Feeling lonely today? Let’s call a meeting.

Suddenly, one of the partners, chuckled and gained the floor (not too difficult with only three people in a Skype videoconference). He recalled an earlier job in a medium size technology firm where the standing joke among the engineers concerning management was, “These guys seem to operate on the principle, ‘Feeling lonely today? Let’s call a meeting.’ “

After we all laughed a bit we once again returned to the ugly reality that most managers still do not conduct meetings following even the basics of best management practices. They do not ask what the meeting is about, what are the deliverables to be expected? Who actually needs to be at the meeting? Do we have enough information, data, to hold this meeting? Do we have a reasonable expectation that we can reach some actionable conclusions that will lead to real tasks with real outcomes? Or, is this just another meeting held ritually to review the status of projects? The moto of this approach to meetings is lets get everyone in the room and kick things around until the day has passed and everyone is bored to death.

Meetings are the lifeblood of organizations. Plan them as though blood will flow.

Meetings are the lifeblood of organizations. But, they need to be conducted as if blood was literally being spent in the process.

If you like graphical representations, here is an explosion of the key elements in a coaching session. Scroll down (click here instead) below for a narrative description.

A Coaching Session

A coaching session is a hands-on work with you, owner and leader of a start-up or small businesses. I apply strong active listening with useful questions and appropriate data to help you find the best path through the maze of opportunities, risks, and the occasional disastrous bright idea. Then, I work with you to develop a concrete list of tasks that you must accomplish to push your business toward the goals. Ongoing work focuses on getting the right things done and refocusing as the situation develops. A coaching session is a structured conversation about your business. Most start with issues or opportunities that are on your mind today. I ask lots of questions that lead you to explain what the opportunity is and how you think you will tackle it. It is amazing how often just explaining to someone outside of your business how you are thinking about a particular situation reveals weaknesses, or highlights strengths, in your thinking. Thinking out loud is frequently productive because you are forced to hear the ideas outside your head and, of course, I can hear them, too. Further questions probe for problems or missing elements in your plans or perhaps other opportunities that you have not recognized. I also bring my thirty years of business experience into the discussion through examples from my own work or from experiences with other clients

Because you and I have had discussions about where you want your company to be in two or three years, I can ask how this particular opportunity contributes to reaching those goals. This is one of my key values to you. I am not tied up in the fray of your day-to-day activities, so it is easier for me to remind you of the long view, the big picture.

Sometimes new approaches or skills will be required to capture the opportunity. Most of these can be learned in a just-in-time manner and learned more readily and thoroughly because you re applying them to an actual problem you need to solve. At times, I will point you towards resources for you to explore to build up your knowledge of management principles and practices.

Sometime during our conversation you or I will bring up the two or three specific tasks that you said you would work on to drive your business forward over the last week or so. We will review and critique what you did and either slap each other on the back (conceptually of course) for the successes or re-tool the approach for the less than optimal results. And before the close of our discussion you will tell me what you think are the upcoming two or three forward looking tasks for the upcoming week.

One of the neat things about all of this is that it takes place on the telephone or via Skype over the Web. If we need to review some plans or financial data, we can do that via the Web. You meet with me from wherever you need to be. It is easy to fit an hour into your schedule with no need for me to come to your office.

Where do the new approaches and skills come from? Are they just a laundry list of what I happen to know about? The short answer is no. Sometimes it appears that management is just a hodgepodge of practices and verbosity from academics and consultants. But, we really do know something about how high-perfromance organizations work. These principles and practices flow from high-performance management work of the last fifty years from around the world. These are  embodied most boldly in the Toyota Production System (TPS – also know in the US as lean manufacturing or lean enterprise), Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award Criteria, ISO9000-2008, and EFQM.

What About Results?

Learn more about our results with clients here and about who are clients are here.

Is Business Coaching for Me?

“I have not had a coach since high school. I am not sure I need a touchy-feely experience to make me feel better about myself. Isn’t this going to cost a lot of money?”

Here are some ways to think about these questions and more.

Tell Me More about Management Principles and Practices

You can learn more about what these are and where they come from here.

1. Invest in culture as a corporate asset
2. Make listening an enterprisewide (sic) skill
3. Turn innovation into a continuous process
4. Provide a clear and compelling purpose
5. Extend and enhance the digital fabric
6. Practice good social citizenship

Lists like this one are very popular. I have been known to make lists of key practices and the like. But for the practicing manager lists are frequently tough to integrate into day-to-day work. Mr. Temkin’s six imperatives falls into this problem category. Overall, the six imperatives are reasonable enough as they stand. But I want to take a closer look at each and then suggest a more global approach.

