Sunday, August 18, 1805

I recently read the Journals of Lewis and Clark, a nearly day-by-day account of the expedition sent by Thomas Jefferson to survey the Louisiana Purchase. Here is one journal entry from Meriwether Lewis on his birthday, while passing through what became the state of Montana.

Sunday, August 18, 1805

“This day I completed my thirty-first year and conceived that I had, in all human probability, now existed about half the period which I am to remain in this sublunary world. I reflected that I had as yet done very little, very little, indeed, to further the happiness of the human race or to advance the information of the succeeding generation… [I] endeavor to promote those two primary objects of human experience, by giving them the aid of that portion of talents which nature and fortune have bestowed on me, or in [the] future to live for mankind as I have heretofore lived for myself.”

With improved health and longer lifespans today, maybe people can get away with having this thought at age 39, instead of 31 (though Lewis only lived another four years). But still, for someone who had achieved much at a young age, what a journal entry.

The pastry that changed my life and a new stage for business

I recently sampled a kouign aman made by my friend Romina, who is a pastry chef superstar and an amazing person. Her kouign aman immediately became my favorite pastry. Too bad she lives two thousand miles away.

Romina was in NYC recently and worked as a stagaire at a couple of restaurants here. The concept behind the stage is that a chef will work in another’s kitchen for a day or so in order to get exposure to other techniques or cuisines. Restaurants are certainly businesses and I began to imagine whether non-food business managers could offer the same courtesy to colleagues from other organizations.

What would work the same:
- The stagaire agrees to respect specific innovations of the organization itself
- The stagaire actively contributes to the new organization
- The stagaire quickly learns and appreciates what could apply to his/her own business back home

What would work differently:
- The timeframe would need to be longer. A one-day stage in an office probably wouldn’t suffice, whereas a one-day stage in a restaurant would
- While anyone in an organization as a stagaire would be trusted by the owner/manager, their presence may be viewed differently by compliance organizations and other employees. Security issues would need to be addressed
- In non-food businesses, the stagaire may be better off observing, sitting in on meetings and discussing with the manager at day’s end

In a sense, the traditional management consultant is something of a reverse stagaire, going into a new organization for a time to bring in ideas and processes from outside and not necessarily having the relevance to apply what he/she sees on the client side to the consultancy. Other than consultants, typical business stage-like exchanges include the formal (case studies, articles, best practices) and the informal (talking business outside of work). It’s important to do this, no matter what business you’re in.

Keyboards, convention, efficiency and luck

When Christopher Sholes designed the QWERTY keyboard layout for early typewriters, it was partially to separate the keys of letters commonly used together and thus prevent key jams, which had a secondary effect of slowing down typists once key jams were no longer a problem.

But still, the QWERTY standard is seen on almost all English language keyboards even though it is not the optimal placement of keys. Rather than learn a new arrangement, like the Dvorak keyboard, most people prefer to stick with what they know. (The world’s record for fastest English language typing is held by Barbara Blackburn, using the Dvorak Simplified Keyboard. She had a peak speed of 212 wpm.)

So while most of the English language world uses a substandard keyboard layout what impact does this have on typists of other languages? Is it possible that some languages, purely by luck of letter frequency, use the QWERTY keyboard more efficiently than English language typists?

I looked at the languages for which I had data: English, French, German, Spanish, Esperanto (why not), Italian, Turkish and Swedish and mapped letter frequency to the QWERTY keyboard. A screen shot is below.

Doing a true comparison of keyboard efficiency in different languages calls for typing speed tests (of letter, not word speed), but lacking these data I made some assumptions. To compare the effect on different languages, I assumed that the Dvorak model was ideal and measured the degree to which the foreign languages followed that model of putting high frequency letters in the middle row and weighted to the right hand.

And the winner is… Esperanto. Yes, by chance, this artificial language should have a faster typing speed than the others. Losers in the speed contest are German and French, both of which have their highest frequency letters in the top row and to the left. That’s the power of convention and luck on efficiency, whether on keyboards or in business.

Then again, maybe we shouldn’t focus on typing fast but rather on writing thoughtfully and well…

Speed to marketer

When I first incorporated Inticiti, I was astounded at the speed with which direct marketers contacted me. I incorporated on a Thursday. The following Tuesday I received my first piece of junk mail addressed to the business.

Certainly the process for sending that piece of junk mail was automated and not specific to me. And I did what most people would do – into the recycling bin it went.

The marketers send so much mail because they believe based on their research that each letter they send is worth more in future revenue than the cost of its printing and mailing. What happens if we become a customer of one of those companies and need to call their help desk? General customer experience notes that wait times are excessive (or “feel” excessive) and staff are often not as helpful as we would like (or we “feel” that to be the case). It sometimes seems as if companies believe that each customer served is worth less in future revenue than the cost incurred to serve them.

