Backhoes and Bureaucracy

We use tools because they make us more efficient, able to get more done, with less effort.

I use tools a lot, for construction, software development, management, leadership, organizing, travel, and I appreciate mechanics who can really use a tool.

I worked a summer with Sterling Guthrie, backhoe artist. He had a totally different way of thinking about work and a more creative relationship with gravity than did men who stood on the ground. He would use his backhoe for up, down, sideways, and twist, saving hundreds of man hours and increasing the production and safety of our crew. Sterling got more completed work out of his backhoe than any man I’ve known.

I was remembering Sterling last week while I was on a Caribbean cruise. Every time we left or came back on the ship we ran a security gauntlet. Ship’s crew, mainly from the Philippines and Eastern Europe, ran us through a scanner at a brisk pace, 100% document check, speaking to each of us by name, actively looking for signs of “not right.” They were smiling, because smiling increased their engagement with each passenger, they were engaged because they were going to be on the ship if anything went wrong, they were establishing personal connections because that is what experience professionals do.

For that cruise, we started from the Port of Baltimore, saving time, complexity, and the security-by-threat of air travel. That was a major bonus.

While I was on the cruise I got to think about why our government had shut down my municipal golf course, memorials, cultural institutions. How had they ever gotten authority to spread that misery?

I remembered a conversation with an in-law a couple of years ago. He was explaining the healthy pay bump he got from carrying a gun to his job, “I’m not a toll collector, I’m a bridge guard!” I couldn’t help myself, “Really? How many get away?”

When we came back, we went through US Customs, after 6 runs through private security screening that week. This time there was no engagement, no encouragement, with a crew who had decided our security was best protected by being unhappy and uninvolved.

Providing negative reinforcement, making no reinforcement the desired state, misses half the available reinforcement response. Our official customs experience was a little less efficient than an open doorway.

I used to accept the occasional government foul up as a part of being a citizen. As business and social groups have gotten more efficient, the government I interact with has lowered their successful completion baseline, while increasing their citizen-threat behavior.

A bureaucracy is a tool, just like a backhoe. If the operator can’t provide value while delighting the customer, it’s time to get another operator.

Sometimes you have to Drop The Other Shoe

Lennie’s Market

“God sells all things at the price of labor”

Leonardo da Vinci

Way before open source!

Increasing Value

For Actions

There are three conditions an action has to satisfy to be considered valuable.

1. You have to get it right the first time,
2. The thing you are working on has to change physically (work added), and
3. The customer has to care.

One out of three or two out of three do not qualify as valuable no matter how convincingly you protest.

For Adding Value In Transactions

I remember that value is what costs me nothing, that you can’t get at any price.

Ideas for increasing your value?

Start a Relationship – Leave Something of Value

When I meet someone, I give them a large two-sided card with information about topics, my blog posts, and items of interest that the person will find useful, in addition to my contact details for Sales Lab. We call it a Hot Sheet.

During our conversation, I will circle an item on the Hot Sheet if pertinent, or can write a URL or other reference in the margin for use later by the recipient.

It is easy to update or change and I can print as many as needed for upcoming meetings. Usually, each time I see a person at a meeting or event, the Hot Sheet is newly revised.

I was at a meeting of YPLG (The Young Professional’s Leadership Group) this week and was talking with a person who knew me but was trying to place where we had met. When I gave him a Hot Sheet, he immediately remembered where and when we met – and he said he still uses his original Hot Sheet as a technical reference.

In addition to its unique size and content, the Hot Sheet is memorable to the recipient. How memorable is another business card for your pile? Which has the best chance to begin a relationship?

Blogging – You Add The Value

You experience something of interest and write a blog post to share it with others. It may be from a conversation, an event, points made at a conference, or your experience in making something.

If you are merely reporting, the reader gets a pretty flat experience – the true value is absent from the post.

You are the one that creates value for the reader by sharing your thoughts, observations, and the best things learned by the experience. Why? Because your view is unique and insightful for the reader – much beyond the mere highlights of the topic. A case in point...

Recently I heard a talk by Steve Wozniak – the Woz behind the technical brilliance of Apple – with two other prolific bloggers. Same session, same speaker, heard the same things – but here's what each person took away from the presentation:

• Design around the features of the technology, but keep the user in mind when creating process
• Each time Woz showed him the latest project, Steve Jobs said “I can sell that”;
• People develop expertise by making things.

