Three Blind Managers

A restaurant had three owner/managers that shared duties on different nights. They all had different management styles, and didn't make any attempt to coordinate their approach to employees.

One waitress received consistently positive feedback from Manager One. Manager Two was often critical, taking her to task for some of the same things that Manager One praised her for. After a few months on the job, she asked Manager One for a raise. He said that she'd see an increase on her next cheque, but that didn't happen. When she asked Manager Two about it, he told her that none of her work justified a raise.

It's always difficult to report to more than one Manager. It's especially difficult when Manager One and Manager Two don't communicate with each other or even try to get on the same page. Managers often don't see how this stuff drives employees crazy.

What's Your Problem?

If you're in business, you need to know what your problem is; what is the problem that you are in the business of solving?

T. Harv Eker, high-octane creator of Secrets of The Millionaire Mind, says that an entrepreneur is someone who solves problems for a profit. Good definition. The more problems you solve, the more profit you make. The bigger the problems you solve, the more profits you make.

When you realize this, and look at your business in terms of solving customer problems for a profit, you can't get to problems fast enough. Bring them on! Seeing problems as opportunities for profit is quite a bit different from seeing customer problems as a nuisance to be avoided.

One household appliance company kept hearing laments from their customers about how hard it was to get rid of their old clothes washers and dryers. Apartment dwellers especially had a problem, with no place to store their old appliances until they could hire someone to eventually haul it away. While the company had ignored this customer problem for years ("We're in the new appliance business, not junk hauling!"), an employee suggestion led them to consider the opportunity it presented.

They were delivering the new appliances anyway. They had capable staff onsite with the equipment needed to move appliances. They had space on the delivery truck, since they had just unloaded the new appliances. The staff were returning to the truck empty handed. The truck was returning to the depot empty. The company decided to offer a removal service, charging a small but highly profitable fee to haul away the old appliances at the same time as they delivered the new ones. They built a relationship with a recycling organization and a used-appliance outlet to get rid of the old equipment. The customer problem was solved, the company's profits increased.

How many more problems might they be able to solve?

• Customers have a problem unpacking, installing and connecting the new appliances. It's often pretty complicated and needs a good handy man to complete. Solve that problem with some cross training and a few tools, and you have an on-the-spot installation crew. More profit opportunity.
• Customers have another problem getting rid of all the packaging and large cardboard boxes from the new appliances. Solve that problem by taking the packaging back in the mostly empty truck. More profit opportunity.

So, next time your customers complain, or share a problem with you related to your business dealings with them, think about how you might solve that problem and turn it into profit. Because that's what entrepreneurs do.

You DO Make Widgets

As you strive to explain why your business is different, have you ever found yourself saying "We don't make widgets here!" Do you feel that your business is more complex, more demanding than the simple manufacture of products?

Especially in service organizations, the tendency is to think that production of a product is "so much simpler than what we do here!"

But the reality is that every organization makes widgets, every organization makes products, and products are the only things that you can provide to a customer.

A quality manager at BMW's South Carolina plant got it right when he said "Of the 58 products BMW creates at this plant, only three are vehicles. We also create Invoices, Purchase Orders, Plant Tours, Dealer Seminars, Audits, Phone Conversations, Warranty Claims ... everything we do results in a product, and every product has a customer."

When you define your output as a product, you can identify who your customer is for that specific product. Then, knowing that customer, you can start to become customer-focused, continually making your product better and better, from the customers' point of view.

So what are your products?

Robin Lawton of  International Management Technologies presents a useful model for identifying your products. A product must be:

• A deliverable [ie. must be a noun, not -ing]
• Very specific
• Packaged in countable units
• Made plural with an “s”

So, though you might be looking for coaching, coaching itself is not a product. Though coaching is a noun, nouns that end in -ing are not useful product definitions. You can't count the number of coachings and you can't make it plural with an "s" - "I would like three coachings please" doesn't make any sense.

So, the actual product you might be interested in is a weekly coaching session. You can count the number of coaching sessions, you can discuss what a productive coaching session might look like. You can define your expectations for a weekly session, and you can identify features and benefits you'd like to see in a coaching session.

As part of coaching, a followup call might be a related product. You can count the number of followup calls, and you can identify what makes a good followup call. Similarly for an agenda, an assigned task, a task list, or a productivity suggestion. These are all products.

To get you started thinking about the products you produce, about your widgets, consider this list:

Advertisements, Answers, Blueprints, Campaigns, Contracts, Courses, Decisions, Deliveries, Diagnoses, Greetings, Innoculations, Invoices, Interviews, Job Postings, Plans, Policies, Prescriptions, Procedures, Product Returns, Recipes, Repairs, Reports, Schedules, Shipments, Strategies, Surgeries, Visits,

Learning to think of your output as a product, or widget, can be very helpful on your path to improved productivity and improved quality.

