Book Summary
By Bud Roth
 |
Slack: Getting Past
Burnout, Busywork and the Myth of Total Efficiency, by Tom
DeMarco |
This summary is complements of Roth Consulting Group, LLC 317-843-9521
Tom DeMarco is a leading management consultant to both Fortune 500 and up and coming companies. He has discovered a counterintuitive principal that explains why efficiency improvement can sometimes make the company slow. DeMarco wisely suggests that slack can actually improve the performance of a business unit and company. His approach will work for new and old economy companies alike. His handbook will debunk commonly held assumptions about real-world management and give you a brand new model for achieving and maintaining the truth of effectiveness as well as a healthier bottom line.
It's possible to make an organization more efficient without making it
better. That's what happens when you drive out slack. It's also possible
to make an organization less efficient and improve it enormously. In order
to do that you need to reintroduce enough slack to allow the organization
to breathe, to reinvent itself, and make necessary change.
From DeMarco's exposure to many Fortune 500 companies, he concludes that
one-third to one-half of the organizations over improved to some extent.
That is, their people are pathologically busy, frantic, and at least a
little bit fearful. This " hurry-up " mantra and an increased
focus on busyness can end up causing people to slow down.
The ability to change has to be an organic part of the organization. Change
has to be going on all the time, everywhere. In needs to be everybody's
business. That means that everybody needs to have some capacity to devote
to change. This is the time people dedicate to rethink how they're working.
A successful company must set aside resources necessary to let invention
happen.
Modern-day managers in all parts of our economy are under enormous pressure
to do everything much faster and much more cheaply, to minimize both time
and cost. When you’re torn between two mutually exclusive goals,
when there is no room for give, the result is stress. Managers everywhere
are under stress, and stress, as we all know, is bad for the health, tough
on relationships, and causes poor judgment. If the employees are suffering,
you know that the customer must also be suffering. When stress is the
problem, slack is the solution. The stressed out organization that elevates
pressure to prominence status is counter productive. The long-term effect
of too much pressure is poor motivation, burnout, and loss of key people.
The best managers use pressure only rarely and never over extended periods.
A culture of fear gets in the way of everything that is healthy or worthwhile.
Growth is stunted. Changes or improvements become nearly impossible. Morale
is in the dumpster. Good people leave and new good people stay away.
The Corporate Quality Program is a mechanism for driving out defects.
When it succeeds, quality programs help produce products that are defect
free, or nearly so. The focus on one, easy and actionable aspect of quality
and ignoring everything else has negative impact. Real quality programs
should spend one ninth of its resources on defect prevention and removal,
and the rest on assuring product uniqueness, usefulness, market impact,
change of customer work modes, etc.
The overstressed organization is so busy making itself efficient that
it has forgotten how to be effective. You’re efficient when you
do something with minimum waste. And you’re effective when you're
doing the right something. You really cannot have a choice of one or the
other. The challenge is to bring efficiency and effectiveness in balance.
Effectiveness moves steadily toward its real goals of the organization.
Organizational change is not merely the process of removing barriers to
change. It also requires vision, leadership, timing, and much more. Slack
is a lubricant that makes all these things possible.
Vision and leadership, in particular, depend on degrees of freedom made
available to the potential visionary or leader. Box these gifted people
in enough, and none of their magic will be able to happen. (over)
DeMarco says that there is no easy formula to real leadership, but it
seems clear that the following elements always need to be present: Clear
articulation of the direction, frank admission of the short-term pain,
follow-up; follow-up, follow-up.
Lack of power is a great excuse for failure, but sufficient power is never
a necessary condition of leadership. There is never sufficient power.
Acts of leadership you encounter everyday are often performed by relatively
powerless people. People sometimes follow, but they are not innate followers.
Leadership is everybody's business, and following someone who has the
inspiration of the moment is also everybody's business. Leadership is
a rotating function. Following whoever has got the “hot hand”
is a side effect.
Change always implies abandonment. You abandon things because they no
longer provide the best way to do things. People must abandon their mastery
of the familiar, and become novice once again. People can make this kind
of change, but they can only make it if they feel safe. If they do not
feel safe, they will resist the change. Learning is the key activity of
meaningful change.
The enormous resistance to change is not exactly logical; it's more likely
to be emotional. How people feel can be more of a factor in the success
of a change than what they think. That's why the sudden decline of corporate
fortunes is exactly the worst moment to introduce a change. People are
uneasy about their jobs, worried about lasting corporate health, and perhaps
shocked by the competition. A far better time to introduce a change would
have to be at the period of healthy growth.
Middle managers are the people who are key in making changes and reinventing
the organization. Middle managers are also responsible for directing operations
and other ongoing activities. Of course, in the process of flattening
our organizations, we got rid of the middle managers and the centers for
change. We called this action " trimming fat. " The fact that
they had time on their hands made them fat. The fact that managers have
time on their hands allows them time for reinvention. The extra time is
not waste but slack. Without slack they could function in only their operational
roles.
People are natural learning machines, learning all the time. To become
an effective learning organization, you need to make a habit of learning
those particular skills that create constructive change. The team provides
an ideal learning environment, a place were coaching is an integral part
of each day's work. The teams embody the four elements of learning: a
learner, a facilitator, materials, and co-learners. The most ideal place
to learn is while doing the job. Coaching facilitates the process of learning
while performing work. Collaboration with co-workers enhances the learning
process. We cannot learn in isolation.
There is no such thing as " healthy " competition within a knowledge
organization; all internal competition is destructive. Knowledge work
is by definition collaborative. There has to be collaboration as well
between teams and among the organizations the teams belong to.
Training, as normally conducted in the slack organizations, is a non-learning
technique. DeMarco states that the essence of a training experience is
this slowing down. Learning takes time. Training = Practice by doing a
new task much more slowly than an expert would do it.
Risk is not inherently bad. Risk is uncertainty. Risk-management allows
you to go forth into risky territory with some assurance of just how much
risk you're running. Proceeding at breakneck speed is, by definition,
inconsistent with risk-management. The corollary is that managing your
risks requires that you go at some slower speed. Most companies focus
on a rosy scenario date. There is little flexibility in their deadline.
We should choose a prudent speed rather than breakneck speed. The difference
between the time it takes you to arrive at "all prudent speed"
and time it would take you at “breakneck speed" is your slack.
Slack is what helps to arrive quickly but without a broken neck. Remember,
risk avoidance is flight from opportunity.
Complements of Roth Consulting Group, LLC 317-843-9521
Roth
Counsulting Group, LLC
5914 Silas Moffitt Way, Suite A, Carmel IN 46033
ph: 317-843-9521 webmaster@rothcg.com
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