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|In: Leadership|Last Updated:

The award for best two-layer play on words in a book title goes to How to Feed Friends and Influence People: The Carnegie Deli (Milton Parker and Allyn Freeman, 2005).

It’s the tale of the best deli in New York — a place that makes its own corned beef and pastrami and turns them into sandwiches the size of your head.

It’s a nice little book, and valuable besides, since interspersed with the deli’s history are recipes — including the formulas for knishes, stuffed cabbage, and of course matzoh balls.

And, it describes the ten business principles that have made the Carnegie Deli a huge success. Regular readers of Keep the Joint Running know the difference between running IT as a business (bad idea) and running IT in a businesslike way (great idea). That being the case I have an excuse for: Listing the ten principles, offering my own comments, and counting the cost of the book as a business expense.

1. Keep it simple. The Carnegie Deli sells delicatessen food. That’s it.

That isn’t it, of course. There’s a lot of complexity supporting that simplicity. As CIO your organization has a lot of moving parts, too (138 — we’ve counted them). See if you can develop a formulation as simple as the Carnegie’s for what you do.

2. Do one thing better than anyone else. The Carnegie Deli sells customers phenomenal food in generous portions at a great price. It’s why, with lots of New York delis to choose from, they eat at the Carnegie.

You run IT, not an independent business. You still need to give your boss and your peers a reason to work with you and your department instead of ignoring you, or wishing you were someone different. What is it?

3. Create a family atmosphere among the staff. This isn’t fake. As I watched Sol Levine, the Carnegie Deli’s manager, schmoozing with his customers our server told me, unasked, “We love that guy!”

When employees trust each other … and you … it’s easy to make great things happen. When they don’t you have no chance.

4. Promote from within. Sometimes you’ll need new blood, especially when your old ideas have run out of steam. More often, managers hire from the outside because they failed to prepare anyone on the inside.

5. Have an open ear to staff and customer comments. The twenty-buck term is “organizational listening.” Managers who don’t listen to everyone they can don’t know What’s Going On Out There. That makes them ignorant — poor preparation for making good decisions.

6. Make it yourself. This is far easier when your products are corned beef, pastrami and pickled tongue than when your products are software and data repositories. Few IT shops can build everything internally. What you can do, though, is make it all your own. Once you select (for example) SAP and implement it in your company, it’s your unique implementation. You’d better have gurus who know it inside and out.

7. Own the premises. The Carnegie Deli owns its own building. As CIO, this principle should make you think hard about the consequences of, for example, rented data center space in a co-location facility. The benefits are well-known. The hazards are all related to loss of control, and you shouldn’t take them lightly.

8. Management is always responsible. The book says it best: “There’s no finger-pointing. If something goes wrong or is mishandled, management is at fault.”

More to the point: If something goes wrong or is mishandled, the manager in charge should be asking, “How could I have prevented this, and how am I going to prevent it from happening again.”

Blame is for schmucks.

9. Do not be greedy. Greed is a strategy that works in the short term but almost always crashes and burns in the long term. Greed makes managers adopt unsustainable business practices. This is true of the company you serve. It’s also true for departments with grandiose plans. Make it one step at a time, and do each step well.

10. Have fun working. Some CIOs have problems with absenteeism, and with employees who hide in their cubicles, uninterested in doing their jobs.

They should ask themselves what it is about the department they lead that makes employees want to be somewhere else.

The last time I ate at the Carnegie Deli Sol Levine told me, “We’ve been doing this for 75 years and we still don’t know what we’re doing.”

If I didn’t know what I was doing as well as Sol and his colleagues don’t know what they’re doing, I’d be a much better consultant than I am today.

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|In: Leadership|Last Updated:

You’ve just moved into the CIO chair. Congratulations.

You spend the requisite month listening instead of talking, making no commitments, figuring out what’s going on. You find a department that operates through oral traditions and improvisation. It needs, in other words, a healthy dose of process.

What’s your next step?

Here’s what the answer isn’t: Design and implement great processes.

One of the stranger aspects of organizational change is that you can’t often fix a problem by trying to fix the problem. At least, you usually can’t fix problems directly, for two reasons. The first is that most of the problems you see are the symptoms of other, less apparent issues you don’t see. The second is that the number of levers you can pull and buttons you can push to influence the behavior of the organization you lead is surprisingly small.

If an organization is underperforming, its processes aren’t working as well as they should. This is a matter of definition: Process means how employees do their work.

That doesn’t mean you can fix an organization by fixing its processes. Far from it. If you want stronger processes, starting with process design doesn’t work very well. The buttons and levers lie elsewhere. Among the more useful:

  • Changing the business culture, to encourage a process state of mind. If you need an organization that’s more orderly — one that operates through well-defined, continuously improving processes — begin with culture change. Otherwise, everything else you try to do will wither and die, killed through the passive resistance and malicious obedience of employees who just don’t see the point and who like the less-bureaucratic way things are right now.
  • Educating process managers in the niceties of process management. Just as employees, left to their own devices, generally prefer informality to well-defined processes, process managers, left to their own devices, often prefer managing the work to managing the processes that manage the work.Nor is this necessarily a bad attitude. You can, in theory, manage processes by watching key performance indicators, dashboards, and exception reports without once interacting with a live human being. To manage the work you have to interact with the people who do it.If you want process to happen, process managers must learn the discipline of process management. If you want process to happen without doing more harm than good you’d better make sure they understand that process management isn’t an alternative to leading people — it’s a complement.
  • Fixing the policy manual, most often by throwing out most of your policies. If the policy manual is thick it almost always means compliance has replaced strategy as the force driving the company.It also means that whenever anything goes wrong, most managers instinctively try to prevent recurrence with a new rule. The result: A stifling, choking bureaucracy in which following the steps, filling out the forms and above all following the rules matter much more than achieving anything that resembles a useful result.Once you’ve finished clearing out the policy underbrush, institute one new policy: Whenever possible, institute a guideline instead of writing a policy. Guidelines do the same sort of work that policies do, but they leave enough flexibility to get the job done.
  • Reorganizing. Many executives reorganize the way Correge models change attire — frequently, as the mood takes them, to stay in fashion. Doing so has, as the saying goes, much the same effect as rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. A roll of duct tape would be more useful.One reason the tool of reorganization is so often used incorrectly is that organizational structures are mis-represented whenever anyone draws them. Showing them as a hierarchy does a fine job of presenting reporting relationships. It fails to depict something far more important: An organizational structure is a set of boxes packed within bigger boxes set within even bigger boxes.The rule for business processes is straightforward: Processes break in proportion to the number and height of the organizational barriers they have to cross. The challenge for organizational designers is that however you organize, the total number of boxes … and therefore the number of barriers … won’t change very much.

    So when you reorganize you aren’t going to remove the barriers to all processes, because you can’t.

    All you’ll be able to do is to decide which processes you improve, and which you make more difficult.

    Choose carefully.

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