Best thing learned for each – what a broad range of take-aways from his talk. Imagine how different the three posts are about this meeting.

Same is true for other bloggers with large followings – readers read Dana Blankenhorn for his insight about the on-line world, not the reporting about what's new or changing; same is true about marketing and Seth Godin – it is the distilled wisdom of his posts that drives the traffic to his blog.

Bloggers create value by offering their thinking on a subject and what they've discovered. Readers frequent places where they receive value – this certainly applies to blogs as well.

Do you agree?

Check out Blah, Blah Blog at the Web Managers Roundtable, on August 9, and BlogLab, coming August 16.

Assigning Credit

We’re in a startup, which is frequently taking us where no man has gone before.

So I asked Jack, “How would you value Zack’s contribution?”

Jack said, “Well, it’s different.”

I said, “Actually, it’s exactly one third, as there are three of us working.” We are all doing very different tasks to get this beast launched. 

I was thinking about all the employees who try to make a career criticizing their coworkers, trading opinions for coffee. Ugly career.

There’s a new work ethic, where people are getting results. Cory Doctorow demonstrated the model in Makers. Small group, total contribution, getting together to increase velocity.

Jay Deragon at Social Flights said, “There is no point in criticizing or explaining social media. The only worthwhile choice is to go build something.”

What are you seeing?

Value Centric Work Analysis

How to consistently take up to 80% of the time out of a process

History Counts
Just like the story of the Easter Ham, how many of us have seen behaviors and beliefs that over time had significantly departed from best practices?

Perhaps even practiced a few ourselves?

“I don’t know who discovered water, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t a fish,” highlights how hard improving your situation is when you are in the middle of it. Why, that is like doing an engine overhaul while inflight! (Another description)

What are some other descriptions you have heard about the difficulties of improving your existing situation?

Value centric work analysis is a fast, efficient way to consistently take 80% of the time out of a process.

What could that mean for your organization?

Flow Analysis
The first thing to do is make a list of every action your organization takes to get a specific result. This is not easy.

Work has a way of going around to many people. It gets batched and stopped. It gets scrutinized and approved. It gets broken and fixed. Work becomes rework on a regular basis.

To get different results, try a different point of view. Instead of observing, imagine you are the thing being created and document every change that way. If you start as a request by email,

• Step 1 is you are sent,
• Step 2  you arrive,
• Step 3 you wait, 
• Step 4 you are examined, 
• Step 5 you wait, 
• Step 6 you get worked on,
• Step 7 you wait, 
• Repeat steps 6 and 7 as often as usual,
• Step 8 you are completed,
• Step 9 you wait,
• Step 10 you are sent to the next stop, maybe!

Repeat to describe what actually happens until you have defined the entire work process.

Now you’re ready to establish value!

Value Added
After you have an accurate work analysis, you need to figure out which steps are adding value. Normally this breaks down when the Sacred Cowboys make a last stand guarding the Sacred Cows, so let me make this easy for you.

There are three conditions that must be met for an action to be considered valuable.

First, the thing has to change physically. I have seen whole careers built around moving a piece of paper from this box to that box. That no longer qualifies. Neither does checking or scrutinizing. No improvement, no value.

Second, you have to get it right the first time. Rework is evil, doesn’t matter why. All operations involved in rework don’t count.

Finally, the customer has to care. Have you ever looked at how many operations in a process have no direct improvement to what the customer gets? This means bad times for many staff functions…at least as they are currently done.

So at its simplest, a value centric work analysis is a table of steps in a process with the name of the task, the time it takes, and three boxes to check off whether it provides each of the three conditions defining value.

Knowledge is Power
Now you have a view of your operation that is decidedly different from what you have seen before. As you look at the non-value operations, some will be easy to delete. “Why did we ever start doing that?”

Others may be mystical. “What will happen if we stop doing this?”

Some may have been defined incorrectly. Change them. No harm, no foul.

The remaining non-value operations are now sharply defined. The time has come to look at them critically, to eliminate them, to reduce the time required to do them, to think about using higher value replacements.

The result is taking A LOT of the time out of process, often dramatically reducing the cost of operations, and creating some flex for finding higher value use for resources.

Your comments?