JB Bryant - Maximizing Employees, Transforming Processes, and Building Customer Loyalty

School’s Out! How to spend your company’s “Summer Break”

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Summary: The United States recession we are experiencing is not unlike summer break when we were in school. Fewer external demands are dictating our schedules. How you utilize your “free time” will affect your success both now and when “school” starts again.

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I have to admit it – I was a terrible student in High School, and not much better in my early college years. Somehow, in my Junior year of college I experience a sudden awakening that permanently changed my attitude and approach to life and its demands. I wish I could remember just what it was that caused the shift but, alas, the memory of those years is failing. What I do know is that whatever it was, it greatly contributed to my successes throughout my Master’s program and later career.

Throughout recorded history, the US has averaged one recession every decade. They tend to last about 10-12 months.

We are officially experiencing a recession today -– commonly defined by economists as two quarters of negative GDP growth and defined by the National Bureau of Economic Research as "...a significant decline in economic activity spread across the economy, lasting more than a few months, normally visible in real GDP, real income, employment, industrial production, and wholesale-retail sales."

School’s out. It’s summer break. How are you spending your “free” time?

The most successful students in High School (whom, I admit, I thought were weird as I slept in until noon) spent summers in development camps, studying topics of their own interests, participating in academic competitions, or working summer jobs to save money for a car or college. That is, the little time they had free from external demands they spent pursuing internal demands of self-development. This served them well when they returned to “business as usual” in late August.

If your customers are not placing enough external demands on you right now, what are you doing? Are you sitting back griping and worrying? Are you cutting your staff – the very people who make your company do what it does?

It’s a strange cycle, staff reduction. Business is down, cut employees, increase the unemployment rate, reduce the amount of spending money available in the economy, sales drop even further, .… You get the picture.

What if instead, you spent this summer break in self-development? What if you used this opportunity for much-needed reflection and creative thinking to identify where your waste really comes from (the bulk of it is likely not in your employees) and to develop innovative areas for growth? What if you invested what little you might have by developing your employees into truly effective members of your organization?

Heck, how much time do you really have to do these kinds of things when the market is strong?

If you have insights or questions on how to thrive in a weak economy, please start a dialog in the comments section below and I will reply.

If you’d like to know more about how to process improvement and employee development can costs, increase innovation, improve employee morale, and pay for itself several-fold, Contact Me.

Arrows connected by boxes: Focusing on your real opportunities

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Summary: The real opportunities for your organization’s growth and profitability lie not in the boxes of your flowcharts but in the arrows that connect them.

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First, a quick announcement for my dedicated readers. I’m gradually working on integrating this blog with my organizations website. Why be in two places? Over time, this blog will be found at the Strategic Alignment Group’s site. The transition will not be an easy one, Rest assured that when it’s done I’ll announce it here and the current URL will still redirect you there.

Throughout my career I’ve diagramed perhaps 500 or more processes – office workflow processes, manufacturing processes, thought processes, software processes, you name it.

From a distance, they all look about the same: Variously shaped and positioned Boxes (representing events, activities, people, output, decisions, etc.) and arrows (representing process flow and associations).

Processes and their diagrams can be simple – such as an inner-departmental process – or quite complex – such as a “Quote-To-Cash” process in a custom manufacturing environment.

Regardless, the flowchart boils down to boxes and arrows.

I think it’s fair to say that the most attention is typically given to the boxes. Is it because they are prettier? Because they are easier to identify? Easier recognize? Contain better labels?

In reality, your greatest opportunities for growth, cost reduction, return on investment, and innovation are in the arrows.

Arrows are deceptively simple splatters of ink. But consider what they contain for a moment.

Take a simple example, part of a Claims Receiving process (we’ll call the circled envelopes “round boxes”):

Now ask the following questions for each arrow:

1. How does the Material Handler move from one box to the next?
2. What decisions must be made?
3. What information does the Material Handler need to perform this step properly?
4. What are the ramifications of not having the correct information?
5. What skills and knowledge are necessary to perform this step well?
6. What are the ramifications of not having the adequate skills and knowledge?
7. What attitude is necessary to perform this step well?
8. What are the consequences if the Material Handler has a bad attitude?
9. What could slow down movement from one box to the next?
10. What could speed up movement from one box to the next?
11. What if progression between these boxes is omitted altogether?
12. How much time and money is spent between one box and the next?

