A lot of interesting stuff makes the rounds of the Internet. I received this scan and tracked through Google to Snopes (I love Snopes).

These remarks were made spontaneously  on a Voice of America broadcast that was heard in more than sixty countries.

It would be very cool if it had really happened in 1968, but that was literary license; the broadcast actually took place in May 1961.

But the seven years difference doesn’t matter. What matters is that his comments were prophetic and came true in far less time than many believed possible—right up until last week.

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Click over and find out what’s changing

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I wrote a couple of posts about Senator Ted Stevens, King of Pork—more than 3.4 billion dollars worth—and Senator Ted Stevens, convicted felon—all seven counts.

So I thought it only fair to add another chapter just in case you hadn’t kept up.

Stevens was up for re-election and as soon as the conviction was announced he flew straight back to Alaska to campaign.

He refused to resign from the Senate, said he would appeal his conviction and was reelected by a 1% margin—given to him by old (over 30) guys.

Now, I’d always heard that convicted felons had to jump through various hoops, depending on which state they lived in, if they wanted to vote.

So what about Alaska?

“Alaska law states that convicted felons are barred from voting if their crime is one of “moral turpitude,” which in Alaska includes a wide swath of illegal activities.”Receiving a bribe” is listed among them…the Alaska Division of Elections announced that the senator’s crimes were, in fact, of moral turpitude but that a guilty verdict wasn’t enough to make him a convicted felon for purposes of voting.

State law does stipulate that a candidate for the Senate must be a registered voter—and thus not a felon who committed acts of moral turpitude—when he files for the office. But Stevens had not yet been found guilty when he filed.”

Makes your head spin.

There are two things I’m taking away from this.

The first is a question; if a ‘normal’ Alaskan was convicted of moral turpitude would he just continue merrily on his way?

And the second is that this is pretty graphic proof that, to a majority of voters, pork and familiarity trumps ethics any day.

Not that any of this matters. In his final days, George W. will pardon Uncle Ted just as he pardoned Scooter.

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See the beginning at what we’re facing

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Previously we discussed how evolution uses two types of variation – small and large – to explore the map of survival and to climb to the peaks of excellent adaptation for the best survival.

The Power of Many Tests

First let’s consider small and large changes in your services and products.

The consumer packaged goods industry, led by Procter & Gamble, has developed small variations to a science.

If Tide sells well in the 32 oz. box, then let’s try small, large, and jumbo sized boxes of Tide. Some will cannibalize other sizes and some (most) will just plain flop. But a few will grow and flourish in the grocery aisles. Product managers have created many other extensions of Tide – low suds, color-safe, and probably even low calorie. Each one is a single, small step exploring the landscape of consumer preference– and each one is an attempt to climb to a peak of survival in the grocery aisle.

This testing of small product changes goes on in almost every other market.

• Software providers offer many performance levels – entry level, professional, and enterprise.
• Credit card providers offer a wide variety of features in their card products – low interest, cash-back, donation to your favorite organization, points, and even your picture on the card.

Large variations may be a little less obvious, but are just as common.

Building on Tide’s success with consumers, product managers developed Tide-in-a-stick, which can remove stains immediately, even without washing. Can Tide make the jump from the laundry shelf to the consumer’s purse?

Apparently so. This is a large jump to a different environment.

• Intuit, the maker of TurboTax, recently began offering loans on tax refunds.
• Cable companies are now offering telephone service and telephone companies are attempting to offer television service.

Embrace Your Ignorance—Focus on the Failures

The examples of product variations discussed above appear to be pretty obvious. But we did not mention any of the failures, only the successes. The failures are gone from the grocery shelves and never even made an impression on us. These failures represent over 90% of the trials, so in running a business, we cannot ignore them. On the contrary, we need to understand them much better.

Bluntly, you cannot skip the failures and go right to the successes. That is called predicting the future and our track record is not very good there. Looking at a random process like the stock market prices, results demonstrate that an index fund—an investment that tracks a particular index (S&P 500, DJIA, etc.)—outperforms over 85% of the active mutual funds consistently, every year. Similarly, a strategy of dollar-cost investing (the same dollar amount every month) consistently outperforms attempts to time the market with purchases and sales.