Practice good social citizenship

Lets start with the sixth, “Practice good social citizenship”. This defies the laws of capitalism. Capitalism has never been about doing anyone other than the firm good. In fact, there are enormous built-in penalties for firms that attempt to do anything significant in this realm. One only needs to review the history of the last year or so to see that companies act in their own (management not necessarily stockholder) best interests.

Even today we are being treated a new episode in this  debacle in Europe with the near collapse of the common Euro currency under the weight of Greek financial malfeasance. Would not good social citizenship lead Goldman Sachs and the other big banks not enable the bad habits of the Greek government?

One of the primary rules of capitalism is that every individual firm seeks to externalize any and every cost that it can. You can see this all around in day-to-day life. Why do we have environmental laws that attempt to restrict how companies deal with the waste from their processes? Why do we have Workers’ Compensation Laws? How is it that the largest financial institutions in the country drove themselves into insolvency only because they knew that they would be shielded by the American government from failure? You can add you own examples to this list.

The forces of externalizing whatever a firm can and the desire to make profits wherever possible under any conditions, even outright illegal ones, has always overwhelmed calls for “good social citizenship”. Nothing in Mr. Temkin’s recommendations will change this. This imperative is just window dressing.

Invest in culture as a corporate asset

Every manager knows that company culture is important. Mostly, this awareness has grown through learning to manage in environments that are toxic or moderately negative at best. So this imperative makes some intuitive sense. A central problem emerges when you try to develop a strategy and tactics to carry out this imperative. Without an actionable definition of what corporate culture is, it feels like pushing the proverbial string towards an unknown objective.

So, lets step back a moment and ask, “What does ‘corporate culture’ mean?”

Wikipedia suggests some of the complexities in its definition of “organizational culture” in the following quotation from the beginning of its discussion:

This definition continues to explain organizational values also known as “beliefs and ideas about what kinds of goals members of an organization should pursue and ideas about the appropriate kinds or standards of behavior organizational members should use to achieve these goals. From organizational values develop organizational norms, guidelines or expectations that prescribe appropriate kinds of behavior by employees in particular situations and control the behavior of organizational members towards one another.”

Organizational culture is not the same as corporate culture. It is wider and deeper concepts, something that an organization ‘is’ rather than what it ‘has’.

Corporate culture is the total sum of the values, customs, traditions and meanings that make a company unique. Corporate culture is often called “the character of an organization” since it embodies the vision of the company’s founders. The values of a corporate culture influence the ethical standards within a corporation, as well as managerial behavior.

Mr. Temkin suggests tactics for managers to use to “manage their corporate assets”: ^[[2]]

1. Track employee goodwill
2. Develop a Voice of the Employee Program
3. Establish a vocabulary around culture
4. Actively manage it.

There is merit in each of these but without a useful understanding of the existing culture and a definition of the corporate culture you are trying to build. These programs will lead nowhere.

Here are a few references to statements by companies about their culture:

• Google
• Bunker Hill Home Insurance
• Kaplan Real Estate (PDF download)
• CareerBuilder.com
• Altera

As you have discovered there is considerable variability in what is, and is not, included in the actual day-to-day usage of the term “culture”. Nevertheless, there are lots of common threads here. The question then becomes how do you define the culture of your organization, and how do you make changes that respond to the gaps between the future states and the present state? More on how I might respond to this below.

Make Listening An Enterprisewide Skill

Listening as an active skill is required at the personal and organizational level. Every good and great manager is, by definition, a great listener. So, this imperative fits into the obvious category. The Web has opened new avenues to practice listening and made it possible for listening to the outside world, to customers, competitors, technologists, and so on, accessible far inside every organization. And, in parallel, the Web has made it possible for employees and managers to listen to each other in ways not possible earlier. Tempkin’s suggestions for how managers can cultivate listening are good:

• Listen in a variety of ways
• Listen by example (senior managers need to demonstrate active listening)
• Listen to employees
• Listen for soft voices
• Listen to online communities
• Actively encourage listening

But, Tempkin’s claim, “The bottom line: enterprise listening allows firms to embrace change”, is not satisfying. Listening is a way of engaging with those around you. It is a methodology for discovering what is going on and why. Listening supports real engagement by employees and stakeholders. Listening opens the social space to the creation of new ideas and connections. Listening provides moments when the brain of listener is taking information in instead of thinking about the next point they want to make. But, the connection between listening and embracing change is not causal nor even necessarily suggestive of a significant link. Embracing change requires an understanding of either the opportunities to be gained or disasters avoided. Listening is simply one of the many activities that might go on while change is considered, put off, avoided, or rushed towards.

