipe a secret -- but according to a recent article,

The real secret is basic freshness. They use dairy products delivered directly from upstate New York farms. They decline to add preservatives, because their cheese shouldn’t take up permanent residence in the back of one’s fridge; it is meant to be eaten soon. “We have nothing in stock,” Simon [Friedman, the son of the owner] said. “We only produce the orders we get in.”

Low inventory, producing to customer pull. . .  It's not light (or lite) cream cheese. It's lean.

Respect for people (Shingo Edition)

More wisdom from last week's factory tours with Ritsuo Shingo: 1. Don't ask workers for improvement ideas. Ask them:

• What work they don't like
• What work is tiring
• Any suggestions they have for management

In other words, you can't just ask for "improvement ideas" unless and until you've established trust -- i.e., until you've earned the right to ask for their help.

2. "Blaming your workers is like spitting in the sky. It comes back down on your face. It's your teaching that needs to be improved."

'Nuff said.

Forget about the Toyota "house of quality"

I'm accompanying the Shingo Institute study tour in Japan this week, and have had the incredible good fortune to spend time with Ritsuo Shingo, son of the late (and legendary) Shigeo Shingo. I asked him about the two pillars of lean (jidoka and just-in-time) in the famous Toyota house of quality, and he told me to forget about the house:

It doesn't matter what the pillars are, or what the roof is, or what blocks are in the foundation. You have to choose the structure that makes sense for your company. The concepts and elements are what's important, not where they go.

The lean community has, in recent years, shifted focus from tools to fundamental concepts and respect for people. To me, Mr. Shingo's advice is of the same piece. Slavish adherence to tools, language, and even graphics is pointless -- you have to translate the ideas to make them relevant for your idiosyncratic situation. As long as you have the right concepts, you can make whatever pillars you want.

For that matter, you don't even need a house. Make a submarine. Or a pop-tart. Or a light bulb. Just make sure you respect people and make it yours.

Will people pay attention now that HBR has validated it?

I've been preaching for years now that companies should pay more attention to how much time they regularly squander. Whether we're talking about confusing communication, inefficient meetings, or unimportant initiatives, organizations waste enormous amounts of time on non-value added activities. Most companies don't seem to really care as long as this waste doesn't hit the bottom line (and it doesn't, since managers are on salary, not hourly wages). The same companies that will argue the need for a corporate jet to keep their senior team maximally productive (Down time at airports? The horror!), will tolerate the rest of the company spending 300,000 hours per year supporting one weekly executive team meeting. Disappointingly, even companies engaged in lean transformations seem not to care much about the waste of time. I've met many people from nearly every functional silo in these firms over the past five years, and they all complain about email overload, meeting gridlock, and other pointless activities. And yet their firms accept this waste as either unimportant or unavoidable, a fact of nature along the lines of the sun rising in the east and setting in the west. They'd never accept a similar waste of time and attention on the plant floor, of course, because people are working on the clock, and because they can measure material utilization down to the penny. Muda of time? No problem. Muda of metal? No way.

But perhaps there's hope. The May issue of HBR features Your Scarcest Resource, an article that quantifies some of the cost of poorly managed time, and suggests strategies to reduce the organizational waste. There are no Copernican insights here -- the ideas are as gob-smackingly obvious as most time management ideas. (Start meetings on time, and end them early if they're not productive. Standardize the decision-making process. Etc.) -- but it's a good article. But just maybe the HBR imprimatur will at least get management to start turning their lean lenses on the waste of this most precious, and non-renewable, resource.

If you decide to take it on, feel free to call me. I wrote the book on it.

May 2014 Newsletter -- The Madness of Futures Orders

Futures orders may be great for an individual brand, but they’re absolutely terrible for the industry as a whole. What’s good for the goose is definitely not good for the gander—or the gaggle, for that matter. Futures orders push both manufacturers and retailers to operate with giant batches of products. . . . Download PDF to read the full article

Communication vs. Coordination

The power of visual management and standard work.

