Responsibility Without Authority

Responsibility Without Authority

My friend Sara runs a rapidly growing non-profit in NY. They’ve gone from 5 employees to 55 in the past 18 months. Despite the increased staff, decision-making is more sclerotic than ever, she and her executive team are still consumed with trivialities, and wide-spread frustration is growing over the organization’s lack of nimbleness.

Her situation reminded me of a story I heard about James Treybig, the president of Tandem Computers. He once called a meeting with the engineering leadership team to find out why, when there were 20 people in engineering, the team regularly performed miracles. But three years later, with 300 people in engineering, it seemed like nothing was getting done.

Probably you’ve seen the same thing in your own organization—yet I don’t think that this is an immutable fact of life, on par with Newton’s Laws, or the impenetrability of your medical insurance EOB statement. And while I can’t speak for Tandem, in Sara’s case, the problem definitely isn’t due to a bloated organization loaded with corporate fat.

The truth is that when responsibility doesn’t equal authority, you’ve got problems. Sara beefed up the organization in order to relieve the exec team of the burden of dealing with the innumerable small, daily decisions that devour time like the Eighth Plague: which type of desktop inboxes to buy. Which water bottle style to give away at a fund-raising event. Where to host the holiday party. Whether to use royal blue or slate blue for highlight trim. She wrote job descriptions that specified responsibility for managing these decisions, and hired people for the positions.

Sounds good. Except that the job descriptions didn’t explicitly give them the authority to make these decisions. Further, she didn’t coach the leadership team to delegate that authority. The predictable result? The myriad daily issues still come bubbling up to the leadership team’s level—but now each decision takes even longer, because approval for each one requires a meeting between a senior leader and her subordinates. Slower decisions and more time sucked up in meetings: a double loss for Sara.

In some ways this situation is a more nefarious version of the founder’s dilemma—in which an entrepreneur’s stranglehold on decision-making, so helpful in launching a company, ends up impeding its long-term growth. Sara’s situation is worse because it looks as though she’s avoiding the problem—after all, she’s just hired a bunch of people to handle these decisions. Unfortunately, she’s only exacerbated the situation by increasing headcount and impeding execution.

At Sara’s organization, the mismatch between responsibility and authority created bottlenecks. But this kind of mismatch between authority and responsibility typically creates different kinds of problems throughout an organization:

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

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

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

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

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

Ceding ownership for decision-making is hard, but totally worth it. Sara and her executive team are now rewriting job descriptions to better match responsibility and authority. It’s an uncomfortable process, because it means yielding ownership of issues that they’ve always handled. But they’re already starting to see faster execution, higher morale, better collaboration among departments, and a drop in the number of meetings they need to attend.

Take a look at your direct reports: do they have authority commensurate with the responsibility you’ve given them? If not, it’s worth the time to revisit their jobs and see if you can bring those two components into balance.

What's a Fit Organization?

Recently, Matt May was kind enough to interview me about my new book for his blog. You can read my eloquent response to his questions here, Or, if you're more of a visual person, check out the inimitable Todd Clarke's one-page visual summary of my ideas below. He does a wonderful job of distilling blog posts, books (and really, any kind of dense intellectual content) into elegantly simple designs. You can see all of his work here. 

Rethinking the Shadow Board

I was in Zurich recently and stayed at a hotel that was formerly a brewery, established in 1867. I saw this shadow board in one of the preserved rooms.

Very impressive -- 55 years before Toyota talked about 5S, the Swiss were doing the same thing.

I excitedly showed this to a friend who runs a manufacturing company in Zurich, but he was unimpressed. He pointed out that the board is inflexible: if the tools change, or if new machines require different tools, then this board becomes a hindrance to the worker, not a help. 

In his company, he uses photographs to show the *current* best layout for the tools that the worker uses, and posts the photo above the work station so that the workers can spot abnormalities, missing tools, etc. It looks like this:

We often talk about right-sizing machines, having single minute exchange of dies, making flexible production lines, and so on, but his comment reminded me that our supporting systems -- particularly visual management tools -- need to be flexible as well. Investing money in tools that can't change and grow with the organization is a waste of money. 

"I Want To Be A Somebody."

Thanks to NBC and the Deming Institute, last night I was able to watch the entirety of "If Japan Can. . . Why Can't We?" (And thanks to Apple TV, I was able to watch it on a full size TV rather than hunched over my computer. With a bowl of popcorn.)

I know that many of the bloggers in the lean community will be writing about the video (I'm looking at you, Mark Graban.), but I wanted to add a comment to the conversation.

I was struck by how little wisdom and understanding the general corporate world has attained since the show first aired in 1980. We still have business leaders who strive only to cut costs. We still have leaders who see technology as the royal road to productivity. And perhaps saddest of all, we still have leaders who don't understand that the real reason for the incredible success of (some) Japanese manufacturers is the way they leverage the thousands of brains they employ to improve the way the work gets done. 

