Business Blog: Hoover’s Business Insight Zone

Is this a picture of the Department of Widgets and Doodads in your organization?

The picture actually displays an homage to the great cartoonist Rube Goldberg, pictured here with a couple of young volunteers while giving a talk in front of the drawing board.

Goldberg’s famous namesake drawings were hiliarious because the contraptions in them were elaborate and impractical beyond all reason. But I talk to plenty of people whose daily frustrations make them feel like their organizations are built along the same lines. (You can see more of Goldberg’s famous contraption drawings at the official Rube Goldberg site.)

The other day I polled the crowd about what to do with high-maintenance people, so now let’s broaden the focus:

How do you deal with the high-maintenance processes
in your organization?

~

(Contraption photo by freshwater2006; Goldberg photo courtesy of Alan Light.)

Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three,
and not a hundred or a thousand . . . Simplify, simplify.

Thoreau won’t be displacing Peter Drucker at the top of the management-wisdom heap anytime soon, but on this one thing they certainly agreed: you need to get things simpler if you want to do them better.

Drucker held that top executives could handle one or maybe two major initiatives at a time. Anything more and something was sure to get lost in the shuffle. Thoreau believed that the trappings of America’s increasingly mechanized life — way back in the mid-19th century, mind you — were crowding out human interactions, with each other and with the realm of nature.

Every day I hear from dozens of people who lament the complexity of their lives — at work, at home, and especially in the mixture of the two. Special anger wells up at company policies, cultures, and individuals who gum up the works with needless complexity.

Mind you, some complexity is necessary: you don’t build an MRI machine or an airport terminal using 3rd-grade-level math. But how many of your tasks — your team’s projects — your company’s larger endeavors — would benefit from a hard dose of simplification?

So, tell me:

What should YOU make simpler for yourself?

What should your ORGANIZATION make simpler for everyone?

~

One of the side effects of spending so much time thinking about (a) the media and (b) business management is that I can’t even read the recap of a baseball game in peace. I come across something like this . . .

Tigers score most runs this season, hand Rangers sixth straight loss

DETROIT (AP) — The Detroit Tigers’ biggest inning in four years could mean a lot more to the foundering Texas Rangers. Manager Ron Washington’s job might be in jeopardy.

. . . and the rant just boils up inside me.

Please bear with me here, because this isn’t so much about baseball as it is about management decisions and how the media covers them.

There are several things wrong with those two opening sentences:

1. The Tigers didn’t need their biggest inning in four years to beat the Rangers. They were already beating them. Sure, the score would have been 7-6 instead of 19-6, but a loss is a loss — and the psychological weight is still heavy when it extends a losing streak. Sure, when a team puts up an 11-run inning, that ought to be in the story’s lead, but the way it’s used here is not apt.

2. Washington’s job might be in jeopardy? According to whom? The writer? “Anonymous sources close to the Rangers’ front office”? No sources besides Washington are cited. The manager, for his part, said the right things: “Any time a team is in a losing streak, the manager’s job is on the line . . . It falls on me when the team isn’t playing well. I’m the manager . . . that’s the way it goes.” But this is a still just a unsubstantiated notion on the beat writer’s part — and not a helpful one, since the lead conveys a hunch or rumor as though it’s an established fact.

3. From the perspective of how the Rangers club is managed, the real story is the mediocre-to-low quality of the pitchers that Washington has been given to work with. It’s bad enough that the Rangers were facing the Tigers, who have one of the most dangerous lineups in the Major Leagues. Fact is, though, that the Rangers have been getting shelled frequently throughout this season — because their pitching isn’t strong. And whose job is it to acquire good pitching for the team? (Hint: not Ron Washington’s.)

It’s that last point I want to harp on, because we see this all too often in the “real” business world, too: a middle manager is handcuffed in terms of resources, personnel, decision latitude, or whatever — and then blamed when things go wrong.

The real fault here lies with the Rangers front office for assembling a thin pitching staff. Knowledgeable analysts were saying before the season ever started that the Rangers weren’t very good. Now those predictions are coming true on the field.

Here’s the thing: part of the blame for the team’s poor showing could fall to Washington. But if it does, he should be fired because of his overall qualities as a manager — not because of what happens in one game . . . against a heavy-hitting opponent . . . on a day when Ranger pitchers melt down one after another.

And an AP beat writer should help readers to understand that, not confuse the issue.

Here endeth the rant . . . for now.

~

(Photo by Dave Hogg.)