Do you see the importance of the arrows? Many more such questions could be asked, and a different process would elicit different questions. This is a relatively low-impact example, too. Plug in your own, and ask the questions that matter.

The point is, it is the arrows rather than the boxes that provide the most opportunity. The arrows contain knowledge, information, data, culture, methods, conflicting priorities, procedures, policies, talents, technologies, attitudes, materials, time, costs, and a whole lot more.

The arrows of your organization are its lifeblood. Look there to increase your profit.

If you have insights or questions on this topic, please start a dialog in the comments section below and I will reply.

If you’d like to know more about how to process improvement can costs, increase innovation, and improve employee morale, Contact Me

Knowledge What? An Intro to Knowledge Management

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Summary: A high-level, low-jargon, "fun" introduction to Knowledge Management, describing its approach, specific concerns, and methods.

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Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information? 
– T.S. Elliot

Knowledge Management. That odd phrase has been popping up a lot for the last decade or so. What in the world is it? I Googled the phrase and came up with 15,100,000 hits. I promise to condense it here.

As I answer the question, think about all the “brain work” it takes to make your company work. Some estimate that only 10-20% of the average modern company’s assets are physical. The rest are intellectual assets like patents, business processes, market share, brand loyalty, employee skills, databases, corporate image, and a host of other stuff. That takes a lot of brain work!

I remember first being struck by this in 1999 when Microsoft purchased Hotmail. Hotmail’s physical assets were worth about $100 Thousand. Microsoft paid them $400 Million.

Imagine that for a minute. I want to buy your lemonade stand. We agree that your cardboard box, jar of Country Time, pitcher, and paper cups are worth $10, but I offer to pay you $40,000 for it!

What made Hotmail worth 4000 times as much as its physical property was worth? It was Hotmail’s “brain” - its intellectual assets.

If you have only been part of your company for a short time, your experience has probably been similar to the following: Your finished product is pretty simple – some sort of widget or wadget that is delivered to the customer in a simple package. Procuring and fulfilling orders for your product, however, can be surprisingly complex. Selling, making, and delivering such a simple product requires a whole lot of very smart people doing a whole lot of very smart things together. Coming in from the outside, you have a certain advantage. You aren’t bound by the way they’ve “always done it around here.” You bring insights from the successes and mistakes of previous employers.

If, on the other hand, you’ve been with your company a long time, you’ve seen things become more complex over the years. You have a significant advantage. You remember a day when things were simpler. It’s easier for you to see through the complexity to the core business. The things newbies get distracted by are just ways of accomplishing the things you’ve done since the beginning. No matter what smart ideas new people bring to the table, you have learned to deal with the complexity and you can see how simple your business is at its core.

All of that – what new and established employees contribute, including what they’ve learned about products, business, and service there and elsewhere – is part of your company’s intellectual assets.

I’ll describe knowledge management now. As I do, think about how important communicating and learning are to performing all that brain work…but you’ll need to expand the normal use of the words “communicate” and “learn.”

In the modern world people communicate with other people and with computers. Computers communicate with people and other computers. Similarly, both people and computers learn from both people and computers.

So communication and learning happen people-to-people, people-to-computer, computer-to-people, and computer-to-computer.

That’s a large part of what makes your company go ’round, and that’s where knowledge management focuses its attention. Knowledge management is a way of thinking about communication and learning. It’s also a way of acting to ensure communication and learning are effective. It really boils down to this:

… Help people know what they need to know when they need to know it …

Knowledge management accomplishes this by developing good processes, developing good people, and developing good tools. You might think of it as Just-In-Time for knowledge.

“Managing knowledge” sounds a little weird. Can knowledge really be managed? Not really. We don’t really manage knowledge; we manage the processes, culture and tools that help people communicate, learn, and apply. But that’s too long to put on a business card.