But for me, the most poignant and powerful moment in the video came in the segment on GM's "Quality of Work Life" program. One of the Tarrytown workers said (starting at 59:25), 

Quality of Work Life is involvement. Involving me in the decision-making process. And treating me as. . . as somebody. I want to be somebody. 

His statement was one of the saddest things I've heard in a long while. Think of the thousands -- tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands -- of workers who, in the 35 years since this video first aired, spent their lives feeling like a nobody. Who were treated as replaceable hands, and not brains. Not hearts. Not people. It's enough to make you cry. 

When I think about lean, and about the profound respect for people that lies at its core, this is what I'll think about. At its best, this is what lean does. It makes people feel like a somebody. 

From Flabby to Fit, or Why Track Spikes Don't Make You Faster

When I started running in 8th grade, I was dead last in every race. I stunk. I had asthma, allergies, and I couldn't run more than 3/4 of a mile without stopping (definitely not a competitive advantage in a 2.5 mile race). Over the next nine years, I became a pretty decent runner,  and ended up as a pretty competitive at the college level. Not world-class, not national class, but pretty good. I studied and learned how to train and race better. I became a student of the sport—and of my own body. By the end of my racing career, I was a much smarter athlete. 

The organizational journey from mediocre to outstanding—from flabby to fit—is similar. You need to study the way your organizational processes function on the macro level, and how individual jobs are done on the micro level. You’ll have to become a student of your own company so that you can build better processes and more capable people.

Tools alone won’t make your organization fit, any more than a new pair of track spikes would have made me fast. Don’t get me wrong—I loved buying new racing spikes, but they didn’t make any difference on the stopwatch (sadly). But if the past 25 years have shown us anything, it's that tools alone are insufficient. You can look up how to make a heijunka board; you can read a book on installing a kanban system; you can hire a consultant to set up manufacturing cells; and in the end, you’ll join the very long list of companies that attempted to copy Toyota and ended up mired in mediocrity. There is a place for tools, of course, but they’re useless unless they’re deployed in an environment that observes the fundamental principles of continuous improvement.

Honoring those principles will set you on the road to organizational fitness. And as with personal fitness, the biggest obstacle is likely to be . . . you. Your own well-established habits and preferences, your likes and dislikes, represent a formidable inertia that will be a challenge to overcome. Getting out of bed at 5am in the middle of winter for a swim workout or an eight-mile run isn’t easy, and neither is coaching a front line worker through yet another problem solving session when you’d rather just tell her what to do.

Culture’s no excuse, either. You’ll undoubtedly face some resistance to the changes you want to make. However, it’s likely that the resistance is largely due to fear from past experiences with command and control leaders, or the cynicism of dealing with managerial “flavor of the month” initiatives. That resistance will dissipate when people hear the sincerity of your words and witness the commitment of your actions. Cultural resistance won’t last long in an environment where process improvement and employee development are woven into the fabric of daily work.

W. Edwards Deming said, "Survival is optional. No one has to change." He was right, of course -- but that doesn't mean that it has to be a long slog through the muck under enemy fire. Whether you’re a Fortune 500 company or a five-person organization that doesn’t even subscribe to Fortune, you can embark on the organizational fitness program that I detail in Building the Fit Organization. It’s simple (if not easy), and progress will be slow. But the financial, intellectual, and emotional rewards make it a journey worth taking.

How Not to Look Like an Ass on "Undercover Boss"

CBS’s reality TV show, Undercover Boss, provides viewers with the thrill of schadenfreude when they see a highly paid CEO receive his comeuppance as he experiences first-hand the dirty, difficult, dangerous, or demoralizing reality of many of the jobs in the company. We snicker at the clueless CEO who didn’t know that the air conditioner in the warehouse (in Alabama, in the summer) has been broken for three weeks because of his order to cut expenses; that it takes four levels of approval to order more paper for the copy machine; that demands to increase productivity mean that there’s no time to go to the bathroom.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. One of the fundamental precepts of a lean organization is that leaders at all levels go to the front lines to see what’s actually happening. And as I argue in Building the Fit Organization, it’s also essential for leaders to actually spend some time each week or month doing the work that you’re asking others to do—it’s the only way to earn trust and to gain true understanding of what your people are dealing with.

Of course, you don’t have to know about lean to understand the value of this behavior. Look at the sidelines of any football game this Sunday, and you’ll see the coaches standing on the sidelines—not spending time in some fancy conference room. Or consider spin class instructors, or personal trainers—the best ones spend their time with you, in your world. They don’t just email in your workout. They participate, they model, they observe closely in order to better understand your reality so that they can improve your performance.