Axiom of Evolution: The future is unpredictable.

Corollary: Central planning never works.

Evolution does not attempt to predict the future. It does not know, and does not care. To dramatically illustrate the point, evolution has no central planning committee. In a tangible sense, evolution does not even exist. How’s that for a lack of central planning.

For us as business leaders, the first step is admitting we have a problem. Repeat after me, “I cannot predict the future.”

Already I can hear the protesting thoughts in your mind. “I know my business. “I know my market.” “I know my customers.” And yet, the customers and markets continue to surprise us all.

Central planning never works—at the level of governments, businesses, and even individuals. The future simply holds too many surprises for each of us, both personally and professionally. The only events we can depend upon reliably are the failures. Successes are much too rare, and much too random.

So, let’s take a minute to study our reliable friends – the failures – and the patterns they create. Our problems with managing failures are twofold, both related to our desire to pick winners according to our view of the future.

We kill off experiments too soon.

• We do not allow enough peculiar experiments to blossom. Early in the process, we identify some experiments as losers and shut them down before they can yield any useful information.

We allow our favorite experiments to continue too long.Governments suffer this phenomenon in particular. Once started, government programs are almost impossible to shut down.

• One good example is the temporary tax placed on telephone service to fund a war in the Philippines, back in 1898. This tax was finally eliminated only a few years ago, in 2005.
• Bridge and road tolls are another example. Originally these tolls were put in place to pay for the construction of the bridge or road. But, once in place, these revenue generators almost never get removed.
• On the spending side, any number of New Deal era programs are still in operation today.

In addition, when these programs are finally addressed, they are not terminated, but only cut back, or redirected. Like vampires, they keep coming back to suck the life out of the organization.

Evolution tolerates an extremely high failure rate for its mutations—well over 99% of its experiments do not succeed. To keep the experiments from overwhelming the rare successes, evolution is very disciplined about its five basic rules for failures:

1. Fail often.
2. Fail fast.
3. Fail small.
4. Fail cheap.
5. Fail uphill.

Fail often. Evolution is a master at frequent failures. In every single generation, every single organism is a new test. Of these, well over 90% fail the basic test – survival to reproduce the second generation.

Fail fast. Evolution tests each of its experiments immediately, in the next generation. It does not allow any experiment to live a sheltered life in a protected hothouse while the engineers perfect the technology, or the marketers search for the right market.

Fail small. Evolution has designed each test as a single organism, so each individual test is small. Limiting the size and scope of an experiment in a business takes a little more creativity. Speed can help. Forcing each experiment into tests soon and often will help to keep the failures small.

Fail cheap. Fail cheap. For evolution, cheap and small are synonymous. A test of one single organism is not only small, it is cheap, at least for the species, if not for the organism. For a business, if a failure is small and fast, then it is also likely to be cheap.

Fail uphill. This may be one of the most peculiar characteristics of evolutionary variation. In a completely random manner, evolution manages to fail uphill. By spraying out a large number of variations in all directions, evolution tests the “slope” of better survivability on the hill. Only a few variations actually move up the hill. The very next generation incorporates those few successes into the next experiments. Thus, while most experiments fail, the net direction is up the hill of better adaptability and survivability.

Frequent Failure Checkup

• How many experiments does your organization run each year?
• How do you encourage and nurture experiments?
• How do you test each experiment? How soon? How often?
• What are the consequences of each test?
• How many experiments does your organization shut down each year?
• How many vampires (failed experiments) are still sucking resources?
• What signs identify your vampires?
• How do you finally kill your vampires?

Next week we will dig a little deeper into the two primary mistakes mentioned earlier—killing most experiments too soon and not killing off the vampires soon enough. Both of these mistakes are extremely difficult to overcome, because they stem from our internal belief systems. Evolution has some suggestions here, as you may have already guessed. See you then…

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I’ve written (ranted?) several times on the evils of multitasking and every time I turn around there’s more proof that it doesn’t raise productivity, improve results or cure your time crunch.