Turn Innovation into a Continuous Process

Here is an imperative chock full of key words, innovation, continuous, and process. These are bread and butter for every high performance organization. There have been, and continue to be, significant experimentation worldwide in how to foster and drive innovation. Many of these encompass far more than individual companies. Whole countries are trying to foster innovation through combinations of academic, government, and private sector assets. But, to focus on the company level, there are numerous models of innovation. One thing they all share is a view of innovation as a process, a continuous process. Despite the use of the words “continuous process” in Mr. Temkin’s imperative, there is only a hint that a company has to define its own innovation process^[[3]].

As with other of Mr. Temkin’s imperatives the suggested tactics are good, just lacking a strategic and process based context. And this is why most companies that are serious about innovation answer Temkin’s closing challenge, “The Bottom Line: innovation is too important to leave to chance.”, by building a continuous innovation process into their overall company architecture.

Provide a Clear and Compelling Purpose

Temkin hits squarely on the central issue with Mission, Vision and Strategic Plans and Statements of all varieties.  “Just about every large organization has vision and mission statements floating around their hallways. But when it comes to making decisions on a day-to-day basis, these documents are no where to be found. They play NO Role in how the company is actually run.” Unfortunately. Temkin offers us a less then compelling set of recommendations.

• Rediscover your brand
• Look for alignment
• Market to employees
• Make decisions purposefully

The corporate world has been filled with experiments on how to solve the problem of putting strategy to work. It is clear that bridging the gap between vision and planning and day-to-day tactics requires a structured business process and  a lot of management energy to assure that the process is working continuously. Speaking of decisions, Peter Drucker pointed out in his 1967 book, The Effective Executive^[[4]] “”Unless a decision has ‘degenerated into work’ it is not a decision; it is at best a good intention.” This is still true and points to the fact that visioning and planning are the easy part, the tough work is putting the plans into action and having them become the day-to-day work of the company.

Here are a few names and phrases that you can investigate to learn more about current business processes that address this issue:

• MBO (Management by Objective – one of the original concepts)
• Hoshin Planning
• Balanced Scorecard

“Market to employees” is an unfortunate phrase. The very word ‘marketing’ inspires nothing but cynicism from every person on the face of the planet who has ever been exposed to the dreadnought of corporate pr, advertising, and general corporate manipulation. Management needs to communicate transparently and honestly with its employees and simultaneously try to be honest about the limits of its transparency and honesty. Almost 30 years ago, one of the original high-performance systems management gurus, W. Edwards Deming, in his 14 key management principles wrote:

Eliminate slogans, exhortations, and targets for the work force asking for zero defects and new levels of productivity. Such exhortations only create adversarial relationships, as the bulk of the causes of low quality and low productivity belong to the system and thus lie beyond the power of the work force.

Now, you may object that marketing is not “slogans, exhortations, and targets”. However, there are very few, if any, managements that do not descend to exactly this when addressing their employees. And focusing on this part of Deming’s principle is to miss the perhaps more powerful idea, fact perhaps, that the “causes of low quality and low productivity belong to the system and thus lie beyond the power of the work force.” Management controls the design and deployment of the company’s systems. They set the rules of work, provide training (or not) and guidance to getting the work done. Until management accepts its true responsibilities for the success and failure of the company, marketing to employees will always be seen as the manipulative cynical act it is.

Extend and Enhance the Digital Fabric

There can be no arguing with the momentum of the pervasive Web. The visible opportunities here are so numerous and the ones yet to be discovered likely to be just as numerous, so the imperative for every organization to engage is obvious. Temkin states four ideas for executives to keep in mind:

• Understand digital economics
• Assume increasing adoption
• Improve usability, a lot
• Connect online with offline

One point concerning Temkin’s view of digital economics is that business model making should never be left to finance people. Managers must take the initiative here because no finance team will reliably understand customer interactions and operations. Without the input from those directly involved at the front lines, finance driven business models almost invariably look good, even very sophisticated, but are usually disconnected from the realities of the business.