The second complaint (helpfulness) is more difficult to improve since it requires not only good automated menus and scripts for call center agents but also a degree of familiarity and longevity at the call center, where employee turnover can be 100% per year. The first complaint (wait time) could be easily addressed: simply add more agents. Using knowledge of call busy hours and queuing theory we know that adding a handful of agents to a large call center can dramatically reduce customer wait time. And agents in general are pretty cheap.

So why do we ever need to wait on the phone for the help desk? I think it is mostly a matter of context. Companies traditionally viewed their facility and support staff as costs rather than as potential sources of revenue. Only recently are companies thinking about call centers not as reactive cost centers, but as proactive sources of additional revenue.

Like call centers, direct marketers do not consider costs that exist outside of their business model. The most important one of those externalities to me is the time that I have to take each day identifying and discarding junk mail. Further, there is the municipal cost of disposing discarded mail. And do I throw it away or recycle it? Further to that is a possible increased exposure to identity theft made possible by each additional letter with my name and address on it. Taking all of this into account, perhaps the social costs of junk mail (or call wait time) are greater than the economic benefits that accrue to the marketing organizations and their corporate clients.

Taylorism or Tailorism?

It’s been almost a century since the publication of The Principles of Scientific Management. Is there a new Frederick Winslow Taylor, a student of knowledge worker scientific management?

There are a number of drivers in knowledge work and a number of reasons why Taylor’s approach does not work well in this area. For example, there are cost savings arguments to standardization in more complex organizations. Contributing to this is lower employee tenure. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, average employee tenure fell since 1996 (from the BLS study “Median years of tenure with current employer for employed wage and salary workers by age and sex, selected years, 1996-2006”). Tenures decreased the most for employee ages 35-44 (a drop of 7.5% to 4.9 years), ages 45-54 (a drop of 12% to 7.3 years), and ages 55-64 (a drop of 8.8% to 9.3 years). When employees change employers more frequently, they must spend more time ramping up in order to add value in their new organization. It would seem that lower tenures add to the benefits of process standardization for knowledge workers.

But there is a limit to how deeply an organization of knowledge workers will want to standardize processes. The problem is that knowledge work tends to be less easily compartmentalized and that knowledge workers, like the manual workers of Taylor’s factories, often resent being told how to do their jobs, especially as it may make them feel like cogs.

What do the stakeholders -- the organization, the employees, the customers – gain and lose from a process-heavy approach? To the organization: possible gains in productivity but less flexibility to act on creative ideas that produce future productivity gains. To the employees: possible improvements in efficiency in some tasks but lower job satisfaction, depending on disposition. To the customers: perhaps lower prices, but possibly less customized service.

Then I thought of my old tailor from when I was based in Hong Kong. His business was incredibly customer-centric. I would stop by his shop, have a cup of tea, talk about work, look at some fabric, talk about suit styles, talk about the family and then make a purchase decision. A very long, inconsistent and inefficient process. Behind the scenes, cutting cloth and sewing, he may have been efficient, but to the customer he gave a personal and, well, tailored series of interactions. I’d say that to some degree the knowledge worker is a customer of his/her employer.

Maybe not all of what passes as inefficiency is true loss.

The classical music cost disease

A paper from William Baumol and William Bowen “On the performing arts: the anatomy of their economic problems” (1965) showed that while productivity improvements have been made in many other fields there cannot be productivity advances in the performing arts (a string quartet still requires the same number of performers today as it did centuries ago). Baumol and Bowen show that since the performing arts could not realize greater efficiencies, their cost rose over the centuries in comparison to other things.

But today the paper seems to be incomplete in that Baumol and Bowen did not expect performing arts output gains outside of live music. Today it is no longer only the process (playing the music live) that the audience pays for. Productivity has come from other developments such as the sale of recorded performances, performing for larger paying audiences and even quality improvements in instrument components. Additionally it may take musicians less time to learn new music by using technology including computerized note recognition and the ability to hear different recorded versions of a piece at a whim. There may be even more room to improve the learning process.

That being said, classical music today is a money-losing endeavor reliant upon donors and sponsors in addition to ticket sales. What had been the popular music of a century or more ago was the favorite musical type of only 30% of the American public back when Lincoln Center was built in the 1960s and the current favorite music of only 3% of the public today. I believe that some of this problem is related to the fact that classical performers today have found limited success in creating new powerful works and in evolving the performance experience itself. Some steps in that direction have been taken by performances such as those put on by Sympho.

Otherwise, the music exists as if in a museum but with pieces that are preserved not necessarily being the best ones available and the method of their current display influenced by the practicalities of the past.

This is one example of the type of problem we work on at Inticiti.

On training impact

I often see clients with corporate training plans that seemed based on the premise that employees have a right to training, just not the right to use what they learn. Most training courses follow a one-time course model that has no follow-up. In a typical training course that might last a couple of days, employees can be exposed to new ideas and methods, but hardly have the opportunity to practice what they have learned. Under these conditions, how much new knowledge do they retain?

Even more problematic are training courses delivered right in the employee’s office via distance learning. While many companies prefer these courses because they are less expensive, their design means that employees are more easily distracted and tempted and expected to check in on their regular work that they are missing.

