Tag Archives: business management

Management by News Flash

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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

 

Organizations and the Laws of Physics

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I am writing this article to create an imbalance in the world of those who read my posts. I am not in any way attempting to consider all of the options, or to be fair.  I just want to Step on your t pets a little. If it makes you uncomfortable, that is a good thing.  It is what this article is meant to do.

Newton’s Second Law of motion, in paraphrase, states that to change the state of motion of an object, a force must act on it to create an imbalance in forces. The object will then move to establish a new state of equilibrium.

The second law of thermodynamics, in paraphrase, states that systems always move toward a state of equilibrium. This movement will persist until the system reaches absolute zero (system death) or equilibrium is reached.

These concepts taken from physics also apply to human endeavors at the individual and organizational levels. In the human experience we call equilibrium the “status quo”.  I personally find that the status quo is a place for those who need rest or are not motivated to move forward. I am not against rest, but if you are resting and your competition isn’t, you’re losing ground. In other words, the status quo for me is good only when the status quo is to avoid the status quo.  Chew on that one for a while.

The status quo mentality usually forms in organizations and individuals who are internally focused. Being internally focused will isolate you from your external operating environment. You do not feel, or you fail to recognize, external forces that create imbalances in your external operating environment. The result is that you become out of alignment with the world around you. You fail to benefit from changes in the environment or maybe you even fall victim to them. The ostrich may have protected his head, but his rear end is more than a little exposed.

I know that some will say that organizations and individuals must isolate themselves from destructive forces in their operating environment in order to protect their assets.  I will answer that I disagree. Individuals or organizations that do not try to manage within the environment they operate in are simply exchanging one master (the larger outside world) for another (isolation). We do not have to be mastered by either. We control our choices and we become stronger and more robust as we exercise our ability to choose.

Let me give you examples. Governments and businesses isolate themselves from the governed and customers with bureaucratic layers of management. Religions do this by operating on a paradigm of exclusion (us, them) instead of a paradigm of inclusion. The result is that some governments, businesses and religions become more and more isolated, lose connection with their sense of purpose and eventually fail.

So what do you do? First understand that nothing stays the same in our world.  We age, tastes change and the people around us change. There is an interesting story line in the movie “The Time Machine”. The time traveler sits in his time machine and watches the world change around him.  He is isolated from the effects of the change and when he arrives in the future he is out of place and out of sync with the world around him.  The world experienced the changes first hand and has adapted, he did not experience the changes and finds himself in danger without a full understanding of how to cope. In the movie the good guys win, but in real life it probably would not have turned out that way.

We don’t have to agree with, or placidly accept, the changes around us. We can push back, adjust our strategy, etc. What we cannot do is ignore what is happening. The wise person evaluates these changes against reality and avoids letting others interpret their meanings for them. In sports we call this “keeping on your toes” or “keeping you eye on the ball.” In life it is simply a matter of paying attention to what is happening around us and keeping the main thing, the main thing.

In short we must embrace change. The world is moving onward with a great deal of inertia and it doesn’t care if you get left behind. The days of large stable bureaucratically ran organizations are coming to an end.  These are the days of smaller, fast and flexible, organizations that can move quickly to take care of customers, no matter how the environment changes. What customers, and people in general, want are solution providers, not protestors or clingers on to the old paradigm.

One way to manage this is to balance long term projects, goals and rewards with short term projects, goals and rewards. The long term perspective tends to add stability to an organization’s progress over time.  The short term perspective creates more employee engagement and a degree of instability, which is also good. Short term projects, goals and rewards operate in the current reality and force us to see what is actually happening right now. Long term projects, goals and rewards keep us focused on our mission and vision, which may be based in another reality. Short and long term efforts tend to modify each other in a healthy way when managed properly.

The balance point is always shifting.  Don’t let it become a tripping point.