You DO make widgets. Be proud of that!

How Do You Get Customers?

The owner of a small startup company was looking for advice on how to get customers. She had bid a few jobs and dropped off business cards at a few offices but hadn't yet gotten any clients. Her basic questions were "How do I get customers? Why won't they give me business?"

She had been on staff at a commercial cleaning company, had imagined all the money that the owner was making, and had taken a leap to make her own fortune with a commercial cleaning company of her own. Her answers to some basic exploratory questions showed a real lack of preparation:

• What services do you provide? - "We can do anything."
• Who needs these services? - "Every business needs us."
• What do you charge? - "Fifteen hundred dollars a month."

• Why should someone hire you? - "They need to hire somebody."

While desperately hoping that someone would give her business, she was making it very difficult for anyone to buy her services. She couldn't tell me, or a client, what services she offered. She didn't know how big or how small a client she could handle, or what kind of companies and buildings she'd be able to satisfy. She quoted a price, but without defining what services she would provide. And she couldn't give any reason why a client should hire them as opposed to someone else.

On the surface, this seems naive and ridiculous. How could a business owner be so unprepared?!

But, working with larger established companies, this type of answer is remarkably common:

• What services do you provide? An industrial machine shop claimed that they could do any kind of fabrication and repair for customers in any industry. No job was too big or too small! Really? You do jewelry repair AND build steam generators for nuclear reactors AND stamp out automotive body panels AND make surgical implants AND erect structural steel for commercial buildings? Define what services you do, define what services you want to do, and communicate that clearly to your customers.
• Who needs your services? A book keeping service was confident that every business could use them. The reality was that many of the companies they were talking to were either too small to afford them, or too large to need external help. The company advertised widely on the web, yet were really only familiar with the tax structures and regulations in their home province. Some companies are your potential clients, and some are not, whether based on size, geography, industry, or even philosophy. Figure out what kind of companies you want to work for, and go after them, don't waste your time with everybody else.
• What do you charge? Do you sell products, services, or productized services? Are your rates fixed or negotiable? Do you give discounts? Do you charge based on results, or based on hours worked, or based on a fixed fee? Is it clear to your customers what you will do for the price you'll be charging? Are your prices comparable to other service providers? Are you trying to be cheaper than everyone else, the same as everyone else, or do you price your services at a premium? If you don't know your prices, how do you expect your customers to understand them? How do you expect your customers to buy from you?
• Why should someone hire you? People don't generally give you business. You need to convince them that you can provide them with something more valuable than the money they will be paying you. They need to trust you, to believe that you can do what you say you will. The small cleaning startup had not prepared any references, marketing literature, price sheets or list of services. There couldn't provide anything that showed why they were different, why they were better, or why someone should hire them. So, no one was hiring them!

You can certainly try to be all things to all people. You can choose to keep your pricing vague and unpredictable. You can hope people will give you business. But you'll probably be better off if you figure out what it is you do, who it is you do it for, how much you charge for it, and why you're better at it than anybody else.

Does Good Service Mean Self-Service?

A recent Saskatchewan health care experience prompted thoughts about what "good service" means. I got good service, in the sense that the problem was diagnosed, medications were prescribed, and lab tests were performed and interpreted. But, when compared with what happens when I take my car in for service, or when I order food at a restaurant, or when I recently had a house built, I'm shocked at how much management and execution I was required to do myself.

If the "good service" of health care were applied to the others, it seems like I would be asked to buy and install parts in my car, peel potatoes and cook the steaks at the restaurant, and whittle my own kitchen cabinets from a block of wood. Well, it wasn't that bad, but still surprising.

I don't say this to bash health care, since I'm very grateful for the caring assistance I received. But to anyone who thinks that Saskatchewan health care has come anywhere close to truly providing good service, I'd have to disagree.

Perhaps the best health care can aim for is to provide good technical expertise, preferably with a cheerful disposition, while requiring the patient to do things that they really don't have the expertise, experience or even the ability to do. But I think we can do better than that.

He Was Terrible - Will Never Use In The Future

After a recent presentation about quality to a large group of Saskatchewan health care leaders, the feedback forms about my presentation ranged widely, from "What I Liked Most" about the workshop, to "What I Liked Least". I've learned to expect variation, and, striving to improve, I try to learn and adapt based on all the feedback I receive.

The most critical feedback comment I received after this presentation was:

The message of giving patients what they want, when they want it is not realistic. He was terrible - will never use in the future.

Now this one threw me at first, as the insecure side of me reacted to the "He was terrible" part. I quickly re-read some of the other "He was great" comments to restore myself, and then thought about this one for a while. I'm certainly open to adapting my speaking style, or my audience participation exercises, or the ways I present information, but that didn't seem to be what this commenter was saying.