Meeting behavior is *NOT* a small thing

From the recent WSJ interview with Alan Mulally:

WSJ: Are you worried that Ford will go back to its old ways if, someday, you're not there to hand out the cards [printed with a summary of his "One Ford" strategy]?

Mr. Mulally: I am not only not worried about it, but I am very excited about the institutionalizing of our management systems inside Ford.

WSJ: So you feel it's not just you at this point.

Mr. Mulally: Absolutely. We have it built into the audit process. We actually audit the process and the behaviors.

WSJ: When was the last time you had to remind someone: "No, you didn't get it."

Mr. Mulally: Every once in a while someone in business-plan review will, say, pull out their communication device and start working on it. We have the entire leadership team networked around the world, and somebody would have the audacity to start working a specific issue instead of being laser focused on helping everybody?

Or they'll talk. At Ford, one of the behaviors is you listen, and you don't have side conversations during the meeting. It's just so important everybody stays focused. So if someone has a side conversation, we just stop and we just look at them, and it's amazing how it doesn't happen again.

Here you've got a guy who's universally credited with rescuing a $63 billion market cap company talking about how not using smartphones, or avoiding side conversations during meetings, is an essential element of sustaining the new corporate culture.

Pay attention, people: small behaviors are NOT small things. They're critical symbols of what the company values. Mulally cites these seemingly minor behaviors as evidence that Ford has become a different kind of company. More importantly, he uses them as a way to monitor the behaviors that underpin the company's transformation.

Disregarding others, and not being present to support and aid colleagues in meetings -- these are the leading indicators of a dysfunctional corporate culture. They're not the only reason why Ford teetered on the edge of bankruptcy a few years ago, but they're emblematic of a culture that is rotting at the core. That's why Alan Mulally attends to these seemingly minor indicators. And that's why you should, too.

April 2014 Newsletter -- It's About Priorities, Not Time

“I don’t have time” is a complaint you hear often, but that’s really not true. What we really ought to say is, “It’s just not a priority for me.” You always have time for what’s important. At the risk of being melodramatic, if your husband or child were taken to the hospital after a serious accident, I bet you’d find time to sit by their bedside. Because that’s way more important than finishing up the PowerPoint for tomorrow’s marketing meeting. . . . Download PDF to read the full article

How lean improves individual productivity

I'm a rabid believer that lean concepts and tools can improve personal productivity enormously -- hell, I (literally) wrote the book on that. But it's nice to see validation from the go-go world of internet startups. Bill Trenchard, founder of LiveOps and now partner at First Round Capital, just published a piece that supports my argument. He believes that 70% of a tech CEO's time is spent sub-optimally, and his countermeasures come straight out of the lean playbook.

Creating Standard Work: Bill suggests identifying the core processes -- which are often repetitive -- that drive the company, and creating standard work around them.

For anything you do more than three times, write down your process in detail. Build playbooks that you can hand off to someone else, so they can execute something exactly the way you would. Never get held up by people asking what the next step is or whom they should ask about a process.

This is how Uber in particular scaled so quickly. They’ve grown to over 70 cities and they’ve killed it in all of them. How did they do it? With a playbook. They have a list of the things they do in every single city when they launch, with slight regional adjustments. They have practiced this method and tested it and wrote it all down. So now they just execute, like turning a key.

The startups that I have seen succeed the most at scaling are the ones who have systematized their common actions and core procedures early, and made a habit of it as they grew.

Reducing the Waste of Over-processing: Bill takes on the always thorny issue of managing email and sees stupendous over-processing waste in the way we read and re-read our messages:

Think about postal mail for a second. Do you pick your letters up, look at each one and then put them back down only to pick them up and put them down again and again? This is the definition of insanity. Yet that’s exactly what most of us do with our email.... If you can respond to or act on any email in under two minutes, just do it immediately. If it’s going to require more than two minutes, move it into your task manager to process later. When you do this, you have the ability to prioritize tasks and emails in relation to each other, and your inbox no longer owns your time.

