Archive for November, 2009
Stuff and Stuffing
What really matters? If we judge by media coverage, I get discouraged that somehow our society loves news without depth and events without substance, writers without message and knowing who the next talk show host will be in a post Oprah world. But that’s not really what is going on, but rather what advertisers pay to entertain us. What really matters is defined by the choices we make and don’t make, the books we read and don’t read, the lives we change and don’t change, and what we give or keep for ourselves. Yes, the holidays are ahead and we’re focusing right now on ….? That’s the question for me. What does matter during the season ahead?
This week, there is lots of buzz about the upcoming Black Friday; the day people abandon civilized behavior for the sake of a deal. For many, it may be the only day that affordable gifts may be within reach, or shoving range. For merchants, the day that books move from red to black, maybe. It is the demarcation from the day of eating stuffing to the season for buying stuff.
Along the way, myths have become messages that have redefined values and priorities. Thanksgiving is an interesting holiday. The story is told that European settlers in Plymouth were starving from collective incompetence in farming and survival skills and were rescued by Squanto, a native who taught them farming and shared bounty. As a result, a big meal between cultures shared the bounty and thereafter, the big meal became part of our culture. The truth is closer to Squanto was a remnant of a large native society virtually eliminated by European borne diseases who remained near the area that once was his village. The real story is pretty sad, but today it represents an opportunity to gather and reflect on what is good about life and those we love. The myth redefined the message and that message is good.
There is another part of the message that did not make the Butterball on the table. There are a whole bunch of others where bounty does not exist and a growing number for whom the future looks dismal. Be it real hunger for food or emotional hunger for support, Thanksgiving may represent a day of emptiness rather than fulfillment. Black Friday may represent an opening to a holiday season fraught with memories of giving and pockets empty of opportunity.
Let’s remember friends, family, loved ones and the growing many for whom this season may be a dreaded darkness. Let’s find a way to reach out and define what and who we are. Happy Holidays.
Just Questions …
- How do you know if your Lean and Six Sigma training and development program is succeeding?
- When you set out on your implementation, did you develop metrics to gage progress and success?
- Is success measured in terms of training and certification indicators or on the changes in business performance?
- Have you what appeared to be a successful implementation in a failing business or business unit? Are you counting projects and certifications still?
- Are you still using the guidelines for selecting and chartering projects that were suitable for training candidates?
- Are those guidelines yielding the very best, most important business issues for attention?
- Are you running into “stranded investments” of trained resources in areas with insufficient opportunities for high impact projects while other areas are resource starved?
- Is the value of the program challenged or suffering diminishing results?
- Could it be that what worked to get launched now constrains the needs of your current life cycle phase?
- Is form constraining substance?
- Are the rules and tools setting the agenda for what is an opportunity?
- Are the real problems going elsewhere for solutions?
- Are the best and brightest clamoring for an opportunity to be part of the implementation or running away to protect their careers?
- Have you checked for generational deterioration and decay of approaches and quality of analysis and solutions?
- Are the Lean and Six Sigma physicians trying to cure themselves?
- Has critical thinking improved or has it been replaced by a checklist and lots of forms for approval?
- When was the last time you ran your program through a full physical and checked if your practices and practitioners fit your current and emerging business needs?
- Will you know in time?
I Have a Dream
When was the last time you dreamed? Not the go-to-sleep dream, but the dream that has a future that is really attractive, one we wanted to be part of? Is that dream still alive? In the universal words of kids in the back seat of the car, “Are we there yet?” Has the dream taken a detour, stuck in traffic, parked in the remote lot, or crushed in a junkyard, fodder for recycling? In this dream, were we the driver, passenger, or someone on the curb watching traffic go by?
The current calamities have, for so many, turned dreams into nightmares. For organizations, value has been destroyed, visions have blurred, and scarcity and survival have replaced abundance and growth. But, maybe it’s time we dreamed again. There is incredible power in effective leadership. I have believed for many years that the best leaders are the masters of delivering and creating optimism. Great leaders, be they captains of nations, captains of industry, or captains of their lives see light and create visions that pull us into the future. Visions can create the possibilities we dream about and great leaders energize collective motivations into plans and execution.
