Management Reports

Management reports remind me of the peephole in my front door. I seldom see anything I recognize.

Management reports are backward-looking documents, rehashing the recent past. Often used as part of a roll-up, by people charged with repeating others’ reports, usually without understanding them. (See GIGO)

At best, they represent 90 minutes of diversion condensing the last 50 hours/30 days/90 days of work.

Worse is a response of “Let’s discuss,” which turns into hours of the dance of gray fantasy, “Tell me what you want, I’ll agree.” A smart economist told me last month, “You don't torture a dataset until it confesses.”

If the right answers were available, don’t you think I’d have put ’em in there? I wrote one of these reports last week.

Ever notice that when the right answers are available, they are no longer worthy of the report? We’ve already moved to a next stage.

“Just checking, did we get through the next gate when I wasn’t paying attention?” It’s a management fantasy, like being on a cruise ship and waking up in a new port.

If you weren’t going to use management reports to reverify known history again, or trying to change reality to observers’ preconceptions, what might you do?

I’ve always found management reports are light on senior commitments, “When I come down the trail, hotly pursued by the entire population of hostiles, you’re sure you will have that skyhook rented and ready?” 

“I assure you, we’ll really try our best!”

Or what about celebration? The middle of a project can get kind of dreary, or it can be wonderful. That’s up to manglement. Which do you think gets you better work product?

Heck, something good must have happened, otherwise how will we remember what good is?

If you’re just going to roll up your GIGO, how about supplying some top down information that improves strategy, speed, or safety? Best practices are either blindingly obvious or they’re fiction. Best practices are hard work, a lot like blogging, and that’s why we pay the top guys the big bucks.

How would you improve this list?

Tips 4 The Big Chair – Goodness that will curl your toes!

Importing Best Practices

I no longer think different ways of working are inherently better or worse. I find the most productive workers in any task group have found an optimal process. Often that structure can be improved by adding processes from outside the environment.

That’s harder than it looks, as Nothing is impossible for the person who doesn’t have to do it.

Yet, I have seen several times when importing a little knowledge from another discipline made for great gains.

My second tour selling COBOL, we started changing our offer every six weeks, borrowed from something I had read about cosmetics retailing. Prospects were meeting with us just to be entertained, but as long as we were there, would we take a look at...

Wasn’t too long before senior management wanted to renegotiate commissions if it was that easy...

Building a cellphone empire, we had enough hard partiers that we used parts of the 12 step approach to improve our global scalability. They understood the need for weekly meetings, for having everyone define their reality, for finding individual solutions. The level of managerial opinion went way down, and we set industry records for five years.

More frequently, I’ve seen best practice candidates that appealed to someone’s ego or how they THOUGHT the world should be. I wasted six weeks once because my boss kinda read a book on an airplane and thought he had found the silver bullet. My tribe thought I’d lost my mind.

Years later I learned Best Practices Better Be Blatantly Obvious, Otherwise They Are Not Best Practices. Wish I had figured that out.

Just when we’ve optimized all we know, that’s when we get to participate in disruptive innovation, ready or not. Just when you perfect the carburetor, you get fuel injection.

Stewart Emery says there are two requirements for growth, an absolute commitment to telling the truth about reality and surrounding yourself with people who are committed to growth.

Isn’t that the real secret of best practices?

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