Improving Flow: The psychological research is unanimous on this point -- multitasking doesn't work. Email interruptions, whether self-inflicted or from someone sending you a message, kill your ability to create psychological flow. How to improve the situation? Like me, Bill recommends doing it in chunks to avoid fragmenting your attention:

I recommend the batch route. It lets you focus on email when you need to, and give other tasks the attention they deserve. Constant context-switching makes you mediocre at everything.

Go and See, and Leader Standard Work: Using daily standup meetings (or something similar) as part of leader standard work so that you can identify and solve obstacles quickly is critical in the factory and in the office. Cribbing from both the agile software and lean playbooks, Bill goes to the gemba:

[One of the most productive CEOs I know] circulates the office, stopping to talk to his team members one-on-one or in small groups throughout the day. He asks them:

• What’s holding you back from getting more done?
• What are your blockers? Are there any bottlenecks or barriers I can remove for you?
• What resources or processes would let you move as fast as you want to?

Get the answers to these questions and get it done for your team. If you want them to model speed, you need to model speed yourself. Give them the help they need to do their best work in record time. Responsiveness is key.

Bill's post is a good reminder that lean concepts are not just applicable to factory -- or office -- processes. They're applicable to the way that you, as an individual, work. You can remove waste, improve quality, and increase the value you create in the time you spend at the office. It's the only truly non-replaceable resource. Use it wisely.

March 2014 Newsletter -- Leader Standard Work

Do you often feel reactive instead of proactive? Do people complain that decisions at the top take too long to percolate down to the front lines? If so, you probably manage your organization and your direct reports through weekly meetings and email—and you should consider implementing “leader standard work....” (A version of this newsletter originally appeared on the HBR Blogs.) Download PDF to read the full article

Why you need to make processes visible

One of my clients is trying to improve their product development processes. They have two major value streams: one for softgoods (cut and sew products) and one for hardgoods (products requiring injection molds). The development timelines on these two streams are fairly different, although both products are sold to the same customers during the same seasons. The hardgoods process always seemed to be late, with last minute changes and late nights for both the engineers and the factories. As the first step in improving the process, representatives from all parts of the value stream -- product managers, designers, engineers, logistics, marketing, and sales got together to map the entire process.

Turns out, the major problem was gobsmackingly obvious: the engineers thought the product had to be finalized and ready to go in time for the first customer delivery date. But the sales team needed the product to be finalized and ready to go for the salesman samples -- two months earlier. Whoops.

The softgoods team already knew this and operated on this model. It was just assumed that the hardgoods team operated this way as well. But making assumptions is never a good idea:

It was only the visualization of the process that laid bare the mistaken assumptions.

There's still plenty of improvement opportunity in the process. But with the ambiguity in the delivery date cleared up, the team now has the possibility of actually meeting customer needs.

The Silent Andon Cord

I was fortunate to hear Rich Sheridan, president of Menlo Innovations and the author of the terrific book, Joy, Inc., speak at the AME Innovation Summit last week. At one point, he explained that "the sound of silence from your colleagues is a signal that they need help." There's always conversational noise at Menlo Innovations. It's an open office environment, and his programmers work in pairs, so there's always plenty of talking. If programming is progressing smoothly, there's a consistent conversation between the programmers. But if there's extended silence, the programmers have probably hit a roadblock and are having problems figuring out a way around it. Essentially, the sound of silence is a kind of invisible, silent, andon cord. When it's "pulled," one of the nearby programming teams comes to help.

I love this story.

In a typical office environment, it's often an effort to signal that you need help: you have to get up from your desk and find your boss or a colleague, which might take 2 minutes or 20. There's also the need to overcome the psychological hurdle of explicitly saying that you've got a problem and need assistance. Menlo's approach eliminates the need to find someone while removing the psychological hurdle. How easy is it in your company for people to get help when they need it?