Friday, 8.10pm
Sheffield, U.K.
To give real service you must add something which cannot be bought or measured with money, and that is sincerity and integrity. – Douglas Adams
This is the first in a new set of posts that goes through the ideas in John Seddon’s 2003 book “Freedom from Command and Control”.
You will be able to read all the related posts using this link.
Why pick this book to study?
Most businesses operate on thinking that was created a hundred or so years ago.
People like Taylor invented the idea that you could make people act like robots, repeating actions in the most efficient way. Ford worked out that you could arrange them in a factory doing simple things again and again and end up with a complex product like a car, and Sloan figured that managing budgets was the way to make money.
These ideas were new and very successful at the time, particularly in factories.
Now, they just don’t work. But people still try and use them because they haven’t learned any other ways to get the job done.
Juran and Deming did work that transformed how manufacturing is done and how factories are run but service businesses still operate with the old ways of thinking.
Seddon’s book is one that tells us what to do to make things better.
Some of the ideas that we need to think about are shown in the picture above.
Let’s say you’re starting a business tomorrow – how should you think about delivering your services?
Do you think about roles and responsibities? Who’s the boss? Who’s in charge? Who are your subordinates?
That’s a command and control way of thinking – there’s a hierarchy in the office and some people do the thinking and others do the work, and one group boss over the other.
The other way is to think in terms of systems. What are the parts, what connects them, how do they communicate, and what emerges if they all work together?
Systems thinking is a big topic so we’ll come back to that later.
The next thing to think about is where managers spend their time.
I saw a series a while back about a project improving a hospital. The bosses sent in an administrator who spent all their time sat in the office poring over spreadsheets and numbers.
Never once walked the halls, met the staff, or watched the work being done.
Real managers get to where the work is, they get involved in the operations because they alone have the power to improve things.
You cannot wield power effectively sitting in an office – you have to get out there.
Now, what should you work on?
People in organisations quickly adopt roles, and these roles form groups, and those groups fossilize into functions.
Suddenly everyone is busy doing something but no one can explain why they are doing that thing.
You must have come across this – the most common example is that report you do every month that takes six hours that you email and then get no feedback, no questions, but you’re still told that it needs to be done every month.
Instead, real work is what customers need doing. Not what they ask for, but what they need, what makes their situations better.
That’s called customer demand – it’s how you help them. It turns out there’s two kinds of demand – a good one and a bad one, but we’ll talk about that in another post.
If you stop doing stuff that doesn’t need to be done, like that report; stop doing it, or automate it; that’s you removing waste. If you don’t get rid of waste you increase costs – that’s six hours of time where you could have done something else or just put your feet up and relaxed.
In summary
A good service business works when you try and learn and improve so that you can create mopre value for clients.
Focusing on the numbers – the budgets – in a service business is more likely to cause you to cut corners, complicate things, make the service worse, have customers abandon you, and reduce profits.
The money will flow when you do the right things, remove waste, and make customers happy.
More in the next post.
Cheers,
Karthik Suresh
Handcrafted insight 