Category Archives: Competitiveness

Dean Meyer’s “How Organizations Should Work” – an A+ Reference on Intentional Organizational Design

Posted on by Leave a comment

The organization that you design designs you back.

Similarly, the organization that you fail to intentionally design will also design you back. And you probably won’t like the pain it inflicts… whether that pain manifests as political battles, conflicts of interests, or just plain stonewalling or slow-walking. People tend to perform based on how well their goals and objectives are defined, how effectively their roles (and the relationships between their roles and other roles) are defined, and how rigorously the organization monitors and reinforces desired behaviors and outcomes.

Unfortunately, it’s rare to get all those pieces in place and functioning at the same time. But thanks to Dean Meyer’s new 2022 book, How Organizations Should Work, you’ll have a head start on lessons learned. Based on his multi-decade career in organizational design, he provides simple, tangible, and meaningful explanations that will help you learn how to intentionally design your organization.

I brought this book to Burning Man because I wanted to read it in a place where I could take my time, where I could allow my mind to expand and take in Dean’s lessons, where I could feel the inspiration all around me while figuring out how to bake more inspired organizational design into my own workplace. And I did start reading it there.

But this book is so packed with wisdom and insights that you’ll want to read it slowly. Plan adequate time for it. After getting through the first 80 pages or so at the event, I read one or two sections every weekend. It took me a full three months to get through cover to cover… and I’m someone who can read a whole book in one sitting. This one, though, will make you think, and you’ll need time to pause and reflect on each of the stories and narratives that Dean uses to make his points.

Here’s a small sample of the highlights (and there are more; you can find this book on Amazon for $37-40).

Book Summary (p. 465-494). The best way to develop a reading plan for this book is to start at the end. Dean provides a helpful synopsis of each chapter that you can use to figure out which sections are most relevant for your organization now. The book is structured so that you don’t have to read it from start to finish, but can pick the sections that are the highest priority for continuous improvement in your organization. Some sections (like Chapter 19, on managing workers in the field) may be less relevant to your needs than other sections (like Chapter 15, on aligning sales and marketing). I recommend starting with Chapters 1 through 6 (and if your time is limited, start with Chapters 5 & 6).

Chapter 5 – Market Organization & Chapter 6 – Empowerment (p. 33-57). These two chapters provide the best (and most concentrated) view of the main thesis of the book, which is that every organization should be structured as a market. Each functional area should have customers, and services they provide to those customers. Each functional area should be empowered to make decisions about how the business of that unit is conducted, and should also have the skills to do it (and to build trust within their business unit and between their business unit and others). Organizing according to a market allows people to specialize, makes it possible to monitor performance in a more modular way, and simplifies the cognitive complexity of an organization.

Appendix 4 – Culture: Examples of Behavioral Principles (p. 376-380). Dean notes that companies are great at defining their culture, but often not so great at explaining how people can embody that culture and monitor their behaviors to ensure that they are living it and reinforcing it. In this section, he provides specific examples of behaviors that can make goals like “maintain a high ethical standard” actionable. For example, you can say “we do not permit personal conflicts of interest”. You’ll have to test your processes against these behavioral expressions of culture, too: if you don’t permit personal conflicts of interest, you should identify areas where conflicts of interest might arise and anticipate ways to identify them, prevent them, or resolve them quickly.

There are so many things I like about this book, and it embodies so many principles of good organizational design in a light, conversational way. Although there are a lot of books I really like, I don’t typically gush over them… but this one meets my high standards. Coupled with Dean’s 2017 book, Principle-Based Organizational Structure (which has a less conversational and more academic style), these are the only two references I really need to remind me of the essentials for intentionally building healthy organizations that are aligned internally and externally.

Alignment is the best way to reduce friction between people, and accelerate real progress towards tangible goals.

The Endowment Effect: The Ultimate Organizational Rose-Colored (Risk-Enhancing) Glasses

Posted on by Leave a comment

Fifteen or so years ago, I was a member of a review team that assessed a major, multi-million dollar software project. We were asked to perform the review because the project had some issues — it cost nearly $2M a year, was not yet delivering value to users, and had been running for 17 years.

Were I the ultimate decision-maker, my plan of action would have been simple: shut down the project, reconstitute a team with some representation from the old team, and use the lessons learned to rearchitect a newer, more robust solution. It would have customer involvement from the start to ensure a short time-to-value (and continuous flow of value). But there was one complication: the subject matter for this software package was highly specialized and required active involvement from people who had deep knowledge of the problem domain… and the team already had about 60% of the world’s experts on it.

Still, I was focused on the sunk costs. I felt that the organization should not choose to keep the project going just because over $20M had been poured into it… the sunk costs should not factor into the decision.

But then something very curious happened two years later, as the project was still hemorrhaging money… I was put in charge of it. So what did I do? Launched a two-month due diligence to reassess the situation, of course.

I was not on the review team this time, but their assessment was not a surprise — can the project, reconstitute the team, use the lessons learned to plan a new approach to delivering value quickly.

So that’s what I did… right? NOOOOO!!! I decided to try a little harder… because of course we could get the current software project to be stable and valuable, if we just gave it a little more time.

Even I was shocked by my transformation. Why was I feeling like this? Why was I ignoring the facts? Why was I, all of a sudden, powerless to make the appropriate and most logical choice?

Turns out, I was just demonstrating human nature via the Endowment Effect — which says, simplistically, that once you own something you value it more than before you own it. This is not just a curiosity though… because it can get in the way of effective decision-making.

Think about it:

  • Before you buy a house, you psychologically devalue it because you want to get a better deal. But once you move in, your psyche inflates the value because you stand to win as the value increases.
  • Why is it that leaders often value the opinions of consultants more than the opinions of full-time staff? Because consultants are more expensive, and once their reports have been submitted, you now own the intellectual property… and value it more.
  • The same effect occurs if you buy a company. You may be sensitive to issues and opportunities for improvement prior to the sale, but once your signature is on the dotted line… the endowment effect kicks in, and the rose-colored glasses magically appear.

This has a huge implication for quality and process improvement. Once you own something, you are less able to see the problems that need to be solved. This is why we use external auditors for our ISO 9001 programs, or review panels for our government projects, or a quality award assessment process for evaluating how well we are translating strategy to action.

Other people can see areas for improvement that you can’t, if you’re an owner of the process that has problems. The lesson? Get external eyes on your internal issues, and pay attention to their insights.

KPIs vs Metrics: What’s the Difference? And Why Does it Matter?

Posted on by One comment

Years ago I consulted for an organization that had an enticing mission, a dynamic and highly qualified workforce of around 200 people, and an innovative roadmap that was poised to make an impact — estimated to be ~$350-500M (yes really, that big). But there was one huge problem.

As engineers, the leadership could readily provide information about uptime and Service Level Agreements (SLAs). But they had no idea whether they were on track to meet strategic goals — or even whether they would be able to deliver key operations projects — at all! We recommended that they focus on developing metrics, and provided some guidelines for the types of metrics that might help them deliver their products and services — and satisfy their demanding customers.

Unfortunately, we made a critical mistake.

They were overachievers. When we came back six months later, they had nearly a thousand metrics. (A couple of the guys, beaming with pride, didn’t quite know how to interpret our non-smiling faces.)

“So tell us… what are your top three goals for the year, and are you on track to meet them?” we asked.

They looked at each other… then at us. They looked down at their papers. They glanced at each other again. It was in that moment they realized the difference between KPIs and metrics.

  • KPIs are KEY Performance Indicators. They have meaning. They are important. They are significant. And they relate to the overall goals of your business.
  • One KPI is associated with one or more metrics. Metrics are numbers, counts, percentages, or other values that provide insight about what’s happened in the past (descriptive metrics), what is happening right now (diagnostic metrics), what will happen (predictive metrics or forecasts), or what should happen (prescriptive metrics or recommendations).

For the human brain to be able to detect and respond to patterns in organizational performance, limit the number of KPIs!

A good rule of thumb is to select 3-5 KPIs (but never more than 8 or 9!) per logical division of your organization. A logical division can be a functional area (finance, IT, call center), a product line, a program or collection of projects, or a collection of strategic initiatives.

Or, use KPIs and metrics to describe product performance, process performance, customer satisfaction, customer engagement, workforce capability, workforce capacity, leadership performance, governance performance, financial performance, market performance, and how well you are executing on the action plans that drive your strategic initiatives (strategy performance). These logical divisions come from the Baldrige Excellence Framework.

Similarly, try to limit the number of projects and initiatives in each functional area — and across your organization. Work gets done more easily when people understand how all the parts of your organization relate to one another.

What happened to the organization from the story, you might ask? Within a year, they had boiled down their metrics into 8 functional areas, were working on 4 strategic initiatives, and had no more than 5 KPIs per functional area. They found it really easy to monitor the state of their business, and respond in an agile and capable way. (They were still collecting lots more metrics, but they only had to dig into them on occasion.)

Remember… metrics are helpful, but:

KPIs are KEY!!

You don’t have thousands of keys to your house… and you don’t want thousands of KPIs. Take a critical look at what’s most important to your business, and organize that information in a way that’s accessible. You’ll find it easier to manage everything — strategic initiatives, projects, and operations.

How the Baldrige Process Can Enrich Any Management System

Posted on by Leave a comment

Another wave of reviewing applications for the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award (MBNQA) is complete, and I am exhausted — and completely fulfilled and enriched!

That’s the way this process works. As a National Examiner, you will be frustrated, you may cry, and you may think your team of examiners will never come to consensus on the right words to say to the applicant! But because there is a structured process and a discipline, it always happens, and everyone learns.

I’ve been working with the Baldrige Excellence Framework (BEF) for almost 20 years. In the beginning, I used it as a template. Need to develop a Workforce Management Plan that’s solid, and integrates well with leadership, governance, and operations? There’s a framework for that (Criterion 5). Need to beef up your strategic planning process so you do the right thing and get it done right? There’s a framework for that (Criterion 2).

Need to develop Standard Work in any area of your organization, and don’t know where to start (or, want to make sure you covered all the bases)? There’s a framework for that.

Every year, 300 National Examiners are competitively selected from industry experts and senior leaders who care about performance and improvement, and want to share their expertise with others. The stakes are high… after all, this is the only award of its kind sponsored by the highest levels of government!

Once you become a National Examiner (my first year was 2009), you get to look at the Criteria Questions through a completely different lens. You start to see the rich layers of its structure. You begin to appreciate that this guidebook was carefully and iteratively crafted over three decades, drawing from the experiences of executives and senior leaders across a wide swath of industries, faced with both common and unique challenges.

The benefits to companies that are assessed for the award are clear and actionable, but helping others helps examiners, too. Yes, we put in a lot of volunteer hours on evenings and weekends (56 total, for me, this year) — but I got to go deep with one more organization. I got to see how they think of themselves, how they designed their organization to meet their strategic goals, how they act on that design. Our team of examiners got to discuss the strengths we noticed individually, the gaps that concerned us, and we worked together to come to consensus on the most useful and actionable recommendations for the applicant so they can advance to the next stage of quality maturity.

One of the things I learned this year was how well Baldrige complements other frameworks like ISO 9001 and lean. You may have a solid process in place for managing operations, leading continuous improvement events, and sustaining the improvements. You may have a robust strategic planning process, with clear connections between overall objectives and individual actions.

What Baldrige can add to this, even if you’re already a high performance organization, is:

  • tighten the gaps
  • call out places where standard work should be defined
  • identify new breakthrough opportunities for improvement
  • help everyone in your workforce see and understand the connections between people, processes, and technologies

The whitespace — those connections and seams — are where the greatest opportunities for improvement and innovation are hiding. The Criteria Questions in the Baldrige Excellence Framework (BEF) can help you illuminate them.

An Easy Way to Make Minimum Viable Product (MVP) Totally Not Viable

Posted on by Leave a comment
The classic viral MVP cartoon from Henrik Kniberg (https://blog.crisp.se/2016/01/25/henrikkniberg/making-sense-of-mvp)

5 minute read

The Minimum Viable Product (MVP) concept has taken off over the past few years. Indeed, its heart is in the right place. MVP encourages product managers to scope features and functionality carefully so that customer needs are satisfied at every stage of development — not just in a sweeping finale at the end of development.

It’s a great way to shorten time-to-value and test new market concepts before committing. Zappos, for example, started by posting pictures of shoes on the internet without having an inventory. They wanted to quickly test to see whether people would even consider buying shoes without trying them on.

Unfortunately, adhering to MVP won’t guarantee success thanks to one critical caveat. And that is: if your product already exists, you have to consider your product’s base state. What can your customers do right now with your product? Failure to take this into consideration can be disastrous.

An Example: Your Web Site

Here’s what I mean: let’s say the product is your company’s web site. If you’re starting from scratch, a perfectly suitable MVP would be a splash page with one or two sentences about what you do. Maybe you’d add some contact information. Customers will be able to find you and communicate with you, and you’ll be providing greater value than without a web presence.

But if you already have a 5000-page site online, that solution is not going to fly. Customers and prospects returning to your site will wonder why it vaporized. If they’re relying on the content or functionality you previously provided, chances are they will not be happy. Confused, they may choose to go elsewhere.

The moral of the story is: in defining the scope of your MVP, take into consideration what your customers can already do, and don’t dare give them less in your next release.

The Connected, Intelligent, Automated Industry 4.0 Supply Chain

Posted on by 3 comments

ASQ’s March Influential Voices Roundtable asks this question: “Investopedia defines end-to-end supply chain (or ‘digital supply chain’) as a process that refers to the practice of including and analyzing each and every point in a company’s supply chain – from sourcing and ordering raw materials to the point where the good reaches the end consumer. Implementing this practice can increase process speed, reduce waste, and decrease costs.

In your experience, what are some best practices for planning and implementing this style of supply chain to ensure success?“

Supply chains are the lifeblood of any business, impacting everything from the quality, delivery, and costs of a business’s products and services to customer service and satisfaction to ultimately profitability and return on assets.

Stank, T., Scott, S. & Hazen, B. (2018, April). A SAVVY GUIDE TO THE DIGITAL SUPPLY CHAIN: HOW TO EVALUATE AND LEVERAGE TECHNOLOGY TO BUILD A SUPPLY CHAIN FOR THE DIGITAL AGE. Whitepaper, Haslam School of Business, University of Tennessee.

Industry 4.0 enabling technologies like affordable sensors, more ubiquitous internet connectivity and 5G networks, and reliable software packages for developing intelligent systems have started fueling a profound digital transformation of supply chains. Although the transformation will be a gradual evolution, spanning years (and perhaps decades), the changes will reduce or eliminate key pain points:

  • Connected: Lack of visibility keeps 84% of Chief Supply Chain Officers up at night. More sources of data and enhanced connectedness to information will alleviate this issue.
  • Intelligent: 87% of Chief Supply Chain Officers say that managing supply chain disruptions proactively is a huge challenge. Intelligent algorithms and prescriptive analytics can make this more actionable.
  • Automated: 80% of all data that could enable supply chain visibility and traceability is “dark” or siloed. Automated discovery, aggregation, and processing will ensure that knowledge can be formed from data and information.

Since the transformation is just getting started, best practices are few and far between — but recommendations do exist. Stank et al. (2018) created a digital supply chain maturity rubric, with highest levels that reflect what they consider recommended practices. I like these suggestions because they span technical systems and management systems:

  • Gather structured and unstructured data from customers, suppliers, and the market using sensors and crowdsourcing (presumably including social media)
  • Use AI & ML to “enable descriptive, predictive, and prescriptive insights simultaneously” and support continuous learning
  • Digitize all systems that touch the supply chain: strategy, planning, sourcing, manufacturing, distribution, collaboration, and customer service
  • Add value by improving efficiency, visibility, security, trust, authenticity, accessibility, customization, customer satisfaction, and financial performance
  • Use just-in-time training to build new capabilities for developing the smart supply chain

One drawback of these suggestions is that they provide general (rather than targeted) guidance.

A second recommendation is to plan initiatives that align with your level of digital supply chain maturity. Soosay & Kannusamy (2018) studied 360 firms in the Australian food industry and found four different stages. They are:

  • Stage 1 – Computerization and connectivity. Sharing data across they supply chain ecosystem requires that it be stored in locations that are accessible by partners. Cloud-based systems are one option. Make sure authentication and verification are carefully implemented.
  • Stage 2 – Visibility and transparency. Adding new sensors and making that data accessible provides new visibility into the supply chain. Key enabling technologies include GPS, time-temperature integrators and data loggers.
  • Stage 3 – Predictive capability. Access to real-time data from supply chain partners will increase the reliability and resilience of the entire network. Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES), and radio frequency (RFID) tagging are enablers at this stage.
  • Stage 4 – Adaptability and self-learning. At this stage, partners plan and execute the supply chain collaboratively. Through Vendor Managed Inventory (VMI), responsibility for replenishment can even be directly assumed by the supplier.

Traceability is also gaining prominence as a key issue, and permissioned blockchains provide one way to make this happen with sensor data and transaction data. Recently, the IBM Food Trust has demonstrated the practical value provided by the Hyperledger blockchain infrastructure for this purpose. Their prototypes have helped to identify supply chain bottlenecks that might not otherwise have been detected.

What should you do in your organization? Any way to enhance information sharing between members of the supply chain ecosystem — or more effectively synthesize and interpret it — should help your organization shift towards the end-to-end vision. Look for opportunities in both categories.

References for Connected, Intelligent, Automated stats:
  1. IBM. (2018, February). Global Chief Supply Chain Officer Study. Available from this URL
  2. Geriant, J. (2015, October). The Changing Face of Supply Chain Risk Management. SCM World.
  3. IBM & IDC. (2017, March). The Thinking Supply Chain. Available from this URL

Lack of Alignment is an Organizational Disease. Here are the Symptoms.

Posted on by Leave a comment
Streamlines on a field. Created using the pracma package in R.

Like a champion rowing team, your organization needs to make sure everyone is working together, engaged in synchronized work and active collaboration, and not working at cross-purposes.

But like risk management, working on alignment can seem like a luxury. No one really has time to slow down and make sure everyone’s moving in the same direction. And besides, alignment just happens naturally if each functional area knows what they’re supposed to be working on… right?

Neither of these statements are, of course, true. Synchronizing people and processes – and making sure they’re aware of the needs and desires of real customers instead of cardboard personas – takes dedicated effort and a commitment from senior leaders. There are other critical impacts too: lack of alignment negatively impacts not only project outcomes – but also professional relationships and the bottom line.

from https://goo.gl/2iTKfg

An Example of Diagnosing Misalignment

Although alignment is a many-to-many problem, and requires you to look at relationships between people in all your functional areas, a January 2018 survey from Altify examined one part of the organizational puzzle: alignment between sales and marketing. This is a big one, because sales teams use marketing materials to understand and sell the product or service your company offers. Their survey of 422 enterprise-level executives and sales leaders showed that:

  • 74% of marketers think they understood customer needs, but only 44% of sales people in their organizations agreed
  • 71% of marketers think sales and marketing are aligned, but only 59% of sales people in their organizations agreed

These differences may seem small, but they reveal a lack of alignment between sales and marketing. One group thinks they “get it” – while people in the other group are just shaking their heads.

Symptoms of Misalignment

…include things like:

  • Vague Feelings of Fear. Your organization has a strategic plan (knows WHAT it wants to do), but there is little to no coordination regarding HOW people across the organization will accomplish strategic objectives. You know what KPIs you’re supposed to deliver on, but you don’t know how exactly you’re supposed to work with anything in your power or control to “move the needle.”
  • Ivory Tower Syndrome. You’re in a meeting and get the visceral sense that things aren’t clear, or that different people have different expectations for a project or initiative. But you’re too nervous or uncertain to ask for clarification – or maybe you do ask, but you get an equally unclear answer. Naturally, you assume that everyone in the room is smarter than you (particularly the managers) so you shut up and hope that it makes sense later. The reality is that you may be picking up on a legitimate problem that’s going to be problematic for the organization later on.
  • Surprises. A department committed you to a task, but you weren’t part of that decision. Once you find out about it, the task just may not get done. Alternatively, you’ll have to adjust your workload and reset expectations with the stakeholders who will now be disappointed that you can’t meet their needs according to the original schedule. Or maybe work evenings and weekends to get the job done on time. Either way, it’s not pleasant for anyone.
  • Emergencies. How often are you called on to respond to something that’s absolutely needed by close of business today? How often are you expected to drop everything and take care of it? How often do you have to work nights and weekends to make sure you don’t fall behind?
  • Lead Balloons. In this scenario, key stakeholders are called into projects at the 11th hour, when they are unable to guide or influence the direction of an initiative. The initiative becomes a “dead man walking” that’s doomed to an untimely end, but since the organization has sunk time and effort into it, people will push ahead anyway.
  • Cut Off at the Pass. Have you ever been working on a project and find out – somewhere in the middle of doing it – that some other person or team has been working on the same thing? Or maybe they’ve been working on a different project, but it’s ultimately at cross purposes with yours. Whatever way this situation works out, your organization ends up with a pile of waste and potential rework.
  • Not Writing Things Down.You have to make sure everyone is literally on the same page, seeing the world in a similar enough way to know they are pursuing the same goals and objectives. If you don’t write things down, you may be at the mercy of cognitive biases later. How do you know that your goals and objectives are aligned with your overall company strategy? Can you review written minutes after key meetings? Are your organization’s strategic initiatives written and agreed to by decision makers? Do you implement project charters that all stakeholders have to sign off on before work can commence? What practices do you use to get everyone on the same page?

How do you fix it?

That’s the subject for more blog posts that will be coming this spring – as well as what causes misalignment in the first place (hint: it’s individual behaviors on an organizational scale). The good news is – misalignment can be fixed, and the degree of alignment can be measured and continuously improved. Sign up to follow this blog so you don’t miss the rest of the story.

What other symptoms of misalignment have you experienced?

« Older Entries