Thirty years ago when the notion of improving processes began to get traction in the U.S., it held great promise. But one problem has kept the promise from becoming a full reality.
It’s too complicated!
How many organizations have shelves of binders chalk full of process maps and standard operating procedures? Lots. With the hope of improving performance it is common that the hard work is done to document processes and standard operating procedures. Again, the hope is to once and for all eliminate the confusion.
The problem is once it’s written down no one ever looks at the binder again. Unless it’s time for training new employees and then we dust off the binders and hope maybe this batch of people will follow standard procedures.
I have struggled with this dilemma for a long time myself because I know the value of understanding how work should be done – the value of using processes to accumulate and transfer knowledge. I write a lot about management as a process in my book Business at the Speed of Now. But the freight ain’t worth the price.
There is a simpler way. Like in the classic scene in the movie The Graduate, its one word that matters most. While Dustin Hoffman’s character was told it was all about “plastics”, in the case of process improvement you would well advised to understand “Checklist.”
If you want people to follow a process, create a process checklist that focuses them on the handful of factors that determine the processes success. Here are three things to think about in creating a useful checklist:
- Keep it simple – never more than 10 items
- Avoid the classic checkbox; instead require the recording of useful data (a dimension, the cycle time it took, a category or type of repair, etc.)
- Use the data collected to monitor performance, make further improvements and learn
If you put the right things on your checklist, the most important things for the people who work the process to pay attention to, you will get all the benefit of that boring material in the binder without following that hideous manual you know you put somewhere.
A great book to learn more about this is The Checklist Manifesto. I recommend it.
66 days and counting until Business at the Speed of Now will be available in fine bookstores and on eBooks. It’s getting closer to the December 6th release date!
The evolution to a world where we do Business at the Speed of Now enjoyed strange bedfellows, about as incompatible as John Candy and Steve Martin in the goofball movie Planes, Trains, and Automobiles. Henry Ford’s Model T brought into reality mass production management, which shaped and continues to shape how we think about organizations.
Planes, Trains, and Automobiles
The great age of the television gave a glimpse of the coming of social media. And the computer along with the Internet put into our hands instant access to the world and to each other.
Evidence grows that The Great Recession may be far more than a recession after all. Its’ double-dip nature may prove that our global economy is instead experiencing the grinding gears of a fundamental shift.
“This economic crisis doesn’t represent a cycle,” says Jeffrey Emmelt, CEO of General Electric. “It represents a reset. It’s an emotional, raw social, economic reset. People who understand that will prosper. Those who don’t will be left behind.”
A century ago we watched the end of the Agricultural Age as the percent of the U.S. population that worked on farms dropped dramatically in response to phenomenal increases in farm productivity. In the past 30 years the same reset has been happening as the Age of Mass Production draws to a close proven by the rapid decline of factory jobs.
If mass production is dying, what’s being birthed? Mass customization – an age when everyone wants what they want and they want it now! The shift is making YES the only viable value proposition (a service economy in the broad sense), and NOW the only acceptable timeframe.
An odd symbol of the changing world is a little object of much affection, the potato chip. While chips are mass produced, today you can find some 1,400 bizarre flavors around the globe as chipmakers adapt to the regional and individual tastes of its customers. While chips are not customized in the NOW, they serve as a greasy example that even mass produced products must increasingly be customized.
The shift has profound implications to how we think about organizations, and profound implications to the critical nature of individual employee autonomy to make the all essential, in-the-now decisions.
This is the final installment of Part One of our series leading to the December 6th release of Business at the Speed of Now. In Part Two, I’ll explore how the birth of a NOW world came to be as seen through the lenses of the heroes of our age: Superman, James T. Kirk, Spiderman, Austin Powers and t
84 days and counting until the release of Business at the Speed of NOW
Far more than a boxy black horseless carriage, the Ford Model T is a symbol for many things that made the U.S. a great nation. Not only was it the first automobile produced in mass quantity (15 million were produced between 1908 and 1927), but it fueled a revolution in management.
“I will build a car for the great multitude,” said Henry Ford at its initial release. “It will be large enough for the family, but small enough for the individual to run and care for. It will be constructed of the best materials, by the best men to be hired, after the simplest designs that modern engineering can devise. But it will be so low in price that no man making a good salary will be unable to own one – and enjoy with his family the blessing of hours of pleasure in God’s great open spaces.”
In 1909 it sold for $850 (equivalent in today’s dollars of $20,709), but by the 1920s mass production techniques were so successful that the sales price had dropped to $290 ($3,289 today). At that price, the automobile achieved Ford’s dream and became standard transportation for the masses.
While that reality is incredible in and of itself, the enduring contribution of Henry Ford was a system of thinking – a logic for running an enterprise – a management approach that was so effective and efficient it was widely emulated. Specialization, functionalization, centralization, simplification. Ford tuned his system, employing some of the earliest “management science” techniques, and that thinking is still in popular use in the vast majority of enterprises today.
