High performance Sustainable Growth of an organization is equated to its ability to firmly place itself on the journey of business excellence.
Despite huge amount of work done on business excellence around the world, the question, ‘So how do we really build the path to this journey?’ keeps appearing on the foreground of management discussions.
The co-created book, ‘The Path‘ provides answer to this question by narrating the journey of an organization that is challenged by the fuzziness of today’s complex environment.The concept behind the journey for excellence was provided in a chapter titled, ‘Inside the Growth Curve’. This chapter is now published online for free download.
It was a challenge to deliver an action based content on Operations Management to a clutch of entrepreneurs, when Goldman Sachs along with ISB set on a mission to provide a crash MBA program to 10,000 women entrepreneurs globally.
The only way we could do was by co-creating the session by bringing in operational experience of the participants, without knowing what shape it would take. It was fun and an innovation in delivering such a session (How do we deliver one day session…)
Later on, we posted a summary presentation of the session. The presentation received huge demand and is now viewed over 14000 times and its content has been regularly used by many in their training session.
Over 4 years, we have been hand holding organizations in formalizing their operations management function. The presentation has in deed, transformed into various levels of training and workshops that promises to reveal hidden capacity within a lead time.
In fact, the interactions with entrepreneurs, leaders and managers across businesses led to co-creating ‘The Path‘ and release of its technical version, ‘Building Manufacturing Competitiveness‘. The experience of so far, has not been just limited to operations, indeed it led to operational innovation as a strategic initiative for several of our clients.
You may also like to download, other widely read thoughtworks from our stables; here they are:
There are just three colours to guide the traffic all over the world, we have just 3 financial statements, and in our government system just 3 subsystems Legislative, Executive and Judiciary. In science, Newton, compressed the whole chaos in the world to just 3 laws of motion. And then we have trilogy, trinity and triangulation all related to 3.
Any wonder, why the power of 3 is so strong?
The reason; it provides extreme focused way to put your arms around just the sufficent things that can guide you to all other aspects of that discipline. Everything else is just a part of these and obey them without question. This avoids chaos, confusion, noise and distraction, when the system becomes complex. How come, we have not yet, figured out 3 Laws that can help us simplifying and structuring our fight against COVID-19. Here is the help.
Kristen defined the fight against COVID-19 of being operational in nature. And, the reading of Derek Thompson in the Atlantic was insightful about the rules of dealing with COVID-19. Clearing all the noise around, here we present the laws, precisely 3, for fighting COVID-19. For this, we derive inspiration from Eli Goldratt’s Law’s of Operations.
Objective: Progression of Life is the prime objective of humanity.
Alternatively, saving life is unquestionable. There is no trade-off between life and other things, say life and livelihood. Rather, no problem should ever be framed as a conflict between life and any other thing. Everything subordinates to Life.
If the objective is clear then, it must be recognized that cities are the epicentre of growth with high density population, hence by design they are the most economically active and health wise risky locations(in the context of pandemic). Covid-19 has come from outside country and landed first in cities. Urban poor living in compromised conditions (in developing countries) are the most vulnerable, both from virus and the aftereffects (livelihood, lockdown) of measures to contain virus.
And hence, the 3 Laws of managing the fight against COVID-19 systematically, are as given below and in the mentioned order.
Law-1: First secure the living of vulnerable citizens to stop working and almost immediately, implement the required measures of social distancing.
This means, looking ahead and taking action now, to immediately secure what could become the weakest link of the system i.e. life and livelihood of urban poor. Similar economic support for rural poor, if other support measures not in place.
Law-2: Focus attention on Science to fight Virus.
The core domain of epidemic is in Science. Do intensive testing and tracing (the initial weakest link of the system), and have the mindset of right priority. Build focused capacities and capabilities at war footing, to go ahead of virus.
Commit and Build healthcare, medical device and drug development industry without any compromise.
Law-3: Initiate, pausing companies, help them shift their expenses to the future.
Wages are not the only burden of operating companies. Be Generous, in funding crisis of lockdown and the pseudo-balance between demand and supply. Incremental small supports, however, well intended may not make significant impact in this emerging situation at national level. Help needed is in an order of magnitude.
These 3 laws if applied, will make our actions true to our objective.
Whenever asked to increase the throughput, what did the Manager say?
“We Don’t have enough capacity! We need more capacity, more people, more machines, more software, more space, …” A hallmark statement of the firefighting zone of operations.
This is where the improvement initiatives radical or small start in an organization.
Incidentally, two days back I accompanied kids to Rang Shankara, the iconic theater of performing arts in Bangalore to watch a play on Mullah Naseeruddin. Mullah is a legend of folklore for his witty ideas. Here is how the play goes.
One day a lady comes to Mullah complaining about her home being too crowded with all the relatives, kids and elders. And then, she requests him for a solid advice to get additional space to improve their living conditions.
Never refusing anybody in real need an advice, Mullah asks her if she has any pets at home. Upon knowing that she has a dozen chickens in the poultry, he advices to let all the chickens live inside her home. Surprised by his advice, the lady goes home and lets all the chickens inside her home.
Next day the lady returns with a grim face complaining how difficult was the past 24 hours due to tantrums of chickens. Then, upon knowing that she owns a couple of goats, Mullah advices her to bring in the goats inside home. The disgruntled lady with all the faith in the legacy of Mullah’s intelligence, returns home and lets the goats inside home.
