I really respect what you and the people with you are doing, too.

Stuart Baker
http://www.consciouscooperation.com

You are right. The appropriate systems must be in place to support the prioritization of efforts. What I see a vicious cycle of expediting new high priority work fueled by long durations and unpredictable results caused by multi-tasking in the first place.

Without the appropriate systems in place to prioritize, we work on many tasks at the same time. We stay busy by switching but do not deliver results rapidly. This extends how long any one deliverable will take and makes it difficult to predict completion times.

Extensive duration length and uncertainty leads to management prioritizing “important” work into the existing work in progress, exacerbating the problems. Moving deliverables through the work stream intact reduces the time from start to finish and increases predictability.

The power of short time to delivery and predictable results is that management will queue the next most important thing, rather that expedite over work in process.

Dennis

Multi-tasking is the intentional stoppage of ongoing work to transition focus to another task area.

It has been my experience that many companies, and thus mid-level managers (where the work gets done), live in an inverted priority world: more “high” priority projects than “mid” priority projects, and more “mid” priority than those with “low” priority. This inability to prioritize then creates a need to show some (however minimal) progress across the multiple high-level projects.

The key to eliminating the perceived need to multi-task in my mind is to flip the priority world upright. Project sponsors must internally coordinate and establish a meaningful prioritization of needed work. Secondly, in a multi-team environment, systems need to be in place to ensure that each team member has only one highest priority project, and a clearly defined series of “nexts”. There should be minimal question regarding what should be worked on when I can’t work on my A project. The rest is just good time management.

I have been reading, “The World is Flat” by Thomas Friedman, and have been a fan of Tom Peters for a while now. Both firmly believe that the natural progression will be from the outsourcing of services to that of knowledge-based work - it’s only a matter of time.

Companies will remain competitive through whatever means they choose to utilize as the environment dictates. If faced with an unreliable, incompetent workforce in the US with a highly reliable and motivated workforce in India and China – the decision becomes obvious (from a corporate survival perspective).

The question that both raise; how do we (and our children) remain competitive in a globalized environment?

Outsourcing, to me, makes “global warming” look like just another sunny day in the context of those global issues that are going to most impact our future generations.

Clunk – clunk (that’s me stepping off my soapbox).

To me it is key to work on the human relations, which would include sharing knowledge. Underneath that I think we have a wish to feel that we matter, that we are valued, that we are more than just workers for a company.

I have seen people stay with a company for years because they are happy there, even though they could make more money somewhere else.

Stuart Baker
http://www.consciouscooperation.com

The output of his visit; some rather brutal advice that may be more generally applicable (if I weren’t such a nice guy) across all areas of business:

Seth’s advice: Fire half your salesforce. Then, give the remainder, the top people, a big raise, and use the money left over to steal the best salespeole you can find from other industries or even from your competition. You’ll end up with fewer salespeople. But all of them will be great.

And the good guys? Have them go work for the competition.

Seth is clearly all about “great”, but we all should be.

In the past, I’ve lost “great” people because I believed or didn’t challenge the “good” pay guidlines provided by my HR group. If I had fought harder, I probably would have had different outcomes.

The root of these challenges seem to be engineered into the overall process with local goals, measurements, and management styles all being different, and ultimately driving what each individual/functional area is saying and how they are acting. In siloed hierarchies it has been my experience that these differences rise all the way to the top, and thus are very entrenched at the bottom.

Coming to this understanding over the past few years has allowed me to modify myself to allow dialogues, and in rare instances what I would consider meaningful conversation when the right people are in the room. When it works, it’s beautiful, and makes it a little bit easier to get out of bed in the morning.