Proof, that is, in terms of scientific research as opposed to subjective evaluations.

The most recent was in Sunday’s NY Times that brought out the fact that you don’t really do things simultaneously; rather you switch your focus back and forth between them.

That may sound OK, but the problem is in the lag time, since the human brain doesn’t do the switch instantaneously.

Sure, some multitasking is just rude, think talking on the phone and doing email, while some is downright stupid, like texting and driving.

“…17 drivers, age 17 to 24, to use a driving simulator to see how texting affected driving.

The reaction time was around 35 percent slower when writing a text message — slower than driving drunk or stoned.”

But what about the multitasking that you’re forced to do at work? Jumping back and forth on projects, checking/responding to email, answering questions, etc.?

“A 2005 study, “No Task Left Behind? Examining the Nature of Fragmented Work,” found that people were interrupted and moved from one project to another about every 11 minutes. And each time, it took about 25 minutes to circle back to that same project.”

Have things changed or are the older studies holding true?

According to Gloria Mark, a professor of informatics at the University of California at Irvine and a co-author of that study and a new one published last April titled “The Cost of Interrupted Work: More Speed and Stress” showed that “people actually worked faster in conditions where they were interrupted, but they produced less… Ten and a half minutes on one project is not enough time to think in-depth about anything.”

Impressive. One action that single-handedly kills productivity and innovation, while increasing stress.

Multitasking seems to be a great tool for those who manage by intimidation and abuse, but for the rest of us it would be better to focus and spend some time on innovative approaches that minimize multitasking for yourself and your people.

And before you add a silent ‘but me’ think about which side of ‘but me’ your choice plays to.

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Yesterday I said that creating a happy, i.e., productive, innovative, caring, workforce, was 80% MAP and 20% money-based employee support initiatives.

Everyone who writes or talks about management, or is interviewed as a role model, says the same thing in a variety of ways.

It boils down to what people want

• respect;
• honesty;
  
• shared commitment;
  
• clear communications as to where the company is going, how it’s going to get there, what’s expected of them and how it all fits together;
  
• an ethical culture; and
  
• authenticity throughout.

No details, they’re available in dozens of places, including this blog, along with plenty of how-to’s (two of my favorites are Slacker Manager and All Things Workplace).

Now, let’s say that you’ve done your best to implement what you’ve learned (at whatever level you are), but you’re not getting the expected results. Productivity is still elusive, your people seem apathetic and you have more turnover than is healthy.

What’s wrong? What are you missing?

The answer is most likely deep within your MAP.

As you’ve read over and over, the key to all this is authenticity—translated that means you believe what you’re saying.

But having worked through this with hundreds of managers over the years I can say that frequently one or more of the “required” attitudes weren’t synergistic with their MAP.

They used the right words, even thought the right thoughts, but deep down they didn’t really believe—and their people knew it. Not ‘knew it’ as conscious thought, but knew it as a gut feeling; knew it because every time their manager said one particular thing they found themselves mentally squirming and didn’t know why.

What they did know was that it made them uncomfortable and worried them. The discomfort sat in the back of their mind nibbling away and their productivity went down, which made them still more uncomfortable and created fertile ground for any opportunity that came along.

The solution to this is simple, but very uncomfortable since it requires you to turn you eye inwards to find the offending MAP and then do what it takes to change it.

Now to the 20% that requires money.

Employee support usually falls in four categories.

Technology

When budgets are tight, new technology may be unavailable, but that’s just one piece of supporting your people and you can often work around at lest part of it. Brainstorm with your people and find solutions within the parameters with which you have to work.

Training

Training can be done if you get everybody involved. Here are four things to do within your organization that cost little to nothing.

• Build a useful library, both hard copy and online, that includes classic and current information and runs the gamut from traditional to controversial to off-the-wall. Encourage your people to read up on subjects that interest them, whether or not it directly applies to their expertise.
• Choose “topics of the month” based on both need and interest, and then encourage free-wheeling discussions on a regular basis.
• Adapt scheduling so people can start to use, and become proficient in, the new skills about which they are reading and talking.
• Support brown-bag classes (better yet, buy lunch if you can) in which they can teach their skills to others. Add cross-working assignments whenever possible to ensure cross-training.

