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PAUL MICHELMAN: Hello, and welcome to the HBR IdeaCast. I’m Paul
Michelman, director of content for harvardbusiness.org. And I’m on the
phone today with Ron Ashkenas, whose December 2007 Harvard Business
Review article is entitled “Simplicity-Minded Management.” Ron, thanks
for joining the program today.
RON ASHKENAS: Thank you, Paul. Pleasure to be here.
PAUL MICHELMAN: Ron, in your article, you tackle a pretty weighty
topic, organizational complexity. And you offer up a practical guide to
stripping complexity out of organizations. So before we jump in and talk
about some of the remedies, let’s talk about the problem. You put forth
a thesis that circumstances have conspired recently to add increasing
amounts of complexity to organizations. Can you explain a little bit of
your thinking here?
RON ASHKENAS: Well, I think anybody who lives and works in
organizations, particularly big ones, will find this perfectly obvious.
But as organizations get larger, and there’s more technology and new
technology, and there’s more globalization, and there’s more
competition, and there’s more regulation, all of these factors together
create a great amount of complexity. People have to put together
processes, and controls, and reviews, and organization structures to
deal with all these things. And they have to be done on a worldwide
basis. And because of technology, they have to be done fast, quickly, et
cetera. Put it all together– it makes life very complex. And that’s
both on an organizational basis and on an individual basis.
PAUL MICHELMAN: So let’s talk about individuals, because I think that
should be the focus of the bulk of our conversation today. In addition
to some of the broader organizational remedies you suggest in your
article, you talk about what you termed the hidden cause of complexity.
And that is the actions of individual managers, and how they unwittingly
add to the complexity of their organizations through their individual
actions. You list several actions in this piece that you think are root
causes of organizational complexity stemming from the individual
manager. And I’d like to walk through those, ask you to shed a little
light on them, and talk about the remedies. The first is an age-old
favorite, and that is micromanagement.
RON ASHKENAS: Well, I think just in general, and this is beyond just
managers, I think you can categorize some people as simplifiers, and
some people as complexifiers– people who can sort of cut to the chase
and say, here’s the one or two things we need to do, and people who give
convoluted explanations of things and like to talk in various circles.
And after a while, you don’t quite know where they’re going. So I think
that’s sort of an overall thing about individuals.
With micromanagement, most managers want to know what’s going on. And
they’ll ask all kinds of questions. The simplifier managers, versus the
complexifiers, will be very clear about what are the few key questions
that they need to ask, who they need to ask them of, and at what level,
what kind of metrics and measures they’re looking for. Sometimes because
of managers’ own anxiety, they get down into all kinds of details and
ask all kinds of questions, which create more work than is necessary.
And managers cascade down to multiple levels, start to scurry about to
answer all those questions. That creates enormous amounts of complexity.
I cite one example in the article– this is of a CEO, but we see this
at multiple levels– of creating various kinds of reviews that, on a
regular basis, are asking dozens and dozens of questions, which, if you
go down multiple levels, create a whole machinery and infrastructure of
people answering those questions. That’s very complex.
PAUL MICHELMAN: How do we move complexifiers to become simplifiers?
RON ASHKENAS: Well, one is to think about, what are the few things
you really need to know about? And that’s in terms of asking for data.
And what are the few key goals that you want people to achieve, and to
really be focused on?
I think the master of this was Jack Welch, who taught me and many
people a lot about simplification, where even though he ran a very
large, complex, global organization spanning many kinds of products and
industries, he had very simple questions, like what does it take to be
number one or number two in your industry. Or he would ask his managers,
if you were coming on to this job as a new manager for this job, what
would you do differently? Or if there was a dot-com business that would
come and compete against your business, what would they do to compete?
And what do you have to do to respond? Very simple questions.
So one of the keys to becoming a simplifier is to think of very
simple, straightforward questions that get your people to really
challenge their own thinking and get to the essence of what they have to
do to make the organization more effective.
PAUL MICHELMAN: OK. So the next factor you cite here is poor meeting management.
RON ASHKENAS: I think we’ve all lived in meetings like this. Many
managers I talked to say that they spend 50%, 75%, or more of their time
in meetings. And yet everybody knows all the rules about meetings, that
you should have an agenda. It should be very clear what you’re trying
to accomplish. Only the right people ought to be there. There should be
preparation ahead of time. There should be follow up afterwards. It
should be clear who the leader is, et cetera. But I think most people
who go to meetings don’t find those things present.
So how you run a meeting– and you don’t have to be a CEO to change
this pattern. Anybody can do it. But how do you run a meeting? Who do
you invite? How do you prepare for it? Putting those disciplines in
place reduces complexity.
PAUL MICHELMAN: OK. The next is a personal favorite of mine– unclear, redundant, or conflicting assignments.
RON ASHKENAS: I find that a number of managers, particularly when
they’re not quite sure what to do, they ask a number of people to go
study this, go figure this out, go work on this. And they sometimes give
multiple assignments to– or the same assignment, or a similar
assignment, or an assignment that overlaps, to multiple people. But they
don’t necessarily tell all those people that’s what they’re doing.
Now sometimes when I’ve challenged executives about this and said,
why are you doing this, they say, well, it’s a test. I want to get the
best thinking of a number of different people. What it usually does is,
just creates a tremendous amount of complexity and churn. People want to
respond well. They go off and do good research, thinking. They ask
questions. They often ask the same questions to the same people. And
that creates redundant work for almost everybody.
