Strategy and Tactics – Page 178 – IS Survivor Publishing

McDonald’s redux (first appeared in InfoWorld)

By: Bob Lewis|In: Leadership|Last Updated: September 20, 1999

When Wess Roberts wrote The Leadership Secrets of Attila the Hun, I hope he got a lot of angry mail.

Last month I made some suggestions about what IS leaders could learn from McDonald’s and the roof fell in. While a lot of my mail was complimentary, many correspondents took issue with some of my advice, all of my advice, the notion that there are any parallels between McDonald’s and IS, some or all of McDonald’s business practices, and the quality of the McDonald’s dining experience.

You would think I had said you have something to learn from Attila the Hun. Hey, that was Wess Roberts, not Robert Lewis.

It’s easy to find reasons not to learn from others. The Germans, for example, discounted relativity because Einstein was Jewish. The result: No atom bomb, they lost World War II, and we watch reruns of Hogan’s Heroes.

Because McDonald’s experiences high turnover in counter help and pays low wages for these positions, some of my correspondents said you have nothing to learn from it when you look at your own hiring practices.

Wrong answer. You have a lot to learn, not by blindly imitating but by paying attention. McDonald’s structures its work to require as little expertise as possible. It hires anyone who can do it. And it pays its employees what the market will bear. Neither McDonald’s nor its counter and kitchen workers think of these jobs as careers – it’s just basic employment. It’s better than welfare, and McDonald’s can sell burgers at a competitive price.

McDonald’s recognizes the need for jobs as well as careers. Do you? If you’ve structured every position in IS as a career, you’re probably making a mistake. Jobs in IS require more expertise than working the counter at McDonald’s, but in some situations you can still move expertise from individuals to systems and processes. Figure out when it makes sense to do so. Have you looked for the opportunities, or have you assumed they don’t exist?

In IS, you often structure the work around the unique abilities of the employees you have instead of first defining the position. McDonald’s doesn’t have much to teach you here, but a local entrepreneur, who gets more from 10 employees than competitors get from 20, may. Since he’s in the garment trade, though, not IS, you have nothing to learn from him, do you? Sure you do.

Some letters indicted the whole fast-food industry, not just McDonald’s, saying it exploits workers. Yes, and many employees in IS wear pagers and are on-call 24 hours a day. Is that exploitation, or is it the nature of the work, and so long as there’s no misrepresentation as to what’s expected, there’s no harm and no foul?

Whether it’s Attila, McDonald’s or (worst of all, according to some participants in my Infoworld.com forum) Microsoft, you have something to learn from any individual or organization that has proven itself highly effective. And with all due respect to Stephen Covey, not all of the lessons are obvious, they won’t all feel good, and they don’t all come from people and companies that are admirable in every respect.

In fact, you won’t find any company or individual you can admire in every respect. Not one. Not even you. Or me. Although it’s easy to be self-righteous, it’s hypocritical because no matter how much the other guy looks like Bill Clinton with Zippergate, somewhere in your own life you know you’re Newt Gingrich, just as guilty only nobody knows about it.

Self-righteousness is just another form of arrogance. If you’re unwilling to learn from McDonald’s, are you willing to listen to an employee you find personally irritating? Probably not, but you’re doing both yourself and that employee a disservice.

Learning from others is like learning from history. Sure, there are lots of wrong conclusions you can draw, and if you do learn you’ll find a whole new set of mistakes to make. But if you fail to learn, from history or from contemporaries, you’ll just make the same old mistakes, and that isn’t just dumb … it’s boring.

Mail call on fat network architectures (first appeared in InfoWorld)

Microsoft’s posturing over AOL’s “obligation” to open up its proprietary instant messaging protocol was pretty funny; Micron Electronics’ plan to buy Micron Internet Services from their mutual parent Micron Technology is just plain bizarre. But Oracle’s Larry Ellison, topping the rest of the industry, wins in the definitions category by describing his company’s planned $150 (plus monitor) diskless Linux desktop system as a “network computer”.

This is a system that has 64MB of RAM and runs a Unix variant and applications that are installed locally from a CD-ROM. That makes it a network computer? So, I guess, is the iMac. It’s OK. Ellison coined the term “network computer.” He can define it as he pleases.

Speaking of newly coined buzzwords, my recent columns on fat network architectures generated a lot of e-mail and discussion in InfoWorld.com’s forums.

Many respondents disagreed with my proposition that “thin client” has lost all meaning. Several explained what the term “really” means. Regrettably, no two proposed the same definition …

Other exchanges centered on my conclusion that the one thing thin client architectures all share is their need for a fatter network (hence the name). Either missing my inclusion of servers as part of the network or disagreeing with it, they pointed to products such as Citrix and Virtual Network Computing (VNC) that make efficient use of bandwidth. Since fat network is my term, though, I get to define it, and servers are in.

VNC’s advocates in particular were emphatic about the wonders of their thin-client solution, and challenged me to “prove” my assertion that thinner clients require fatter networks. (Answer: See my definition, above.) If the number of capitalized sentences and exclamation points in its proponents’ postings is a gauge, VNC is worth exploring. The number of capitalized sentences and exclamation points also demonstrates the need for a more businesslike approach to product advocacy if the open source movement is to succeed.

In the end, when the flames had died and the smoke finally cleared, only a few points seemed certain regarding thin-client/fat-network computing:

1. Misuse of the term “thin client” has rendered it worthless. It now means “non-Windows desktops.”

2. The only benefits common to all fat network computing solutions are that they’re easier to deploy, stabilize and administer (please, not “administrate”) than applications installed on Windows desktops. Note to all who wrote: They aren’t more stable, only easier to make stable.

3. Browser-based computing benefits end-users – it allows IS to deploy applications that otherwise would be impractical to create at all.

4. The lonely defenders of HTML-only interfaces acknowledged their limitations, instead asserting that end-users need nothing more. Anyone who has filled out an on-screen purchase order knows better, though – HTML lacks basic facilities, like scrolling regions. To make browser-based applications competitive with modern GUIs you need combinations of JavaScript, Java applets and servlets, ASP, Perl … Techniques for maintaining applications built on all this stuff don’t exist.

5. NCs let you build rich user interfaces at the cost of locking down the desktop – sometimes appropriate, sometimes not – but at the cost of incompatible file formats for office applications. Lotus’ latest version of eSuite may change that, though, opening the door for a mixed PC/NC architecture.

Finally, at least within my unscientific sample, advocacy of thin clients and disdain for end-users correlate strongly. In the “real world,” I’m told, the only software end-users install is games and screen savers; IS knows what end-users need to succeed better than the end-users themselves; and what matters is what’s good for the company, not what helps individual employees do their jobs. Then in the next sentence or posting, I hear that IS lacks the resources to take care of every need in the company.

Put it all together and it comes down to the same, tired formula: We won’t do it for you and we won’t let you do it for yourself because we can’t trust you with the tools.

In IS, I guess, we need to update the old proverb thusly: “Give a man a fish and he eats for a day. Teach him to fish and he’ll wreck everything.”