Check out this story on Peter Aceto, the CEO of Tangerine (formerly ING Direct). In his first year on the job, he worked in the call center everyday:

I took customer calls every single day. I sat down, got on the phone and really began to understand the challenges the call centre staff were facing. It was very tiring but also very exciting. There was a lot that had to change at Tangerine—I mean, even today, even though I behave in a very different way, there are still people who are intimidated just by the role and title of CEO. So I’m trying to constantly break down those barriers. I think [my taking calls] made people feel a little uncomfortable, but sometimes that’s what it takes.

It’s not always easy to do. As Aceto points out, people are usually intimidated (and probably scared) when the CEO plops down next to you and puts on a headset, or processes an invoice, or picks and packs an order, or cleans the drill press. But if you do that on a regular basis—if you make it part of your standard work—it’ll become more than just a CEO flyby that makes people nervous. In fact, it’ll reduce your daily load of meetings and build morale incalculably.

Oh, yeah. And you won’t look like a clueless ass when CBS puts you on Undercover Boss. 

Scut Work Matters

Basic maintenance (or as my wife calls it, "scut work") matters. Especially for senior leadership. 

Not because the 10% of the time that senior leadership spends on maintenance makes a significant difference in preventing breakdowns or keeping the company operating smoothly. But because it has enormous impact on how well, and how often, everyone else in the organization does maintenance. 

In Gemba Kaizen, Masaaki Imai suggests that most of top management's time should be spent on innovation and kaizen, with just a small percentage of time devoted to basic maintenance, as he shows in this chart:

In my experience, most leadership teams ignore the area in red: to the extent that they even think about the need for maintenance, they assume that since it occupies such a small percentage of their time, it's unimportant. 

Nothing could be farther from the truth. You could even argue that it's the most important portion of their time. 

As I've written about before, effective coaching requires that leaders both go to the workplace ("go see") as well as participate in the work that they're asking people to do. That doesn't mean that the VP of Engineering has to clean and oil the machines everyday, or that the CFO should organize client files every morning, but they should at least join in once every month or two. Participation in this kind of scut work doesn't just demonstrate "servant leadership." It also sends a powerful signal to employees that this work is important. If senior leadership can do it, then surely it's important enough for everyone else to do it as well.

Want to see what this looks like? Check out Paul Akers, the president of FastCap, on his hands and knees. . . cleaning the company toilet. My hunch is that if more CEOs did this, we wouldn't need 5S audits. And, of course, there wouldn't be a need for Undercover Boss. 

Maintenance may only be 10% of your time, but don't ignore it. Otherwise, everyone else will, too.

Paris Is All Wrong

Joseph Paris, that is. Not the city of lights.

Recently, Joseph Paris of XONITEK and the Operational Excellence Society argued that the continuous improvement community is making a grievous mistake by worshipping at the altar of Toyota and all things Japanese. He writes:

I believe this reverence of Japan and Japanese companies is largely (perhaps entirely) undeserved—possibly even a myth.  As they say, sacred cows make the best hamburger. And even if all this hype about Japan and Japanese companies was ever true at some point in the past, it is certainly not true today—and has not been true since the early 1990’s.  Further, I would propose that the expected results of any company that has “drank the Kool-Aid” and is trying to emulate the way a Japanese company operates as a path to a better future are misguided at best, and more than likely greatly exaggerated—leading to a disappointment that is almost certainly inevitable.

Paris goes on to compare per capita GDP in Japan, Germany, and the US; the movement of the Nikkei, DAX, and Dow stock indices; and finally the performance of Ford and Toyota stock prices over the past 20 years to demonstrate that Japan and Japanese companies don’t outstrip the US and American companies, and concludes that lean isn’t sufficient to improve organizational performance and competitiveness.

I am by no means a macro-economist (as my MBA professors will no doubt attest), so I won’t argue his GDP and stock index analysis. But I’m happy to debate two premises: that lean management is pervasive, and that Toyota is no better managed than Ford.

Paris says that 

the use of [lean] tools and techniques are now ubiquitous across companies—and since they are nearly universally accepted and embraced by companies, they no longer offer themselves as a differentiator nor do they offer a competitive advantage as they once did. And as such, they expose the limitations of the Japanese way of running a business.

I’m not sure what companies Paris has been consulting to, but in my experience, the number of companies that have fully embraced the lean management system is vanishingly small. Autoliv. Lantech. Herman-Miller. Virginia Mason. A few others for sure, but certainly not to the point that lean has become “ubiquitous” and “universally accepted and embraced.” These organizations are the exception, not the rule—both in the US and in Japan. Moreover, lean is by no means “the Japanese way” of doing business. I’ve worked for two Japanese firms over the years; neither had any knowledge of, or interest in, lean tools or philosophy. To say that there is a universal Japanese way of management—or a universal “American way” of management—is ridiculous. Could there be any more divergent management styles than General Electric and Zappos? It’s like saying that there’s one universal Japanese style of literature, or one universal style of American beer. 

