And “productivity” makes for the slick six. “Profit” gives us the magnificent seven. There are so many important P-words. Process? No, put that one back in the box, we’ll get to it later—much later. Let’s do the high five, plus productivity.

Productivity is sort of a downer after all the excitement in chapter 2, isn’t it? Jacobs Field, Al Bird, Joey, and the need for building sincerity. I deliberately took you for a spin in the people-ology hot rod to give you a feel for what it’s like and what you can do with it when you’re behind the wheel. Now I’m going to shift gears.

So, here we are facing a blob called “productivity.”

One of the dirty secrets of leadership is that its purpose is to maximize productivity. The idea isn’t very poetic: “Let my people go…be more productive,” or “Productive at last, productive at last, Thank God Almighty, productive at last.” But think about it. A leader helps build a pathway to success. In the end, those who take the pathway are happier, wiser, more fulfilled, stronger, and richer in material and spiritual goods. They’ve become more productive by making full use of their talent.

It doesn’t harm leadership to think of it this way as long as the primary purpose is recognized as personal productivity. Who can argue with the benefits of being smarter, more effective, efficient, and satisfied? But the abstract, quantifiable productivity of a business organization is always secondary—yes, always—because it comes as a result of personal productivity. The benefits flow from the individual to the organization and then back to the individual.

If you replace the words “personal productivity” with the words “personal enrichment,” you can see what I’m suggesting. Leadership is a means of enrichment in a sense that has little, if anything, to do with money and everything to do with inner value. When personal productivity is shortchanged, business productivity is undermined as well. People can’t or won’t rise to the challenge. There is no way to have strong productive organizations built around demoralized, unproductive people.

We’re going to have to cut down the complications that grow up in any organization as a result of the tendency to try to make business productivity the primary purpose. By neglecting individual development and enrichment, organizations then must attempt to substitute procedures and systems to fill the gaps. With the increasing neglect of personal development, the organization grows bloated and cumbersome. Bureaucracy is the scar tissue of corporate dehumanization. The more of it you see and feel, the more advanced the disease.

Each system, each complication creates a barrier that interferes with productivity—for both the individual and the business organization. Adjusting to barriers, learning to live with them, and accepting them is my idea of hell. It’s one of the reasons why I was ready to leave Xerox when I did. I learned a lot there—good and bad. My belief in process is pure Xerox. I’m zealous about process execution—as you will see as this book unfolds—because of the company’s failure to live up to its own high standards. A good process should always be flexible and capable of mid-course correction; often Xerox’s wasn’t. A good process also turns up deficiencies that must then be corrected; again and again, Xerox’s did the former but not the latter. It became frustrating and demoralizing as the layers of complication got thicker and thicker.

In some ways, Xerox is a unique case—and not unique at all. Spawned from the fiendish complexity of xerography, the copier giant seems bewitched by the need to balance technological complications against bureaucratic ones. The tangle led to the creation of cadres of highly skilled, often highly frustrated, barrier-busting leaders paired off against highly skilled, often highly complacent, barrier-building managers. It made for an ongoing civil war, much like the wars that are being fought in companies all over the world. I think it’s time for a cease-fire.

Simple Smarts

Make par, not war. I love to golf, I could play every day. No, twice a day. What other sport lets you play a game and do business at the same time? One of the senior members of my home club is a distinguished business executive with a national reputation. One afternoon, he and I were discussing a company that I was researching for a possible acquisition. One of its minuses was a glaring lack of leadership. We both agreed that the weakness could be fixed.

My friend offered some wise suggestions, and as we parted, he turned to me and said, “Frank, it really is very simple.” He bore down slightly on the “it” to signify that he wasn’t just talking about one faltering company, but about them all.

He was right. It is.

Easy simple? No, not necessarily. Hard simple is more like it: long hours, important decisions, heavy responsibilities. But the notion that creating and running a viable business must be riddled with confusion, difficulty, and intricacy is off the wall. Or you have to be a lot smarter than me. And that may explain why I do what I do. At my college graduation, there were parents honoring summa cum laudes. Painfully aware of their son’s horrendous academic record and their tuition-paying days were over, my mom and dad were there asking in amazement, Lordy how come!