Temkin’s comments about connecting online with offline bring to mind again a guiding principle, one that is at the heart of his work. Every effort to design systems must begin with the requirements of customers, whether these are end customers or intermediary internal customers. Only by beginning with the customer view can you sort out the correct balance of system functions and user interfaces, whether online or offline. This process starts with customers, and only then involves others who play a role in creating and refining a company’s operational systems.

Epilogue: It’s Time To Reinvent Management

There is much that could be said about this call for reinvention. One thought stands out. Real change in management comes from two sources, the external realities that impinge on companies and senior management’s attention and approach to how to respond to the external realities. The first, the external realities, are uncontrollable, though at times unknowable, facts. The only controllable factor is senior management’s approaches to their work. Only when senior management brings new, more powerful models of management to bear on their work do matters like what MBAs learn, or how, and to what extent, the company trains staff have meaning to the results.

I have argued for years that the best systematic models of management are to be found in the arena of high-performance business systems. These are now widely known and globally deployed through models like Toyota Production System^[[5]], Baldrige Criteria, EFQM Excellence Model, and ISO9001-2008 Quality Management System. Though they differ in many siginficant ways, there is also substantial overlap, particularly at the top level of guiding principles and practices, All of them are widely used and under continuous improvement by users and experts.

If you would like to begin the journey towards high performance management consider these 14 management principles from The Toyota Way^[[6]] :

I. Having a long-term philosophy that drives a long-term approach to building a learning organization

1. Base your management decisions on a long-term philosophy, even at the expense of short-term financial goals

II. The right process will produce the right results

1. Create a continuous process flow to bring problems to the surface
2. Use “pull” systems to avoid overproduction
3. Level out the workload (heijunka). (Work like the tortoise, not the hare)
4. Build a culture of stopping to fix problems, to get quality right the first time
5. Standardized tasks and processes are the foundation for continuous improvement and employee empowerment
6. Use visual control so no problems are hidden
7. Use only reliable, thoroughly tested technology that serves your people and processes

III. Add value to the organization by developing its people and partners

1. Grow leaders who thoroughly understand the work, live the philosophy, and teach it to others
2. Develop exceptional people and teams who follow your company’s philosophy
3. Respect your extended network of partners and suppliers by challenging them and helping them improve

IV. Continuously solving root problems to drive organizational learning

1. Go and see for yourself to thoroughly understand the situation (Genchi Genbutsu).
2. Make decisions slowly by consensus, thoroughly considering all options; implement decisions rapidly (Nemawashi).
3. Become a learning organization through relentless reflection (hansei) and continuous improvement (Kaizen).

1. experiencematters.wordpress.com
2. I will not provide citations for mentions from Mr. Temkin’s book. It is only 15 pages long and so you can figure out the citations by just downloading and reading it.
3. the hint is in his last suggestion, ‘manage an innovation pipeline’
4. Peter Drucker, The Effective Executive – the definitive guide to getting the right things done, (Harper Collins, NY,  2006) p. 114
5. TPS and further expanded in scope in the Toyota Management System
6. adapted from Liker, Jeffrey. The Toyota Way. 1st ed. McGraw-Hill, 2003.

“DO YOU…

1. IMPROVE basic, measured efficiencies continuously?
2. THINK simply and directly about what you are doing and why?
3. BEHAVE towards others as you wish them to behave towards you?
4. EVALUATE each business and business opportunity with total, fact-based objectivity?
5. CONCENTRATE on what you do well?
6. ASK questions ceaselessly about performance, markets and objectives?
7. MAKE MONEY- knowing that, if you don’t, you can’t make anything else?
8. ECONOMISE always seeking Limo (Least Input for Most Output)?
9. FLATTEN the organisation to spread authority and responsibility?
10. ADMIT to your own failings and shortcomings and correct them?
11. SHARE the benefits of success with all those who helped to achieve it?
12. TIGHTEN up the organisation wherever and whenever you can because familiarity breeds slackness?
13. ENABLE everybody to optimise their individual and group contribution?
14. SERVE your customers with all their requirements to standards of perceived excellence in quality?
15. TRANSFORM performance by innovating creatively in products and processes including the processes of management?

Again from this email concerning this list: “These questions penetrate to the heart of successful management. They have passed, and will pass, the test of time.