Career opportunities

Providing career opportunities is easier than you think—and also more difficult. It requires you to do everything in your power to help your people acquire the skills necessary for them to take the next step in their chosen career path—that’s the easy part.

The difficult part is doing it even though you know that the person will leave, whether your group or the company, in order to take that step.

Rewards

The tighter the economy the more difficult it becomes to provide financial rewards—or so it seems. Overcoming this challenge goes back to authenticity and honesty.

You start by explaining clearly exactly what your financial constraints are, both yours as a manager and the company’s. Your people aren’t stupid, they’ll know if what you say is true. In the thousands of people I’ve talked with over my 25 years as a recruiter I never found one that didn’t have a pretty good idea of what was going on in their company.

Once that’s done, get creative. Ask your people for ideas and involve them in finding creative ways to provide incentives with what you do have to spend—just don’t do anything that isn’t synergistic with your MAP.

Doing all this is the best gift you can give your people—and yourself.

If you’d like to talk more about it feel free to call me at 866.265.7267—no charge, no joke.

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This is part 3 in an ongoing discussion.

Documentation

The documentation of evolution is DNA, the amazing double helix that contains the entire genetic code for each individual.

Contrary to most business documentation, evolution does not store its genetic documentation in printed “white notebooks” that sit on the shelf gathering dust. On a daily operational basis, each cell uses RNA to copy sections of the DNA. Then RNA reads these strands to execute cell functions.

Operating processes (documentation) are the DNA of a company. To replicate its operation from day-to-day a business must have complete documentation.

• How does your business document its operation?
• How does any individual employee know what to do in any specific situation?

Thorough documentation is critical. But remember that evolution uses its documentation every day to drive the operation of the cells.

• How accessible is your documentation?
• Can an employee find it quickly?
• Is the operational sequence embedded in the process itself?

Historically it has been difficult to make documentation easily accessible, and even more difficult to embed processes in the organization. But with the advent of the internet and intranets, help files, business process software, and the entire operational process has come to resemble evolution more closely.

In fact, only online documentation and processes can ever function as well as evolution.

Documentation Checkup

• Is all of your business documentation available online?
• Is it accessible through context-sensitive help?
• Are all of your business processes documented?
• Are your business processes embedded in the everyday operational processes that your employees use to do their work?
• Are your business rules externalized?
• Do your explicit business rules drive your business processes?

Training

Evolution has developed an almost foolproof process to train new cells. Every time a new cell is created, it receives a complete set of DNA documentation . When a cell splits the DNA double helix unzips down the center and  each cell receives one of the exact original strands of DNA. Training for the new cell is 100%, with a complete set of original documentation. Note that the cell does not learn the DNA documentation of the processes of life. The DNA simply is the processes. The definition of the processes is intrinsic to the processes themselves.

In the same way, a business needs to replicate itself very carefully. A new employee must be trained thoroughly. Ideally the process description and documentation is not separated from the business processes themselves. The definition and description are embedded in the processes. The closest description is a context-sensitive help file in a completely transparent process.

Most businesses have some sort of training for new employees. Thorough training should present a holistic view of the operation, from the business goals to very specific operation of particular business processes that the employee will do. Further, training should include error checking and correction. Simple online, self-paced, computer-based training (CBT) is a good place to start, but only a start. An old Chinese proverb provides a direction for comprehensive training.

I hear and I forget.
I see and I remember.
I do and I understand.

Training starts with reading the documentation and testing recall. Then it extends to simulation and participation in the actual business processes. Like learning to swim, the employee flounders in the deep end of the simulation until, suddenly, the light bulb goes on. Only simulation and participation in the actual processes can provide the direct feedback that leads to knowledge, mastery, and effective reproduction of the process.

Training Checkup

• Does your business provide complete online, self-paced CBT?
• Does your training include testing and exception handling?
• Does your training include simulations and the real business processes?
• How do you keep records of employee training?
• How often do you retest and retrain your employees?
• When your business processes change, how do you retrain and recertify your employees?