Now let’s turn to Paris’s argument that Ford’s and Toyota’s stock price is an adequate reflection of their performance. According to his analysis, this chart doesn’t show that Toyota is a significantly better-managed company than Ford. 

Hmm…where do I even start with this argument? First, Ford has significantly improved its product development processes over the past decade—in fact, modeling them after Toyota. Second, and more significantly, unless you’re completely naïve (or a Chicago School of Economics professor), you can’t really believe in the absolute wisdom of the market. If you really believe that stock price correlates with the quality of management, then I’ve got some stock for you to buy: Enron. Sunbeam. Worldcom. Lehman Brothers. Pets.com. 

Instead of looking at the stock price, let’s look at Ford and Toyota’s net income. That presents an entirely different (and I’d argue, a more relevant) picture of management quality:
 

Which company would you invest in now?

Paris closes with a straw man argument that reflects his shallow understanding of lean. He states that 

the company that focuses on cutting waste over innovation and driving value to the customer—innovation and value for which the customer is willing to pay a premium—is not at any particular advantage.

He’s absolutely correct here. . . except that lean is not just about cutting waste out of operational processes. The elimination of waste is certainly part of lean, but that’s in the service of driving value to the customer. Less waste means that more financial and human resources can be dedicated to the creation of customer value. 

I agree with Paris that we shouldn’t hold up the Toyota production system as a “holy scroll” and a “sacred scripture.” (In fact, I argue the same thing in my new book, Building the Fit Organization.) But in everything else, Paris is all wrong. 

Training Wheels vs. Crutches

Last week I was speaking about my new book at a company that has a well-developed internal improvement team. In most engagements, the team embeds one of their lean experts within a department, and for the next year or two, that person works within the business to improve operations, while gradually easing herself out of her role. When that posting is complete, the person moves on to another department. 

This company views their office as the equivalent of kaizen training wheels. Their job is to help the various functional departments learn the skills, tools, and mindsets needed for lean and support them on their journey until the department can do it on its own. Their job is not to assume responsibility for improvement, or do all the heavy lifting, for the department. Cardinal Health, which uses a lean six sigma methodology, takes a very similar approach, in which people from the LSS team rotate in and out of functional departments, helping them improve processes, but not owning the improvement projects -- until eventually, the LSS expert finds a permanent position within the business units.

By contrast, many organizations use their internal improvement team as a crutch. In these organizations, the team parachutes into a department for a week/month/year, fixes the current problems, and then moves onto the next challenge. The emphasis is on rapid results, not on skill development -- and I'd argue, on episodic, rather than continuous improvement. When new problems arise, or when the company decides that the department must do still better, it has to wait until the continuous improvement cognoscenti with their belts and decoder rings are able to slot them into their schedule.

Training wheels help you develop new skills so that you can continue to ride on your own. Crutches make life easier today, but don't develop new capacity or capability. How does your organization operate?

The Tragedy of CEO Curiosity

My friend Roger is the president of a small manufacturer here in California that's owned by a larger Swiss company. A few months ago, his facility hosted a global meeting of all the companies held by the Swiss parent. In keeping with company custom, he made a sign welcoming all the participants and listing their names. After peering at the list for awhile, the Swiss CEO said, "Interesting. . . I'm trying to figure out how you ordered the names."

In fact, there was no particular order -- Roger listed the names randomly. But when the CEO made his comment, Roger panicked: did the CEO expect a particular order? By title? Seniority? By shoe size? Roger was so anxious about making a mistake that when he made a list for an event later in the meeting, he agonized over it for 45 minutes before finally putting the names in alphabetical order.

Now, it turns out that the CEO didn't care. He was just curious, because he couldn't see any discernible pattern in the names. (And he's Swiss.) But Roger, as a relatively new head of the subsidiary, couldn't help but read something into the CEO's question that just wasn't there.

I call this problem the "inference effect." The higher up the organizational food chain the person asking the questions is, the more likely we are to infer meaning that isn't there. If it's your colleague asking a question, you probably take it at face value. If it's your (Swiss) CEO, you'll infer all kinds of unintended meaning. The mangers at one of my clients often joke that they'd like to "kill the CEO's curiosity"-- whenever he asks a question at one of the quarterly business review meetings, it causes the team to prepare even more reports and analysis for the next one. Over the years, his team has sliced and diced the data so many ways that they can hardly see the forest for the bark, never mind the trees. And the sad thing is that the CEO didn't care deeply about most of the questions -- they were simply expressions of idle curiosity.

The tragedy of the inference effect is the needless waste and churn it creates. Roger spent 43 minutes more than was necessary to make a list on a sign. The financial team at my client is spending time analyzing sales by region by distribution channel by packaging color by day of the week by store manager's zodiac sign.

As the CEO, you owe it to your team to be cognizant of the inference effect. You're one of their most important customers, and they'll work hard to provide you with an answer, because they assume you value it. Feel free to ask something out of sheer curiosity, but if you don't want them to do additional analysis, say so. Don't let them infer meaning that's not there -- because they will. And that's not only a waste, it's a tragedy.

