The No Tool Zone

Cover via Amazon

The Overjustification Effect . . . the act of doing something for mere pleasure is compromised by rewards.  When first reading Alfie Kohn’s Punished by Rewards, I came across the concept.  We see it in everyday American life.  The evidence is that in organizations, there are a lot of people that either expect something extra for doing extra or won’t do something unless there is a reward involved.

As Americans, we have grown up with this concept.  Most of my friends and many that I have spoken with were given rewards for good grades.  Money, pizza, McDonalds and more were our incentives.  This later morphed into “what will you give me” when asked for any favor from friends or family.  The satisfaction of just doing to help has been erased.  The entitlement mentality we see in America today is certainly connected to this thinking.

It was also Kohn that talked about rewards and their effect on people.  Yes, they drive behavior . . . the wrong behavior.  It was also Kohn that pointed out that B.F. Skinner did many experiments on animals, but wrote his papers on people.

However, extrinsic motivators are part of everday American organizations and so many organizations violate the 95/5 Rule (where the individual is at the mercy of the system they work in). Rewarding the individual, doesn’t make sense when their performance is dictated by the system.  Unless, of course, they have found a better method.  Even then, organizations have to be careful that the individual doesn’t hoard the method for continued reward.

As Americans, we need to find our way back to the days where we did things because they are the right things to do.  We have become overstimulated by rewards.  Overjustification has been woven into our fabric and needs to be purged.

Tripp Babbitt is a speaker, blogger and consultant to service industry (private and public).  His organization helps executives find a better way to make the work work.  Read his column at Quality Digest and his articles for CustomermanagementIQ.com. Reach him on Twitter atwww.twitter.com/TriBabbittor LinkedIn atwww.linkedin.com/in/trippbabbitt.

I’ve been reading and writing a lot over the past month, just not much on my blog.  Most reading about organizational purpose.  In this case, not just customer purpose, but a higher calling to benefit mankind.  Certainly, we want to respond to customers and create an environment that they want to engage and embrace.

However, there are other elements in every system that need nurturing.  One overlooked area is the treatment of vendors.  Many organizations focus on the customer and improvement, but treat their vendors like, well . . . dog poop.

Pounding the vendor for the lowest price, they don’t become partners, instead vendors become a whipping boy.  A whipping boy was a young boy assigned to an equally young prince and when the prince did something wrong the whipping boy got the punishment.  If you have been a vendor long enough, you will find yourself a whipping boy for unevolved organizations.

This is usually driven by management fear of not hitting their numbers.  Sometimes the hierarchy is used as the next rung down gets the blame.  More convenient though is an outsider that can be blamed . . . a whipping boy.  Deflecting blame to vendors has become an art and a science.

All that hard work to impress customers, but you don’t pay your vendor in the promised timeframe which negates all the goodwill you accomplish.  The system is out-of-balance and treating one better than other can only result in long-term consequences.  Vendors have other relationships and influences that can influence future customers.  What goes around come around.

Treating vendors fairly is always a good policy.

Tripp Babbitt is a speaker, blogger and consultant to service industry (private and public).  His organization helps executives find a better way to make the work work.  Read his column at Quality Digest and his articles for CustomermanagementIQ.com. Reach him on Twitter atwww.twitter.com/TriBabbittor LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/trippbabbitt.

I had dinner the other night at a new local restaurant with my wife.  She asked me about how a restaurant might improve their service.  Seems a reasonable question and I am constantly evaluating the service I get or don’t get.

I thought I would order a sandwich like I do at my favorite “other restaurant” and that would be a grilled tenderloin with extra pickle and a cottage cheese side.  I gave my order to the waiter, she wrote nothing down.  Sure enough, the sandwich came fried and i had to send it back.  The waiter also failed to provide eating utensils or apologize for the wrong order.  The tenderloin (#2) was OK, but nothing special.

