Advice Line | Bob Lewis » Where are the box's boundaries

July 08, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Where are the box's boundaries

TAGS: General

Dear Bob ...

I'm responding to your recent Keep the Joint Running, "Iacocca's alliterative leadership list," (6/18/2007) where you discuss the importance of "out-of-the-box" thinking.

I believe the value of "new ideas" or (groan) "thinking outside the box" is highly over-rated. There's always a notion and even a conceit that says that what an organization needs is new ideas, specifically my new ideas. That's what politicians campaign on. The difficulty is not coming up with new ideas. I would wager in any organization that you could get 5 - 10 people from anywhere in the organization and they could come up with 10 - 20 valid new ideas if they sat down and discussed it for an hour. The problem is not the dearth of ideas; it's the planning, organizing and execution of ideas.

Most of the ideas I have heard are high level "concepts" that have value and you can't argue with. Let's streamline this operation, someone might say. Who could argue? But assembling a team of capable people to analyze and actually do the planning is hard to do. Then making a plan and obtaining the resources to support the plan and the "streamlining" can be damn near impossible.

Good idea, yes. But just try doing it without staff, without funding and doing it on some ridiculous schedule that’s pulled from the sky. I blame at least part of this on previous cut-backs which largely eliminated true staff people who didn't have production responsibilities but looked ahead, tried to do the planning necessary and the strategic thinking. Staff people are among the first to go during all the cut-back of "fat". Now operational managers have to do a lot of staff or administrative duties in addition to keeping the place running. Then someone comes up with a good idea and they have to spend more time trying to analyze data and identify roadblocks, obstacles, or whatever to make operations move even faster. Ironically, this usually increases their work load.

In summary, good ideas are plentiful; it's the planning, organizing and execution that’s the trick.

- Executioner


Dear Executioner ...

Vague goals are commonplace. Truly innovative ideas are another matter. "Streamline this operation" is hardly thinking outside the box, after all. "Instead of setting reorder points, restocking levels and estimating delivery time we could just let our selected vendor monitor our inventory and keep it within contractually established boundaries," is a different matter.

Thinking outside the box is a matter of spotting the hidden assumptions that are built into a solution for reasons that once were important but no longer are, and figuring out what you can do now that they no longer constrain you.

At least, that's how I define the phrase.

We are, by the way, in complete agreement that compared to the challenges of execution, developing useful ideas is relatively easy. In my estimation, a healthy organization should generate at least an order of magnitude more good ideas than it's in a position to pursue. It's the organizations that have shut off the spigot that concern me.

- Bob

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Posted by Bob Lewis on July 8, 2007 04:12 PM

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