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My new book, Building the Fit Organization, comes out on September 22. It's a fresh approach to continuous improvement -- no mention of Toyota, no Japanese, and no weird English jargon. Instead, it has approachable examples and models drawn from the world of physical fitness and athletic excellence. You can pre-order it on Amazon now:  http://amzn.to/1N84QEf. 

Joe Dager at the wonderful podcast Business901 interviewed me about the book recently. You can listen to the podcast here: player.fm/1VQhZV. If you like to watch more than listen, you can see my first webinar on the book, which I idd for Joakim Ahlstrom and the C2 Consultancy here: youtu.be/6EMz7yVXNFw.

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If you're in the SF Bay Area on Sep 24-25, I've organized an amazing 2-day workshop with Mark Hamel on Visual Management & Leader Standard Work. Mark is a great teacher and deeply experienced in all facets of lean. The event will be held at the hospital job site of Boldt Construction, where you'll have a chance to see an how an obeya can be used to manage the complexity of a major construction project. For more information, go to http://www.ame.org/node/30883.

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That's all the self-promotion for this week. 

Cheers, 

dan

Semantics Matter.

I was helping a client with a process mapping exercise recently, and saw this post-it:

n their excellent book Metrics Based Process Mapping, Karen Martin and Mike Osterling suggest that process steps be written in “Verb-Noun” format to show the action. Therefore, the mapping team defined one of the steps as “Receive Ingredients.” (Although with a process time of a half-day and a lead time of eight weeks, it’s actually more like “wait for ingredients,” but no matter.)

What’s interesting in this example is that the team was viewing the activity from their perspective, rather than from the perspective of the work that’s being done. As a result they defined the critical action as “waiting.” And while that’s technically true, it obscures the critical issue: that while they’re waiting, the production of those ingredients is taking eight weeks. In other words, the focus is on the team that’s waiting, not on the team that’s producing the ingredients.

There’s very little you can do to improve “receiving.” There is, however, plenty that you can do to improve a manufacturing lead time of eight weeks when the process time is only half a day. But those possible improvements are obscured by the passivity of “receiving ingredients.”

What did we do? We changed the process block to “Produce Ingredients” and placed it in the supplier swim lane—and then started the examination of why the lead time is so long, and began brainstorming possible countermeasures. The team now expects that they can reduce the lead time to 1-2 weeks.

Another team in the same workshop had a similar issue: one of their process blocks was “Get Sales Input,” with a small process time but a long lead time. When we moved this block from the design team swim lane to the sales team swim lane and relabeled it “Provide Customer Feedback,” it became apparent that the design team could go directly to customers for feedback, and avoid the time waste of working through the sales team.

If you have similar process block in your maps, the odds are good that the placement and phrasing of the post-it is obscuring both the real action and the opportunities for improvement. Focus on the work and who’s doing it, and let that be your guide. “Waiting,” “receiving,” “Getting” and other such phrases are passive, non-activities that impair your ability to see what’s really going on. In other words, semantics matter. 

Directive Coaching Isn’t All Bad

I’ve been talking recently with a colleague about effective coaching. Like many in the lean community (including me, in my forthcoming book, Building the Fit Organization), he argues that coaching should largely consist of Socratic questioning that promotes thinking, reflection, and ultimately, self-development. In contrast to directive coaching in which the coach transfers knowledge to the learner, developmental coaching helps the learner discover the answers himself. In this developmental approach, improving a business process is less important than improving the ability of the learner to think.

These two approaches are nicely illustrated in a slide from David Verble of LEI:

Developmental coaching is powerful when you need people to grow. This kind of coaching essentially engages a person in meta-work—in thinking about how their work is done, and how to do it better. Developmental coaching results in improved outcomes over the long term—more Olympic medals, a lower rate of surgical complications, shorter time to market. Even more importantly, it improves people’s ability to improve.

But for many years, I was a high school cross-country coach, and the vast majority of my coaching followed the more traditional, directive model in which I told the runners what to do. And now, as an active member of a masters swim club, my coaches do the same—they tell me how to position my arms, hands, and body in the water in order to swim fast.

The kind of coaching that’s appropriate depends on the situation and the objective. Developmental coaching isn’t a great idea if the learner is competing—you’re not allowed to coach Roger Federer in the middle of a match, Michael Phelps is underwater and can’t hear you, and Usain Bolt is finished before you’ve cleared your throat. It’s also not a great approach if someone is learning how to operate heavy, dangerous machinery—asking an operator about the experiments he could run to improve safety is not helpful if he’s already crushed a finger. When you need results right now, you need directive coaching.

A friend of mine says, “The most powerful improvement tool we have is our employees’ brains.” That’s true. But let’s not forget the value (and role) of our own brains. 

