Another business lesson from the kitchen: the order matters

I mentioned in a previous post how I love to cook and often have a cooking show on while I'm preparing dinner at night. I was watching Emeril as he made a bolognese sauce (which I tried along with him and it turned out fantastic!) and he commented that when you start by putting the olive oil and bacon into the pot you need to wait to add the onions and garlic and other ingredients. If you add everything all at once the moisture from the vegetables will prevent the bacon from crisping which needs to happen in order to get the full desired flavor.

In other words, using the proper order matters just as much as using the right ingredients.

Let's switch gears. Business. You're trying to make something work better, cheaper, faster. You've got a gal that's a black belt in Six Sigma. You have a guy who did a stint at Toyota and loves Lean. And you've got another gal who loves the Theory of Constraints or TOC. Do you throw them all at the problem all at once and say, "have at it"? You can, but I wouldn't.

If you have those three skill sets in-house you're fortunate. You have the ingredients you need. But the order in which you deploy these resources matters just as much in business as it does in cooking. The research that's coming out in the continuous process improvement literature strongly suggests using TOC as a focusing mechanism to determine the optimal place to start. You can't work on everything all at once and you need to know where to focus first. Bring in your TOC expert. Then bring in your Lean SME to reduce waste, then your Six Sigma person. These results will typically yield far better results than trying to "cook" the approaches all at once.

What works even better is to have a person, a firm, a team that not only knows each discipline well but also how they work together--the Integrated TOC/Lean/Six Sigma (iTLS) approach pioneered by Bob Fox and others. Instead of having one person cook the pasta, someone else come in to make the sauce, a third to make a salad, and someone else to plate it, you just bring in a chef who can do it all. Ideally, bring in a chef that can teach you how to make the dish yourself the next time.

How iPods in cars is like process improvement

I have a 15-year-old son who is also a talented musician. Whenever he's in the minivan he assumes he's in charge of the sound system and grabs the long cord we have plugged into our auxiliary port, plugs it into his ever-present iPod, and begins blaring Led Zeppelin or Pink Floyd (fortunately he has good taste!). Now I like loud music from time-to-time, but not ALL the time like he does. So we play this little game where he slowly cranks up the volume on his iPod and I slowly notch it down via the volume controls on the steering wheel.

Process improvement is a lot like that.

It used to puzzle me to no end how I could go into a given functional area, reduce the required man-hours to process a given widget from dozens or hundreds down to a handful, and then watch as no discernable impacts made it to the bottom line--or even downstream! Then I discovered the Theory of Constraints (TOC). Now I know it's all about the iPod example.

TOC teaches us to think systemically and see the organization as a whole. It then gives you the lens to see that the parts that make up the whole come in two flavors: those that have a capacity equal to or greater than the demands placed upon them, and those with a capacity less than their respective demands. Then, you're able to look at the latter group and find the bottleneck, the constraint.

If you improve the throughput of a resource upstream or downstream of a bottleneck it's like you've just turned the volume up on the iPod but then the bottleneck turns it back down on the radio dial; it cancels out the benefit. In fact, improving the throughput upstream could actually be making things worse--you're just building the pile of work in front of the constraint higher faster.

The Integrated TOC/Lean/Six Sigma (iTLS) approach most notably outlined by Robert Fox in his new book (as well as by others such as the book Velocity) uses TOC as a focusing mechanism to first see where should we focus our improvement efforts. Then we can bring in Lean to reduce waste, Six Sigma to reduce variability, and technology to automate and streamline (maybe that should be changed to iPIT for Integrated Process Improvements and Technology? Or maybe TiP for Technology integrated with Processes?) . Taking this approach gives you the comfort of knowing anything you do will have an immediate systemic effect and that someone else doesn't have their hand on the volume control downstream.

From Piano Practice to Self Expression

My 11 year old has turned a corner on the piano. Instead of having to remind him multiple times a day to practice and setting up job charts as reminders with rewards for doing it, he stumbles downstairs first thing in the morning and begins playing before he's even spoken to anyone. He sits down and plays when he gets home from school. He plays a few times throughout the evening. The difference seems to be that he's finally hit a tipping point in his skill level where he can play a handful of songs well from memory and he's beginning to feel the release of self expression through his music (I can't think of many motivators more powerful than self expression).

The next time you notice resistance to some new business processes, instead of reiterating the "why we did this and why it's best for the company" speech, try helping the individuals in question gain more skill at using them. Help them to become more proficient.

Six Sigma Net Promoter Metric and Tom Peters TGR/TGW

I was listening to episode six of the Six Sigma Pointers podcast by Thomas Pyzdek, this morning, (which I highly recommend, btw) and he was talking about the Net Promoter metric. Essentially, you ask a customer if they would recommend your product or service to a friend or colleague--asking them to respond on a scale from zero to 10. If the customer marks a nine or 10 they are considered "promoters." If they mark a seven or eight they are considered neutral. And if they mark a six or less they are considered "detractors." The metric is derived by subtracting the detractors from the promoters.

The podcast elaborates on how closely this metric correlates with business performance and on how many of the Fortune 500 have adopted it. But what I found most interesting was when Mr. Pyzdek mentioned how one goes about improving this metric. Obviously from a pure math perspective one can either increase the number of promoters or decrease the number of detractors. But each group seems to respond to a different driver. Detractors seem to respond to just getting the basics right and not doing things wrong. Promoters tend to respond to providing a "Wow!" level of service and doing things right.

I think Tom Peters has the clearest description of this distinction in chapter eight (Beyond TQM Toward Wow!) of his book The Tom Peters Seminar. He gives some great examples and insights which I won't attempt to recite here (it's really worth picking up the book!) but his thesis is basically that we need both sides of the equation and when Americans began really looking at quality as a competitive driver we were almost entirely focused on eliminating the "things gone wrong" (TGW) from our systems and processes. And that's important. He makes the point you shouldn't have crumbs on the floor and missing towels when you walk into the hotel room. But that's not enough. We also need to look at "things gone right" (TGR) and find ways to "delight and provide even the unexpressed needs of the customer" (e.g., such as Tom walking into a hotel room where he would be giving a speech the next morning to find a projector and screen set with cables carefully taped down so he could practice his presentation.)

Dr. Goldratt mentions a similar paradigm in Beyond the Goal when he says there are really only two things to worry about:

1. Things that shouldn't have happened but did; and
2. Things that should have happened but did not.

It's simple, but hard to pull off. And it becomes even harder when you consider that Tom will probably expect a projector the next time he stays at that hotel chain for a speaking engagement. So now today's "Wow!" is tomorrow's expectation.