Growing up, my favorite leaders were defined by adversity, Winston Churchill and Abraham Lincoln to name just two. They manifested an eloquence that gave, to so many, the courage to hope and the will to endure and strive. The adversity and nightmares around them did not defeat them, but rather inspired them to dream, focus, create a vision and motivate the delivery of a better future. It’s possible, not easy, but doable. Without the adversity, the greatness within these leaders may have been buried under the blanket of comfort and success. Adversity defined Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, even the business giants like Andrew Carnegie and Henry Ford. Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech is timeless, the message creating and motivating a visionary power to fuel capacity, a capacity to move forward through adversity fostered by what is worst in people and enable millions to reach within and find what is best in people.
Adversity creates opportunity. Adversity energizes leaders and innovators. Adversity is what problem solvers dream about. The Great Depression was a fountain of new business creation, stoking the engines of creativity and diversification. It’s not easy, but doable again.
We approach a season redefined by prosperity. Be it the traditions of giving thanks or the tsunamis of buying presents, they have trappings of what abundance could look like and what “merry” or “happy” would look like. This year may not look as abundant. Maybe it’s the time to dream again, create new visions and challenge the leaders within us to embrace adversity and bring light to others.
Great leaders are judged by what they enabled others to accomplish, because others followed, sacrificed, endured, persisted and overcame adversities. Opportunities are always infinite. What we haven’t considered is always infinite. Only what we’ve accomplished so far is finite, memory is finite, scarcity is finite, even fear is finite.
“Hope is a waking dream.” Aristotle
Where is That Report?
To a small to large extent, most reports that are produced and delivered are late, early, inaccurate, or incomplete, with too much or too little at the time when needed to make decisions. Ouch, that sounds like a nasty indictment. But it’s true nonetheless, because we may be trapped in the paradigms that produce batched outputs in a continuous world. That means that there is typically a schedule or a request that triggers the production of the report and the world and its impacts on us are changing all the time, so some of the stuff in the report have changed by the time we get it.
Let’s leave the compliance reporting aside as that is a very different discussion.
Now, why all the rants? The real value of reports and spending a fortune on information is to enable better choices and decisions. We can influence the future and make a better place for our enterprises and ourselves by what we chose, decide, and execute. For decisions that are influenced by transparency to what is and isn’t, we want the accessibility and usefulness to be convenient, correct, as fresh as available, all the quality stuff, and unencumbered by anything else. The bundling and batch production of a “report” affects all the above. Plus, many reports are produced with an eye to production efficiency rather than decision effectiveness. That means that we get more information than we specifically want or need, because the reports are created for a broader audience. Maybe we only need one of the twenty published pages, but sorting that out hurts production and delivery efficiency. Maybe the process requirements were set as a result of a project executed by the function that produces, rather than the one than decides. Don’t blame them, their budget and metrics prompted it.
We’ve learned to create and use these bundled documents over many years. We know how to organize the information and make it as useful as possible, maybe. As long as we “report” utilizing the constraints of documents, we will have to display in two dimensions, pay the price of hand-offs, stale information, delays and costs of compiling …. And the killing of lots of trees. When dealing with risks and decisions that have complexity and velocity, electrons do a better job than hands and people. Try asking, “what if this, and what about looking at it this way or that?” …. Then wait for the next report.
Many have already figured it and are way beyond the simplicity of this argument. Today there are really great technologies that can answer in real time and across as many windows as are relevant. But often the richness and capability still makes it into the batched reporting, robbed of real time and stripped of the multi-dimensionality requirements of better decisions.
Now, don’t take this as an endorsement or even an encouragement for enterprise systems of big IT spend. This is a suggestion to challenge the old habit of producing in batch, potentially governing the timeliness and quality of choices and decisions.
Do we need a report, or do we need a decision? I suggest you answer the decision one first.
Thoughts?
What’s the Score?
Have you ever balanced a scorecard? What did you do? How did you decide what balanced meant? What did you do with the scorecard? Did you win? Was it a competitive win or was it a within the scorecard win? Would an outsider evaluate you as a winner without seeing your scorecard?