Error Correction—Handling Exceptions

Exceptions happen and some exceptions have serious consequences. Sometimes errors occur in transcribing DNA and almost every transcription error is bad, often fatal to the organism. Evolution assumes that DNA will have transcription errors, so it has developed error checkers that travel the DNA chain specifically to find and fix these transcription errors.

Evolution also assumes that errors will occur in cell operation, so it has developed a number of methods to fix operational errors. Evolution evidently is a believer in Murphy’s Law—Whatever can go wrong, will go wrong. One of evolution’s favorite error correction methods is terminal obsolescence—death. It’s a little drastic, but works well for evolution. All of evolution’s experiments come with expiration dates.

Like evolution, a business must develop a number of mechanisms to detect exceptions and correct errors. Our focus is on exceptions in existing operational processes—”events outside the boundaries of normal operations,” as opposed to true anomalies—novel events which occur rarely and unconnected to existing processes.

Computerized processes automatically identify simple exceptions such as data entry errors, e.g., identifying and rejecting letters entered into a numeric data field such as age. But most exceptions are more complicated.

An exception to a time-based event may have a number of responses conditional upon the degree of the exception. When an insurance policy expires and the payment check arrives late, the response may depend upon how late the check arrived, with penalties increasing in proportion to the tardiness.

Just as operational processes are simply expressions of business rules, the first few levels of exception handling must be controlled by business rules, with automatic detection requiring no human judgment to determine the response.
For processes that manage hundreds to millions of separate events, exception handling must meet four criteria:

• Immediate identification – because the cost of the exception and the response increases dramatically as the exception remains unaddressed.
• Immediate response – even if the consequences are delayed, the response must be quick.
• Appropriate consequences – “Let the punishment fit the crime.” Choose a response that resolves the exception with minimal side effects.
• Recorded for evaluation – trends often start as exceptions. Log the exceptions so the causes can be found and fixed.

The long-term response to exceptions is to eliminate them. In manufacturing processes a method called “statistical process control” uses operational trends to identify root causes and to resolve them. Example: An automatic lathe trims metal wires to exactly 1 cm diameter. The acceptable tolerance is 0.01 cm. The measurement of the bars after trimming shows upward trend, from 1.002 cm last week to 1.004 cm this week. The wires are still within the specification, but the statistical upward trend indicates problems ahead. A maintenance check on the machine shows the cutting bit has worn down.  Once the bit is replaced, the upward trend stops.

This is a simple physical example, but the same concept applies to other operational processes.
Automatic processes make easy examples, but most of our processes are semi-automatic, with people doing the “semi” and people causing most of the exceptions.

Various tests indicate that people achieve success rates of 90-98% for many things, attaining success rates above 98% only in very specific situations designed to support peak performance. So when our business processes include people we must expect exception rates of 2-10%.

The root causes for exceptions generated by people fall into four categories:
Documentation – is the task adequately documented?
Training – is the person trained to do the task?
Task match – Is the task reasonably suited to the person doing it? Obvious examples are physical limitations—requiring acute eyesight or hearing. Less obvious examples are tasks requiring math skills, language skills, or external knowledge.
Personal issues – Does the person have some issues (health, family, etc.) that are affecting performance? How do you identify these situations, and how does your organization handle them?

Exception Handling Checkup

• How does you business plan for exceptions?
• How well does your business define and identify exceptions?
• What is the frequency and cost of each exception?
• Does your business have automatic business rules for handling frequent exceptions?
• How quickly does your business identify each exception?
• How quickly does your business respond to each exception?
• Does your business log exceptions and track exception trends?
• Do you know which of your processes are semi-automatic vs. fully automatic?
• How does your organization handle employee personal issues?

Redundancy through Distribution (Cross-training and Project Teams)

Evolution builds in redundancy almost everywhere, at almost every level. DNA itself has two strands in a double-helix. Evolution prefers bilateral symmetry—two eyes, two ears, legs, arms. Bilateral symmetry provides many benefits, including back-ups.

