Each finding in and of itself may seem a platitude (close to the customer, productivity through people), but the intensity of the way in which the excellent companies execute the eight h— especially when compared with their competitors — is very rare.
For us, the fascination of the 1st story was the saga of a little band of Boeing engineers poring through German files on the day Nazi labs were occupied by the Allied forces. In so doing, they quickly confirmed their own ideas on the enormous advantages of swept-swing design.
It really is extraordinary to find the kind of quality assurance McDonald’s has achieved worldwide in a service business.
Many of the others were ahead of IBM in technological wizardry. And heaven knows their software is easier to use. But IBM alone took the trouble to get to know us. They interviewed extensively up and down the line. They talked our language, no mumbo jumbo on computer innards. Their price was fully 25% higher. But they provided unparalleled guarantees of reliability and service. They even went so far as to arrange a backup connection with a local steel company in case our system crashed. Their presentations were to the point. Everything about them smacked of assurance and success. Our decision, even with sever budget pressure, was really easy.
Just because the product is toilet paper, or soap for that matter, doesn’t mean that P&G doesn’t make it a damn sight better than anyone else.
Whether bending tin, frying hamburgers, or providing rooms for rent, virtually all of the excellent companies had, it seemed, defined themselves as the de facto service business. Customers reign supreme. They are not treated to untested technology or unnecessary gold-plating. They are the recipients of products that last, service delivered promptly.
He needs both to be apart of something and to stick out. He needs at one and the same time to be a conforming member of a winning team and to be a star in his own right.
In other words, men willingly shackle themselves to the 9-to-5 if only the cause is perceived to be in some sense great. The company can actually provide the same resonance as does the exclusive club or honorary society.
Both challenged ideas put forward by Weber, who defined the bureaucratic form of organization, and Taylor, who implied that management really can be made into an exact science. Weber had pooh-poohed charismatic leadership and doted on bureaucracy; its rule-driven, impersonal form, he said, was the only way to assure long-term survival. Taylor, of course, is the source of the time and motion approach to efficiency: if only you can divide work up into enough discrete, wholly programmed pieces and then put the pieces back together in a truly optimum way, then you’ll have a truly top-performing unit.
He described good managers as value shapers concerned with the informal social properties of organizations. He contrasted them with mere manipulators of formal rewards and systems, who dealt only with the narrower concept of short-term efficiency.
Chronic use of the military metaphor leads people repeatedly to overlook a different kind of organization, one that values improvisation rather than forecasting, dwells on opportunities rather than constraints, discovers new actions rather than defends past actions, values arguments more highly than serenity and encourages doubt and contradiction rather than belief.
The very word “organizing,” for instance, begs the question, “Organize for what?” For the large corporations we were interested in, the answer to that question was almost always to build some sort of major new corporate capability — that is, to become more innovative, to be better marketers, to permanently improve labor relations, or to build some other skill which that corporation did not then possess.
Such skill building, adding new muscle, shucking old habits, getting really good at something new to the culture, is difficult. That sort of thing clearly goes beyond structure.
Excellent companies were, above all, brilliant on the basics. Tools didn’t substitute for thinking. Intellect didn’t overpower wisdom. Analysis didn’t impede action. Rather, these companies worked hard to keep things simple in a complex world. They persisted. They insisted on top quality. They fawned on their customers. They listened to their employees and treated them like adults. They allowed some chaos in return for quick action and regular experimentation.