As an executive, I can’t complicate my life. I’m not smart enough. I’ve got to keep it simple. How simple? Here’s how simple.

• Hire the best people
• Provide them with the best training and development
• Offer them limitless opportunities
• Create a high-energy, caring environment
• Recognize and reward success
• Make it fun and challenging
• Fashion and execute a business process that delivers these promises
• Build high-yielding, high-value relationships internally and externally
• Forge an enriching experience for everyone

And there’s one more:

• Deliver now!

If you don’t think that’s simple, maybe you are not approaching the task like a good manager. I’m not being facetious. While I’m writing about leadership, the best leaders are good managers. They know to ask a basic question: How do we do that? Assuming “that” is what needs to be done to run a profitable business.

If we know what we have to do, how to do it—and then do it—we’re 90 percent of the way to success. Still simple, right?

The next question then comes down to this: How can we do it better than we are doing it right now?

Can you walk me through what you have to do to survive and prosper, and how you actually accomplish these requirements? The basic stuff? Now for Pete’s sake, don’t commission a study or hire a consultant to do research. If you can’t answer off the top of your head, there is a problem. Or if the answer involves more than a sentence or two, you are getting tangled up in complications. Xerox, for example, is in the business of making and selling copiers—like it or not. It may aspire to be a “document” company or have another grand vision, but if they don’t sell copiers today, tomorrow, and the next day it’s adios. Anything that gets in the way of that purpose is a barrier.

Barriers are the enemy of productivity. It’s amazing how extraneous activities—complications—are allowed to get in the way of primary business purposes. Gobs of rationalizations are laid down to protect them from people like me. I’ve heard anything from “I’ve got to attend a meeting” to “We can’t do that until the proposals have been submitted.”

Are face-to-face meetings important? Absolutely. But if they don’t directly impact the customer, meetings become barriers to executing the bottom-line business activity. Purposeless meetings are productivity killers. Likewise, proposals, analysis, paperwork of all sorts are important parts of a business process. But the basics come first. Ben’s Kansas City Steak House better take care that it serves up the best prime beef before it gets preoccupied selling lottery tickets or opening a sports bar. Ben can do those things, but only after he takes care of his bottom-line activity (and keeps taking care of it).

How can you hire the best people and give them the best training and development if complications are allowed to get in the way of the fundamental business purpose and the fundamental action to achieve that purpose? You’ll probably end up hiring the wrong people and giving them the wrong training. It would be like poor Ben using lottery specialists to burn steaks back in the kitchen and wait on tables. It would be a disaster. The promise of limitless opportunity and an enriching experience for all are empty without a disciplined focus on what it is we do to stay in business.

If leadership is the art of cutting down barriers to create a pathway to success—and it is—the very first barrier is blocking answers to these questions:

• What do we have to do?
• How do we do it?
• Are we, in fact, doing it?

Once you know that you should be able to tell me:

• How often did you take that action today?
• How does that compare to yesterday?
• How often do you expect it to happen tomorrow?
• How many times did you take this action personally?
• How many times did your average worker perform this action?
• How do those figures compare to last quarter or last year?

If you don’t know the answers, what do you know? I suspect you know about a lot of complicated stuff. Good for you, but it’s bad for business. Bad because the emotion, the trust building, the vision, the communication, the recruiting, the training, the relentless leadership—all the things we focus on in this book—will be of no use. Once you’ve put your heart on your sleeve as a leader and offered sincerity, you’ll have to roll up your sleeves and get busy clearing away the complications and using a chain saw to cut down barriers that interfere with personal productivity. It’s part of the job. Make that it’s the best part of the job.

We’ve got to get beyond the notion that equates high productivity with slave-driving and downsizing. The usual drill is for new managers to come on like the “productivity Gestapo” by announcing an enormous increase in output without going to the trouble of discovering what is actually interfering with current productivity levels. I don’t care how sincere you are and what family stories you share, if you don’t make an immediate effort to cut down barriers people will start humming the words to the famous “Who” tune—“Here comes the new boss, same as the old boss.” They’ll know that nothing is going to change except the stress level and the frustration factor: Both are headed higher.

