All Posts in Policies and Procedures

|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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At last! Many have asked, most have been patient. You can finally subscribe to KJR as an RSS feed. The URL is https://issurvivor.com/?feed=rss2. Thanks for waiting.
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|In: Industry Commentary|Last Updated:

I’ve discovered a new process design methodology. I call it “Six Stupid.”

Everyone knows that a group of people is dumber than its least intelligent member. Six Stupid is based on this insight. Unlike the better-known Six Sigma, Six Stupid requires the collaboration of at least six idiots, to design process flows that defy reason and preclude exceptions. To illustrate:

My wife and I ordered furniture on-line from a prominent multi-channel retailer. A few hours later we stumbled upon a better alternative at a much more attractive price.

The first retailer’s website refused to cancel our order so I called customer service, where a polite representative told me she couldn’t cancel it either. The reason? It had already been sent to the warehouse for processing.

When I suggested she contact the warehouse, she explained that it had no telephone number to call. Really. The only solution was for them to ship the merchandise and for me to refuse the shipment. When it arrived back at the warehouse, they’d restock it and credit my account.

Which is how it happened.

This wasn’t a case of customer elimination management. Quite the opposite — customer service took care of me just fine. No, this was an example of Six Stupid. Even if the merchandise had been picked and was waiting on the shipping dock, anyone with a gram of sense could have figured out that logging the shipment as departed, then rolling it directly to Restocking would have saved paying UPS twice to ship it back and forth. But policy, and the lack of telephone service, made sure everyone Followed the Process.

Then came the blizzard, and with it a Six Stupid airline experience.

It happened like this: I’d bought round trip tickets to New York City. A week after that trip I’d booked a long weekend in Florida.

Then plans changed and I had to stay in New York an extra week, which meant I’d fly to Minnesota Thursday evening so I could get on a flight to Florida the next morning. The fare rules, you see, didn’t allow converting two round-trip tickets into one triangle fare.

Then, the day before I was to return to Minnesota, the weather service forecast snow there, and lots of it. The airline cancelled my flight in anticipation and rebooked me for the following morning, to arrive a half-hour after my flight to Florida was scheduled to depart.

I called customer service, explained the situation, and suggested that under the circumstances, routing me directly to Florida clearly made more sense for both of us.

But the fare rules still wouldn’t allow it. The best they could do was to rebook my Florida flight to later in the day. I asked the guy on the phone to check with his supervisor, which he did. No-go: She wouldn’t or couldn’t override the system. “I guess I’d better speak to your supervisor, then,” I suggested. He connected me.

“I know you have complex fare rules that mere mortals like me can’t fully comprehend …” I began. Those were the last words I would successfully utter for at least five minutes.

The customer service supervisor scolded me … that’s the only accurate description … for (1) being disrespectful to the airline; (2) trying to game their fares to get a cheaper flight to Florida; and (3) now trying to cheat to get the best of both worlds.

I confess that by the end of the call I became somewhat testy. Anyway, the next morning I spoke to a different supervisor, described my previous attempt at resolution, and asked if the airline really wanted to fly me in and out of a blizzard zone when a simple and easy alternative was staring both of us in the face.

She told me the first supervisor had placed a red flag in my records. It said that under no circumstances should anyone help me out. She did anyway, routing me directly to Florida.

It was the opposite of the first Six Stupid situation: The airline’s process did allow for exceptions. But I caught someone in a very bad mood who insisted on Following the Process anyway.

The point of this week’s tiresome missive? There are two.

The first: Don’t use the Six Stupid methodology to design whatever processes you’re trying to implement. Make sure every process has a process bypass process to handle situations that just don’t fit.

And second, make this rule inviolable:

Turning a new process on does not justify employees turning their brains off.

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