It’s the process, stupid
Gene Mage
“So, what are you working on this week?” my mom asked over herb-roasted chicken Wednesday night. “Disaster recovery,” was the only thing I could come up with to accurately describe the project work ahead of me.
“The client seems to have misplaced $50,000,” I went on to explain, “Apparently there was no process in place for ensuring that the daily deposits of cash were making it intact to the bank.” “That’s nice dear,” Mom replied, “Would you like some more stuffing and chestnuts?”
While Mom breezed through the conversation as if I was
talking about a little-league game, the shock and horror on the face of the
director responsible for that area would have made Stephen King reach for a
nightlight. As with most businesses
today, this particular organization is counting pennies, recycling pencils, and
making double-sided copies to deliver the financial results. The unexpected loss of $50,000 was something
akin to arriving home to find your dog making long distance phone calls to a
love interest in
An employee discovered that she could receive, for example,
$10,000 of cash from a customer and deposit $5000 in the bank, while
appropriating the other $5000 for personal use without anyone noticing the
discrepancy—for 6 full months. Being a
good disaster recovery consultant, I reached into the depths of my expertise to
say what needed to be said, an insight so subtle, so hidden from mere mortals,
that I was brought all the way from
“Think about your local burger franchise,” I continued. “Make your procedures so fool-proof that you
will get consistent quality even from marginally capable employees who stay out
until
But that, dear reader, is the point. As Michael Gerber so eloquently presents in his legendary book on entrepreneurship entitled The E-Myth, you cannot count on getting “good people” to get things done. On the contrary, you must deliver your promises with relentless consistency with the talent you can get, which often tends to be teenagers who stay up too late.
It’s the process, stupid. You have to document how work gets done, and build in quality assurance to hold people accountable for following the procedures. You insist on process compliance not because of childhood trauma leading to an overly controlling personality, but to ensure that customers receive a consistently good experience.
Customers expect you to deliver outstanding quality all the
time, every time. The only way to
achieve that outcome is to build systems that maximize the odds those
results will happen.
You would think that after five decades of literature by extraordinary minds
such as Philip B. Crosby and W. Edwards Deming no business today would try to
operate without a written playbook.
After endless lectures on Japanese Management, Total Quality, ISO 9002
certification and the Malcolm Baldridge Quality Award, are there still people
out there who have missed the message to “write down how you do it, and do it
the way you write it?”
This week we all heard the sad news about Jesica Santillan,
the brave young woman who received a heart/lung transplant of the wrong blood
type at
Syndicated columnist Gene C. Mage is author of the book Managing for High Performance. To contact Gene, visit www.makingitwork.com.