This list looks a lot like others I have seen, and certainly many entries would be on such a list that I might create. But, whenever I see lists like this, I say to myself, “Great, but how do I do this?” Lets just take number 15, for example,  “Transform performance by innovating….”. What business processes do I put in place that assure that these results are regularly and sustainably produced? Or, what approaches and tools do I deploy to achieve number 8, “Economize…” ? Again, are there tools and approaches available that assure the we meet number 13, “ENABLE everybody to optimize their individual and group contribution?”

Without wasting further time with rhetorical questions, let me point out that in fact there are well-developed, well-tested systems of business processes available for a manager who wants and needs to achieve positive answers to questions like those posed by Heller. These include Lean^[[2]] , Baldrige^[[3]] , EFQM^[[4]] , or ISO9001-2008^[[5]]. None of these are simple cookbooks of management. The reality of management problems is much more complex and requires some subtlety in thinking through how to apply the principles and practices of these management systems to the individual enterprise. Nevertheless, these management systems provide the tools to systematically achieve results that answer the 15 points of this checklist, and more.

There is something else that interests me about lists like Heller’s 15. These lists almost always contain a provocative overlap between the attributes and skills of the manager and those of the organization. This overlap produces an opportunity (and responsibility) for the manager to drive the development and maintenance of these attributes in the organization. On the other hand, without the manager embodying a number of these attributes and skills, the organization will not come to embody them. In this case the manager’s performance is a negative driver of performance.

Lets take a look at a couple of Heller’s 15 as examples of this overlap phenomenon.

Number 4, “EVALUATE each business and business opportunity with total, fact-based objectivity?” calls for a fact-based approach to business. If the manager does not act, think, and talk in a fact-based manner consistently and rigorously, the organization will veer off this path quickly in response. If a manager does not gather facts and make decisions based on facts^[[6]] the organization will note this and begin to act in a fashion consistent with whatever decision making process the manager uses. This is a simple fact of life. People will do as the boss does, not as the boss says. On the other hand, if the manager is fact-centered in decision making, the organization will respond in like.

Number 13, “ENABLE everybody to optimise their individual and group contribution?”, is another interesting example of the overlap between the personal approaches and performance of the manager and and those of the organization. Central to every high-performance organization is the challenge to create an environment in which every person can and does make a fully engaged and productive contribution to the organization. The manager’s involvement in cross-functional team-based work expressly embodies this approach. After all, the people who report to a general manager (CEO, divisional manager, owner) are by definition cross-functional and they should solve the organization’s challenges as a cross-functional team. If the manager carries out his/her work in a cross-functional team-based manner, this will drive and support similar approaches throughout the organization. And, similar to our earlier discussion, failure here will support traditional management methods of command and control.

This overlap between the individual and the organizational is a great resource for the manager who wants to build a high-performance organization. They can make a direct contribution to the transformation by learning new approaches and skills and applying them in their day-to-day work. And, really, the principles and practices are quite straight forward. It requires more persistence than genius to build high-performance organizations. The transformation process is not like building a rocket where every part must work perfectly to even get off the launch pad.

1. http://www.thinkingmanagers.com/
2. Lean is the American name for the Toyota Production System, also more broadly the Toyota Business System. There is no standards organization for lean principles and practices. A good starting point is Womack, James P., and Daniel T. Jones. Lean Thinking: Banish Waste and Create Wealth in Your Corporation, Revised and Updated. 2nd ed. Free Press, 2003 and The Lean Enterprise Institute
3. Baldrige National Quality Program Criteria
4. European Foundation for Quality Management
5. International Organization for Standardization ISO9001-2008 Quality management systems — Requirements
6. Here is an interesting point about “facts”. Facts are by definition observable and independent of any individual. Facts exist in the shared space of the organization; they do not belong to any person, but to the organization.

No Significant Differences between Stars and Average in Intelligence, Problem-solving or Technical Skills

So it was with some anticipation that I read through Robert E. Kelley’s  How to Be a Star at Work: 9 Breakthrough Strategies You Need to Succeed (Three Rivers Press, 1999).  This book is based on research at Bell Labs in the 1980s, and 3M a bit later, on the differences between “stars” and average managers.  . Learning to be an effective manager is a multi-disciplinary-multi-modal effort. Clearly an important step is to understand what constitutes the approaches, practices, and skills of an effective manager. Based on work with hundreds of managers, Kelley found that there was no significant difference between “star” and average managers in their raw intelligence, problem solving skills, and technical skill attributes.This may seem surprising until you remember that accomplishing real results in the business world is not a based on individual performance but on the collective efforts of a whole organization. There are almost no significant business problems (or technical ones, too) that can be solved by a single individual. In fact, it is the job of a manager to bring together all of the resources required to achieve real results, focus them on the task and push, pull, inveigle, cajole, lead, or any other verb that describes the persuading that goes on to organize groups in action to achieve real results. Viewed from this perspective it seems less surprising that being a “star” manager has more to do with attributes other than raw intelligence, problem-solving, and technical knowledge.