Basically we manage knowledge creation, capture, transfer, flow, and application. To what end?

• Knowledge management can help established employees get the knowledge they need right now more efficiently – without poring through multiple systems or wasting time finding someone who knows.
• Knowledge management can help new employees see how it all fits together more quickly.
• Knowledge management can connect the pieces of the company together in a way that nurtures innovation and discovery.

And I think you’ll especially like this one…

• Knowledge management can help employees spend more time doing what they love – their core jobs – and less time preparing to do what they love.

I’ll close by describing some core beliefs in knowledge management. Hopefully they sound like common sense…

• Collaborate – All of us are smarter than any of us. your company is smartest when its people think together
• Simplicity – Communicate simply so you can learn quickly
• Some learning isn’t necessary – The better a system is designed, the less people need to learn to use it
• Only what matters – Remove all the information that doesn’t matter right now. You only need what you need; everything else is distraction
• Recycle – No need to reinvent the wheel. Reuse knowledge as often as possible
• People are better than tools – Tools are necessary, but people communicate better than computers and learn better from each other than they do from computers
• Respect experts – People at the front line know more about the details than people up the line. People up the line know more about connections between the details than people at the front line
• Process-based – Most useful knowledge in a company is directly connected with a business process. In fact, business processes are simply knowledge in action
• Results are king – Knowledge is useless unless it is linked to action. Put ideas into action as fast as possible. Understand what you want to do; determine what you need to know; decide how to communicate it; and then do it

That last one is really important. Managing knowledge – or, perfecting corporate communication and learning – has a very specific goal: Deliver quality products to customers efficiently. Or, as I repeatedly say, “transform knowledge into profit.”

If you have insights or questions on this topic, please start a dialog in the comments section below and I will reply.

If you’d like to know more about how to transform your organization’s knowledge into profit, Contact Me

Organizational Maturity

"We cannot become what we need to be by remaining what we are."
~Max Depree, American author

Tori is a wonderful young lady, exactly the girl I would want my own daughter to be if I had a daughter of my own. I am blessed to have the chance to co-parent her and be a part of her development.

One great thing about Tori is her sense of responsibility. Another is her willingness to change as she grows and learns.

A case in point is how she has been learning to participate in common family tasks. You know the ones I mean – things like clearing the table after dinner. We used to have to define specific roles:

“Tori, you take the plates; Mom will take the serving dishes; I’ll put away the leftovers.”

But she is gradually learning that things get done best when everyone sees what still needs to be done and does it. As a family, we are beginning to function like an effective team. One of us collects all the plates and silverware they can carry, someone else grabs the glasses, someone else puts away leftovers, etc., each of us making trips to and from the kitchen until the job is done.

Of course we each know our capabilities and limitations, and we do have loosely defined roles, but we get the job done without rigid job descriptions. And we do it very, very well. (OK, I’m slightly exaggerating– we’re getting there, but there’s still road to travel).

The first time I realized Tori was really learning this was a few weeks ago: We thought we were done, but Tori noticed a crumpled up paper napkin that had been left behind. She threw it away without being told.

As parents, we call this “maturity.” A number of different words have been applied to the same quality in business: Teamwork, Agility, Adaptability, and Instinctiveness are perhaps the most common. But what’s wrong with the phrase “corporate maturity?” I think it has a nice ring.

As I write this, I’m thinking of a company where I once served, which I’ll call “Acme Widgets” (I know, that really lacks creativity. Sorry).

AW was 40 years old. We expect people of roughly the same age to have a certain amount of personal maturity. We expect them to be on some sort of career path, to have grown intellectually, to have developed responsible personality traits, etc.

AW certainly had a mature career path: They were a market leader! AW was intellectually mature, too: They were innovative. And AW was mature in responsibility: They functioned by clearly defined values, were financially responsible, made quality products, and would go to all ends to ship orders on the promised ship date.

