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Archives for 2010

Beautiful…Systems?

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Tom Peters is right in Re-Imagine! when he writes:

We avoid words like “beauty” — and the concept of beauty — between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. (Especially if we work in the likes of HR or IS or Logistics.) But as part of the urgent process of re-imagining organizations, we must embrace both the word and the concept — and make beauty the primary attribute not only of product design but also of process design.

In short, we must create an enterprise environment in which enterprise systems are no less than … Beautiful Systems.

Mastering Both Ends of the Spectrum

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Yes:

“An effective leader must be the master of two ends of the spectrum: ideas at the highest level of abstraction and actions at the most mundane level of detail.”

That’s from Tom Peters and Robert Waterman in In Search of Excellence. They elaborate in this way:

“The value-shaping leader is concerned, on the one hand, with soaring, lofty visions that will generate excitement and enthusiasm for tens or hundreds of thousands of people. That’s where the pathfinding role is critically important. On the other hand, it seems the only way to instill enthusiasm is through scores of daily events, with the value-shaping manager becoming an implementer par excellence. In this role, the leader is a bug for detail, and directly instills values through deeds rather than words: no opportunity is too small. So it is at once attention to ideas and attention to detail.

Keeping the Monkeys Off

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Management Time: Who’s Got the Monkey? is a classic Harvard Business Review article on time management for managers. I can’t find it online for free, but here is a summary that is so good that you probably don’t even need to read the full article:

You’re racing down the hall. An employee stops you and says, “We’ve got a problem.” You assume you should get involved but can’t make an on-the-spot decision. You say, “Let me think about it.”

You’ve just allowed a “monkey” to leap from your subordinate’s back to yours. You’re now working for your subordinate. Take on enough monkeys, and you won’t have time to handle your real job: fulfilling your own boss’s mandates and helping peers generate business results.

How to avoid accumulating monkeys? Develop your subordinates’ initiative, say Oncken and Wass. For example, when an employee tries to hand you a problem, clarify whether he should: recommend and implement a solution, take action then brief you immediately, or act and report the outcome at a regular update.

When you encourage employees to handle their own monkeys, they acquire new skills—and you liberate time to do your own job.

Creativity and Innovation are Different

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Tom Peters in In Search of Excellence, quoting Theodore Leviit:

The trouble with much of the advice business gets today about the need to be more vigorously creative is that its advocates often fail to distinguish between creativity and innovation.

Creativity is thinking up new things. Innovation is doing new things. . . . A powerful new idea can kick around unused in a company for years, not because its merits are not recognized, but because nobody has assumed the responsibility for converting it from words into action….

If you talk to people who work for you, you’ll discover that there is no shortage of creativity or creative people in American business. The shortage is of innovators.

All too often, people believe that creativity automatically leads to innovation. It doesn’t. . . . The scarce people are the ones who have the know-how, energy, daring, and staying power to implement ideas. . . .

IT Pros: Macs Cost Less to Manage Than PCs

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A post at TUAW summarizes the results of a study that does a good job of showing the problem with organizations not getting Macs because they are “too expensive.” Here are two paragraphs from the post:

According to the survey, Macs were cheaper to troubleshoot and required fewer help desk calls; system configuration, user training, and servers/networks/printing were all cheaper for a Mac environment than a PC environment. Software licensing fees turned out to be nearly identical for both platforms.

The survey doesn’t factor in the costs of the Macs themselves; Macs do present a large up-front investment, especially compared to the budget-priced Dells you usually see populating most office cubicles. However, half of the survey respondents noted they switched to a Mac platform because of a lower total cost of ownership.

Government Health Care and Project Management

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In a recent column on health care, Thomas Sowell writes:

It is not uncommon for patients in those countries to have to wait for months before getting operations that Americans get within weeks, or even days, after being diagnosed with a condition that requires surgery. You can always “bring down the cost of medical care” by having a lower level of quality or availability.

That last sentence is very illuminating. You will notice the same pattern that I blogged on in regard to project management a few weeks ago. In that post, I noted that there are three constraints on anything — cost, quality, and time — and you can have two but not all three. If you need something cheap, then you will either have lower quality or a longer schedule. If you want something fast, you will either have lower quality or higher cost. And so forth.

This reality exists in health care as well as project management; it exists anywhere that you have to utilize resources. So, in regard to health care, Sowell notes that many schemes to “bring down the cost of medical care” do so by decreasing quality or increasing the time it takes to get scheduled for important surgery and care. Yet, these schemes often talk as if there is no trade off.

We ought not talk about these things as though we are operating in an unconstrained world, as though having the government step in will magically result in cheaper health care, with the same standard of quality and the same speediness of implementation.

Now, I do think it is possible for health care to get cheaper while preserving excellent quality and timeliness. We have seen this happen, for example, with computers (and technology in general) — costs have gone down, while quality and performance has gone up, and you don’t have to wait in a breadline to get one.

But how did that happen? Through innovation. The cost of health care can come down — while preserving quality and timeliness — through innovation. The question then becomes: what environment is most conducive to motivating the innovation necessary to do this?

It doesn’t come from the government. Notice, again, the tech industry — it is not governmental controls that led to the creative and risk-taking entrepreneurship behind the creation of Apple, Google, and the thousands of other companies (even Microsoft) that have transformed our lives through technological improvements. Rather, it was the opposite — letting them be free to create, pursue, fail, regroup, and make things happen.

I don’t know why it is so hard to learn this lesson. We see it every day, and now the Internet itself is one of the best examples of it — it is through decentralization that society advances, not centralization of government power over an industry.

The greatest irony is that many of the people who get this when it comes to the tech industry, the Internet, and entrepreneurship fail to see the connection when it comes to every other area — such as taxation and, the main issue here, health care.

Get in the Zone Through Time Blocking

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Another Fast Company column by Gina Trapani. Here are the first two paragraphs:

In an interruption-driven culture, it’s too easy to let everyone else decide where your attention goes and how to spend your next 10 minutes. If you jump every time your phone rings, a new email arrives, your Blackberry buzzes, or someone stops by your desk, you’re undermining your most important work and costing your company money. A recent study shows that unnecessary interruptions costs the U.S. economy $650 billion dollars in lost productivity per year.

Being available to your boss and co-workers is part of your job. But the most creative and important work you do requires total focus and attention for an extended period of time. Your brain needs at least 15 minutes of uninterrupted time to dive in, concentrate on one thing, and get into the zone where you’re truly focused and doing your best work. Time blocking is a technique that sets the stage for that to happen.