Business Insight Zone

Call them bottlenecks, if you like.

I called them “chokepoints” the other day, but we also call them “bottlenecks” or “hangups” or “roadblock” or “pains in the a**.”

Years ago Intel walked away from its alliance with Rambus after Intel CEO said that Rambus’s technology acted as a “gate” on Intel’s design progress.

What “gates” are you living with?

Call them inefficiencies.

Here’s George David, chairman of United Technologies:

You can’t walk through life with a trained eye and not see the opportunities for productivity. Every time you sit in traffic, that’s a productivity loss. Every time you go to the doctor and fill out a bunch of forms and he refers you to somebody else and you fill out the same forms all over again, that’s a loss of productivity. Whenever you wait for something, that’s waste. I believe you can have 10 times more. I really do.

Call them “red tape.”

From the comments on the previous post on chokepoints, here’s my pal Rusty:

I believe that there is a lot of red tape and bureaucracy that a lot of us face when trying to make things happen at our jobs.

Granted, scheduling things like a conference room is something that shouldn’t take long to do, but there are times when simply getting things accomplished is harder than it should be just to “follow protocol” or “process”. So I can see chokepoints being all over the place that would take an army to change.

And I am also finding out here at my company that because systems have been in place so long, people want to avoid change, even if it means a change for the better. So it’s a vicious cycle at times too.

And here’s part of my reply:

Ideally, organizations diversify and specialize separate functions — that is, they create bureaucracies — for better efficiency. And it works: it doesn’t make sense to have your top salesperson and your top accounts-receivable clerk sharing each other’s duties.

But it’s also human nature to protect turf, and it’s in the nature of organizations, best I can tell, to develop points of friction — or chokepoints.

What points of needless friction are YOU living with?

Call them opportunities for improvement.

Consider this from Charles Fishman’s stellar December 2006 article on Toyota:

By the end of this year, Buckner and his team hope to have cut almost in half the amount of floor space the paint shop needs — all while continuing to paint 2,000 cars a day. For Buckner, the paint-shop improvements aren’t ‘projects’ or ‘initiatives.’ They are the work, his work, every day, every week. That’s one of the subtle but distinctive characteristics of a Toyota factory. The supervisors and managers aren’t ‘bosses’ in any traditional American sense. Their job is to find ways to do the work better: more efficiently, more effectively.

Just don’t call them intractable.

Now, more than ever, we have to find these chokepoints, acknowledge them, and address them.

Are you game?

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Previously: Watch out for chokepoints!

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Photo by Evan Wood, used under a Creative Commons license.

Category: Management