Ideas

>>>>> #1 – The triumph of process

0> p. 20 – “They were getting nowhere because they were applying task solutions to process problems.”  “The difference between task and process is the difference between part and whole.”

0> p. 21 – “Our organizational structures for the last two hundred years have been based on tasks. The fundamental building block of the corporation was the functional department.”

0> p. 25 – “A process is a group of tasks that together create a result of value to a customer.”

0> p. 27 onwards – four steps towards process-centered: [1] Recognize and name your processes; [2] Awareness by everyone of these processes; [3] Process measurement; [4] Process management as primary purpose of the organiztaion

>>>>> #2 – Voices from the front line (1)

>>>>> #3 – From worker to professional

0> p. 44 – Three types of work: [1] value-adding; [2] non-value-adding but supporting value-adding; [3] waste

0> p. 45 – most companies do well in improving value-add work (=the actual doing) and eliminating the waste, but not so well in “the work needed to to make conventional processes function, but is also the source of errors, delay, inflexibility, and rigidity.”

0> p. 46 – “The only way to avoid using so much glue is to start with bigger fragments” i.e. bigger jobs

0> p. 46 – “When three people are involved, there is a need for coordination, communication, and checking; not so when one person is involved”

0> Alternatively, make sure everyone understands the entire process and focus on its outcome

0> p. 47 – “We replace simple jobs and complex processes with simple processes and complex jobs”

0> p. 50 – “This change goes far beyond savings in time; it transforms attitudes.”

0> p. 50 – “While process centering frees people from administrative hassles and liberates them from drone work, it also places new demands on them. (…) Dramatically increasing the ratio of real work to busywork may be a boon to the spirit, but it can also be a great drain on the body.” (!)

0> p. 53 – “A professional is someone who is responsible for achieving a result rather than performing a task.”

0> p. 53 – professional customer / result / process vs worker boss / activity / task

0> p. 59 – “The transition from worker to professional is a sea change in the nature of work, and it entails many changes – from empowerment gained to security lost, from alienation overcome to an encounter with the danger of burn-out, satisfaction bought at the price of high anxiety.”

>>>>> #4 – Yes, but what does it mean for me?

0> p. 61 – “There is an enormous gap between intellectually understanding an idea and really appreciating what it means.”

0> p. 73 – “Removing limits on what people can achieve can be a perverse invitation to burnout. It is exhilarating to be stretched to your limit, but after a while you need a break before you break. All-day, every-day stimulation can fry your nerves like wiring that carries too much current.”

0>>> Your job when you are on vacation is to charge the team battery. From time to time, the team will have to fall back on its emergency resources, and if nobody takes care of those resources it won’t be there. If you are the one with the most recent vacation, it is your job to be the most resilient. So for Pete’s sake, if you are on a holiday, don’t do a half asses job by diluting your mission with some low tier work that we can take care off while you’re out. Prioritize! Take that battery charging to the max, it is your god damn duty. You owe it to your team mates to be your strongest (and most inspired) possible self when you return. Don’t be inefficient.

>>>>> #5 – From manager to process owner

0> p. 80 – “In general we can break the process owner’s responsibility into three major areas: design, coaching, and advocacy.”

0> p. 81 – [DESIGN] “Empowerment does not equal anarchy.”

0> p. 81 – “While processes exist in conventional organizations, they only rarely have been consciously designed. They are usually the accretions of endless ad hoc decisions that have been made over time in response to changing circumstances. Consequently they usually perform very poorly.”

0> p. 81 – “While not yet a science, process design can fairly be termed an engineering discipline. Like all branches of engineering, it requires grounding in a set of basic principles and techniques (…)”

0> p. 82 – “The first principle is that process design must be customer-driven. (…) So process design must begin by formulating a cutomer-driven, outside-in perspective on the performance requirements of the process.”

0> p. 83 – “In addition to meeting customer requirements, the process owner must also establish measures that meet de company’s needs: for profitability, return on assets, growth, and the like.”

0> p. 86 – [COACHING] “The team goes to the process owner when they have trouble making the process design work in their particular situation and need some help adapting it to exceptional circumstances.”

0> p. 88 [ADVOCACY] “It is the owner’s job to obtain the financial resources that the process needs in order to operate.”