Evolution also uses cross-training. As an extreme example, some adult reptiles, amphibians and even fish can change sex when needed. Stem cells can change functions. The same gene that controls the number of spines in the fins on a fish also controls the number of fingers on a hand. Enable that gene for a short time to get three fingers on a frog hand. Enable it a little longer to get four fingers and a thumb.

Evolution also uses cross-functional teams. Genes perform different functions when enabled by different proteins at different
times. Genes even respond to relative position in the body—front/back, left/right, top/bottom. The same gene expresses different actions depending upon the proteins that indicate its position within the body.

Evolution uses clusters of genes to drive the development of specific elements in an organism. The overused example—the eye—is the result of a number of genes working together. Frequently genes activate other genes in a long Rube Goldberg sequence of genes and proteins to construct a specific organ. Each gene may be a member of several clusters, each cluster working together for a short time, to accomplish a specific purpose.

In business we use project teams, or cross-functional teams, in much the same way. To install a new software system the project leader may bring together a collection of experts in the software application, business process engineering, subject matter experts, and of course the users themselves. If we look at the entire business as a series of projects, is it possible to operate the business predominantly with a collection of cross-functional teams on a routine basis?

At this point a reader may be considering some obvious objections. First, all this cross-training and project operation must create redundancy and increased overhead with all the associated additional costs. As any good cost accountant knows, there are many ways to analyze cost.  Cross-functional project teams typically add value to a business on a longer time horizon and on a larger scale.

Example: Installation of a new software system. The project implementation team has specific goals: improve the internal adoption rate, make the system easier and better to use, and reduce the operational errors it generates.

Each of these goals is an annuity that generates an ongoing economic return over time. So the value of the project implementation team must be calculated over time.

Another common objection to a cross-functional team is the specific expertise required for certain jobs. Can an accounts receivable collections clerk be trained to do software development? Do we really want our lead sales person to learn the intricacies of cost-accounting? Some job pairs simply do not fit into a cross-training model, but many others are amenable to cross-training.

Businesses face considerably different demands for reconfiguration as they grow and change. So the capabilities for reconfiguration must be different. Obviously an accounts receivable collections clerk cannot be retrained to do software development overnight.

Cross-training requires the elimination of many cherished prejudices in order to take advantage of all cross-training opportunities within the business.

Cross-Training Checkup

• To cross-train, you need good training capability. How well does your business train employees?
• What cross-training programs do you have in place?
• How often does your business use project teams?
• Does each project team have a charter, a set of objectives, and an expiration date?
• Are the project team members chosen from different functional areas?

Why so much talk about operations? What about sales, new products, and business leadership?

For some readers this series of posts may feel like a long walk through the weeds of operations. Some sales people left the room awhile ago, to go make customer calls.

However, evolution’s first job is replication and, just like evolution, a successful business must know how to replicate its past success.

Processes, training, documentation, exception handling, project teams and cross-functional training, are the tools by which a business “remembers” what it did yesterday and recreates that success today. In short, operations and execution keep the business going every day.

Do not give up on evolution yet as a model for business. As we consider how evolution uses variation and selection, you will find plenty of opportunity to use your creativity, enthusiasm, insight, and other uniquely human skills.

I’ll return next week for the first of two posts on variation.

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There’s a lot of finger pointing in the news these days, right along with every flavor of ‘expert’ pontificating on why the current mess happened and what needs to change.

But there’s not nearly enough talk about the ‘why’ of those changes.

But then, why should the ‘why’ of change be any different than all the other ‘whys’ that people sidestep?

Identifying, thinking about and understanding ‘why’ takes effort; it takes thought.

People are so wired and so busy that thinking is fast becoming a lost art.

To start with, it takes a certain amount of quiet and quiet is almost nonexistant. And if there is quiet, then people fill it with cell calls and i-Pods.

And why bother when one can google dozens of sources, get their thinking, mash it up and regurgitate it as one’s own smarts.

Then the ‘why’ can be buried under pop language and previous sound bites that have the added benefit of making the speaker sound smarter than he is.

So remember! Stop. Listen. Think.

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