Simple question:

What’s the dumbest thing your organization does?

Gruesome though they may be, I look forward to your comments. Feel free to post under a pseudonym if necessary. Fire away!

~

(Excellent found-item dunce cap by my Twitter pal ninjapoodles.)

A little while back I quoted Michael Bloomberg on how he built his eponymous business:

“We made mistakes, of course. Most of them were omissions we didn’t think of when we initially wrote the software. We fixed them by doing it over and over, again and again. We do the same today. While our competitors are still sucking their thumbs trying to make the design perfect, we’re already on prototype version #5. By the time our rivals are ready with wires and screws, we are on version #10. It gets back to planning versus acting: We act from day one; others plan how to plan—for months.”

Are you a victim of planning how to plan for months on end? Years, maybe? (Or even your whole career so far? Be honest with yourself.) A friend of mine has called this “scenario paralysis” — the trap we fall into when we imagine all kinds of possible future scenarios . . . and thereby get stuck.

Why do we get stuck? I think it’s because we’re sooooooo freakin’ smart that we imagine that we can look into the future accurately, even though a backward glance across our lives would tend to disprove that.

We overanalyze because we think our highly-trained rational minds can dig us out of holes that are created by non-rational forces. Or, to put it another way, we don’t know how to come to grips with the emotional challenges we face in business, so we fall back on something we know we’re good at — rational analysis — even though it’s not the right tool for the problem at hand.

What’s the #1 non-rational/emotional force? My bet’s on plain old fear.

We don’t want to venture into the unknown; we don’t want to go through the sorts of mistakes that Bloomberg’s crew made. It’s a heck of a lot more comfortable to do another flowchart or hold another planning meeting instead, especially if you work in a corporate culture that responds poorly to mistakes or otherwise prizes “rightness.”

Now, dear readers, I turn it over to you:

• Do you suffer from scenario paralysis?
• What do you suggest for fighting it?

~

(Image by psd.)

Is this what Terminal 5 looked like
when BA “tested” it?

Last week we talked about British Airways‘ nasty experience opening its new — and theoretically state-of-the-art — Terminal 5 at Heathrow Airport. Well, things haven’t exactly stabilized:

• BBC news: Fresh baggage woes at Terminal 5

All this, even though the airline has sworn up and down that it carried out exhaustive testing of the terminal and all its systems before it opened about ten days ago.

Software tester Abi Sutherland has been studying the fiasco, and she believes that BA has fallen victim to one of the oldest fallacies of testing — following the “happy path” of use:

The very unhappy path to Terminal 5

. . . In software terms, there is something known as the happy path, which is what happens when all goes well. The happy path is nice to code, nice to test, nice to show to management. It is, however, not the only path through the system, and all the wretched, miserable and thorn-strewn paths must also be checked. Read more

No comments

Who ya gonna believe?

You could be forgiven for experiencing whiplash from the latest economic headlines:

• Bernanke Says Economy May Slip Into Recession
• IMF cuts forecasts for U.S., global economies
• Wall Street Shows Optimism That Crisis Is Fading

Check that last headline again: Just when you think you’re getting a grip on how badly the economy’s doing, something — a good day on Wall Street, a favorable economic indicator, etc. — gets people wondering whether things aren’t quite that bad. It’s hard to know what to think about where the economy’s headed. But clearly . . . it ain’t that good.

Especially since I’m a business-news junkie, I have to be careful not to spend too much time reading the economic tea leaves. And given my interest in 20th century history, it would be fascinating to spend all day deciding whether I agree with the IMF that the current financial crisis is the worst since the Great Depression.

Ignore the forecasts; stick to the knitting instead.

But who cares? Sure, economists do, and regulators should. Talk about the chances of a recession with your friends over dinner, if it interests you. Button up your portfolios, if you haven’t already. (Although it’s a wee bit late, by this point.) But you know what? It’s not worth that much worry — not for most people.

I submit that most of us are better off more or less ignoring macroeconomic data as it applies to us personally. Sure, think about what it means in terms of your company’s strategic and tactical approaches. Lean times call for different measures — both offensive and defensive — according to what business you’re in, and according to what business function you perform. But does it genuinely matter to the marketers and product managers sitting around me here at Hoover’s World HQ whether we’re technically in a recession or not? No. It’s enough to know the basic trajectory and how it affects our customers.

And it’s still more important to serve customers well and to act on their feedback. I know I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know, but given the flood of financial reporting that threatens to drown us, it bears repeating: the macro-economy is usually nowhere near as important to your career as the quality of your relationships with your customers and the quality of your business execution from day to day.

