In the high performance world, something that needs to be fixed after you’ve made it is called a defect. Defects represent a form of waste. They represent waste because defects have to be either scrapped or re-worked. Scrapping something represents money down the drain. Re-working it adds unnecessary costs. 

In the high performance world, when you produce defects you understand that as long as the systems remain the same you’ll reliably keep building defects. So in order to stop building defects, high performance organizations change their systems and processes so they won’t produce more defects.  They try to get the right results the first time. 

But in the political world, when you produce defects you first try to find someone to blame for creating the defects. It’s especially convenient to blame the other party.  That’s in part because politicians are often less concerned with the results as they are with the process–especially the process of getting re-elected. (That’s why Kennedy and Deal in their book Corporate Cultures referred to bureaucracy as a process culture out of control.)  “Just work the process; we’ll fix the problems we created later,” they say. 

That’s foreign thinking to high performance organizations who understand that customers won’t pay for those fixes and that everyone needs to accept personal accountability for continuous improvement.  

It’s hard to think like this unless you have a high level of emotional intelligence and maturity. Given the spectacle we’ve seen in Washington lately, this may be the primary reason politicians can’t seem to learn from high performers.

• Strong operational hydraulics
• Rewards for performance, not mediocrity
• Core values with teeth
• The right conversations
• Adventurous leaders in key positions
• Constant pressure versus heroic efforts

It uses a straightforward and useful checklist of questions you can ask yourself.

It started with a call from Jose, a business leader in Southern California  who’d learned of our work integrating the cultural and technical aspects of lean transformations. He wanted help launching lean six sigma with his leadership team and employees. Last week was my only available four day window–day out, day back, two days at the client site.

Jose loaded me up with emails covering every conceivable aspect of his company. Everything I needed to get up the learning curve on the long ride out.  

I used day one to get to know the leaders, conduct a few focus groups with employees and tour the operation. That plus the advance reading gave me what I needed to understand the climate and culture, performance opportunities and likely barriers to achieving them.    

For the next two days we plowed through change management fundamentals and then the advanced course: defining the future condition; identifying the requisite leadership roles and expectations; creating a plan to eliminate root causes of performance problems related to on-time delivery, quality and operating income; building the framework of a continuous improvement process; and prioritizing what work needs to stay on the plate and what must go. 

All in two days!

It worked because the leadership team was business-savvy, enthusiastic, used to doing hard work fast and, of course, (here comes the self-serving part) the content was exceptional.

The team has plenty to work on. We’ll check in at regular intervals for what Jose referred to as “sanity checks.” 

Good work, happy client, nice ride home. 

But the softie side of me also loves the ads that poke a little or jerk at the emotions. Because I spent a number of years in the advertising/marketing community  I believe I can view spots from the ad guy’s perspective and  from the perspective of the guy watching the game while eating a bowl of chili.

From both perspectives, I thought the Super Bowl ads last night were mediocre compared to previous years.  The Doritos adds were clever and reminded me that they were selling Doritos.  And I’m a sucker for the Clydesdales, especially when a dog brings a horse and steer together for a lifetime of friendship.  Ahhh! Get me another Bud, please.

Otherwise I didn’t see a lot of creativity and wonder if that’s not part of the conservative, risk-averse advertising we’ve been seeing in recent years, especially in the economic downturn. Most of the spots lacked clear selling propositions and failed to make the product or service the hero of the ad, as David Ogilvy importuned young copywriters years ago. The Intel ad for a processor got my vote for the most juvenile and most difficult to figure out.  There was so much noise around the message that it took two airings before I figured out that they were selling processors not robotic toys.

Memory Lane. I miss the great ad days I was part of.  The days of Ogilvy, Leo Burnett and Doyle Dane and Bernbach “Think Small” spots for the Beetle. Here from YouTube is the German version of the famous snow plow ad. For those who missed this great ad era, the tag line at the end is loosely translated as “Ever wonder what the snow plow driver drives to work?”  The spot almost needs no commentary.   http://www.youtube.com/user/beetlejuice150#p/search/1/cUnEbNgHFco

Let me know what you think.

Jim

For those who were watching more serious fare, like I Love Lucy re-runs, Undercover Bossis is about corporate CEO’s who masquerade as someone else so they can snoop on their employees. Some snooping may be perceived as good and some bad by the producers.  But snooping is always disingenuous in my book.

It may be cute TV but a leader resorting to dishonesty to get in touch with his organization and its people is perverse, uproots the concept of authentic leadership and eliminates the leader as a candidate for teaching the corporate ethics class.  Its potential for abuse is horrendous.