The balanced scorecard has been a source of lots of debate and consulting armies going about guiding organizations on keeping score. My observation has been that too often the exercise has amounted to filling data into a predetermined template from what data is available and accessible with follow on work to “interpret” what the scoreboard means. What continues to nag me is the distractions that some predetermined “balanced” views may precipitate.
First, no two categories are ever equal. But if you try to make them equal on a scorecard, you will get unintended consequences. The more something is claimed in a slogan, the less likely it is true in measurable practices.
“Employees are our greatest asset” is a statement of value, not a measure of opinions that are captured in an employee satisfaction survey score. What does the scorecard really measure? I would argue that, if asset quality matters, maybe it should measure how quickly we acquire good assets, secure the most out of the earning capacity, and then how quickly we dispose of bad assets. However, political correctness and actually treating people as assets is challenging and likely look bad on surveys. A scorecard would be sensitive to what the game is and how people are to be utilized at what stage of the game. The categories are dynamic as well as the numbers. Take a hard look at what tracking “training hours” does within very large organizations. You will find some interesting compliance systems that actually govern the speed of learning (check the on-line stuff) so that the scorecard hours are achieved. Yes, we are willing to slow down the quick studies and reduce their productive time for the sake of the “score.”
Financial strategy is even more dynamic and much more complex. What we desire to emphasize on the balance sheet or the income statement is very different for industries, organizations, health, global economy, volatility, growth, risks, competitors, asset mix, exposure … to name a few. So, the scorecard categories and weights are dynamic, not static, so the scorecard structure is not structural, but fluid. A structured scorecard in a dynamic environment will always lag the signals and thereby trigger responses inappropriately. Does it enable or constrain the best decisions? And, we can’t use the scorecard to score itself.
Customer satisfaction is a fascinating score to evaluate, if it leads to better decisions in time to make a difference, where it needs to make a difference. How often have we observed what appears to be poor business decision making in order to appease a “customer tyrant” for fear of low satisfaction scores? We all have. So again, the complexities of a dynamic world require sufficient agility in the relationship between what matters virtually so that the “score” leads to proper action. Again, what does balance in the score really mean and what does it really drive in behaviors? Does the statistical “dulling” effect hide the scary customer stuff happening on the fringes where risks are born and changes are incubating?
Now, for those that feel this is going in the direction of winging it and data anarchy, not so. Score is important, but balance cannot always be predetermined or should be hard-wired in dynamic environments. If life is quiet and stable and predictable, this may be an irritating and irrelevant sounding blog posting. I don’t know anybody like that anymore.
The questions that we should be vigilant about measurement and scorekeeping must be configured around decision making only. Data is useful for what I am about to decide. That’s it. The scorecard, scoreboard, or dashboard must fit the game we are playing and where and when we are playing it. Balance can be a dynamic challenge for multinational entities in a multi-polar world.
This should be exciting, if we agree. It is exciting because technology today enables transparency at the speed of light. Our interconnectivity and networked interconnections have the capacity to render a view to enable dynamic balance. Balance is a consequence of judgment and agility. Both require virtual transparency that grabs new and relevant lenses to look at what is happening when the decisions can alter the future most effectively.
Thoughts?
The Choice is Yours … Maybe
What defines a good strategy? What does it mean? Strategy may be one of the most overused and subsequently confusing subjects in practically any realm we encounter. We hear about so many categories of strategy, that subjectivity has overcome objectivity in the usefulness of the word. Military strategy, business strategy, product strategy, life strategy, financial strategy, global strategy, marketing strategy, project strategy, retirement strategy … are among the near infinite categories.
Add to that the subject of planning … and it gets even messier. I believe that the two terms have been comingled sufficiently to take on whatever meaning one chooses and therefore beginning to approach becoming meaningless when evaluating or comparing between entities. Try testing this sometime. Ask 20 different people to define strategy, planning and strategic planning and see what you get. Expect to be amused, or maybe even confused. You may also discover that the responses will often predict what the respondent does and where they fit within an entity.
Add to that the confounding impacts of organizational structure and budgets, and, … maybe we begin to make it really hard to get clarity. Yep, I’m going to have a go at it ….