The result of great efficiency was a circular economic engine that produced affordable products and worker wages sufficient to buy the very products the mass production engine generated. The great American middle class was born, fed, sheltered, and eventually made increasingly comfortable with dishwashers, plasma televisions, computers and an iPhone in every hand.
While a blessing in a thousand ways, Ford’s system of management became so ingrained in our management thinking that we lost track of the fact that it was an ideal construct for its time, not the only way to run an organization. Mass Production worked THEN.
Today, our economy thrives on Mass Customization. We live in an era where YES is the only viable value proposition and NOW is the only acceptable timeframe. This is NOW! Failure to understand this fundamental shift puts any business at risk of surviving through the biggest economic shift in a century.
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Two-and-half weeks following the August 29, 2005 Hurricane Katrina’s assault on the city of New Orleans, federal officials did something unbelievable. According to a CNN article about Chalmette Medical Center, “Doctors eager to help sick and injured evacuees were handed mops by federal officials who expressed concern about legal liability… And so they mopped, while people died around them.” Many similar stories of chaos and mismanagement provide a sad checklist of what not to do when you’re managing a disaster.
That paragraph is an excerpt from chapter five. More than any other research I have done for the book, MANAGING IN THE NOW, the stories about the Katrina disaster were the most appalling examples of the complete absence of process thinking.
In chapter five walk through an example of a company building out its NOW Fundamentals Map, foundation to the shift from THEN thinking to NOW thinking.
Here’s what I write about its use:
“Over the past twenty years the NOW Fundamentals Mapsm that evolved from that sketch for the bank’s leaders has benefited nearly 100 diverse organizations, including a high school, a university level nursing school, a high-end customer window-covering manufacturer, a large financial services business, several medical equipment and device companies, wood products companies, a global supply chain company, multiple software and technology companies, a family restaurant & pub, the executive branch of a state government, a corrections system, and a Christian missionary organization.”
President John F. Kennedy articulated one of most inspiring visions of modern times when he said in speech before a joint session of the U.S. Congress on May 25, 1961, “…I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth.” His challenge set in motion an unparalleled period of collaboration and U.S. technological innovation.
On July 16, 1969 astronaut Neil Armstrong fulfilled that vision when he set foot on the moon and uttered the immortal words, “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”
Organizations need to know why they exist and what they are trying to accomplish. Kennedy’s speech made the mission clear in a way that inspired commitment and action to reaching a clearly defined goal. However extraordinary or mundane a mission you set for your own organization, you need to do what Kennedy did because that will lay the basic foundation upon which your people will build success
I recently reconnected with Megan Clubb through LinkedIn, the CEO of Baker Boyer Bank which even through the recession continues to be one of the best regional banks in the country. We had some great fun working together in the early 1990s and my consulting career was just getting started and Megan was on the path to become CEO of the bank. I mention her bank because she faced a problem common to many organizations. Here’s what I write in the book:
In 1990 Baker Boyer Bank, a well-run regional operation based in Walla Walla, Washington, embarked on an initiative to enhance quality by mapping every single process in the organization. In this way, management treated all processes (and their problems) as equal. To paraphrase George Orwell, “All problems are equal, but some problems are more equal than others.” You will not reap a decent return on investment if you try to map all of an organization’s processes in one fell swoop. So what should you do? First, stop thinking in terms of processes and start thinking in terms of the overall system. Then you can more easily separate the got-to-have breakthroughs from the nice-to-have improvements. Only the former will get you a big return on your investment to sustain such efforts.
To help Baker Boyer Bank, we showed the bank’s leaders how to see their organization as a system. That involved sketching on a single sheet of paper all the critical elements the leaders needed to manage in order to achieve their goals. The satellite’s-eye overview of the system would help them identify their major constraints focus their effort where it would yield the greatest return. While most small regional banks have merged into bigger national chains, Baker Boyer Bank remains a thriving and highly respected independent player in its market.
Virtually all organizations use how they are doing versus their budget as a key measure of performance. While you must manage your dollars, this measure is necessary but borders on useless in terms or focus. You might enjoy this from the book:
THEN companies tend to use few measures, and the ones they do use often fail to keep the right scores. Take “performance against budget”, for instance. This “most used and least useful” measure tells you nothing except whether or not you spent the money you thought you would spend. But what does it tell you about whether or not you are making satisfactory progress toward your business goals? NOW company leaders want to know about that progress. They use scorekeeping to create the right context for action. The right context gives employees the maximum freedom to act in service of the customer. The right measures create the right context by clearly communicating what you expect your people to accomplish. Every good management system relies on them. They remind everyone, “I keep score to maintain focus.”
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