This is a guest post from James Lawther of www.squawkpoint.com

I read a Hodding Carter quote the other day.

“TV news is like a lightening flash. It makes a loud noise, lights up everything around it, leaves everything else in darkness and then is suddenly gone.”

The quote reminded me of an organisation I used to work for where they managed by the TV News (they called it bullet points, but it was a very similar thing).

• Every Thursday I would ask my team for their weekly bullets, things that had gone well, good news stories and concerns.
• I would have a quick flick through these, and then in turn distill out the interesting things, the bits worthy of note and pass them up the line to my boss.
• He did exactly the same thing, and so it went, thousands of activity bullets every week, each one being sorted, filtered, shined and passed on up the chain.

Then, once a week at the executive meeting they would come together and be reviewed by the great and the good, pawed over, questions asked, challenges given, decisions made.   It was the back bone of how the business was run.

In principle it seems like a good idea, percolate up all the important stuff, sort the wheat from the chaff, update the executive board every week on everything that is going on in the business that they really ought to know about.

Unfortunately it didn’t quite work like that, the reality was more like this:

• Once a week everybody groaned at the thought of big brother looking over their shoulder.
• They would think of the good things that they had done, beautify them and send them in as bullets.
• Managers would sift through the bullets, looking for the golden nuggets.  If there weren’t any, the managers would invent something about what was urgent to them at the time and send it up.
• Senior managers would then also spend time, creating a “strategic context” for their bullets, massaging the message some more and then sending them on.

By the time the senior executive team received their bullet points, hours and hours had gone into their preparation, good news had been built up, bad news had been muted down and the bullets were as accurate a representation of what was going on in the organisation as the TV News is of life on Earth.   (With one slight difference, bullets always emphasise the positive, the news always emphasises the negative, it is called giving your audience what they want).

Of course the problem with the News is it doesn’t give you any sense of perspective, so there is a better way:

1. Work out what is really important to the running of your business.
2. Arrange to receive a weekly report about that, showing if performance is improving or worsening (there is no substitute for a trend).
3. If things aren’t going the way you expect, go and look for yourself, talk to people, understand what is going on.  Don’t rely on third hand news.

Finally, if noise and events become a distraction, always ask yourself “Is this really important?  Or just a news flash?”

James Lawther gets upset by operations that don’t work and apoplectic about poor customer service. You can read more about service improvement on his web site www.squawkpoint.com