This outstanding company, like so many others, had one glaring maturity flaw that could prove detrimental to them down the line: They did not change easily, that is, they did not learn well while they grew. They were not internally adaptable.

“To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly.”
~Henri Bergson (1859-1941), French philosopher

There are a few questions I like to ask employees that help more clearly assess a company’s adaptability. Here are a few. Take a moment and answer them for yourself:

1. In your own job, how likely are you to recognize when what you do needs to change, i.e., that your job needs to evolve because of external changes?
2. How likely are you to recognize when how you do things needs to change to accommodate your evolving responsibilities?
3. Do you feel free to communicate needed changes to your supervisor or manager? (
4. Do you feel your observations and suggestions will be truly considered?
5. Do you openly make such suggestions to your supervisor?
6. Do you feel free to make changes yourself?

Finally, here’s a tough one for many people:

7. How likely are you to do something just because it needs done, regardless of job titles and without complaint or resentment? Are you more likely to throw away the paper napkins because no one has done it yet, or are you more likely to complain that the Paper Napkin Tosser didn’t do his or her job?

21st Century businesses are going through rapid, exciting changes. I trust yours is one of them. Next year will most certainly look different than this year, and each successive year will bring more change and growth potential.

Do your answers to the above suggest that you are ready to embrace the changes?

“Maturity of mind is the capacity to endure uncertainty.”
~John Finley, English historian and mathematician

If you have insights or questions on this, please start a dialog in the comments section below and I will reply.

If you’d like to know more about how to develop a mature, adaptive culture in your organization, Contact Me.

Spinning Your Web

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Summary: A parable about being realistic, turning away opportunities, or getting squashed on the pavement.

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Enjoy the following parable:

A very large and very hungry spider spun a web. It was a lot of work, but within minutes of finishing his masterpiece he had a delicious catch. A fly flew into his web, and the spider ate his treat.

"Scrumptious snack," he thought, "but I need more" -- for as I said, he was a very large and very hungry spider.

"If I spin a larger web, perhaps I can catch a larger meal."

So he set to work. He spun a large, beautiful web. He waited and waited, and soon a butterfly flew right into it.

"Hallelujah," he exclaimed. "This will make a tasty snack." The spider devoured his snack, but he still wanted more.

He was very large and very hungry indeed.

"I will now spin a HUGE web -- the biggest, most beautiful web a spider has ever spun. I'll have myself a feast!" said he.

So our spider friend spent hours spinning and spinning and spinning. He was exhausted (and worked up an even bigger appetite) until, finally, he could spin no more. He had created the biggest, most beautiful web a spider had ever spun.

After what seemed like forever to our very large and hungry spider, along came his prey -- right into the web, just as he planned.

But his prey was a human, who destroyed the spider's creation and squashed him flat on the pavement.

My, what a morbid parable that was, no? I apologize for writing something so depressing. But the truth is, in this world of unlimited marketing and over-inflated self-image, many "spiders" spin webs bigger than the prey they can "eat."

When I created the parable I was thinking of how job hunters beef up their resumes and confidently, carelessly, apply for jobs they are not truly prepared for. They may get the interview -- could possibly even schmooze their way into the job -- but they will soon get squashed on the pavement.

The application is even bigger than that, however. And this topic really irks me as a Quality-minded professional, so I need to comment on it.

It is hard as a calculus final exam to find a company with a plan for turning away business. Yes, I said "turn away business."

Take a deep breath, pop a glycerin tablet, then continue.

Increased sales volume is intoxicating. Those numbers go up, and so does your adrenaline. You spin your web bigger and bigger. You take customers with needs you haven't addressed before and, though no one will say it, you really aren't sure if you can. You have a special person or group -- maybe a Sales or Engineering Director, maybe someone else -- to which those "challenging" requests are sent. But that person has been trained to always say "yes." We'll make it happen.

Then what happens? You do your best, but you produce an inferior product and hope they won't notice or you run your established customers behind schedule. If neither of those is true, then you have really overworked your employees and morale really stinks.

In any of those cases, quality suffers -- product quality, on-time quality, or employee relations quality.