The message here, as far as I could see, was that giving patients "what they want, when they want it", was not realistic. Granted, there's plenty of room for misinterpretation, since it was a very brief comment with no opportunity for discussion or clarification. Still, this is a deeply disturbing comment coming from a health care leader.

If we don't give patients "what they want, when they want it", what do we do instead? What is "realistic" for the health care industry?

1. Not give patients what they want. Perhaps we should ignore our patients' desires for good health, for effective interventions, for relief of pain and symptoms, for respect, for information, for good service. My mom wanted an appointment with her doctor this week; the clinic's schedule wouldn't allow it. Maybe that's a good thing?
2. Give patients what they don't want.  Perhaps we should try to increase the number of hospital-acquired infections, clinical errors, or prescription drug interactions. A study published in the Journal of the American Geriatric Society found that one out of thirty senior hospital admissions were due to adverse drug reactions.
3. Give patients what we want. Perhaps we need to reschedule their appointments more at our convenience, make them walk further around the hospital, drive to an even-more-distant specialty hospital, and put a few more people into each bed while we're at it.
4. Not give them help when they want it. Face it, patients are whiners. The whole idea of wanting health care when you're sick is just so needy. Perhaps it would be better to extend wait times even further, and add more handoffs and waiting rooms to each procedure along the way.
5. Give them help when we want to. Perhaps it would be better to require people to pre-schedule their visits to the emergency department, or maybe spread out their influenza infections throughout the year. Or, like a recent friend's experience, send notice of a scheduled specialist appointment at an arbitrary date in about six months, then push it back two months, then push it back another three months.

What scares me most about this critical comment is the suggestion that good customer service in the health care industry is not realistic. In every other industry, customer service (giving customers what they want, when they want it) is critical to business, a differentiator between success stories and business failures. Yet somehow it's "not realistic" in health care? I don't think so.

In today's StarPhoenix, Mark Lemstra wrote that Health care needs ideas, not more money, I couldn't agree more. And some of the old ideas and attitudes might have to go, to make room for new ones.

Have You Built a Tower of Babel?

To mess up the ambitious plans for construction of the Tower of Babel, God "confounded the language of all the Earth."(Genesis 11:5-8). In a bit of a mischevious intervention, God divided the people by getting them to speak different languages, where before they had spoken one. Without the ability to communicate, they were unable to coordinate their efforts. There was no possibility of getting the job done at all, let alone getting it done on time or under budget.

In the 1967 sci-fi short story "Babel II", available in War Games, Harry Crosby (aka Christopher Anvil) describes a world where the technology has gotten so complicated, where the degree of professional specialization has become so extensive, that none of the professionals can understand each other, and no-one understands completely how the technology works. Their attempts to build an Esmer-drive starship are doomed!

In your company, it's very likely that the people in purchasing have no idea what any of the stuff they're buying is used for, or how to tell a good flux capacitor from a bad one. Your people in operations probably have no idea what finance means when they talk about "Net changes in non-cash working capital items related to operations". As we divide our companies into departments, into specialists that speak different languages, we build a Tower of Babel where people are truly unable to understand each other.

As you examine the sequential steps that your organization takes to satisfy your customers, you'll see many handoffs from one department to another, from one language group to another. More often than not, the handoff is not well understood by either group. A complete order, for the sales department, means they got a deposit or purchase order from the customer. A complete order for the shop means all the line items are correct and all required materials are in stock. A complete order for shipping has no back orders and clear delivery instructions and address.

When we try to improve, it's common to work within a department, trying to make our work as efficient as possible. We aim to meet our departmental targets in the belief that this will achieve the company targets. We work to improve our individual departments in the belief that this will improve the organization. Paraphrasing a little more of "Babel II": All the departmental curves showed progress. It was natural to assume this meant company progress. But what about the connections between the departments, between their managers and between people generally. It would be possible to carry this specialization so far that nobody understands anyone in any other line of work, and then what will we have?

What we'll have is the typical modern company, where departments speak their own languages and work to improve within themselves, but the real flow of work and value never gets much better.

One Thing Crucial to Success

A panel of successful business leaders was asked for the single thing that was crucial for success; some advice for young entrepreneurs looking to follow in their footsteps.

One said "Passion"
Another "Integrity"
A third "Tenacity"
A fourth said "Attitude"

The list went on, and in the ensuing discussion, they all made it clear that there is no silver bullet, no prescription for success. It takes all of these things plus hard work, luck, leadership, relationships, and vision. But a message that became clear, and that pulled it all together, was this:

You have to learn to give, before you try to take.

Of the lessons they'd learned, all the positive ones centered on using your gifts to truly serve the needs of your customers. All of the negative lessons centered on times that their companies forgot that.

Learn to give, to serve, to share your gifts with customers, to help solve their problems. The more you focus on giving, on serving, the more successful your business will be.