Execute, execute, execute.

I’m in the same camp as Tom Peters when he says that getting your strategy right is a really important first 2% of business . . . but that the “other 98%” of execution is much more important, because that’s where your business actually stands or falls.

Great businesses have been started in every sort of economic weather. Somewhere, there’s an entrepreneur who’s starting a business that will be very successful despite current business conditions, or maybe even because of current business conditions. Heck, I have a buddy in Northern California whose real-estate business is expanding rapidly right now. He has more work than he can keep up with, even in one of the toughest geographic markets — and toughest periods — the real-estate business has ever faced. And what does my buddy do every day? Focuses on his business. Executes the details.

What YOU do to your business is more important than what the economy does.

My advice: Keep an eye on those storm clouds. Glance over those economic headlines. Batten down your financial hatches as necessary.

But then pull on a poncho and get to work.

~

Previously in this vein:

• Landscape and weather in the business world.

~

UPDATE, Thursday morning: Wordpress isn’t cooperating with me, so I’ll add here the comment I tried to add in response to dblwyo’s comment below:

Hi, Dave - Great to hear from you.

I don’t disagree with your point. Yes, folks need to be aware of what’s going on in their own industry and in the economy at large. For that matter, they need to understand the “weather” that’s affecting their company and their role within that company, since the two could easily diverge.

But I guess what I’m reacting to is the nonstop stream of media coverage that hyperventilates a la “Recession! Depression!! Meltdown!!!” or “Actually, an Obscure Indicator that Doesn’t Affect You Suggests It Might NOT Be a Recession”.

The trends we’re facing now in the economy have been building for a long time, as you rightly point out. NONE of this should come as a surprise. Okay, possible Bear Stearns folks weren’t AS aware as they should have been about the company’s periolous state, but we’re also talking about maybe the worst meltdown ever experienced by a major financial house in this country.

And again, many people will *worry* about this as they worry about rejiggering their personal stock portfolio from day to day, when in fact they would be better served to keep the economic weather and the state of the stock market in their peripheral vision, but to FOCUS on their own work.

Executing well in your own function, in other words, often covers a multitude of failings in macro-conditions.

~

(Photo by iowa_spirit_walker.)

Evoking a post from a couple of weeks ago, here’s a recipe for some thought-provoking online goodness . . .

First, take Netscape, Opsware, and Ning founder Marc Andreessen:

Second, have him comment in detail on the classic “Psychology of Human Misjudgment” lecture of Berkshire Hathaway vice chairman Charlie Munger:

Third, ponder what all of this means for your own career and company.

Fourth, take action as a wiser businessperson.

I’ll have more to say on this later — it’s right in my business-analysis wheelhouse — but for now I’ll just point you to Andreessen’s first post on this subject and encourage you to go grapple with it.

Those who can free themselves from the unfruitful habits that neurology tends to force upon us will achieve true differentiation in the business world.

~

Previously in this vein:

• Irrationality in investment decisions.
• Confirmation bias: fight the Procrustean instinct.

(Andreessen photo from NNDB; Munger photo via Forbes.)

To give you something to think about on this Monday morning, this post applies our earlier discussion on naive questions to our work as individuals.

Naive questions, you’ll recall, are the simple — even childlike — questions that experience tends to grind out of us, but that we should cling to because they bring so much clarity. Questions like “Why are we doing this?” or “How is this going to make us more money?” could save companies untold grief, if we embraced the answers they provoke.

Many of us, when we’re away from the office — or at least out of earshot of the bosses — have no problem asking questions like these of our departmental or company-wide projects. If you’re like me, you’ve known plenty of folks who have made themselves experts at confessing the “sins” of their companies. (Feel free to lob in your own favorite organizational “sins” in the comments.)

But how many of us are willing to turn the spotlight on ourselves?

Suddenly, the chatter stops.

From all of my experience covering business, and from wide personal observation (including, oh yes, painful backward glances at my own performance), I conclude that many of us would benefit from asking ourselves naive questions regularly, both to sharpen the work we’re doing now, and to improve our career paths.

Naive questions work the same way for individuals that they do for companies because we are all managers of our own selves and our own careers. They’re just as hard to face for individuals as they are for companies — maybe harder, since they tend to churn up all sorts of unpleasant emotions.

