About Dan Markovitz

Dan Markovitz is the founder and president of TimeBack Management. Prior to founding his own firm, Mr. Markovitz held management positions at Sierra Designs, Adidas, CNET and Asics Tiger. Learn More...

Leveling; smoothing out the flow; e.g., doing two performance evaluations a day for 3 weeks, rather than ten a day for three days -- and then needing to take a vacation because you're so burned out.

Overburdening people, process, or equipment; e.g., people working 100 hour weeks for months on end -- come to think of it, like most lawyers and accountants.

Uneveness or variability; e.g., leaving work at the normal time on Thursday, but having to stay at the office till midnight on Friday because the boss finally got around to giving you that project...at 4:30pm.

Waste; activities that your customer doesn't value and doesn't want to pay for; e.g., billing your customer for the really expensive 10am FedEx delivery because you didn't finish the document on time.

TIMEBACK BLOG

Surgeons need to wash their hands. You need to keep your desk clean.

Posted June 30, 2008 @ 5:17 AM

I just got back from Germany, where I spoke to the European subsidiary of a large U.S. manufacturing company. The audience was composed of both individual contributors and managing directors, and although the speech was well received, it was clear that the managing directors were a bit disappointed: they wanted me to talk more about big-picture strategic issues, rather than on the mundane details of keeping their desks clean, or dealing with emails, or managing meetings.

I could understand their feelings -- they figured that the banality of keeping their desks clean and their inboxes empty had little or nothing to do with the challenges they face on a daily basis. (How do we winnow down the 153 product initiatives we're considering? How do we raise revenue per employee? Should we exit a market we've been in for 15 years but that has diminishing profit potential?)

Nevertheless, I think they missed the point: the little stuff like managing the flood of email is the critical foundation needed for dealing with the big issues. The reason they could never find time to deal with the big stuff is that they continually lost time and focus to interruptions from coworkers, or stupid emails, or simply searching for information in the debris piled on their desks.

Ask yourself this: what are the obstacles to doing whatever it is that you deem really important? Odds are that you "don't have enough time." You spend far too much energy dealing with email; you can't find 30 uninterrupted minutes to think; you're trapped in endless meetings that run overtime. And if that's true, then you can see that mastering the basics allow you to handle the larger challenges your company faces. To use the popular airplane metaphor (that I find so irritating): how can you get your 50,000 foot view of life and work if you can't even get your damn plane off the runway?

I think an analogy is useful here: surgeons learn to wash their hands before doing a procedure. In fact, they learn a specific routine for washing to ensure that it's done right each and every time. Nothing could be more basic -- or seemingly far removed from the "big picture" issues affecting the case they're about to do. But if they don't wash, the likelihood of a good outcome is minimal -- the patient may very well die from infection.

Hand washing is simple. But it's essential to reaching the key strategic objective like transplanting a heart or excising a lung tumor successfully. Keeping your desk clean and your inbox empty is simple, too. But like hand washing, it's an essential building block to your success. Especially with the major strategic issues you face.

Anonymous, You're right

Submitted by dan markovitz (not verified) on Mon, 2008-07-07 13:59.

Anonymous,

You're right about the pointlessness of antagonizing professionals about where they store pens. But what about where and how they store emails and other information? In 1997, a WSJ study showed that executives were spending 6 weeks per year simply *looking* for information -- not working on it, just looking for it. (And I can only imagine it's gotten worse since then.) Even if their survey was wrong by 50%, think of the waste.

So the precise location of their pens may not be important. But the discipline and habit of organization is indeed critical to "their quality and their work." Toyota considers 5S to be the foundation of all lean efforts, even though sweeping the floor may seem far removed from stamping a quarter panel.

I don't buy it... surgeons

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Tue, 2008-07-01 22:00.

I don't buy it... surgeons keeping their hands clean *is* a core part of their quality and their work. When people antagonize professionals about where they store pens in their desks... come one, find something better to do.

very well put

Submitted by Matthew Cornell (not verified) on Mon, 2008-06-30 20:51.

Good discussion, Dan. My attempted pithy summary: "The antidote for stuck strategy is focused action."

Just like John Wooden.

Submitted by Tim Walker (not verified) on Mon, 2008-06-30 16:26.

Yes, yes, yes.

We've talked before, I think, about John Wooden's approach to coaching his UCLA basketball teams. He started with the freshmen (as a stunned Lew Alcindor recalled) by showing them how to put on their socks and shoes in a way that would prevent blisters and slipping.

Meet the problem at the point of contact. Work from the bottom up. This doesn't preclude ALSO pausing to reflect on some of the big-big problems, but it gives you the foundation to make sure you can GET TO the big-big problems.

So, yes, amen.

Great analogy

Submitted by Jared Goralnick (not verified) on Mon, 2008-06-30 12:51.

Great analogy, Dan! Finding a way to get past the organizational stuff means getting a handle on it. I'm going to hold onto this analogy to doctors as it relates so well to so many information overload and organizational situations.

Thanks for sharing!