There’s something mentally stabilizing, even encouraging, to know what’s going to happen.
Not precisely. Not like a crystal ball. Just generally, like a heads up.
At a parent meeting, my daughter’s volleyball coach said, the season is long and the work is hard, at some point your kid will want to quit, don’t let them.
That was good. It prepared the parents.
We don’t always get this information
Sometimes we get the “Instagram” life. That’s unhelpful.
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In 1987, Ben & Jerry’s had their best summer ever: a year-over-year sales increase of 60% to 32 million dollars.
Financially things were good.
Functionally things were a mess.
At their brand-new plant, the freezer doors didn’t have “tolerance”. The sliding doors were only just large enough for a forklift to perfectly pass through. Sometimes it didn’t. The result was that after enough banging on the freezer frame, the staff left the doors open and relied on the plastic strips to insulate the ice cream as best it could.
“The term freezer door,” wrote CEO Fred Lager, “became a metaphor within the company for anything that wasn’t working and was being ignored despite a painfully obvious need for attention.”
Human resources, processes, and candy chutes were all freezer doors.
They had to address these growing pains.
At an all-hands meeting after the busy summer season wound down, Ben Cohen gathered everyone and gave a state of the company. To address the freezer doors he asked everyone to form groups and create a list.
There were a lot of complaints, but Ben took them all in stride. “It’s only an indictment of management if you think that a well-managed organization doesn’t have problems,” Fred recalled Ben’s comments, “This was just telling us what we had to work on and letting the employees know that we knew about it.”
It was a heads-up.
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These wrap-ups that lead to heads-ups are post-mortem reviews. At the Rewired Group, they are a mandatory part of the process. But they don’t just successfully happen.
Our egos can get in the way. Post-mortems are NOT to assign blame. Howard Marks called this book, “a very interesting book on self-justification” – aka somebody f’d up and it wasn’t me.
What works better is a culture of extreme ownership. This starts at the top. Ben Cohen wasn’t a perfect leader. No one is. In Lager’s book, he comes off as demanding and not fully aligned with the rest of the ice cream crew. But what he does do is avoid the ego trappings of the top position.
“Eighty-five percent of all problems,” wrote Deming, “are system problems not people problems.”
Be wary of the ego. Address the system. Fix the freezer door.
The Waiter's Pad 