As a new restaurant, that is trying to secure new customers . . . they did not provide service that I expected or “what mattered” to me.  Had they been able to do this, I may have switched to the new restaurant.  Why?  Because a week later I had a similar experience at my favorite restaurant.  In fact, I can think of a few restaurants that failed one way or another which meant there was opportunity.

It reminds of the story that I heard years ago, where two hikers coming out of a tent run across a grizzly bear.  One hiker starts to slowly put on his tennis shoes and the other hiker on seeing this says, ” You are never going to outrun that bear.”  The response, “I don’t have to outrun that bear, I just need to outrun you.”

The issue is that you never know what the competition is really doing.  Don’t worry about what the competition does, just worry about what you are doing.  If you can “execute” to “what matters” to customers you probably can build a decent clientele.  The problem is restaurants seem to be focused on things that don’t matter to me.  And  if you want to get my business . . . get my order right.

I caught an interview with an gentleman by the name of Brad Grossman (Grossman and Partners) that works with executives to keep them current (in general).  I visited his website and found that one of his predictions for the future is the need for more analytical positions in the future.

If only analysis was the problem.

The American problem is synthesis.  God knows that as Americans that we know how to break things down.  We already are in data overload.  We have complex systems of delivering products and services that are weighed down in costs of the infrastructure.  Are ability to break things down does not guarantee that when we put them together again they will synthesize very well.

The functionally separated organizations that we have designed perpetuate the problem.  Dogmatic management that manages the pieces by optimizing them at the expense of the whole system.  Locked-in by pay for performance with the fundamental belief that performance is down to the individual.

The organization has a boat anchor around its metaphoric neck.  Learning how to synthesize means learning to see the damage or enablement that the current thinking is doing to the system.

Tripp Babbitt is a speaker, blogger and consultant to service industry (private and public).  His organization helps executives find a better way to make the work work.  Read his column at Quality Digest and his articles for CustomermanagementIQ.com. Reach him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/TriBabbittor LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/trippbabbitt.

I ran across the “Sourcing Sage” and his creative cartoons about outsourcing.  I found the cartoons to be entertaining but not-so-much the sage advice.  His wisdom is that in order to outsource/share services an organization needs to do the following:

1. Process Documentation
2. Standard Operating Procedures (SOP)
3. Training Curriculum
4. Knowledge Base
5. Product Documentation
6. Organizational Optimization
7. Workstation Standardization
8. Systems Inventory
9. Metrics
10. Costs

Nothing new or creative but does “re-emphasize” what most big IT firms will tell you.  Unfortunately, most of this stuff guarantees nothing when sharing services and/or outsourcing.  In fact, most of it is waste.  However, in the industry this is best practice.  A fool and his money are soon parted.

And it happens all too often . . .

Standardization leads to failure demand as these manufacturing factories can not absorb variety found in service.  The result is a colossal waste of organizational dollars.  All the documentation in the world is not going to fix an already broken work design, it just adds to the costs.

For more on outsourcing and shared services click the one that interests you.

Tripp Babbitt is a speaker, blogger and consultant to service industry (private and public).  His organization helps executives find a better way to make the work work.  Read his articles at Quality Digest and his column for CustomermanagementIQ.com.  Learn more about the The 95 Method for service organizations.  Reach him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/TriBabbittor LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/trippbabbitt.

The last American election “exposed” outsourcing as an evil, and in part, a reason one presidential candidate defeated another.  The belief is that outsourcing – foreign or domestic – helps to optimize a business function.  I heard this argument for the hundredth times on the Washington Times Communities website in an article titled, Outsourcing vs. Offshoring.

It is the wrong thinking.

However, organizations continue to perpetuate the “optimize each function thinking” as blindly acceptable.  Sub-optimization results on a large scale.  Locking in waste for short-term profit games has become a national pastime in the US.  It is hard to find organizations that don’t lick their chops when they see the reduced costs in the form of lower wages in outsourcing.