Be Here in Fifteen Minutes, Or Else

A large phone company had a waiting list for the new iPhone 4. Customers on the waiting list had paid a $100 deposit and wanted the new phones as soon as they were available. In the interest of fairness, the company decided that they would call the people on the list, and give them fifteen minutes to get to the store to pick it up, or it would go to the next person on the list.

Angela and Doug, long-time customers of this company, both happened to be on that list. Angela, a surgeon, was interrupted in the operating room by her receptionist who had received the call at the office. Doug, a pilot, received the call while he was enroute from Calgary to Denver. In both cases, the company rep insisted that "If you want the phone, you need to be here within fifteen minutes." In both cases, their first responses were not fit to print. In both cases, their subsequent suggestion that a spouse or colleague pick up the phone was rejected. Both eventually got their phone, but not without several more phone calls and escalating complaints.

A very good lesson in how not to listen to the voice of the customer.

A Little Over-Processing Waste at the Pharmacy

A pharmacy has a software system that prints three items at once - a label for the bottle, a receipt for the customer, and a record slip for the files. The software system is robust and reliable.

As part of their work process, one pharmacist routinely checks the information on all three items to make sure it is the same. This is not to make sure that it is correct, this is to make sure that the three pieces are the same. This cursory check takes about 20 seconds and is done on the basis that "you can never be too careful."

Truth be told, you can be too careful, if you're being careful in a way that doesn't actually help anything. These printed pieces are never different; they will never be different; the inspection will never find a problem. The inspection is a hold-over from experiences with previous systems that weren't robust; with the current system, the inspection is not needed.

In Lean terminology, this extra effort, this double check, this inspection, is Waste, specifically Over-Processing waste. It is a step that takes time and effort, but doesn't add any value for the customer.

And these wastes, tiny as they seem, really add up. Consider that 20 seconds/prescription x 200 prescriptions/day x 250 days/year = 275 hours wasted each year. Eliminating this step from the process could free up 275 hours for a pharmacist every year! That's almost two months! Finding and eliminatng a few more small wastes could potentially free up the equivalent of a full-time pharmacist, without adding any new staff.

That's the excitement of Lean and the potential of continuous daily improvement.

One Gallon of Waste at the Hospital

"Do you remember that gallon of blah-blah-blah that I asked you to order last week? Do you know where it is?"

So started the conversation in the hospital ward, and the search began.

The file of paper requisition forms was searched.
The computer records were examined.
Two phone calls were made.
A search of the storage room was undertaken.
Thirty cabinet doors were opened and closed.
Another phone call was made.
Three people were asked if they'd seen the blah-blah-blah.
Two possibilities were suggested.
Two wild geese were chased.
Another staff arrived and said they thought it was back-ordered.
The computer records were examined again.
Two more phone calls were made.
The blah-blah-blah wasn't found.
A new requisition order was filled out.

This is just one gallon of waste, one tiny incident in the life of a busy hospital. This is one small example of how trivial our wastes can be.

This little incident won't even make the radar of management, won't be considered important in the grand scheme of things, but this is the stuff that drives people crazy. This is the stuff that contributes to error. This is the stuff that wastes time and money, day after day after day. This is what Lean, and 5S, and continuous improvement, and employee engagement is all about.

Building Relationships, One Coffee Percolator at a Time

I just got a hand-written Thank You card in the mail from the Handy Group of Companies in Saskatoon. We had rented a 36-cup coffee percolator from their Special Events department for a family birthday party a few weekends ago.

This was a very nice gesture, and indicative of how they've built their business. Consider that our entire rental cost about ten bucks and the hand-written card probably cost about two, including time and postage. Now this company does rentals for large-scale parties and all sorts of tools and construction equipment and would routinely have rental contracts worth thousands of dollars. Yet for my ten dollar coffee pot, they still invested the time and energy to send a Thank You note. Hand-written no less.

This is a great example of how to value your customers. Rather than looking at the tiny size of my purchase, this company saw an opportunity to build a relationship. They looked beyond the value of the individual transaction to the lifetime value of a customer. That's what makes it worth sending a Thank You note for even a ten dollar purchase.

Thermostats, Minions and Midgets - A Rant about Feedback

As your office heats up in the hot July sun, a thermostat signals the air conditioner to start cooling things off. In mid-January, when it's minus thirty outside, the thermostat signals the furnace to start blowing hot air. When talking about feedback with managers, the thermostat analogy comes up quite often and the hot air begins to blow.

Managers give feedback to employees, or so they claim. But most of what managers give out to their minions is actually judgement, evaluation, or criticism, which is quite different from feedback, quite different from what a thermostat does.

Thermostats send information about the temperature of the building to the other parts of the HVAC system. They don't pass judgement on the ability of the air conditioner to cool. They don't evaluate the furnace on how well it's doing its job. They provide feedback, from one part of the system to another part of the system, to help the system maintain an appropriate temperature. With an appropriate temperature, your minions can be more comfortable and productive as they strive to do your bidding.

