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|In: Organizational Effectiveness|Last Updated:

The Gartner Group calls it the “Zero Latency Enterprise.” Regis McKenna’s new book is titled Real Time.

McDonald’s asks “Want fries with that?”

Although McDonald’s doesn’t dominate the fast food business the way Microsoft dominates the desktop, it’s been stunningly and consistently successful over the years, even though its food is about as good as Microsoft’s software (but don’t push the metaphor, please – I’ve never found a bug in a Big Mac).

One reason for McDonald’s success is that a long time ago it realized that customers don’t care that much about flavor. Speed matters a lot – McDonald’s customers want their food in real time, with zero latency between ordering and eating. They want a clean restaurant to eat in. They don’t want to spend a lot. They want to keep the kids happy.

And oh, by the way … actually eating the food shouldn’t be unpleasant.

I have a lot of respect for Regis McKenna, and have even gained one or two useful insights from the Gartner Group. You can learn a lot from McDonald’s, though, which figured it out long before RM or GG, and you can learn it for a lot less money. Not only that, you can get a Happy Meal in the bargain. For example:

  • Training: McDonald’s doesn’t leave things to chance – Hamburger U may sound funny, but it’s one of the reasons eating at McDonald’s doesn’t lead to unpleasant surprises. Is the training you give your leaders as effective as Hamburger U? If not, why not? The products you deliver are a lot more complicated than a Breakfast Burrito.
  • Leverage: People get all gooey about how the plains Indians used the bison so efficiently, but McDonald’s puts them to shame. When McDonald’s buys a cow, the entire cow – skin, meat, bones and hooves – gets put to productive use. In IS, leverage comes from reuse. Do you create libraries of reusable subroutines or objects? Do you require developers to learn what’s in it?
  • Procedures: There are lots of ways an employee could assemble a Quarter Pounder, but there’s only one way a McDonald’s employee does assemble a Quarter Pounder. When it comes to your core processes – tasks employees do over and over again – do your employees do things by the numbers? Or do they waste time trying to figure out the solutions to problems that have long-since been solved?
  • Willingness to customize: My youngest, Erin, asks for a fish sandwich with “… only the bun, the fish, and the sauce, please. Nothing else.” And that’s what she gets. We spend a lot of time in IS worrying about enterprise-scale problems, but the single biggest difficulty we have is helping small constituencies with specialized needs. Do you know how to help a small group solve a small problem, or do you tell them, “That violates our standards,” or “We won’t solve it for you and we won’t let you buy the tools you need to solve it yourselves, either”?
  • Hiring old people: Think there’s a labor shortage in IS? Compared to the food industry, you have it easy. McDonald’s hires old people. It hires young people. It hires recent immigrants with poor language skills. It even hires the cognitively challenged. It meshes its staffing needs with their scheduling limitations, it helps every new employee find a way to succeed, it pays enough to attract them all, and it makes each McDonald’s a decent place to work, too. Meanwhile, lots of IS shops practice age discrimination, screen out anyone without a computer science degree, and never consider hiring high school students to work the help desk part-time, even though they know PCs better than most “IS professionals” and would kill for the job, besides.
  • Killing bad ideas: The Arch Deluxe didn’t sell, and McDonald’s unceremoniously took it off the market. What really bad idea is still floating around your organization because nobody is willing to put a bullet into it?

And then there’s the issue that started this column, speed. Anything that might slow down a McDonald’s employee in delivering an Egg McMuffin to a customer isn’t there in the first place.

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|In: Business Ethics|Last Updated:

A good friend told me, “I was terminated with 20 minutes left in the day, on a Thursday. They had said I would be severed sometime during the month but they had led me to believe it would be closer to the end of the month. Nice treatment after 24 1/2 years …”

Another company bought his employer a few years before. He had known the day was coming, and he never once expressed resentment over his coming layoff. Elimination of redundant staff is one of the realities of a merger or acquisition. Yes, it’s painful, but there’s no foul — business is out to make good business decisions.

Why was it was managed so badly?

Consider the Portuguese man-of-war. As we learned in high school, although it looks like one animal, it’s actually a colony of independent coelenterates, each of which feeds and reproduces separately.

We’re colonies, too. As Richard Dawkins points out in The Selfish Gene, a body is just a gene’s way of making more genes. Even that is a simplification. An unknown proportion of our internal constituents began as independent critters. Mitochondria, for example, the organelles that make oxygen the key to metabolism instead of a toxic gas, started out as free-living bacteria.

Even though each of us is a colony, we manage to act as a purposeful organism – so much so that we harm individual colony members with callous disregard. (Example: Every time someone goes on a diet they starve or kill billions of fat cells – and just think of how many are destroyed during liposuction!)

Liposuction creates personal change. How about business change?

IS projects have always been about business change, and an increasing number of companies recognize that all IS projects are really business change projects that inject significant new technology into the equation.

Most business changes both create and eliminate jobs within the enterprise. Whatever your role in IS, at some point in your career you’ll help eliminate the jobs of innocent employees who did their jobs competently but whose roles are no longer needed because of the business change you helped the company achieve.

Companies are getting better at managing business change. They’ve learned to redesign processes, integrating technology into the new process design. They’ve learned to train employees in the new processes and technology rather than assuming everything will be self-evident. Most have learned to communicate the reason for a change, not just “here’s your new job – now go do it.” Some have even learned that redesigning the organizational chart comes after redesigning processes and technology, not before.

Sadly, though, many companies still see employees as nothing more than adipose cells … hence the phrase, “Getting rid of the fat.” And if you raise your hand to protest a layoff you risk being branded as soft – the business equivalent of “bleeding heart liberal.”

So here’s some advice: If you have an opportunity to influence how your business will manage a change that requires layoffs, don’t get all righteous about what is ethical, compassionate, or the right thing to do. In business, ethics is a personal matter, and ethical businesses get that way through leaders who act ethically, not through preaching.

Instead, be practical.

Point out that the long-term goal of business change is growth, and the cost of laying off one group of employees and then recruiting a different group is far higher than the cost of retraining the employees you have.

Suggest that when “trimming the fat” the company should use a sharp knife, not a sledgehammer. If valuable employees who support change find opportunities while non-performers and change resistors find themselves on the outside, most employees will quietly applaud when they no longer have to cover for their non-producing peers.

Most important of all, point out that every time the company treats departing employees like the cast-off byproducts of cosmetic surgery, the morale of every remaining employee plummets, and employees who might otherwise support change will become sullen and passive resistors of it, something every bit as poisonous as some colonists in a Portuguese man-of-war.

That’s bad for profits, and even worse when the next big change comes around.

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