One company that seems to have got training – at least company-wide training – right is GE. For example, GE’s Six Sigma program has employees attend four weeks of training in statistics, processes and quality control and then requires employees to use what they have learned while working on or leading Six Sigma projects. Top management, many of themselves former Six Sigma “Black Belts”, supports the training.

I’m not making a case for implementing Six Sigma, but the integrated approach that GE takes seems to lead to more learning and higher payoff.

While it may not be practical to do the same with shorter, more specific courses that only apply to a small number of employees, companies can do a few simple things to increase their return on training investment.

- enforce a minimum amount of training per employee annually (dollar amount, credit amount, or time amount)
- encourage employees to take training outside of the office
- After an employee receives training, require them to deliver an internal training session to others. The purposes of these sessions should be to both transmit knowledge elsewhere in the organization and to make sure that the new training sinks in over time

Permanent space vs. hoteling

Some businesses have done away with permanent office space or cubicles. Instead, when an employee is in the office he or she registers for a place to sit and depending on availability gets a spot. Work or personal items that would have been kept in a permanent desk drawer may now be kept in a locker and moved to the temporary space each day. Colleagues who wish to find others may look them up on a website directory which lists the identification number of the cubicle or office which they are using that day.

The entire argument for hoteling, as this is known, is financial. Reduce your office real estate and save on the bottom line. However, what is lost from the top line in this structure? What is lost in terms of worker productivity and morale?

Rules of lunch, or Why to take a break

A few years ago I had a client who was a senior member of a large real estate development firm. During one lunchtime conversation he looked back over a career that spanned 40 years and talked about a few of the things he had accomplished of which he was proud. One of them, curiously, was his “lunch policy”. He has lunch almost every day in the office with colleagues of all levels. At lunch he has two rules. First, if you are busy with something or have other plans you take care of lunch yourself and don’t disrupt the lunch of others. Second, at the lunch table no discussion of work is allowed.

In the past, when I worked at a traditional management consulting firm I found that to many colleagues, lunch was just a time of day when you happened to eat while working. The idea of leaving the office to eat somewhere else while not working was foreign and the perception of having done so was to be avoided. I could never understand why people could think that being seen working through lunch would make them more effective or raise their perceived value to the firm. Eventually I came to eat lunch with the colleagues who felt the same way I did or with clients who never even heard of the issue.

I never could figure out what kept the others so busy. In fact, I came to believe that they were always working because they were less efficient due to the fact that they were, you guessed it, always working.

My recommendation is to take a break, go out, walk around, refresh your mind and be more productive.

Measured by tickets closed, not problems solved

What are we measuring? Misguidance on what to measure can result in poor customer service, albeit service that may satisfy agreed customer service requirements.

I recently called a software manufacturer because I had trouble activating one of their products, which I had bought. Here’s a synopsis of what happened.

- First call to customer service. Rep asks me for name and phone number. Decides my case needs to be handled by another group which specializes in product activation. Routes me to another rep.
- Second rep calls me by a different name and has the wrong information about my case. Starts to walk me through activation process. Can’t handle a question about a different version that I have preinstalled on my machine. I mention that the rep must get this question all the time. Am asked to call another specialist (cannot transfer me).
- Third rep has to ask all over again what the case is. I explain again and ask the version question no one can handle directly and am told to call a fourth person. Am given 10-digit case code.
- I call fourth rep, who automatically knows my name from the phone number the system recognizes but needs the case code anyway. I end up explaining to him how I think I can solve the problem. He agrees and asks if he can close the problem ticket. I decline since I don’t know if the problem will really be solved since it will take 20 minutes to uninstall and reinstall the software.
- Receive two different long emails from customer reps asking if the ticket can be closed. Includes details on how to respond to message, such as different email address and ID number.
- Receive additional email (addressing me by a new wrong name) which states that the ticket is closed since I have not responded.
- Ticket closed, problem solved.

Your Brain Is Not a Closet

Artificial memory (such as what we can draw upon from databases) is not the same as natural memory (from our brains). As David Brooks writes in his op-ed piece "The Outsourced Brain", artificial memory means we can follow prompts from a GPS-enabled computer in order to drive ourselves home. That drive may be easier, faster and less stressful than it would otherwise and we certainly don't need to understand the road system to arrive home.

However, too much reliance on artificial memory has its shortcomings. I think one of the biggest areas is developmental shortfall and atrophy of mental skills.

For example, while using a calculator speeds up a lengthy calculation and makes it more accurate, should we always rely on a calculator even if it is accessible? I have seen people use calculators for tasks that take more time than mentally multiplying numbers (I used to have a boss who would use a calculator to multiply by 10).

Using artificial memory whenever possible can lead to mental laziness. The brain doesn't seem to be like a closet with a limited capacity that can be used to store one memory at the expense of another. Instead, use of our memories should enable us to uncover patterns and insight that would not come out merely from use of artificial memory.

Choose when to outsource your brain.