In business, we design systems and processes to help our minions achieve the corporate goals, whether we produce midgets or provide services. If producing midgets (as opposed to the more common example of widgets), true feedback might be in the form of a control chart showing the heights of the midgets coming off the production line. This control chart might be provided to the Midget Extrusion Machine Operating Minion so he can tell when the machine is starting to drift out of spec. This feedback helps the minion understand how his part of the process is performing and allow him to take appropriate actions to make sure the midgets all meet the appropriate height specification. This is feedback, one part of the system giving information to another part to help it do its job.

Rather than blowing hot air and chilling people's passion with your judgements and evaluations, work on developing true feedback loops that help your minions produce more midgets, or whatever it is you do.

What kind of midget were you thinking about?

Sewer Rats and Corporate Learning

If you ever have to kill a sewer rat, you can take advantage of a serious weakness of the varmints - they remember what they've experienced and use their memories to predict what will happen in new situations. "But wait," you cry, "how can memory and experience be a weakness? How can memory and experience make a rat vulnerable? Isn't experience a good thing?"

As it goes in the sewers, so it goes in the corporate world, with a high value placed on experience and corporate learning. An entire industry has sprung up around the areas of knowledge capture and learning management systems. Companies create Chief Knowledge Officers (CKO) and pursue Knowledge Management (KM) solutions. We strive to capture memory and experience in our companies, but we never really question memory and experience themselves? When does memory help us? Does experience ever hurt us?

We assume that memory is good, that past experience protects us, that our accumulated memories and experiences help us make better decisions in the future. However, the influential pshychiatrist W. Ross Ashby, in his classic paper Principles of the Self-Organizing System suggested that there is no faculty or ability that is universally good, universally beneficial. An ability is only good or bad in relation to the environment. And this takes us back to our sewer rats.

A normal sewer rat is very suspicious. It has learned, in the relatively consistent world of the sewer, not to trust strange new food sources. If you put a pile of appealing, but poisoned, food in the sewer, the rats will hesitantly eat only a tiny sample of it, not enough to kill them. Because their environment is generally stable, their memory serves them well and protects them from this new and dangerous situation. But their memory is not always helpful.

In Ashby's words, "If, however, wholesome food appears at some place for three days in succession, the sewer rat will learn, and on the fourth day will eat to repletion, and die. The rat without memory, however, is as suspicious on the fourth day as on the first, and lives. Thus, in this environment, memory is positively disadvantageous." So, if the sewer environment includes the pest-control practice known as pre-baiting, memory and experience will lead rats to their death. What does this suggest for business?

If your business is in a stable, predictable industry in a consistent, unchanging business environment, experience and memory are valuable assets. If what happened before is a good predictor of what will happen next, experience is valuable. If how we handled this before is still useful and relevant, we can use it to determine how we will handle this today. If, however, your business is in an emerging industry, operating in a fast-paced unpredictable environment, the value of experience lessens, and may even become harmful. This is a judgement we all have to make as we face decisions and predictions about the future, as we design strategies and tactics, and as we choose people for our teams.

There are several areas where there is tension between those who have knowledge, experience and memory and those who don't. Consider the following:

• Is seniority justification for higher pay? Those who've been around longer have seen situations that new hires have not. But, new hires have fresh outlooks unconstrained by the way things were done before. Which is more valuable to your organization given the situations you're facing today?
• Should you promote from within? Internal people know the history of what's gone before, of how we got to where we are; outside hires do not. Depending on what you're facing, is knowledge of this history valuable or harmful?
• Do you seek answers from within your industry? If you're in health care, do you look to other health care organizations for solutions, or do you seek new practices from the world's of customer service, food processing, and manufacturing?
• Do you need to improve? The way you do things today was developed in yesterday's environment to face yesterday's challenges. Is it appropriate for today's environment and tomorrow's challenges?
• Are your policies bloated by past experience? Every time an incident happens, we add some wording to our policies, yet we almost never take things away. It grows and festers until we have six pages just dealing with dress code including precise definitions of "spaghetti straps", "midriff" and a working definition of what constitutes "visible underwear".

So, as with the sewer rat, don't assume that capturing memory and experience is inherently good. If your world is stable and unchanging, it's wise and helpful to base your decision on "how we've always done things around here". However, if your environment is changing, if you're facing challenges unlike those of yesterday, you need some fresh solutions, some fresh voices, some inexperience.

Higher Costs Produced Higher Profits

In pursuit of profit, a research and testing lab had been methodically eliminating support staff like administrators, middle managers, and secretaries over the years. By reducing costs, the result should have been increased profits, according to their standard formula of Profit equals Income minus Expenses.

The tasks that had previously been performed by support staff were now handled by more senior people, by technical people, by staff, by managers and by sales people, empowered by ever-evolving office technology. Unfortunately, profit and productivity never seemed to keep up with the wishful thinking. They weren't getting the upside that should have emerged as a result of the continually decreasing expenses.