It’s the new boss’s responsibility to swing the chain saw so that his or her people can deliver the productivity gains that will benefit everyone.

And after the cloud of exhaust fumes and sawdust settles, what’s left? I realize that I’m reverting to my sales background, but I firmly believe that frequent high quality customer contact is the simple core of every business—and for that matter every relationship.

Okay, here’s the question again: What do we have to do?

Answer: Delight our customers by fully meeting their needs and doing it better than the competition.

If in good conscience you can say, “My business doesn’t work that way,” take this book back to where you bought it and maybe, if they believe in delighting the customer, they’ll return your money. But I don’t think bookstores will have to worry about being overrun with returns. Everybody has customers. So can the pat answers and take a hard look at what you do to stay in business. If providing a product or a service to a customer is near the top of the list, the next “now-to” is a no-brainer.

The now-to is adamant about quick action because I want you to avoid falling into the trap of taking action eventually. Forget eventually. Don’t wait for the study to be completed or the consultants to sign on. This will boost the customer contact rate, and even a modest increase is of great benefit. It will get your people busy and focused, and motivate you to keep your promises (like, “I will cut down three barriers a day”). When the rate is abysmal—which it can be in businesses that have been overwhelmed by complications—the effect is like a turbocharger kicking in.

After Danka acquired Kodak’s color copier division, I discovered that Kodak had equipped each of its district sales offices with sumptuous demonstration rooms. They were gorgeous setups. The problem was that Kodak never used them. To jump-start sales and energy levels, I ordered a three-month demo blitz. It prompted a customer contact rate for the period that exceeded the entire previous year. The order rate rose dramatically, as well. But I didn’t just say, “Let the demos begin,” and snap my fingers. I made it my mission to clear the obstacles that had kept those demo rooms out of action.

In the same way, before joining Danka, in my last assignment for Xerox, I took over the Columbus district, which had been allowed to fall to close to the bottom of the national sales rankings. At the first meeting with my teams I said, “We’re going to run the next four laps as fast as we can and then we’re going to pick up speed.” They thought I was crazy, but that’s exactly what we did. After four quarters the district was near the top nationally and gaining steadily. That turnaround didn’t happen because the productivity Gestapo had arrived, it came about because—first—I had to clear the obstacles off the track. Once that happened, talented men and women were able to run faster and faster and faster. As the speed increased, so did the exhilaration, the fun, and the rewards.

Get moving. Get productive—now. It’s simple.

The Red Notebook

You want simple? Here’s simple-plus preparation, the second of the “High Five.” Go to an office supply store and buy out their stock of red spiral-bound, wide-ruled, single-theme notebooks; the kind you probably used in a college or high school; the pages are 8.5-by-ll inches and have prepunched holes for use in a three-ring binder.

Keep one on your desk or in your briefcase to record leadership ideas, experiences, pieces of good advice, mistakes, and so forth. When it’s full, stash it away and start another.

For example, “Frank, it really is very simple,” went into my red notebook for future reference. I’ve accumulated hundreds of pages of material that way. Here’s an item from several years ago after I attended a meeting run by a senior manager who announced plans for a “surprise attack” on the competition.

The guy had zero credibility going in and even less coming out. He was notorious for never following through, and the cynical comment from my colleague caught the moment precisely. Without the red notebook, the gem would probably have been lost. I also use the red notebook to record important decisions. I can go back and re-create one-on-one meetings with my sales reps that occurred ten or fifteen years ago. But I get even more value out of noting and then using good ideas that I pick up from other leaders. And I’m not afraid to flag the ideas—mine in particular—that don’t work.

You might want to go back and pick up a few items from chapters 1 and 2: Al Bird’s story is a good candidate as is Bill Locander’s advice about heading for the loading dock to make some personal connections.