What does Jon Stewart know about lean?

Very little, actually. But he does know quite a bit about standard work.

His retirement last week reminded me of a post I wrote six years ago about the process he and his team use to write the jokes for the Daily Show. He explained to Fresh Air’s Terry Gross:

You'd be incredibly surprised at how regimented our day is, and just how the infrastructure of the show is very much mechanized.

People say, The Daily Show, you guys probably just sit around and make jokes. We've instituted—to be able to sort of weed through all this material and synthesize it, and try and come up with things to do—we have a very, kind of strict day that we have to adhere to. And by doing that, that allows us to process everything, and gives us the freedom to sort of improvise.

I’m a real believer that creativity comes from limits, not freedom. Freedom, I think you don’t know what to do with yourself. But when you have a structure, then you can improvise off it.

What I hear all the time is, "My job is different. I'm not like the admin staff processing invoices, or the mail room guy whose job is just to send out letters. My work is creative."

More creative than a team of comedians?

Even for something as creative as writing jokes, there's a structure to follow. And by establishing that structure, writers can unleash their comedy. Without it, they'd probably be a bunch of unfunny fat guys eating donuts and wondering why their show just got canceled.

Take another look at your work. Sure, you have to be creative. But whether you're a doctor in an emergency department, the marketing director for a tech company, or the coach of a professional football team, you can define a process and create standard work.

Of course you'll have variability: the doctor never knows who's going to walk through the hospital doors, the marketer doesn't know what customer will complain about an ad campaign, the coach doesn't know which player will get injured. But these cases are the exceptions, not the rule. If you try to manage your work for the exceptions, you'll never get anything done. Jon Stewart said that it took him six years to write his first 45 minutes of material. Now, with a rigidly defined process (and, to be fair, a team of writers), he creates 30 minutes every single day. The structure, and the standard work you define, enable you to manage the unpredictable crises.

If something as evanescent as comic inspiration can leverage standard work, there's no excuse for you not to do so for your own work.

I hope this doesn't mean I have to read "Atlas Shrugged" again.

I spent a few days coaching high-potential public health academics this week, and noticed a common problem: they struggled to complete their important work like grant applications and papers because they didn't place a priority on their own needs. (Truth is, this is a problem for many people, not just academics, but I suspect that it's more common in this world than, say, on Wall Street.) They were so committed to the needs of their colleagues that their own needs went unfulfilled. That makes them martyrs -- or saints -- which is great if you want a lifetime of free admission to the Vatican, but not so great if you're trying to, you know, get stuff done.

A healthy commitment to oneself is necessary if you want to accomplish something valuable for yourself and your community. It's the oxygen mask rule: put the mask over your own nose and mouth first, before you take care of your kids.

You want muda? Let’s talk about muda!

Cognitive Waste

Cognitive capacity at any given time is limited. There’s only so much mental bandwidth for processing information. So when we introduce lean to an organization, why do we insist on using up some of that precious capacity by forcing people to translate Japanese into English? Why do we ask them to make the mental leap from making cars to healing patients?

In my forthcoming book, Building the Fit Organization, I argue that we should be speaking a language that people are comfortable with when we introduce radically new ideas. Lean is a new way of thinking for many people—it’s crazy to make it harder for them to wrap their heads around these ideas by wrapping them in a foreign language, or by telling people how Toyota makes cars. All that does is consume valuable cognitive capacity on the waste of translation.

Some people will argue that there’s no real equivalent to many of the original Japanese words like gemba, but I maintain that the slight difference in nuance between “front lines” and gemba is probably not your biggest obstacle to changing your leadership behavior. And do you really want people to struggle with memorizing the definitions of muda, muri, and mura? If you’re so committed to Japanese, why not ask people to use tsukurisugi, temachi, unpan, zaiko, dōsa, and furyō for six of the wastes? There are subtle differences in translation there, too. And please, let’s not talk about Toyota. AGAIN. You know as well as I do that as soon as you mention Toyota, your audience immediately resists: “Toyota’s totally different from us. They make cars. We make _______.” They think that even if they make something like motorcycles. (“It’s totally different. Our vehicles only have two wheels. No crossover at all.”)

Look, there’s nothing wrong with using the original Japanese words or referring to Toyota. There’s a lot of value there. But maybe it shouldn’t be the first thing you throw at your team. First, get them to embrace the fundamental concepts. Use language and examples that people can relate to easily and comfortably. Once you’re past that intellectual, emotional, and cultural hurdle, you can do a gemba walk at Toyota and learn your 3Ms and 5Ss.

Until then, it’s just intellectual muda.

