Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency - Softcover

DeMarco, Tom

 
9780767907699: Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0767907698 ISBN 13: 9780767907699
Verlag: Crown, 2002

Inhaltsangabe

If your company’s goal is to become fast, responsive, and agile, more efficiency is not the answer--you need more slack.

Why is it that today’s superefficient organizations are ailing? Tom DeMarco, a leading management consultant to both Fortune 500 and up-and-coming companies, reveals a counterintuitive principle that explains why efficiency efforts can slow a company down. That principle is the value of slack, the degree of freedom in a company that allows it to change. Implementing slack could be as simple as adding an assistant to a department and letting high-priced talent spend less time at the photocopier and more time making key decisions, or it could mean designing workloads that allow people room to think, innovate, and reinvent themselves. It means embracing risk, eliminating fear, and knowing when to go slow. Slack allows for change, fosters creativity, promotes quality, and, above all, produces growth.

With an approach that works for new- and old-economy companies alike, this revolutionary handbook debunks commonly held assumptions about real-world management, and gives you and your company a brand-new model for achieving and maintaining true effectiveness.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Tom DeMarco is an international management consultant with clients in numerous industries. His previous books include The Deadline (a business novel with more than 40,000 copies sold) and Peopleware (nonfiction, with more than 100,000 copies sold). He divides his time between New York City and Camden, Maine.

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If your company’s goal is to become fast, responsive, and agile, more efficiency is not the answer--you need more slack.

Why is it that today’s superefficient organizations are ailing? Tom DeMarco, a leading management consultant to both Fortune 500 and up-and-coming companies, reveals a counterintuitive principle that explains why efficiency efforts can slow a company down. That principle is the value of slack, the degree of freedom in a company that allows it to change. Implementing slack could be as simple as adding an assistant to a department and letting high-priced talent spend less time at the photocopier and more time making key decisions, or it could mean designing workloads that allow people room to think, innovate, and reinvent themselves. It means embracing risk, eliminating fear, and knowing when to go slow. Slack allows for change, fosters creativity, promotes quality, and, above all, produces growth.

With an approach that works for new- and old-economy companies alike, this revolutionary handbook debunks commonly held assumptions about real-world management, and gives you and your company a brand-new model for achieving and maintaining true effectiveness.

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1

Madmen in the Halls

THE LEGACY of the nineties has been a dangerous corporate delusion: the idea that organizations are effective only to the extent that all their workers are totally and eternally busy. Anyone who's not overworked (sweating, staying late, racing from one task to the next, working Saturdays, unable to squeeze time for even the briefest meeting till two weeks after next) is looked on with suspicion. People with a little idle time on their hands may not even be safe. As one of my friends at Digital Equipment Corporation told me during the company's darkest days, "There are madmen in the halls, looking for someone to ax." Of course, the ones they were looking to ax were the folks who weren't all that busy.

Crisis of Confidence

Your company may not now have actual ax-wielding crazies roaming the halls, but their specter is almost certainly still with you. This is the remnant of the crisis of confidence we've just come through. Consider: As this is being written, American and western European business is in a period of extraordinary prosperity. The rest of the world is a basket case and we are healthier than we've ever been. And yet just a few short years ago, we were all in an agony of doubt. How could we survive, we wondered, against the competition of the ravenous third world, willing to work for peanuts and liable to undersell us in any market anywhere? How could we stay even with the superbly educated Japanese, or those clever and hungry workers coming out from behind the Iron Curtain, or the Taiwanese and Koreans with their superhuman work ethic and their awesome skills? Acting on our doubts, we went through a purge of excess capacity (i.e., people with homes and families). We trimmed as though our very survival depended on trimming.

Wasn't it reasonable to put our house in order in this fashion? Maybe it was in the short run. It probably contributed at least somewhat to our present strength. Yet the lasting side effect of the purge--the notion that busyness is the essence of business--can only do us long-term harm.

The Price of "Putting Our House in Order"

During the last ten years we have downsized, "right-sized," laid off, and fired people's butts. We have cut payrolls, closed plants, sold off divisions, and generally scared all our remaining employees to death. We nodded in approval as characters like Chainsaw Al (at one time the worst CEO in America) did their dirty work. We bid up the stocks of companies like AT&T who led the trend, i.e., led the retreat.