Better Strategies and Skills in nine areas

What Kelley did find was that the stars has better strategies and skills in nine areas:

1. Initiative – working the white spaces of the organization
2. Networking – knowing who knows what in the company’
3. Self-management – managing your whole life at work
4. Getting the big picture
5. Followership – checking your ego at the door and leading in assists
6. Teamwork
7. Leadership – doing small-”l” leadership in a big”L”world
8. Organizational savvy
9. Show-and-Tell: persuading your audience with the right message

There is some overlap among these nine strategies. For instance Followership, Teamwork, and Small “l” leadership are clearly interdependent ideas. But I do not want to quible here. If you compare this list with the attributes of high performance organizations you will find useful correlations and synergies.

This book is widely available through your local library and from bookstores local and online.

1. see Henry Mintzberg, Managers Not MBAs: A Hard Look at the Soft Practice of Managing and Management Development, 1st ed. (Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2004) for more on this.

A Google search for the phrase “time management” returns the droll news that there are more than 14,900,000 responses. Amazon lists 448 books with ‘time management” in the title or subject line. A similar search on Youtube.com returns over 2,000 videos about time management.

But, what can this really be about? Time is a concept we use to delimit the past from the present, and whatever future there might be. Einstein is reported to have said, “The only reason for time is so that everything doesn’t happen at once.”^[[1]] Perhaps because we, as human beings, are a fleeting moment, we have a special focus on time. We are very aware that our time is limited, unknowable.

In any event, as is obvious, yet easily ignored, time, just speaking of it in the world of business and organizations, is not an inventory item. Nor is it a piece of capital equipment. No one has figured out how to make it intellectual property. Time has no place on any financial statements as an asset nor liability. Time only appears there in the sense already mentioned, as a way of differentiating what has already happened from the present moment, coupled usually with suppositions and claims about what will happen in the future. Time is not a process to produce value for customers.

All of this is just chewing around the fact that time appears to be important to our work lives, but it is ineluctably, and unmanageably drifting on.

Then we have this other word, “management”,  in the phrase, “time management”. Management is about goals, direction, focus, persistence, process, enrolling and enabling the work of others, and results. No where in the work of management is there a focus on controlling, directing, or managing something uncontrollable. In fact, when it comes to uncontrollable elements in the life of a firm or organization, the most applicable maxim is: “Control the controllable and forget about everything else.”

When I think of this phrase, “time management” I get brain hurt. The two concepts just can not occupy the same space in my mind. ”Time management” exactly demonstrates the meaning of the word “oxymoron”. The Greek roots are “sharp” and “dull”. Are you getting brain hurt now?

Figure out what is important and getting on with doing that. What results are you striving for?

The real truth is that we should drop the phrase “time management” from our vocabularies as meaningless, or  worse, a distracting mental construct. So, what is all of this about? Even a casual glance through the vast literature of “time management”, or just a quick remembrance of our own thinking about this specious “time management”, reveals what this is all about. It always come down to figuring out what is important and getting on with doing the important. What results are we striving for?

Seize the Moment for the Important

The strategy is to determine what is really important for your business and simply seize time and work on that. All of those other activities that are less important must not really need to be done when you really are focusing on what is important. And, we know that all that other day-to-day work will always overflow any available time. The only strategy to follow is to focus on the important. Generate real results around the important. Following this approach will both improve your productivity and the company’s results and shed very interesting light on all of those day-to-day meetings, conversations, and other tasks that now are getting crowded off your plate by your focus on the important.

1. I could not find a reference citation for this quote. It is ubiquitous on the web. Perhaps it is apocryphal? In a recent re-read of David Allen’s Getting Things Done Penguin, 2001), he has a side note (p. 5): “Time is the quality of nature that keeps events from happening all at once. Lately it doesn’t seem to be working”. – Anonymous

“You have to walk the talk.”