You spun your web and got squashed on the pavement.

Though it's pervasive, I've noticed that this phenomenon is more common among smaller companies.

Coincidence, or cause/effect?

Please -- for the sake of your customers and your employees -- know how big a web you should spin. Have a realistic "turn away business" plan in place, and enforce it.

Your feast will come soon enough.

Why does this happen? What do you think? Sound off by leaving a comment below. Or, contact me directly.

Impassable Quality - Your Company's IQ

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Summary: Not your typical article on quality! Practical analysis of what causes poor quality and how to ensure quality. Checklist included!

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You've experienced the frustration. So has every professional who has led a complex, high-output environment.

Quality standards were once given highest priority. Thousands of man-hours were spent developing, perfecting, and implementing them. But that was during "slow season." Now - with business booming - soaring claims suggest those quality measures have been pushed aside.

Why does this happen? Because it can.

What I want you discover is that it doesn't have to be this way. With the right planning up-front, you can infuse your organization with Impassable Quality.

"Impassable" has two meanings. I'll call them Roadblock and Control Gate.

A roadblock is impassable because it prevents you from proceeding. You have to turn around and go another way.

A control gate is impassable because it cannot be bypassed. It's the only way to get from here to there.

This last sense is what I want you to build into your quality initiatives. Quality that cannot (not should not) be bypassed any more than you can start your car without the correct key.

I've provided a helpful checklist to use in your planning, below. But permit me a brief digression, please, as I provide a context for quality.

Every highly successful organization today has, to some degree, realized that managing the flow of corporate knowledge is imperative to success. Simply stated, the goal of managing knowledge is transforming knowledge into profit. And the only way to do that is to transform knowledge into operational requirements.

These aren't just nice goals; they are exactly what you tried to accomplish when you implemented quality controls.

"Impassable Quality" is just a shorthand way of saying "knowledge that has been transformed into operational requirements." If what you produce matches your operational requirements, it will be of good quality. If it doesn't match your operational requirements, it will be of poor quality.

Logically, then, the only way to ensure that your knowledge matches your organizational requirements – that it increases profit in every case – is to make sure quality can't be circumvented; to make it impassable.

Let me say it once more: If quality controls can be bypassed, they will be. Who has the time to do things they don't have to do when business is booming?

To understand what is required to make Quality the only possible way to complete a process, we need to understand why quality slips. Human processes are much more challenging to design and enforce than automated processes. Following are some primary reasons we end up with poor quality output from human processes.

1. People Don't Know – People don't know what they need to know or what they are supposed to do. They end up either making their best guess or improvising
2. People Don't Understand – Information is available but is too complex. People either don't understand it, misinterpret it, or ignore it. Again, they end up either making their best guess or improvising
3. People Don't Care – People may not care about quality because they have bad attitudes, because they don't realize why quality matters in a given task, or because their work is evaluated by a goal that competes with quality
4. People Don't Need To – There are no significant consequences to poor quality, or at least the consequences aren't visible to the person who allowed/caused the quality to suffer

Below, I have taken those causes of poor quality, broken them down, and created a checklist of questions you may use to evaluate your solutions. I've provided examples for each question.

1. People Don't Know

1. Is information immediately available when it is needed?
   Ex. – The user receives instructions at the very moment s/he needs them (not before and not after) and doesn't have to waste time finding them
2. Is only necessary information presented – no clutter, not buried in a bunch of irrelevant information?
   Ex. – A document only contains what is needed at the moment, not surrounded by extra information, lines, checkboxes, etc.
3. Is what to do with information clearly stated?
   Ex. – The next steps in the process are clearly stated along with the information being used
4. Is "quality output" clearly defined, agreed upon, and communicated for this context?
   Ex. – People know exactly what standards they should shoot for. Maybe they are posted on a nearby wall, written into a quality checklist, incorporated into a form, etc.