Political and consumer backlash seems to be bringing back the jobs . . . and again for the wrong reasons.  The problems with outsourcing go beyond politics.  This is not to say that consumers should be ignored as they decide what organizations to place their business with.

The deciding factors need to connect with the waste service organizations are outsourcing.  When the design of the work prevents customers from getting their demands satisfied – we get failure demand.  When phone calls run 40, 60, 80% and higher of these types of demands -which I find in almost every organization – why would you outsource this much waste?  It is more prudent to redesign the work.  Service organizations that outsource this much waste are locking in costs, not reducing them.

So few organizations know what to measure that reduces costs and the result is managing by costs alone.  The result is always increased costs.

Before the next onshoring craze let’s address the problems first . . . the right ones.

Tripp Babbitt is a speaker, blogger and consultant to service industry (private and public).  His organization helps executives find a better way to make the work work.  Read his articles at Quality Digest and his column for CustomermanagementIQ.com.  Learn more about the The 95 Method for service organizations.  Reach him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/TriBabbittor LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/trippbabbitt.

Another American icon bites the dust.  Sure, we still have our auto manufacturers even if they are a shadow of their former selves.  We are a divided country . . . haves and have nots, 1% and 99%, management and labor, Republicans and Democrats.  The list can go on.  Winners and losers, except in the case of Hostess it is clear that everyone losses.

Who didn’t grow up eating Ding-Dongs, Cupcakes and Twinkies?  Not the most nutritional of snacks, but they were really good.  They just never continued to get better.  The product was a cash cow and I can not find one new product.

English: A Hostess CupCake, shown whole. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

This is a management problem.

A declining market in what would be like trying to sell buggy whips in an age of cars.  The cash cow, suddenly becomes a boat anchor.  The ship sinks under the weight of management and labor taking advantage of past successes through pensions, increased salaries and other balance sheet and income statement busting actions.  Who would get most of what is left of the wreckage?  Not a question designed for a going concern.

These difficulties are exacerbated by six different leaders in the past 10 years.  The last CEO being a “turnaround expert.”  This, however, was a liquidation or more so a demolition.

This is a management problem.

As Americans, we have grown used to having managers going through a revolving door.  Leadership needs to be stable, so they can learn.  The misfits in management instead know how to manage a balance sheet and income statement but no little about growing a business or in this case how to build a Ding-Dong and not be one.  For American management this is what it has come too.

Management and labor are need of working together to end the madness.  The change needed is that management must first respect the worker and together work with them to improve the system.  Not just to reduce costs, but to improve culture and work on innovation.

Lesson learned?  We can only hope.

Tripp Babbitt is a speaker, blogger and consultant to service industry (private and public).  His organization helps executives find a better way to make the work work.  Read his articles at Quality Digest and his column for CustomermanagementIQ.com.  Learn more about the The 95 Method for service organizations.  Reach him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/TriBabbittor LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/trippbabbitt.

David Walker of the Comeback America Initiative that he founded is often on CNBC explaining what it will take to get America on track.  It is the same story . . . build a plan, budget the plan and institute performance measures.  To paraphrase Mr. Walker, the former US Comptroller, “this is what big, successful companies do.”

This thinking is what led us to the US decline in the first place.

Mass-production and industrialized thinking that didn’t succeed after WWII has led to retrenchment.  In this case a better word would be – retreat. Down-sizing our budget and workforce requires a plan.  Winners and losers baked in and the losers are Americans.

This does not mean that we should continue down the course of large deficits or that budgets don’t matter, it just means you are managing a retreat.  Large scale ideology leads to massive expenditures as more expense is derived from managing the downsizing.  This is not the way forward for the public or private sectors.

Finance has overwhelmed logic as the numbers are misleading.  Context is needed and so is the evidence.  However, big thinkers don’t have time for the detail and this leads to deficits.  Managing scale, flow is missed and naturally so are the causes of cost.

Political candidates are touting their road maps, plans and other non-sense without knowledge.  Voters starved for detail can get only sound bites, sappy commercials and personal attacks.  It is pathetic.