A central truth is that managers must model high performance principles and practices in order for the organization to adopt them. This is the old saw, “You have to walk the talk.” However, it is not necessary to perform everything perfectly right from the start. High performance management is a learn-by-doing process.

The great news is that once you begin to learn and apply high performance practices, people in your organization will notice and they will begin to adopt them too.

What are some of the key principles and practices?

Personal practices that drive manager performance

1. There really is no independent organization that represents “lean”. Nevertheless, the Lean Institute is a great resource with lots of  information and educational activities.

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The initial chapters take up the question of humans as multitaskers. For those who need to be reassured that the common sense answer to this question is, in this case, more than common, that it really is the sensical answer, take the time to follow the narrative. Yes, this is one of those business books written as a story. In most regards I have come to think of the first such approach that I know of to writing a business book in a narrative story format, The Goal: a process of ongoing improvement, by Goldratt, wishing it had been the last. But, I digress.

Crenshaw introduces the notion that because we really are capable of only one task at a time, the appearance of multitasking is really a series of “switchtasking” in which we shift our attention back and forth among a number of tasks. This process incurs significant inefficiencies due to the housekeeping overhead of our brain keeping track of where we are starting and stopping with each task.  Significant errors also occur as a result.

The proliferation of information devices over the last decade has multiplied the opportunities for interruption and created environments which are perpetually competing for our attention. Email, cellphones, voicemail, instant messaging, text messaging, faxes, and more clutter our desks, pockets, belts, pocketbooks, backpacks, hands, and, ultimately, our brains.  As Crenshaw aptly states, “The reality, though, is that these things will make us productive only if we learn to take control of them….If you and I don’t set up a schedule and protect our time, we allow ourselves to be run over by the traffic of information.” (page 61).

Crenshaw goes on to suggest a strategy for doing just that, establishing a schedule. I have written earlier about the need to avoid Too Much Information.

In Crenshaw’s approach to meetings which calls for establishing “recurring meetings” where people regularly need to meet with you, I think that an opportunity for a deeper understanding of what is happening is missed. The first step with meetings is to examine the reasons for the meetings. Altogether too often meetings are symptoms of poor underlying business processes, especially decision making. Many meetings turn out to be about how a decision is to be made, what information applies, what are the boundary conditions and parameters, and so on. These meetings should be replaced by sound business processes that make the decision making faster, closer to the end user, and more reliable. Other meetings will turn out to be program or process status meetings. These too should be replaced with better business processes and visual status reports. In general a manager should view every meeting where they do not add significant, singular value as a symptom of opportunities to improve processes.

Crenshaw’s approach to developing a time budget seems to me just a re-run of the age old time management gurus’ spreadsheets in which we keep track of all activities for a number of weeks and then analyze them for waste. In my experiences personally, and with clients, this approach does not work well. A significant number of people simply will not maintain a log of their activities in sufficient detail and at enough length to really be useful. More troubling, very few are able to act on the results of the analysis.

I have come to relie on a Seize Your Time approach which I have written and spoken about frequently. Basically, this works as follows:

Take out your schedule for the next week. Block out two hours during which you will post on your door a sign saying, “Do Not Disturb”, turn off all communication devices including your beloved Blackberry (iPhones, too) and work without interruption on some valuable project that will move your organization forward.

You can read more about this in my Time Management postings and podcasts.

One area in which Crenshaw strikes on a rich vein of truth is his discussion of “business systems” and “personal systems”. Here he points out the fact that the “personal system” of the business leader becomes de facto the “business system” of the company.

Many business managers and owners act as though magically their behavior is disconnected from the behavior of their company. They engage in the delusional notion that people throughout their company do not notice how they behave, how they make decisions, what their priorities are, what their values in dealing with people and other companies are, in fact, almost everything they do or say (mostly do).

Fortunately, this is not true. Why “fortunately” you might ask. The answer is that the behavior of the leader of small and medium size businesses has dramatic and reliable impacts on the performance of the company. And, since we do know what constitutes high-performance in business leaders, the leader can learn the appropriate behaviors, actively model them in their own performance, and see the results cascade through their firm.

I applaud Crenshaw for taking on a popular buzzword and small-scale plague not only in business life, but also our day-to-day world. Multitasking is indeed a myth. I would be tempted to be more vigorous in my rhetoric and say that multitasking is a fraud and a thief.