PAUL MICHELMAN: OK. So the next up, Ron, comes at complexity from a
different angle. And that is email etiquette. What do you mean by that?
RON ASHKENAS: Well, I think all of us are familiar with being in the
email world now. Whether we’re at our desktop, or whether we are
addicted to our blackberries, we get emails on a 24/7 basis. Most
managers I talk to receive dozens and dozens, if not hundreds, of emails
a day, and thousands of emails over the course of a month.
With that kind of volume of email traffic, it’s important to be very
selective about how you use email, and to follow a certain discipline.
Too many of us, myself included, use the Respond to All or Reply All
button. And you end up having a whole string or trail of emails that go
to multiple people, even on trivial things, like setting up a meeting,
or finding out whether somebody is available in a certain date, which
goes to dozens of different people, all of whom don’t need to have that
information.
The same thing with many documents that are attached to emails, which
are draft documents and sort of get circulated– people work on them and
send them back. And the control over what’s the master document, so
that people need to work on only the core document, instead of working
on various versions of it– now that’s not only a problem in people’s
personal complexity. But for an organization that needs to manage
document control and retention, and document destruction, which ones to
keep and not to keep, when there’s so many versions floating around out
there in cyberspace, becomes a problem of complexity.
PAUL MICHELMAN: Now talking about documents leads us right into the
fifth problem you cite in terms of individual complexity. And this is
one that a former boss of mine fell prey to– PowerPoint perfection.
RON ASHKENAS: Ah, yes. This is one of my favorites, as well. It’s
become a cottage industry. And PowerPoint is an incredibly great tool to
convey complex ideas with charts, graphs, bullet points. Now some
people, of course, mistake using Word documents in PowerPoint format, so
they fill up their PowerPoint charts with so many words that it’s
impossible to read.
But it’s become a cottage industry. And I know many consulting firms,
and even some companies, outsource their PowerPoint charts to India,
where they have people working on a 24/7 basis, taking all sorts of data
and putting it into charts and graphs. What you end up with is people
who are weighing their contributions to a company on the basis of how
good, comprehensive, and fancy their charts look. And I don’t know how
many times that I’ve seen managers sitting in meetings, watching chart
after chart after chart, Powerpoint presentations, where it’s not quite
clear what’s the point. Is there a decision here? Is there a key piece
of data that we’re going to need to look at?
One example I cite in the in the article is a company called Nortel
Communications– that one of the executive vice presidents there, Dennis
Carey, instituted a rule called the one-minute rule, where PowerPoint
presentations, you get one minute. So if you can put one or two charts
up in one minute, then you make your point. And then everything else,
you can leave it as handouts or attachments, et cetera. But you have to
have the real essence in one minute.
It’s very similar to Mark Twain’s old line about, he would have
written a shorter letter, but he didn’t have the time. It really
requires you to think about what’s the essence of what you want to say.
And what do you want to convey to your audience, and what kind of
decision or action do you want to come out of this? And you ought to be
able to do that in one minute, and everything else is commentary.
PAUL MICHELMAN: Listening to you talk about these things, these sound
like sensible and valuable pieces of advice. They also strike me that
they take a certain amount of rigor, rigor of thinking, being very
disciplined, being very thoughtful about the way you go about managing
your unit. How do you get into this mindset? Let’s say I want to put a
sticky on my desk that reminds me to keep things simple. What should it
say?
RON ASHKENAS: Well, simple is not easy. And we shouldn’t mistake the
two. You really need to ask yourself a few key questions. What do I
really need to accomplish today? What are the few key drivers of success
that I need to keep my eyes on? And is there a line of sight between
what I’m doing today to those key drivers of success? If you keep asking
yourself that question, and if that’s the sticky you have on your desk–
what are those few key drivers of success, and is what I’m doing moving
towards that, in a way that I can see the connection– then you’re going
to get into a greater degree of simplicity.
But it’s not easy. A lot of this is anxiety-driven. We want to keep
ourselves busy. We want to look good. We want to know everything. And
every little bit of extra work that we create, we create even more extra
work for other people. So it’s a constant struggle. It’s a bit like an
addiction.
One of the things I mentioned in the article is that for senior
managers in particular, but for all managers, it’s good to have other
colleagues that you talk about this periodically. Say, what am I doing
that’s creating complexity in an unnecessary way? How can I be more
simple? And challenge each other about that. Because it’s not quite so
easy to just look in the mirror and say, talk to yourself. You need
somebody else who can hold the mirror up for you and help you think
about this.
PAUL MICHELMAN: Ron Ashkenas, great advice. Thank you very much for joining us.
RON ASHKENAS: It’s been a pleasure, thank you.
PAUL MICHELMAN: If you’d like to learn more on Ron Ashkenas’s ideas,
you can pick up the December 2007 copy of the Harvard Business Review,
or visit the Harvard Business Review website at www.hbr.org. We hope
you’ve enjoyed this week’s program. To learn more on these and other
management topics, please visit our website at
www.harvardbusinessonline.org. Thanks for listening, and be sure to join
us again next week.
http://blogs.hbr.org/ideacast/2007/12/harvard-business-ideacast-72-a.html