A lesson learned from high school gym class...
The place was Mr. Wittner's gym class and we were learning basketball. A bunch of headstrong high school flunkies, he explained to us that if we ever wanted to succeed at a pick-up ball game, we should at the very least show up dressed correctly. If you're playing behind the school (inner city) on a Saturday and you show up in anything but the right shorts and shoes, no one would pick you for their team.
At the time, we all thought it was a plea to get us to wear the gym uniform. Later I realized that it's a core value. Customers' reaction to your actions reflect your actions. If you show up ready to play on the same court as your customers, they understand that you're taking them seriously. So much of business is concerned with setting expectations of others, but how much time do we spend living up to expectations?
Saturday, January 30, 2010
Tuesday, January 5, 2010
Proper planning
Nothing beats good planning but execution is critical. The best laid plans are little without execution. Sometimes, plans need to be shorter-term too. If an organization isn't going to make it six months, a two year strategic plan isn't helpful.
Always focus on flawless and consistent execution. Any plans that are followed should include sufficient detail on execution and the means to make execution more flawless and consistent. Often it takes time to reach an acceptable level but constantly aiming at an attainable goal breeds success.
Plans should be diversified and robust enough to account for reasonable unforseen events. Just because something seems to be going right, win-win bolstering of existing plans only serves to guarantee execution.
Always focus on flawless and consistent execution. Any plans that are followed should include sufficient detail on execution and the means to make execution more flawless and consistent. Often it takes time to reach an acceptable level but constantly aiming at an attainable goal breeds success.
Plans should be diversified and robust enough to account for reasonable unforseen events. Just because something seems to be going right, win-win bolstering of existing plans only serves to guarantee execution.
Friday, December 25, 2009
Hindsight is not 20-20
History is supposed to teach us about the future. It's the concept of experience: you analyze something that's happened in the past and learn lessons from it. The thought is that these lessons prevent you from repeating mistakes in the future.
The problem with this is that we've lost a lot of objectivity about the past. If your analysis is biased, you won't learn anything. Instead, you'll just reinforce the bad behavior that led to the mistake in the first place. It's paramount to realize that every story has at least two sides and unless you analyze from both sides fairly and equally, you're not being objective. Look for the real reasons something happened. It's okay to note that there were gaps in your information as you made the decisions you made and it's even okay to label your own past judgements as flawed. Just be fair to the other sides.
To make this worse, the cycle of happen-analyze-archive is happening too quickly these days. People communicate more with the Internet than they ever did before it. This gives people the false sense that they know more about a situation than they really do. Thus they analyze prematurely and they have an immediate avenue by which they can memorialize their false analysis.
The problem with this is that we've lost a lot of objectivity about the past. If your analysis is biased, you won't learn anything. Instead, you'll just reinforce the bad behavior that led to the mistake in the first place. It's paramount to realize that every story has at least two sides and unless you analyze from both sides fairly and equally, you're not being objective. Look for the real reasons something happened. It's okay to note that there were gaps in your information as you made the decisions you made and it's even okay to label your own past judgements as flawed. Just be fair to the other sides.
To make this worse, the cycle of happen-analyze-archive is happening too quickly these days. People communicate more with the Internet than they ever did before it. This gives people the false sense that they know more about a situation than they really do. Thus they analyze prematurely and they have an immediate avenue by which they can memorialize their false analysis.
Hourly Motivation
Motivating people who are paid hourly is a difficult problem to solve. If you pay an intelligent person for work produced by a particular simple unit like time, lines of code, widgets produced, etc., they'll eventually learn to minimize their production cost and lower the effort necessary to produce a unit. Since headcount management is generally inelastic and higher order quality is hard to measure, the situation can go unchecked for too long before corrected.
This clearly does not apply to some special cases. Some people are inspired and naturally committed to quality. Unfortunately, they will often burn out and their produced quality will suffer, although not by their deliberate action. There is also a small subset of people who are so good at what they do that producing lower quality takes more effort than producing higher quality.
Therein lies one solution, make it difficult to produce lower quality. If done improperly however, this can lead to a poor work environment and thus higher turnover. In this situation, if overdone, workers will see imposed requirements as nagging.
Another solution is a culture of quality. This is an attempt to instill internal policing on the workforce. Once again, if overdone, this will lead to hiring difficulties because many prospective and new hires will see the culture as inpenetrable.
Imposing quality requirements can be useful but often more difficult. In any society, having too many rules or laws presents problems of uniform and judicious enforcement. This requires external policing and a fair justice system.
The best solution is grassroots management. Have small groups each with effective leadership. Each should be allowed to make its own rules within reason. Each should also be allowed to develop its own culture that meshes with the overarching organization culture. With sufficient reporting and transparency, things that are required in any profitable organization, internal competition will drive higher quality across the board. Reporting is also enhanced by smaller groups because leaders, who can be trained more easily, have better access to real raw data and exception oversight.
This clearly does not apply to some special cases. Some people are inspired and naturally committed to quality. Unfortunately, they will often burn out and their produced quality will suffer, although not by their deliberate action. There is also a small subset of people who are so good at what they do that producing lower quality takes more effort than producing higher quality.
Therein lies one solution, make it difficult to produce lower quality. If done improperly however, this can lead to a poor work environment and thus higher turnover. In this situation, if overdone, workers will see imposed requirements as nagging.
Another solution is a culture of quality. This is an attempt to instill internal policing on the workforce. Once again, if overdone, this will lead to hiring difficulties because many prospective and new hires will see the culture as inpenetrable.
Imposing quality requirements can be useful but often more difficult. In any society, having too many rules or laws presents problems of uniform and judicious enforcement. This requires external policing and a fair justice system.
The best solution is grassroots management. Have small groups each with effective leadership. Each should be allowed to make its own rules within reason. Each should also be allowed to develop its own culture that meshes with the overarching organization culture. With sufficient reporting and transparency, things that are required in any profitable organization, internal competition will drive higher quality across the board. Reporting is also enhanced by smaller groups because leaders, who can be trained more easily, have better access to real raw data and exception oversight.
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