Every manager I talked to in compiling this list has mended his or her ways and is now a successful leader. Nobody’s perfect. Mistakes happen all the time. But the worst mistake of all is the mistake we don’t admit and therefore can never correct. Use the “terrible twenty” to determine where you stand today—or where your boss stands. It’s a humbling experience. I probably was doing number thirteen—didn’t have a process or stick to it—early in my leadership career. I tried to get by on energy and aggressiveness. What I was actually doing, as is the case for the rest of the “terrible twenty” was turning myself into a barrier that interfered with productivity. My people would have been even more productive if I had gotten out of their way by cutting down the no-process barrier instead of creating it. As we go though the book, look for ways to reverse the equation and make the list the “terrific twenty.”

Special Ed

I’m going to do an entire chapter on training, but I want to touch on it here because it is the key to preparation.

My middle name should be Gallup or Roper. I am always polling. I have standard questions that I ask the business people I meet on my travels. One of them is about training. I’ll wait until I hear how well the person’s company is doing (or not doing) and then ask, “How’s your training?” The answer is always a variation on, “Frank, it’s lousy.”

How’s your new notebook computer?

Great.

How’s the video conferencing system?

Terrific.

How’s the roomful of high-speed color copiers?

Love ’em.

How’s the Internet?

Wow!

How’s your training?

Lousy.

Business literature is filled these days with sports analogies. Just imagine how that exchange would go if it involved the San Antonio Spurs or the New York Yankees. Something tells me that the wows, terrifies, and greats would involve training players to slam-dunk and hit home runs; the front office technology would come in second or third or not at all. Sports teams know what their primary business purpose is—win games—and to achieve it they must hone their playing skills. Preparation that does not relate to basic business purposes becomes a barrier.

Home Schooling

Most everyone knows the Boy Scout motto: Be Prepared. Okay, be prepared for what? That question mark has left room for the creation of a huge training industry that knows what its primary purpose is, even if you don’t. Feeding your complications makes perfect sense to these entrepreneurs. There are thousands of nonessential skills to be taught and learned. It’s a wide, wide world. And what’s wrong with education for education’s sake? Nothing, as long as it doesn’t interfere with primary purposes or eliminate training time for those purposes.

I get particularly irritated when people are pulled off the job for training on high-tech software and hardware. It goes right back to the question—What are we preparing for? Companies that would, in the blink of an eye, downsize 3 or 4 percent of their workforce to fatten the bottom-line will divert manpower from activities that could quickly and directly earn the same amount of revenue. Put those people out on the street in front of customers, not on an unemployment line.

People can learn how to use a Palm Pilot or a notebook computer at home, in the evenings—with their kids helping them—instead of sitting in a classroom with an instructor who probably doesn’t have the foggiest notion of what they will end up doing with the technological skills he or she is trying to impart.

As we attempted to integrate Kodak’s high-end color copier operation into Danka, I was impressed by the state-of-the-art technology that had been provided to the sales reps and support staff at Kodak. What didn’t impress me was that hardly anyone used the equipment or skills, which had been purchased at considerable expense. It was a rerun of the empty demo rooms. On one of my first visits to division headquarters in Rochester, New York, I asked an executive to access the computer system and show me the thirty- and sixty-day sales forecasts for key district offices. He looked at me as though I were crazy.

“Then show me that order rate broken out office to office.”

“We don’t have that.”

“The rate per rep?”

“Can’t do that either.”

It was embarrassing for both of us. “What can it do?” The answer was a lot of complicated stuff that had little or no bearing on the simple purpose of selling color copiers fast enough to pay the rent. Having a bunch of names in a computer database doesn’t mean anything. It’s what you do with the names. Preparation was being done, but not the right kind of preparation because Kodak lost the connection between what it had to do as a basic bottom-line business activity and what, in fact, it was actually doing. You don’t have to be computer literate to employ the MSLR technique I introduced in my first book. MSLR, or major suspect list review, is the ultimate low-tech preparation process. Basically, it amounts to sitting down with the rep and asking him or her dozens of questions about key prospects: What’s the status of each account and what is being done for each one? What’s the competition up to? Who’s the key decision maker? When will a decision be made? The point is to get five or six levels down inside the business. You can do that by candlelight—forget about digital technology. A MSLR should take place once or twice a year if you’re running a sales operation, and a similar in-depth preparation process can be devised for any business. Find out:

• Are we doing what we need to be doing?
• Are we really doing it?
• Is it working?
• How can we do it better?