The following day, she again returns to Mullah and starts complaining how difficult life has become since past two days. Mullah hears patiently and then asks her if she owns any other pets. Upon knowing about her owning two horses, he advices to let the horses live inside home. Disbelievingly, the lady returns home having faith in the legacy of Mullah and against all wishes of her family members lets the horses inside the home.
Twenty four hours later, she returns to Mullah all weary and exhausted. Mullah looks at her and says that her problem is just about to evaporate. He advices, “Go back home and drive out all pets from home”. She goes back and at once drives out all the pets from home.
Early morning the following day, she returns to Mullah and thanks him profusely with gleaming face. She starts describing how good the home has become, how spacious it is with so much place to move around and so much air to breath. Everybody could sleep soundly. The house somehow looks bigger.
Moral of the Story : No matter what the current capacity of your office, factory or plant is, huge capacity is hidden just around there. And, there is always an opportunity to quickly improve it substantially!
Actually, a lot of capacity (with ‘throughput’ being the real measure) is hidden inside your organization. It requires a belief in people who work there that they can reveal the hidden capacity (additional throughput). Once we have this belief then there are uncountable numbers of tools available to identify and reveal hidden capacity.
Capacity Hunt Program is one such program that helps organizations in systematically identifying and revealing hidden capacity. It helps organizations in identifying ‘one thing’ or ‘just the few things’ that prevent it from making more throughput. And, most importantly, such significant improvement in capacity can be obtained in surprisingly shorter time, often in one lead time without resorting to costly investment.
Accepting and recognizing that somewhere, there is hidden capacity in your organization is the first step in improving its performance.
Note: Do not literally copy paste the solution from the above story into your organization. Check the post, ‘How is it applicable to my organization?‘ to know what it means to translate it into your organization.
It is a valid question, whenever a new concept is proposed for transforming your organization. Every new concept comes with a promise of dramatically improving performance. Concepts like Automation, TQM, BPR, Lean, Six Sigma, TOC, QbD, etc, were discovered and developed in one industry and found successful implementations in other industries also. At the same time, there is no dearth of catastrophic failures of transformational projects, even when new concepts were proven in the same industry. Of course, organizations within the same industry would differ in certain ways, but there are more similarities than differences. Never the less, we must accept that the question has validity when somebody comes to you with a proposal, “your competitor is implementing one of the latest breakthrough concepts, the internet of things, IoT. It is time you also had a look at it.”
So, what goes into the right applicability of a new concept?
Let’s look back to the short story we read earlier, ‘We do not have enough capacity!’. The lady in the story finds that the capacity of the house is over stretched with too many people and things to accommodate. This situation is in fact, applicable to any context, and capacity need not be related to just a physical capacity (occupancy). People talk about capacity of a warehouse, a software development team, an R&D centre, a hospital, a restaurant, a factory etc. ‘We do not have enough capacity!’ is the exclamatory cry emerging louder, every time an organization (irrespective of which industry it is from) is stretched to increase its performance.
While there are options to buy out or build capacities, there are often unacceptable risks in terms of cost, time and effort. The lady could have rented, built or bought new house. But she chooses to follow the wise counsel of the Mullah. The story reveals at the end that there indeed is a huge space in the lady’s home.
The underlying belief of Mullah’s counsel is that any given situation has substantial un-noticed scope of improvement. And, this is true for an organization too, and indeed, is found built into the DNA of high performing organizations. Now, in order to get a similar level of benefit, organizations need to avoid copy pasting not only the solution but also the method. And, that is where the difference between success and failure occurs in adopting a new concept in an organization.
In this case, first the word Capacity must be internalized in one’s own context. So, in a med diagnostic centre it is the capacity to carry out tests, in a restaurant it is the capacity to serve incoming guests, in a BPO it is to process transactions, in a software centre it is the number of projects (or lines of codes), in a factory it is the throughput etc.
Second, it may not be necessary to drive the whole organization crazy by pushing everybody to the wall as Mullah took the lady through. For the lady, it was just a couple of days of experimentation, but in an organization, if you try to squeeze people or resources to the extremes, it would be catastrophic. Hence, you need to figure out how to make your team quickly visualize the hidden capacity. This means that an organization must find its own way of improving things. You may need to device a different experiment or do a restricted proof of concept or if your employees belong to an elite group then perhaps, just a short training or counselling would do. The idea behind the program, ‘revealing hidden capacity’ is exactly that. It takes 2 days to demonstrate that there is hidden capacity and puts the team into action to improve the situation.
The key to internalizing or contextualizing a concept is not to run through a whole roster of its tools or techniques or those steps implemented elsewhere, but to be able to identify the underlying principles and translate those principles into one’s organizational context. In fact, in any discipline, you would not generally need to understand more than just the few principles to get best out of it. Have a look at the financial system; you need only 3 financial statements to understand, implement and improve financial health of an organization. An experienced doctor needs just 3 symptoms to find the root cause of what is ailing you. And, there are just 3 laws of motion that are the basis of static and dynamic design of every structure on this earth. And of course, there are just 3 colors in our traffic system.
And so, if there is a well established concept of hidden capacity, how many fundamental principles an organization needs to understand and internalize in order to dramatically improve its performance? Just a few! All other (sub)principles are then included or derivable from these few principles. Would not it be good if your team is equipped to identify just the few principles and implement them in your context than being lost in trying to get a handle on each and every tool and technique?
Let’s have a look at the concept of just a few principles in a following post. Of course, such principles would be applicable to all sorts of organizations, otherwise why would they be called Principles?
