I attended a seminar this week on Staff Engagement and a CEO I met told me how he was working on changing the culture of his organisation to go for perfection and nothing less. He then quoted statistics of the number of failures that would occur if 99.9% was good enough. How many planes would fall out the sky per week etc. In his business where he is producing a high quality, very expensive product for the top end high street retail stores, any failure is costly and so he is changing the culture to go for perfection. “We are only hiring A grade players”, he told me, and “mistakes, however small, are not tolerated. People need to realise that getting close to perfection is not good enough. