“Interesting,” I said, trying to look as if I was thinking about things. I wasn’t really, at least not in any intense way. I’d seen many types of these programs back when I was still active in business. They all had a significant flaw no one really wanted to address. “But didn’t you have to work within that system yourself?” I asked him.
“Funny thing is, no, I didn’t. I was a special projects guy, reporting to Ralph. My teams formed and disbanded based on what I was working on. I never had a performance review, and neither did my teams. We were judged based on the short-term success of the project or the change we’d introduced. And because I had a way to manage that, it seemed to work out most of the time. Now that I think about it, though, we did lose some good people over the years in other places in the company. Never understood it then, but now . . .” He fell silent, watching the dog and little boy wrestle.
I thought it best to keep him focused, so I said, “Run along and get me another beer, Willie. While you’re doing that, think about what else is causing you headaches at Hyler.”
He disappeared into the house and returned in a couple of minutes with more beer and a bowl of corn chips. I made him go back for dip. When he was settled again, he said, “There’s another performance management problem, though it didn’t start that way. It’s how we deal with our sales team.”
I closed my eyes and interrupted. “Let me make a guess on this one. You have a good-sized sales group, and in these challenging economic times they’ve come under a lot of pressure around pricing. They’ve been discounting your products, most likely with the appropriate approvals, and it’s helped sales. So much so that your volume isn’t down all that much, but profit is way down, maybe even in the red. You talk to them about it, but you can’t seem to change their behavior. Besides, it’s better to be selling product and keeping people busy and the company in the marketplace than not. But you’re losing money. Plus, a big part of your salespeople’s compensation is based on commission, and the commission is calculated on the total sale, not its profitability. So while you’re in the red as an operation, you’re paying big bonuses to your salespeople. Like the old joke goes, you’re planning to make it up on volume.”
Will was shaking his head. “It took me a month to figure that out. No one has been looking at whether we’re making money on an order-by-order basis. No one even knew how to do the basic calculation. When we figured it out, no one seemed to understand what it meant, and their biggest concern was that if we change the bonus program, the salespeople will quit. They don’t seem to get that we’re paying our sales crew to put us out of business!”
I laughed at that. “You know, Willie, I was kind of hoping you could come up with something new for me.” I sighed, rather theatrically. “I guess I need to get used to being disappointed.” I finished my beer.
He shook his head. “Yeah, yeah, you have a tough life. We young people are a big disappointment. We’ve all heard that story.” He smiled at me like the Cheshire cat. Overall the effect was a little creepy. “But the good news is, since you’ve seen this all before, you’ve also solved it all.”
This time there was no need to put theater into my sigh. “Well, the solution, if you want to call it that, isn’t that complicated. But it sure as hell ain’t easy.”
FOUR
Will Gets Some Perspective
MY CONVERSATION WITH Martha reminded me of an important life lesson: trying to wrap your head around a new idea can be downright painful. It requires you to think about something in a different way, from a different angle, and our brains aren’t wired that way. What appears to have kept us alive for the last many millions of years is this: we figure out something that works, and then we keep doing it. We might have figured the thing out rationally, but more likely we came to it accidentally, or through trial and error. Whatever the case, our brain locks on that process or method, and from then on, all of our brain power is directed toward doing it over and over and over again, in exactly the same way. We resist change because the way we do the thing works, and we don’t necessarily have time to screw around with something different. Our survival might depend on it. We fool around with a crazy new method for curing meat, the meat spoils, and the whole family starves the next winter. We try planting some new crop, it fails, and the family has nothing to eat the next winter. You get the picture. The whole “starving” downside is a powerful deterrent to making a change.
The problem is that this approach assumes our environment will stay the same; that we won’t face new situations or new problems like, say, superbugs and global warming, or economic downturns and changes in consumer preferences. But hey, sometimes burnt orange is the new black, and that means black isn’t cool anymore. Our environment is changing almost continuously, which means the moment we’ve worked out a way to solve a particular problem, the problem itself changes and our solution gradually works less and less well. But dammit, our brains don’t want to keep reinventing the wheel; they want to mass-produce wheels! Our whole existence seems to be built on the idea that the path to wealth, happiness, and the American Dream lies in replicating the same thing over and over.
Sure, we talk about innovation, creativity, collaborative involvement, continuous improvement, and all those other things we’re supposed to embrace. But when it comes right down to it, those things are a big pain in the ass. Who wants to spend all their time trying to come up with the next iPhone? Very few people do, and even fewer of those have the capability to do it. You’re talking about a group of people that numbers in the thousands. With seven billion people and counting on the planet, statistically this is equivalent to zero people. Of that tiny group of highly innovative, creative people, some work at Apple, and the rest at companies you’ve never heard of. So what happens? Our systems, our processes, our people, and our products all get disconnected from the world. You’re a Detroit car company making millions of cars that no one wants. It’s been pretty clear for ages that you’ve been left behind. But you keep pumping out those crappy cars because . . . why? Because it’s too hard to change what you’re doing? Too hard to think about things differently?
A long time ago, Martha spelled out a few things for me that really struck home. What she said boiled down to a fairly simple set of ideas about change and improvement that apply in any context.
1 There can be no improvement without change.
2 You can’t do it better unless you do it differently.
3 You can’t do it differently unless you can think about it differently. This involves a bit of a leap of faith, but there’s some thinking involved in trying to figure out a new way to do things. Which leads to:
4 You can’t think about it differently without adopting a new mental framework, a new perspective, or, to use a word that can sometimes make people throw up a little in the back of their throats, a new paradigm.
Martha’s point was that a mental framework is really just an organized collection of thoughts about how to deal with a certain situation. A framework is useful, because you get to figure something out once and then store those ideas in your brain for next time. We call the ideas a perspective or a paradigm. It’s like having a little procedure manual in our heads that we follow every time the situation arises.
Of course, the problem with mental frameworks is that soon after we establish them, the world changes and our perspective needs to be revised. Having expended so much effort to get that new perspective, though, the last thing we want to do is revise it. Instead, we want to take it out into the world and use it to solve every problem we encounter. It’s as if the natural industrial engineer in us wants to extract maximum value from every mental framework we develop.
The related challenge we face is thinking that once we have a solution, it will work on every problem. I fell into that trap for a while with project management. Once I understood the basic perspective on projects and familiarized myself with some of the tools that could be used, I tried to treat everything like a project. Turns out not everything is a project, though, and applying the project management process to