Is MSLR preparation or process? Both. The prospect of facing such an intense grilling forces people to prepare. At the same time, preparation is requiring everyone to think and act in a way that will yield the kind of in-depth knowledge that will result in high performance results. You can’t wing an MSLR.

Almost Heaven: Perfection, Pride, and People

Am I naive enough to believe that preparation makes perfect? You bet I am. I’m so naive that zero-defect management has always been my objective. Nirvana. How can you be passionate about anything less?

If you tolerate one defect, why not two? Why not three or four? Without a leader’s relentless drive for perfection—actions not words—quality inevitably slips and takes pride along with it. Here again, the issue loops back to simplicity. If we are going to generate passion and pride, there can’t be a 2 percent or 5 percent defect policy. Defects are evidence that someone is screwing up. That someone includes the person at the top when he or she shrugs it off. I say don’t be afraid of perfection. It may never be achieved, but it is well worth trying for.

Baseball fans love no-hitters because they get to experience perfection. Pitchers and their teams who have come close to no-hitters are deeply disappointed when the other side gets on base or scores. Perfection denied. But none of them would ever stop trying to make it perfect. There’s always a chance—unless you stop trying.

Telling the people in Xerox’s Cleveland district office that they were going to be number one when they stood dead last in the rankings was pure Nirvana-seeking on my part. But it wasn’t BS. I believed it could be done. Just the way I believe in trying to achieve zero defects. My chances of a turnaround would have been nil if I had gone into that demoralized, defeated operation and said, “Here’s the plan: We’ll finish in the top ten this year. Next year we’ll be in the top five. The year after that we’ll finish two or three.”

No one would have bought that. As it was, they thought I was nuts or on drugs. Still, I gave them a vision of what they really wanted to be—number one. They wanted to be perfect. As Daniel Goleman put it in Working with Emotional Intelligence, this kind of passion appeals “to people’s sense of meaning and value. Work becomes a kind of moral statement, a demonstration of commitment to a larger mission that affirms people’s sense of sharing a valued ‘identity.’”

The Xerox team in Cleveland had an identity the day I arrived in January 1988—loser. What I gave them back was their pride and the passion to fashion a new identity. There’s a powerful link between passion and pride. It is hard to feel good about yourself if you are not doing your best. Hard? Impossible, actually. Leaders who tolerate mediocrity or, worse, contrive to institutionalize it, are cheating people of their pride.

If you regularly monitor the PQ—pride quotient—by asking a representative sample of your workers if they are proud to be working for your company, the exercise will serve as an accurate barometer of your operational effectiveness and prospects. Like the canaries that coal miners once took into the mines to detect dangerously high concentrations of methane gas, a fall off in PQ is a telltale sign that as explosion is imminent.

Take PQ seriously. It’s a guide the barriers that leaders need to cut down. Not long ago, I was invited to speak to key managers and supervisors of a major American steelmaker. Before lunch, my principal host held a get-acquainted session for a small group; the discussion ranged over the many problems the company faced. Locally, there had been progress, but it was an uphill battle in the face of indifference from top management. There was reference to a recent survey of corporate-wide employee attitudes that had been commissioned from a major consulting firm. The plant manager who had invited me said that the survey findings were shocking. “The workforce,” he said, “hates everything we do. Everything.” And bear in mind, this was one of the good guys speaking. He was trying to make a difference.

I agreed that it was grim news. “What’s been done about it by corporate?” I asked.

He shook his head. “Nothing.”

Nothing? That was even more shocking to me than the survey’s findings. Nothing? Your employees tell you they hate everything you do, and nothing is done about it? I felt for the guy. He was trying, corporate wasn’t. As a result, the steel company’s PQ was flat-lining. There wasn’t a wiggle. I confirmed it later during the speech by telling the audience how proud I was to speak to a company that was as historic as theirs. I spoke of its role in building America’s bridges, skyscrapers, and industrial output. When I asked how it felt to be work for a firm that had helped the American dream come true, I got a shout of enthusiasm from one lonely person out of about two hundred.