An intervention by a trusted advisor had them reconsider their strategy, and they quickly doubled the size of their support staff, re-creating administrative and secretarial positions that had been eliminated over the years. The result of this modest increase in staff? An almost-immediate forty-percent increase in revenue, with a correspondingly large increase in profit.

It turns out that most of the remaining people just weren't that good at administrative and communications tasks, and they also weren't getting much benefit from the office productivity software. The remaining people were excellent at their specialties, but that didn't mean that they were good at writing, at typing, at using integrated office software packages. They'd struggle with details like fonts and layout, and waste time that they could have been spending on the areas where they should have been working, in their areas of specialization.

By increasing the size of the support staff, by increasing costs, the company was able to increase their profits. The administrative and secretarial costs were directly associated with valuable functions, with valuable purposes. By increasing the costs, the company also increased the capacity of the entire system to do more; they free'd people up to work on what they're good at.

Three Lessons from a Client Visit

At a high-end high-tech firm, a complex project for a large client had gone sour. An emergency trip was arranged for the three most-involved and most-knowledgeable technical staff to go to the client site in an attempt to get the project back on the rails. With one senior technical lead and two junior technicians, they were to clarify the issues, do some in-depth testing and diagnostics, and attempt to come up with a solution during the three-day onsite visit. The meeting was arranged, flights and accomodations were booked and the agenda finalized.

Shortly before the trip, the project manager for these services initiated a conversation with the client's project manager and, out of the blue, decided to:

1. Reschedule the meeting for a day earlier, adding $1,200 to each of three plane tickets, and
2. Change who was going, removing the lead technical person, the one guy knew the most about the issues and most likely to come up with the solution. In his place, they sent a new services manager who had been with the company less than a week. The reason given was so that the client could "put a face to the name" of this new manager.

Since the lead technical person would have driven the entire trouble-shooting project, teaching and guiding the other two, the visit ended up being completely unproductive. Management arranged numerous meetings for the three visitors to meet and greet key people, several long lunches and meeting were held, and zero progress was made on the technical issues. The technical people were completely frustrated and disillusioned.

The service manager and project manager reassured the client that they were "taking the problem very seriously" and were "doing everything possible to find a solution" and were quite proud and vocal about how good the optics were that we "sent a high-level team down to address your issues".  So, the client was able to put a face to the name of the new services manager, but changed the name of the company to "mud," as the technical problem was almost completely ignored on this trip.

Three management mistakes in this scenario, and three resulting lessons to learn:

1. Managers didn't respect the Gemba. Managers need to support the people who are doing the actual, customer-focused, value-added work. In Lean terminology, this is the Gemba, the place where the real work happens. The customer needed a technical intervention, this should have been a technical trip, and the team should have been a technical team. Management face-time is important, but not at the expense of actually solving customer problems and meeting customer needs. This change was disrespectful to the technical team, disrespectful to the customer, and put management wants ahead of the Gemba, of the real work.

2. Managers imposed decisions on workers. The workers were trying to solve a technical problem. The project had anticipated some problems and there was budget for technical trips like this. The client and the technical staff agreed that further remote trouble-shooting wouldn't get them anywhere (they'd been trying to solve this problem remotely for several weeks with no success). Management unilaterally changed this to a management visit, making the trip completely ineffective, and stretching out the customer problem even further. Damage to morale within the technical staff was huge.

3. Managers created barriers, rather than removing them. Effective managers work to consult with staff, and remove barriers, provide resources and help workers get what they need to get the job done. In this case, the managers created barriers and literally prevented the work from being done. Top-down, command-and-control thinking is damaging and ineffective - there are better ways.

The problem remained unsolved for several more months, as this trip had eaten up the remaining travel budget for the project. Eventually, the crisis escalated enough to prompt a repeat trip with the original technical team. On that trip, they were able to solve the problem.

The Savage World of Management

As your troops struggle with a hoard of zombies that were time-teleported onto your battle cruiser from ancient Rome, you swing your mono-molecular sword and attempt to decapitate the tentacled Zygorthian leader who's been leading the rebellion. The entire battle hinges on your success, and your success depends on the roll of a dice.

As you try to convince a herd of rebellious nurses and their union representatives to change how they organize their work, the entire campaign depends on your success, and your success depends on the roll of a dice.

As you try to battle the evil out-of-scope health region warlords and convince them that six nurses can't actually do the work of thirty, your department's sanity depends on your success, and your success depends on the roll of a dice.

In the role-playing and action game of Savage Worlds by Pinnacle Entertainment Group, the role of the dice feels particularly realistic, and is a useful analogy for anyone looking to improve their intuition about change, risk, randomness and prediction as it applies to management and business.