With budgets, the mantra is to cut costs.  Performance measures help keep the budget numbers on track.  In a system full of waste, just cutting costs misses addressing the waste.  A bad system with no money still leaves a bad system.  Performance measures derived from budgets and plans (without knowledge) almost always lock in the waste.

So, this political season be skeptical and demand more than just pplans, budgets and performance measures – how do we grow?

Tripp Babbitt is a speaker, blogger and consultant to service industry (private and public).  His organization helps executives find a better way to make the work work.  Read his articles at Quality Digest and his column for CustomermanagementIQ.com.  Learn more about the The 95 Method for service organizations.  Reach him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/TriBabbittor LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/trippbabbitt.

You would see it more often in manufacturing, but divided responsibility plaques service organizations too.  Typically, in manufacturing it would be seen in quality control efforts where management would declare high-quality products.  The management paradox is that more inspection predictably led to higher error rates.  When two or more individuals inspect the same product to “inspect quality in” it means no one is responsible.

When action items are delved out amongst participants of a meeting, often you will find two (or more) individuals being given the same task to “share” the workload.  Nothing fundamentally wrong with that except someone has to take ownership with the other(s) supporting.  Clarity in ownership is important to avoid finger-pointing or sub-standard action.

President Harry Truman with "The Buck Stops Here" sign on his desk (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

To me, this divided responsibility is reflected in work designs where tasks are broken into so many pieces that no one can have a chance to know if they are doing a good job.  This is because the actual outcome is buried multiple levels beyond the first step.  Customers get frustrated as they have to figure out who does bear responsibility.  This often ends in escalations to management that unfortunately take a lot of time to “get up to speed” to resolve a customer issue.  “The buck stops here” is the famous phrase from Harry Truman that I hear from management in service organizations.  Finding the right answer for a customer is the problem.

Clear lines of communication in the design of the work and responsibility of tasks.  Keep the work together if at all possible, but make one person the owner.

Tripp Babbitt is a speaker, blogger and consultant to service industry (private and public).  His organization helps executives find a better way to make the work work.  Read his articles at Quality Digest and his column for CustomermanagementIQ.com.  Learn more about the The 95 Method for service organizations.  Reach him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/TriBabbittor LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/trippbabbitt.

“Can you blame your competitor for your woes?” he would intone to groups of corporate managers. “No. Can you blame the Japanese? No. You did it yourself.”  – W. Edwards Deming

The bruising of egos for those in management was a staple when Dr. Deming would speak to such groups.  A certain disdain for those in management that didn’t or couldn’t understand the new philosophy.  He lacked the natural charisma to charm his audiences and little effort to do so.

The most damaging single group to American lack of competitiveness is management.  Labor gets all the headlines as this group has been maligned by all to many . . . anyone for a scape goat?  Look to management.

The use of arbitrary numerical goals coupled with the focus on short-term profits are only part of the problem.  My recent article in Quality Digest illustrates the need for management to become leaders by getting knowledge through understanding the work and the system in which they work in and influence.  This is not someone else’s job, it is the job of management.  Boys to Men, girls to women and management to leaders.  The right of passage.

The incessant copying of the Japanese is mostly comical at this juncture.  We have to speak Japanese to improve?  Did Deming ask the Japanese to use American words and phrases in July, 1950?  No, he asked them to learn.  This requires different thinking than that seeks management to set arbitrary numerical goals.  Deming’s famous quote is, “By what method?  Different questions lead to different answers.

Management’s active engagement is a requirement, not a like to have.  The ignorance of current thinking has to be replaced with knowledge.  There is no other way.

Tripp Babbitt is a speaker, blogger and consultant to service industry (private and public).  His organization helps executives find a better way to make the work work.  Read his articles at Quality Digest and his column for CustomermanagementIQ.com.  Learn more about the The 95 Method for service organizations.  Reach him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/TriBabbittor LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/trippbabbitt.