>>>>> #6 – What is business anyway?

0> p. 96 – “Each time I moved into a new one, I looked for what scientists call first principles: the basic concepts or theories that govern a field. Identifying and understanding these principles provide a framework for examining, interpreting, predicting, and even controlling events or actions within the field. Kirchoff’s laws chracterize the behabvior of electrical circuits, for example; Newton’s laws of motion predict the behavior of objects in the physical world. However, when I approached the business world I found that it had no first principles.”

0> p. 97 – “Principle 1: the mission of a business is to create value for its customers”

0> p. 98 : “And what is value? Value is not synonymous with a product or service, although it often involves one or both. Rather, value in a business context means a solution to a customer’s problem.”

0> p. 100 – “Principle 2: It is a company’s processes that create value for its customers”

0> p. 101 – “Principle 3: Business success comes from superior process performance”

0> p. 102 – “Principle 4: Superior process performance is achieved by having a superior process design, the right people to perform it, and the right environment for them to work in”

>>>>> #7 – What’s football got to do with it?

>>>>> #8 – The end of the organizational chart

0> p. 114 – “In process-centered organizations there aren’t any department managers (or departments for that matter). There are process owners who make sure that processes are organized in efficient and productive ways. (…) They are focused on process, not personnel. (…) How do you nurture and support the individual workers so as to get the most out of them? (…) Enter the coach.”

>>>>> #9 – Voices from the front lines (I)

>>>>> #10 – The soul of a new company

0> p. 153 – “I am the object of your training, but the actor in my own learning.”

0> p. 157 – “We never punish people for failure. We only punish sloppy execution and the failure to recognize reality.” [quoting Bruce Marlow, Progressive Insurance)

>>>>> #11 – Corporate Jericho

0> p. 177 – “Modern organizations have learned that the notion of economy of scale has severe limits. With size come diseconomies of scale. As organizations grow, multiple layers of administrative bureaucracy inevitably appear and it becomes difficult for any individual to have an overall understanding of what’s going on.”

>>>>> #12 – Rethinking strategy: you are what you do

0> p. 185 – “There are many ways in which companies can fashion strategies based on their processes. (…) 1. Intensification (improving processes); 2. Extension (enter new markets); 3. Augmentation (extend processes to additional services); 4. Conversion (perform process for another company); 5. Innovation (different goods or services); 6. Diversification (new processes for new goods and services)”

>>>>> #13 – The process of change

0> p. 199 – “Reengineering the corporation introduced the “business diamond”, depicted in Figure-4, to express the fact that every organization can be described in terms of four major features: its business processes, its jobs and organizational structure, its management and measurement system, and its values and beliefs.”

>>>>> #14 – What I tell my children

0> p. 212 – “The point of reengineering is not the elimination of jobs; it is the elimination of non-value added work.”

0> p. 216 – “Engineering is concerned with the design and construction of systems (…) how to create large systems built from small components.”

0> p. 216 – “Process-centered workers must be capable of critical thinking as well. They must know how to ask why.”

>>>>> #15 – Picking tomorrow’s winners

>>>>> #16 – Utopia soon or Apocalypse Now?

0> p. 237 – “There is another wrinkle to the prospect of an economy that offers only big jobs.”

0> p. 238 – “We may be witnessing the birth of an economy with no bottom rungs on the ladder of success.”

0> p. 238 – “It is possible to imagine a future in which only a small number of people are required to produce all the goods and services that a society currently consumes. In such a world how will the rest of us survive? Dramatic increases in productivity are not intrinsically bad. On the contrary, they are very good. They are the only real engine of raising the standard of living. History teaches us that human demand is virtually infinite.”

0> p. 241 – “The future is where we will have to live, but the past makes it livable.”

0> p. 242 – “The wages of work can be paid in a variety of currencies. The most basic is, of course, monetary. We work to earn a living for ourselves and our families. If we are lucky, we can also derive feelings of satisfaction, accomplishment, and pride from a job well done. Some of us are even granted the joy of excitement and stimulation that comes from interesting and challenging work. But there is another reward that we reap all too rarely today. We need our work to have transcendent meaning, but it rarely does.”