In today’s climate, it’s important for leaders to tell the truth. Authenticity has its virtues. CEO’s have immense political and personal influence. They have opportunity to inflict both good and bad. But when you tell people you’re a dockworker when you’re not, you aren’t telling the truth and you compromise yourself and your position. And your real motives come into question.

Some may say that walking incognito “among the troops” is a good thing.  But, I believe there isn’t something fundamentally wrong about the relationship between a leader and his people if he has to fake it to stay in touch?

Some  news media are desperately trying to hang on to the separation between the editorial and business sides of their business, although it’s getting awfully murky out there when advertising appears on news pages and is camouflaged in magazines as news stories) but I wonder about any dilemma CBS might face as its news people seek transparency from leaders while its programmers celebrate CEO’s who lie and hide.

Your thoughts?

In an objective article by Steven Brill, a banker defends the need for high pay that’s paid now–with no deferral.  

“A lot of our folks have second and third homes and alimony payments and other obligations that require substantial current cash.”   

So the notion here is that compensation structures should be designed to accommodate the financial needs of the employees rather than to encourage and pay employees to act in ways that are consistent with meeting customer and shareholder requirements. This employee-comes-before-the-shareholder-and-customer mindset is dangerous in any business or industry.  But it’s no doubt the same mindset that encouraged other goofy behavior, including former Merrill CEO John Thain’s decision to spend $1.2 million on his office and a couple of conference rooms. 

It’s putting me over we and that’s dangerous in banking or any other industry.

Is “They just don’t get it” a fair observation?

Through elaborate research and delightful storytelling, Larry Robertson has for me delicately deconstructed the concept of entrepreneurship, rebuilt it and paraded it back into my mind through many different doors. As a result, I have a much more realistic understanding of entrepreneurs, how they think, how they work, how they dream, how they persist and how they succeed.

I wish I’d had this book 30 years ago when I was starting this journey.

A not-so-small lagniappe that comes with the book is a huge inventory of Recommended Resources that Larry includes after each chapter.  My reading list for 2010!

“I just think it’s time to get something out,” he responded.

“And what do you hope to accomplish?” I asked.

“I think it’s about time to tell people things,” he said, getting somewhat impatient with my business-oriented line of questioning.  I’ve met many of these kinds of leaders over the years. They’re used to ordering up communication activities and receiving responses like, “And would you like fries with that?” 

But. I think it’s irresponsible to let people knowingly use communication management to drain value rather than add value.  So my objective is always to explain as best I can the role of good communication management, provide best practice options and then help the leader align the right solutions with the right problems.  If I think I’ve made a good case and the leader still disagrees, so be it. There’s a point at which my doctor can’t control what I eat so he can cajole all he wants.  But, in the end, it’s my decision, just as it’s the leader’s ultimate decision to follow a path I might not agree with.

In this case, I had an informed reason for pushing him. Focus groups that we’d conducted with his employees told us they were tired of leaders reporting to them about things that were inconsistent with what they were experiencing in their work-a-day world. “They make all these pronouncements but nothing happens,” employees told us.  “They don’t walk the talk.” 

I didn’t want to acquiesce to this leader because I knew if I said something like “that’s a really brilliant idea,” I’d be contributing to an existing problem and not helping him fix anything.   So I explained to himthat “event-related communication” such as a meeting, a webinar, a video needs to be consistent with communication that’s part of the “world of work.”  Meaning that what someone experiences at the event should be somewhat consistent with the experience that person has when she returns to work.  You don’t talk about becoming a world class (whatever that means) company in a video or at a webinar if you continually tolerate bureaucratic bungling and  incompetence throughout the enterprise.

I suggested an alternative approach that would align both the say communication and the do communication in such a way that the experience in the events and the world of work would become similar. In this way his credibility would be bolstered because people would see that he was making an effort to correct the say/do gap that the employees had told us about.

Create three circles.

In one circle list what you’re deeply passionate about in terms of your life’s purpose.  In the second circle list what you’re very good at doing–the talent that seems to be genetically encoded.  In the third circle list what you can make a living doing—what makes sense for you economically.

Now, where do these circles intersect?  The foundation for a great work life is represented where there is a practical intersection of the three.  What I love.  What I’m good at.  Where others think I add value.

These three circles become your compass.  Am I centered where I need to be? Do I need to move up or over?

As you think about what you do these days, how much is outside those three circles?  How much can you stop doing?