Avoiding hiring debacles with standard work

I was fortunate last week to join the Lean Enterprise Institute for a gemba walks class at TaylorMade Golf. While they will be the first to admit that they have a long way to go before they can be considered a lean organization, I was struck by the emphasis placed on standard work. TaylorMade’s business is highly seasonal, which means that each year they have to hire—and train—large numbers of new workers. (Volume from the low season to high season increases about 800%.) Getting these workers up to speed to receive and handle materials, not to mention assemble clubs, is a formidable challenge for the company.

That’s where the standard work comes in. With the standard work, team leaders and supervisors are able to train new hires more quickly, and they’re able to objectively and fairly assess how the new workers are doing in relation to the agreed-upon standard. This assessment allows the TaylorMade to determine whether to keep a new employee, promote them to another role, or to let them go.

Of course, many companies understand the value of standard work for front-line employees on the shop floor. But consider the benefits at the managerial or executive level. What would happen if there was standard work for new managers, VPs, and C-suite employees? What if they had a regular cadence of work that brought them to the front lines to observe and coach employees? What if they had a structured and defined management method that they were expected to follow in your company?

Having lived through more than my fair share of poor hires, bad fits, and cultural mismatches, I believe that they could have been largely avoided if we had had standard work for leaders. Standard work is no guarantee of a perfect hire, of course. But even if we did hire poorly, I know for sure that the mismatch would have been spotted earlier, and the person replaced, more promptly, with a better fit. What’s your way of assessing performance? How do you know (before the annual performance review) if an employee is panning out?

The ants know it. Why don't we?

A new study in the journal Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology finds that in ant colonies, a large number of worker ants are idle at any given time. (No, I don't subscribe to this journal -- I just heard about it on the radio.) These ants aren't just lazy slackers, though. As one of the researchers explains it,

. . . in order to make sure that the right number of workers are allocated to all the particular jobs that have to be done, it's beneficial if the colony has some excess workers -- essentially, extra workers, more than the number that they need to get the work completed because it just makes that process run more smoothly -- of actually figuring out who has to do what.

Sounds to me that the ant world has figured out Little's Law -- that the cycle time to get essential ant business done increases exponentially when labor utilization crosses a certain threshold. Maintaining slack in the system enables the colony to be more effective when work has to get done (like collecting food for grasshoppers).

Most companies realize that Little's Law applies to machines and manufacturing processes, but it's often ignored when considering the workload on people. In a misguided quest for increased "efficiency," we overload people with work, eliminating their slack time -- and thereby cross the utilization threshold beyond which response time plummets. We even do this to ourselves: we pack our calendars with meetings, projects, and tasks, guaranteeing that the inevitable glitch in our systems (a meeting that runs long, a software snag, an unexpected problem with a customer, etc.) will create a cascade of failures in our ability to meet deadlines and deliver on time.

A terrific article in Strategy + Business tells the story of St. John’s Regional Health Center, where the operating rooms were at 100 percent capacity. Emergency cases would lead to postponing long-scheduled surgeries, forcing doctors to wait several hours to perform their cases (sometimes as late as 2 a.m.) and requiring staff members to work unplanned overtime. The hospital was constantly behind.

The solution? Leave one operating room unused so that it would be available for unplanned, emergency cases. That room provided the slack the system needed for the hospital to run smoothly. The authors explain:

On the surface, St. John’s lacked operating rooms. But what it actually lacked was the ability to accommodate emergencies. Because planned procedures were taking up all the rooms, unplanned surgeries required a continual rearranging of the schedule. . . .Once a room was set aside specifically for unscheduled cases, all the other operating rooms could be packed well and proceed unencumbered by surprises. The empty room thus added much-needed slack to the system. Soon after implementing this plan, the hospital was able to accommodate 5.1 percent more surgical cases overall, the number of surgeries performed after 3 p.m. fell by 45 percent, and revenue increased.

What's happening in your product development team, your credit department, your finance group? Do you have enough extra workers -- or more to the point, do they have enough slack in their workdays -- to accommodate new demands, respond to emergencies, or answer customer questions in a timely fashion? Or are you running the team with so few people, or have overloaded them with so many initiatives that there's no slack in their schedules?

Can you run your organization as intelligently as an ant?

Going to the Customer at Starbucks

In a serendipitous bit of blog timing, I was just editing a new post on how fanatical Howard Schultz is about going to see his customer when I read Michel Baudin's latest on his experience at Boeing in getting up close and personal with customers. (Maybe it's something in the Pacific Northwest waters?) Tom Peters tells this story about a conversation he had with Howard Schultz:

Howard Schultz will personally, physically, visit a minimum of 25 Starbucks shops per week. . . I asked him about it and he said, “Look, I don’t care if we have three, thirteen, or 13,000 shops. The reality of the business is one Starbucks employee selling one cup of coffee to one customer. And despite all the statistics that pour across my desk, unless I can feel it, and taste it, and smell it, and touch it—that fundamental human interaction—I ain’t in touch with what’s going on in the world.”

Check out the full video here, or below:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2UlY0Vykc_Y

So yes, by all means go to the gemba. But don't forget to visit your customers (internal or external), too.