The good news: you don’t have to convince a team or a department or an HR department or a chain of command to ask these questions when the organization you’re studying it little ol’ you. And when you get your answers, you don’t have to butt your head against companywide policies or decisions to pursue remedies. In many cases, you can alter “policy” for yourself without interference. In fact, if you’re able to dial down the angst and keep an open mind, you can even revolutionize the way you work.

How? Ask a naive question and follow where it leads. Try these short-term questions for starters:

• Which thing that I do at work wins me the most credit with my organization? (Prescription: do more of whatever it is.)
• Which things that I do every day are wasted time? (Stop doing them!)
• Is this meeting necessary? (If not, cancel the meeting if you called it, or beg off from attending if you were invited.)
• Is this project going to make a real difference to the company? (If not, kill it.)
• Which things am I best at in this job? (Do more of them. Beg to be allowed to do more of them.)

There are also plenty of long-term questions that can change not just the course of your working day, but the shape of your entire career:

• If I could write my own ticket, what kind of work would I be doing?
• How much is my current job like the work I dream of doing?
• Am I having the kind of impact I want in my career?
• How much money do I think I deserve to make in my career?
• I say that I want X, Y, and Z out of my career. Would a disinterested observer agree that what I’m doing now is pointing me toward those things?

That last question brings me back to the headline of this post. If you hired a smart, successful stranger to take a look at your life — to audit your work methods, your current job, and the course of your career — what do you think you’d hear back from them? What would be the good news? What would be the bad news?

Just as companies restructure their activities, so can we. Even when it’s emotionally painful, the process can be remarkably straightforward. How many times have you heard, after a turnaround has succeeded, that the new management at a company did crazy things like . . . reducing costs and . . . improving product quality and . . . improving customer service and . . . selling off low-performing businesses?

In many cases, the changes aren’t radical in themselves — they’re often straight out of the Management 101 textbook. The trick is approaching the situation with new eyes and having the guts to ask “dumb” (i.e. naive) questions like “How could we reduce costs?” and “If I were a customer, what would I think of our customer service?” and “Should we even be in this business at all?”

Try it on yourself. Pretend that you are that smart, successful stranger, and carry out a professional audit on yourself. Ask questions like these:

• “How well does she use her time?”
• “Is what he’s doing now likely to help him advance in his career?”
• “Is this behavior likely to win raises and promotions for her?”
• “If he does this project as well as it can be done, will anyone care?”

If the answers are suprising or disheartening, don’t fret — you’ll hardly be the first person to recognize a mismatch between intentions and reality. But if you’ll muster the courage to act on those answers . . . then you’ll be in elite company.

(Photo by Morrhigan.)

In last week’s post, “Make a list of ‘crucial basics’ and check it twice,” I referred to the federal bureaucratic holdup that was impeding the implementation of Dr. Peter Pronovost’s breathtakingly effective checklist system for decreasing infection rates in hospital ICUs.

Good news! Dr. Bob Wachter — one of the country’s most eminent hospitalists — reports that the Office for Human Research Protections has cleared up the problem and will no longer impede the rollout of Dr. Pronovost’s work. He thinks it’s a historical breakthrough.

This is a seminal moment for quality improvement in the United States. The prior OHRP decision, if left standing, could have mandated regulatory approval and the need to obtain patient and provider consent every time one wanted to improve a process and measure its impact. Today’s decision recognizes the need to balance traditional “research” regulations against the harm that will result if good people are forced to leap over unnecessary bureaucratic hurdles every time they seek to implement a safety or quality practice and see if it worked.

Moreover, as more and more regulations – many sensible but some asinine – are promulgated in the name of safety and quality, I hope the OHRP story kickstarts a process in which the regulators and the regulated collaborate to ensure that the ultimate goal of better patient care is being served.

Now, whether you’ve got people’s lives at stake or not, please go back to my earlier post on “crucial basics” and ask whether your own practices are impeding basic improvements. Are you subscribing to “many sensible but some asinine” self-regulations?

This thought puts me in mind of a famous line from one of the greatest process-improvers in American history — Benjamin Franklin:

The taxes are indeed very heavy, and if those laid on by the government were the only ones we had to pay, we might more easily discharge them; but we have many others, and much more grievous to some of us. We are taxed twice as much by our idleness, three times as much by our pride, and four times as much by our folly, and from these taxes the commissioners cannot ease or deliver us by allowing an abatement.

How much is your organization taxing itself with its idleness, pride, or folly?

[ICU photo by adamci; Franklin image via the National Portrait Gallery.]