The principal target of the cuts has been that bugaboo of organizational efficiency: middle management. We asked ourselves, "What are they, after all, those middle managers? What are they but fat? What do they really exist for other than to be cut out in the interest of efficiency?" And so we cut. We surgically removed the middle layers of our organizations, flattening the charts and widening the scope of management at each level.

Was that a good thing to do? I have my doubts.

Maybe middle management exists for some reason above and beyond filling the space between the top and the bottom of the hierarchy. Part of my purpose in this book is to examine what's supposed to happen in the middle of a healthy organization, the critical role of middle management.

The main activity of those managers is reinvention. It is the middle of the organization where reinvention takes place. This is where the dynamic of today's organizational functioning is examined, taken apart, analyzed, resynthesized, and assembled back into new organizational models that allow us to move forward.

What got cut out of the most aggressively purged organizations is the capacity to change. The so-called restructurings have, in most cases, optimized the present steady state, only at the expense of the future.

Does It Matter?

Well, so what? Some companies have always been prone to trade away the future to make the present look a little more rosy. In the short term they prosper, and in the long term they don't. What's different this time? The difference is that today even the companies that didn't cut the heart out of their effective change centers have made it more difficult for those centers to operate. Change and reinvention require a commodity that is absent in our time as it never has been before. That commodity--the catalytic ingredient of all change--is slack. Slack is the time when reinvention happens. It is time when you are not 100 percent busy doing the operational business of your firm. Slack is the time when you are 0 percent busy.

Slack at all levels is necessary to make the organization work effectively and to grow. It is the lubricant of change. Good companies excel in the creative use of slack. And bad ones can only obsess about removing it.

2

Busyness

IMAGINE that you took on an assignment to direct a film about happenings inside a hugely successful company. How would you portray the company? How, in particular, would you make it look successful? One tempting answer is to convey its great success by showing everyone who works there to be immensely busy all the time. After all, you might reason, how would the company have become so successful if its people weren't putting in substantial extra effort?

My own experience consulting inside some highly successful companies (Microsoft, Apple, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Dupont, to name a few) cannot corroborate a relationship between busyness and success. Very successful companies have never struck me as particularly busy; in fact, they are, as a group, rather laid-back. Energy is evident in the workplace, but it's not the energy tinged with fear that comes from being slightly behind on everything. The companies I have come to admire most show little obvious sense of hurry. They are more like an extended family, embarked upon a project whose goal is only partly expressed in getting something done; the other part of the goal is that all involved learn and grow and enjoy themselves along the way.

Work, particularly knowledge work, can be extremely enjoyable. That's why so many of us become addicted to it. If you take sensual pleasure in your work, and those around you are doing the same thing, if it's clearly okay in your corporate culture to enjoy what you're doing, chances are that yours is a company headed toward success. Sign up for the stock plan.

The Busy Worker

Extreme busyness is injurious to the real work of the organization. I will make that point as carefully as I can in the chapters to follow, stressing the effect in particular on management. But first, I ask you to consider how busyness may hurt the effectiveness of even the lowest-level workers.

Take, for example, the secretary. (You remember secretaries, don't you? A once-common element of corporate life.) A secretary's job may involve document preparation, appointment scheduling, coordinating, and generally facilitating the smooth functioning of one manager's work life--let's say yours. We'll call her Sylvia.

A good secretary is a treasure, as anyone who has ever worked with one knows, and Sylvia is definitely a treasure. With Sylvia around, everything goes more smoothly. When you're away from the office--it never looks this way officially, but whom are we kidding?--Sylvia is effectively in charge. She is the one who coordinates and distributes work to be done. If she ever left, it would set you and your organization back a few months, at least.

But now into this happy scenario drop a consultant with a charter to reduce cost, the "corporate restructuring agent." Whoa, he says, what's this? A secretary? And what's she up to this very minute? He parks himself beside Sylvia's desk with his trusty stopwatch in hand. To no one's surprise, he finds that Sylvia is really only busy 43 percent of the time. The rest of the...

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Verlag
Crown
Erscheinungsdatum
2002
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0767907698
ISBN 13 
9780767907699
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
256
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar

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