Let’s stipulate that all the stuff about goals and objectives is important and not up for debate right now. Let’s also stipulate that stuff is not free and we need to have control over resources and spend and therefore budgets are important. Plus, accountability, transparency, time, cost, and quality all matter too…
Strategy is what we do to create a future such that we maximize the choices and degrees of freedom along the way because some of what we believe or wish for is wrong. We could be wrong in what it will be like, what we actually want, what is going to happen,,, lots of ways. A strategy makes us think and consider the destination(s), the journey, and options for the detours and bumps in the road. Apply this to the categories above and see if it works. Strategies that reduce degrees of freedom and constrain choices tend to end up with calamitous consequences. Try it out on Betamax, the Peloponnesian Wars, mortgage backed derivatives, the Maginot Line, health care oligarchies, pension plans, hard wired enterprise systems, onerous controls and compliance requirements, procurement approvals …. When things do not play out as you expected, or wished, or sold, do you have the preparation and capability to adapt and exercise other choices? Decisions about Afghanistan, health care reform, even our next cell phone contract and provider choice would benefit greatly from this perspective (I believe..).
Planning is what we do to create confidence, not affirmation, that what we seek to do to deliver the strategy has legs. Planning is what bridges the activities between the present and the future so that we are capable to execute and adapt over time. It is about the verbs we will execute in order to secure the nouns and adjectives in our strategy.
So, my oversimplification would argue that we want confidence that we can get to the future we want, or emerges, with choices to make it better when we were wrong a little or a lot. Strategy gives us choice. Planning gives us confidence …
Thoughts?
Just in Case
Just in case. When packing for a travel, what did we add to the bag as we said, “just in case?” Did we sufficient “in case” stuff that we paid extra weight fees for our baggage? When walking into the closet and seeing a wardrobe assortment spanning 6 years and 50 pounds ago, do we hesitate before reaching for something to put into the give-away bag saying, “maybe I’ll wear it keep it, just in case?” How about the files we keep in our desk drawer or in a section of our hard drives, just in case? Do any of the books on our shelf look brand new and unopened after a decade of taking up space, but we keep them, just in case? Are we saving five year old magazines for “when I have some time to read them?”
When setting standards or targets for performance, how large are the “safety cushions” of time we put between when we are done and when it is due, just in case? When preparing a presentation, how many additional slides do we build with details and tangential data, just in case? When ordering materials, printing out decks for a meeting, ordering food for a meeting, setting inventory levels, how much do we add for just in case? Just in time belongs to the confident, but just in case belongs to the fearful. How about our staffing and resource loading? Do we staff up for not coming up short on a peak day, just in case, then find things to do on the slack time?
Management by “just in case” is expensive. Not only is it expensive in inventory, it is costly in added complexity, capability decay, waste, but actually the creation of resource scarcity and often very poor fit. Just in case becomes the catch all phrase for the uncertainties in life, be they rational or irrational, be they quantified or not. How often do we ask the question, what will this cost in opportunity if the just in case doesn’t happen? There are plenty of data and tools that abound to rationally address tangible inventory and the science of supply chain management can transform much of the visible.
Let’s think about the opportunities lost because of just in case.
- What did we not do while spending our time on just in case?
- What did we not consider that was relevant because of the focus on the irrelevant baggage of just in case?
- How much of our focus is dulled because of lugging lots of just in case in our minds or in front of our eyes?
- How many resources sat idle in the wrong place on the wrong topic while we ran into scarcity where it counted because of just in case?
- How much time and how many resources did we tie up or consume on training too many on too much because it was easier to deploy something to a shotgun approach, just in case?
It’s a challenge. Focus is hard and hard choices are what engage our brains and challenge our habits. We may be at a really interesting fork in our lives. It may well be the fork where the direction we chose will require all of the focus, discipline and follow-through we can muster to succeed.
- How much baggage can we afford to bring along?
- Do the reasons or fears that determined what we brought along for “just in case” still determine what we should bring along for tomorrow?
- What are the factors that should determine tomorrow’s just in case?
- Are they determined by the consequences of what happened last time?
- How does the virtual and connected world change all of this?