Whenever you launch a new product, or start a new improvement initiative, or even just have a conversation with someone, there is never certainty of the outcome - it may go the way you hope, it may succeed beyond your wildest imagining, or it may fail miserably. You bring a certain skill level to the process, either as an individual or as an organization, and then luck kicks in; the random variation of complex dynamic real-world systems.

In a Savage Worlds game, an action generally succeeds if you roll four or higher on your dice. So with a regular six-sided D6 dice you have a 50% chance of basic success. But, if you happen to roll a Six, you get to re-roll and add the new roll to the first. If you get another Six, you keep adding. So, even with a six-sided dice, there is always a small chance that you could roll a really big number (ie. roll Six, then Six, then Five and the total is 17). So, let's say you need a Four to wound the Zygorthian leader, but each additional four adds an extra wound. There's always a chance that you will really succeed and roll 17, inflicting four wounds to take him out of the game.

Another neat twist is that on some actions, if you roll a One, it's not just a miss but it's a "things go bad" failure of some sort. So, if you're swinging your "collective agreement" at the evil warlord, and roll a One, you might accidentally chop off the only leg you had left to stand on. Sometimes, even the best of us do something bone-headed and make a big mess of something that we had expected to go smoothly.

As you gain experience and knowledge, you can improve your skills in certain areas. Maybe you take some Leader Effectiveness Training so now you're rolling an eight-sided dice (D8) when kicking off your next team improvement project. Now, your chances or rolling a Four or more have increased to 62.5% from 50%, making it more likely that you'll succeed. However, even if your skill level increases to Legendary, and you're rolling a D12+1 on every attempt, with a 83.3% chance of success, there's always a chance you'll fail.

This feels real, for most situations we face in business.

When cold calling, there's a small chance you'll get a huge order, there's a pretty good chance that you'll start to develop a relationship that might lead to orders in the future, and there's a small chance that you'll cause so much damage to the relationship that you destroy any further chances of doing business with that firm.

When trying to improve the capacity of your service department, there's a small chance that you'll figure out a way to triple capacity without adding any staff, there's a pretty good chance that you'll have some conflict but work through it and gain 35% in capacity, and there's a small chance that it'll go very sour, with serious customer complaints, huge staff turnover, and a new job for you as a homeless person.

There's no certainty in Savage Worlds, and there's no certainty in business. Work on your skills and do everything you can to improve your effectiveness. On a really good day, everything will fall into place in ways you only dreamed of. But every once in a while you'll roll a One, and see how savage the world of management can be.

Have You Established Constancy of Purpose?

A software services company had a new product offering that was intended to replace a previous product suite. This large, customizable product was a major decision for their customers, who often required several months or years to evaluate the new product and decide whether to adopt it. The migration process was not automatic, so the company offered a conversion service, and this is where our story begins.

The department selling the conversion service, together with management, decided strategically how to price the service; since customers could not migrate without this service, it was decided to provide it at cost or even at a loss, in order to secure the much larger and more-lucrative ongoing revenue from the product. This pricing was communicated to clients around the world, and they started budgeting for a changeover one or two years down the road, so they'd be prepared for the migration and have a clear path forward.

Then, management shuffled personnel and assigned this area to a new manager, who happened to be from a business development and sales background, rather than product development. This manager believed that every transaction required a certain minimum profit margin or it wasn't justified. So, in a new pricing strategy, the cost to the customers was immediately increased by about five hundred percent!

Sales people were forced into the uncomfortable position of having to tell customers that the price for their already-budgeted conversion service had now increased by a factor of five. Customers who had already decided on adopting the new product felt understandably betrayed and cheated by this last minute price change. Customers who had not yet made a commitment were also upset, and many chose not to migrate, adopting competitive products instead.

The sales people felt "dirty", "dishonest" and resentful at being forced into betraying their customers' trust, at doing serious damage to their professional relationships. Sales slumped. Several people quit in frustration, both in the service organization and the sales organization.

As Deming asked in Quality, Productivity, and Competitive Position, "Has your company established constancy of purpose? If yes, what is the purpose? If no, what are the obstacles? Will this stated purpose stay fixed, or will presidents come and go? Whom does your president answer to? Whom do your board of directors answer to?"

The same questions can be asked in every department - Have you established constancy of purpose? Will this stated purpose stay fixed, or will managers come and go? In several Dilbert cartoons, Scott Adam's jokes about bungee bosses, who swoop in, make some changes, and then get yanked away. The churn, the waste, and the frustration that results from such frothy changes in purpose drive everyone crazy, and drive losses down to the bottom line.

Strive to create constancy of purpose that will endure beyond the next change in personnel.

Look Ma, No Order Form

A mid-size national company prided itself on customer service. The company was willing to do things for its customers that larger competitors wouldn't do. They believed that their willingness to bend over backwards was the key to their success, and this was probably true. But it was also clear, based on employee suggestions, and very clear when looking in from the outside, that their almost religious commitment to being flexible was actually making their service worse in ways that management wasn't able to see.