2. People Don't Understand

1. Is information simplified – for example, summarized in a way that requires less thought/time for interpretation?
   Ex. – Specifications are laid out in checklists and also summarized in a concise paragraph
2. Is information clear – without unnecessary jargon or unfamiliar abbreviations?
   Ex. – Words and phrases are fully spelled out and the document consistently uses a set of standard terms. A corporate thesaurus or dictionary is available for definitions when needed
3. Do people know how to use it?
   Ex. – Training, clear process definitions, and reference material are made available when needed
4. Do Quality Controls allow for exceptional situations so that people know what to do when they encounter exceptions?
   Ex. – Quality Controls are developed for "standard" process iterations, but rules are also built in for "non-standard" situations, such as when non-standard add-ons are required

3. People Don't Care

1. Is an accountability system in place?
   Ex. – Regular reports are used by management to reward employees who give the greatest attention to quality, and to correct problems quickly when quality begins to decline
2. Is the responsible person evaluated by a goal that conflicts with quality?
   Ex. – Employees are rewarded based on volume output alone with no regard to quality output. Naturally, they become more concerned with more about volume than quality

4. People Don't Need To

1. Do we measure quality and communicate how we're doing to everyone involved?
   Ex. –Corporate reports include quality numbers along with other numerical data; internal and/or external newsletters provide everyone with a view of the quality of our output, etc.

And this is the big one…

1. Is there an exact fit between quality output and the next task in the process?
   Ex. –It is impossible to begin the next task in a process without a quality product from the previous task, just as it is impossible to drive the car with the wrong set of keys

Use these questions to guide your planning as you develop improvements. Build Impassable – unavoidable, permanent – Quality into your solutions.

If you would like to discuss Impassable Quality, please contact me.

The Priority of Minding Your P's

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Summary: Cluttering people's workdays with information they don't need is as irresponsible as not providing what they do need. And it's expensive.

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Investing wisely...
Should your organization invest its resources in pushing knowledge to users (supply) or helping them pull it when they want it (demand)?

That question highlights a long-standing debate in knowledge transfer theory. Push and Pull are often called the "Two P's" of knowledge transfer.

The answer is really a no-brainer. There are plenty of things you don't realize you need to know (news, opportunities, changes, etc.), and those should be pushed to you. But when there's knowledge you know you need, you should easily find it (pull).

…The question isn’t big enough.

Choices, choices, choices...
You’ve been there.

The restaurant’s menu is a wee bit over-zealous. The variety is great, but deciding what to order is time consuming and frustrating with such an extensive menu.

     "Pull” is difficult when the volume of information is large.

Your server makes some recommendations. S/he is narrowing down your choices, hoping to entice you to make a decision. Unfortunately, the server’s choices aren’t appealing.

     “Push” is only helpful when the information is right.

You pick something almost at random. Invariably what your meal partner ordered is more appealing than what you received.

Let’s get this straight...
What if as you were seated, your server handed you a menu that only had food you were in the mood for at the moment? All you had to look at was what really mattered. How much more quickly and effectively would you order?

An important third P is necessary for an organization's knowledge to be turned into profit. We intuitively recognize it, but we easily overlook it.

Priority...
I'm not the first to recognize this. I've usually called it "relevance." David Moorcroft of the outstanding Royal Bank of Canada first called it "Priority." (1)

Restaurants may be a long way from offering only what you want, but modern technology and strategic method make this possible in today’s businesses.

In today's world, cluttering people's workdays with information they don't need is just as irresponsible as not providing them what they do need. And it's expensive. Very expensive.

Simply stated, if we do not evaluate how important and relevant particular knowledge is to a given situation, we'll spread around a bunch of information that doesn't really matter. Workers will end up with "infoglut," and no one will pay attention to any of it.

Evaluating Priority is not optional...
As Mr. Moorcroft wrote:
"For technology to truly make communication more effective, it must deliver information that is relevant, easy to find, and aligned with a strategy...for greatest impact."

Contact me if you’d like to improve the relevance of the information and knowledge you deliver throughout your organization.

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Footnotes:

(1) Mr. Moorcroft's article, Enabling RBC's employees to choose their own news, appeared in the Oct/Nov 2007 issue of Strategic Communication Management.