It was sickening. I glanced at the plant manager and he looked like he was ready to dive under his chair. Poor guy. What a devastating PQ check!

Adding Up the High Fives

In the final analysis, what PQ tells us is whether an operation is winning or losing the war for talent. The August 1998 issue of Fast Forward magazine used the same military metaphor to assess how American businesses are preparing for the talent crunch that is shaping up. It concluded—and I’m using my own G.I. terminology—that 80 to 90 percent of us are destined for KIA, MIA, or POW status.

Fast Forward used a McKinsey and Company study of almost six thousand executives to show that there is a consensus that over the next twenty years, the most import corporate resource will be talented people. A nice round number—six thousand. They made it sound pretty cut and dried: increased competition, globalization, capital availability, strategic transparency, and the flexibility afforded by rapid technological innovation and the commensurate speed of obsolescence all mean that victory will go to those who have the best and brightest people. The one problem is that the best and brightest will increasingly be in short supply.¹

What I found disconcerting about the study is that only 10 to 20 percent of the executives questioned felt that the improvement of the talent pool was one of their company’s three top priorities. And 75 percent of them said their companies didn’t have sufficient talent, or that talent was in chronically short supply.

Let’s run through that again. Everybody seems to agree that talent will determine who wins and who loses, and practically no one is doing very much about it. Maybe I’m missing something, but it doesn’t make much sense to me. I’ll bet 80 to 90 percent of the people reading this book are nodding in agreement. And you are also likely to agree that finding and developing talent is not a priority.

Another nod.

Hold on. I’ll bet you’ve been nodding a lot. As a native New Yorker, I’m an expert on the New York nod. There’s the quick New York nod, a couple of shallow up and down bobs of the head to signify agreement to a “what else is new” proposition. Then there’s the yeah, yeah, yeah New York nod, a series of jerky nods that says, “Enough, already. I understand.” A half nod, half twitch usually means, “I haven’t the faintest idea what your saying but I’m not about to admit it.” (This may come with a “deer in the headlights” look in the eyes.) Finally, there’s the slow, steady New York nod, accompanied by a slight shrug of the shoulders. It’s sort of like a downbeat of punctuation. That one means, “I gotcha, but what the hell can I do about it?”

Don’t nod your way through this book.

We probably face the most fluid and changeable business environment in a century. If there’s low water in your talent pool, when the fat boy jumps off the diving board, it’s going to be very painful. And if you personally get pushed into the water, will you survive? Early, I talked about zero tolerance. You need zero tolerance toward a company that neglects you. I spell talent—Y-O-U. What the respondents to the McKinsey survey were really saying was, “My company could care less about me. I’m not getting the backup I need to do my job, and, if my colleagues’ talent and development are being neglected, I’m probably in the same boat.”

Face it. The paradigm has been broken. We don’t have to work an entire career for one company, and that frees us to say, “I’m not going to take it anymore. I’m out of here.”

But what a waste! It doesn’t have to happen if we practice people-ology. I love being a leader. What a thrill it is to play even a small part in helping another person develop his or her talent. What a privilege and heavy responsibility. That’s why I am trying so hard to sell you on leadership. It’s the next best thing to being a parent. My daughter Alle was given a school assignment to tell the class about her father and what made him special. I was dying of curiosity so when she came home from school, I asked her what she had told her classmates about me. Here’s what she said: “My dad tells me every night how beautiful I am and how proud he is of me.”

Alle, that’s what dads are for. And it’s a pretty good definition of what leaders are for too. Dads get to help their children grow; leaders get to help their friends grow. What a great life.

 

There I go again, using perfection, passion, and pride to circle back to family and emotion just as we seemed to be getting “businesslike” and dealing with things like productivity. That’s right, and I’m going to keep doing it until I establish that emotion is the high-octane fuel that can propel any business organization higher and faster, and take its people along for the ride. And what a ride it can be! It baffles me when I encounter ho-hum business environments that seem to be plastered with invisible “no smiling, no laughter, no pleasure, no pride” signs. Why do people take it? Don’t the owners, stockholders, or managers realize why the organization’s performance—its productivity—is as lackluster as the mood?

Gimme five! It really is very simple.