As part of being flexible and offering good customer service, management refused to provide an order form for use by their customers. In this company, orders were received at a centralized sales center from customers all across the country. This company, with one hundred million dollars annual sales, prided itself on accepting orders in whatever format the customers wanted to send them. So, their customers would place orders by phone, fax, email or online, in free-form text, with whatever information they wanted to include, differing from order to order and from customer to customer. There were no guidelines, no attempts at standardization. When asked about the possibility of providing an order form to help streamline the order process, management's response was "There's no way we'd do that to our customers. We believe in good customer service!"

So, some orders would list specific product codes, others would describe a product in words, others would say "same as last order", despite the fact that six different people from that customer site might order product and it was rarely clear which "last order" they were referring to. Some orders might include desired shipping dates and delivery methods, others would not. Some orders might include a purchase order or payment method, others would not. Many would have incomplete addresses or contact information, or would miss some other key pieces of information that were necessary to process the order.

So, on many, many orders, the Service Agents would have to call back, clarify, guess, interpret, assume, look up information, and fill in the gaps that customers left when submitting their orders. Fully one quarter of each Service Agent's day was taken up with trying to complete and clarify missing and required information on incoming orders. They would inevitably have to involve the customer in this process, often repeatedly, in order to resolve all the issues.

How much easier would it have been for the customers, and for the Service Agents, if the customers knew up front what information was necessary when placing an order; if they had a simple, straightforward order form to guide them? Customer service would have been much smoother, with less telephone tag and back-and-forth communication.

This company was certainly successful, but they could have been so much more successful, with a lot less stress and busywork. In their mind, good customer service meant "doing whatever it took to rework the customers' orders and fill in all the required information." This approach just ended up creating more work for both customers and Service Agents.

How much wasted effort could have been avoided with even a little bit of standardization?

Digging Up the Garden - Lean, Reliability and Machine Availability

Living on a prairie acreage, there's a lot of dirt to be dug. Whether it's cultivating the space between the shelterbelt rows, preparing the garden for planting, or digging weeds out of the too-big flowerbeds, there's always some kind of digging to do. Since a big goal of acreage living is relaxing and enjoying nature, you end up with a bunch of different tools in an attempt to get everything done with as little effort as possible. And since work on the acreage usually has to squeeze between the demands of life and your real job, the digging usually has to happen now, or you won't get a chance for another week or two. Otherwise, things (ie. weeds) get out of control.

Preparing the large garden this year, I planned to use our old 35hp Massey Ferguson tractor with its sixty-inch three-point-hitch cultivator. Unfortunately, I noticed a crack in the tractor frame that definitely needed some welding before taking it out in the field.

Since I only had one day between work commitments to get the garden done, I decided to use the 16hp John Deere riding tractor with the 36" rototiller instead. That worked pretty well for a good three-quarters of the garden, but then the drive belt broke and I didn't have a replacement. Since the parts store was on the other side of the city  (a full hour round trip), I switched to Plan C; I wanted to get the job done.

Plan C was the 8hp rear-tine TroyBilt tiller, 24" wide and usually reliable, although I'd remember having trouble with it the previous year. In checking it over, I found there was no lubricant in the worm gear and remembered the leak that I didn't fix last fall. Rather than take the time to fix it and go buy the right oil, I turned to the small 40-year old Craftsman 7hp front tiller, 22" wide that had been sitting in the shop for years. To my surprise, it started fine but the mechanism to engage the digging tines was bent and needed repair.

Since there was only a couple hundred square feet of garden left to do, I turned to plan E, an 8" wide potato fork and a rake. Working hard for about an hour, I dug up the remainder of the garden by hand and raked it to break up the chunks. The garden was ready, but hardly a smooth, lean, waste-free process.

As we strive to improve our processes, and get more done with less work and less waste between steps, we end up relying on things to happen properly the first time. We rely on consistency. When things go wrong, it can bring everything to a standstill. Two simple lessons here from digging in the dirt:

First, your equipment, tools and technology must be well-maintained, reliable, and available to do the job when needed. As your processes become Lean and the inventory and backlog buffers that previously hid downtime are eliminated, equipment failures can have immediate, rippling, far-reaching effects on production. Effort spent on reliability and root cause analysis of downtime is effort well spent.

Secondly, simple tools are pretty darned reliable. Instead of complex ERP systems, computer networks and electronic devices, consider hand-written visual status indicators on a white board in the work area. Which is more likely to break down, be unservicable, and be hard to improve?

Advanced technology, automated equipment and other complex tools can be great, but they dramatically increase your vulnerability to unplanned downtime, and to being stuck with a system that is hard to fix, hard to change. If you are unable to work on the system yourself, the risk of failure, and the effects of a failure, are both increased.

Keep it Simple. Keep it Maintained. Keep it Available.