Your lean transformation is going to fail.

Are you considering a lean transformation? Don't bother. You're probably going to fail. The truth is, most companies are temperamentally unsuited for lean. Maybe management doesn’t have the patience and long-term outlook to stick with anything for more than a year. Maybe the executive team sees lean as just an HR program, or something that they can hand off to the quality department. Or perhaps the company’s leaders aren’t emotionally ready to make the fundamental change in leadership style from command and control to coaching and consulting. And maybe the interpersonal soil between labor and management is so poisoned by a lack of trust that lean will never take root and grow.

Good luck trying to succeed with lean in this kind of environment. You’re much better off just doing a few improvement projects here and there (with or without lean tools) to improve sales or profit margins. You’ll save yourself lots of money and time, and spare yourself a giant headache. A lean transformation? It’s just not worth it. You’ve got about as much chance as Donald Trump does of getting elected president.

But if, against all odds and common sense, you really do want to pursue lean, you’ll want to make these five commitments.

1. Take a minimum five-year view. Consider any financial gains in the short term as a gift, strictly as icing on the cake. If you really want to transform your organization, it’s going to take a long time to change the fundamental thinking and culture of your firm.
2. Hire a coach for everyone on the leadership team—including the CEO. Give the coach tools to hold execs accountable for changing their behaviors. (Hmm, performance reviews and pay docking?)
3. Get rid of executive offices. Move everyone onto the floor in their respective functional areas. Require that senior leaders spend a certain amount of time each month doing one of the front line tasks in their departments.
4. Insist that all members of the leadership team attend at least one improvement conference per year.
5. Commit to a policy of no layoffs as a result of improvements.

Making these commitments won’t guarantee success in your lean journey. But without them, you’ll almost certainly fail.

Avoiding the Information Push/Pull Mismatch

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Despite the proliferation of convenient, easy, fast, and free communication devices and media, communication chaos often reigns in complex organizations. That’s because there’s a terrible mismatch between the content of the messages we’re sending and the type of messaging media we often use. Messages fall along a continuum of urgency—from “The building’s on fire!” to “There are leftover brownies in the break room.” You can’t afford to miss the first one; the second one, not so much. (Okay, I know some people would say that the leftover brownies are just as urgent, but at least in terms of survival, if not gastronomic satisfaction, the fire really is more urgent.) The differing urgencies point us to different communication media. The fire gets a loud alarm and a PA announcement over the loudspeaker, while the brownies get an email. From a lean perspective, urgent messages get sent via a push system—you get the fire alarm when the sender wants you to. (Of course, Toyota’s famous andon cord is a push system—music plays and lights flash when the worker needs help.) Non-urgent messages get sent via a pull system—you retrieve the message from the server when you’re ready.

At least, that’s how communication should work. In practice, however, we’ve gotten out of the habit of using different mediums for different types of messages. Email has become the default mode of communication in most companies irrespective of the message’s urgency. The result is communication chaos. We send urgent messages via email even though we fear they’ll be lost in the mass of non-urgent messages (both important and trivial) —and then to compensate, we follow up with a phone call two minutes later: “Did you get my email...?” Or we send the email and then go to the recipient’s office immediately after: “I just sent you an email, and….” Intuitively, we know that email is a pull system, so we rely on a push system (phone call, face-to-face conversation) as a backup. That’s crazy, but fortunately it’s only a waste of time. What’s worse is when a truly urgent message gets lost in the inbox and we miss the opportunity to respond quickly enough to avert a serious problem.

You might argue that this problem could be avoided by just reviewing messages as they come in. That, after all, is what the email desktop alert does for you. But that argument doesn’t make sense. First, there are plenty of times when you’re not actually at your computer, or you’re talking with someone, so you’ll miss the alert. Second, the cure is worse than the disease: as numerous studies have shown, dealing with interruptions (aka multitasking) is toxic to productivity and work quality. Finally, it just doesn't make sense to review each incoming email when 99% of them are not urgent.

It’s far better to just match the right communication medium for the type of message you’re sending. Why bother searching for a needle in the email haystack when you can just avoid putting the needle in there in the first place?

Here are four steps to take to avoid the information push/pull mismatch:

1. Identify the communication tools people are already using widely in the organization. (You’re probably using more than you think.)
2. Choose one or two “push” media for urgent issues. They could use technology (pagers, cell phones) or not (face-to-face meetings, flashing lights).
3. Conduct an internal discussion about what constitutes an urgent issue and decide upon the appropriate channel to handle it.
4. Explore different types of “pull” media to reduce email burden—for example, Yammer, Slack, even old-school project boards.

Undoubtedly, there will be mismatches in some of the messages. But establishing a protocol for choosing more appropriate communication media will reduce the frequency of those mismatches, and lead to smoother, faster, and less chaotic communication and cooperation.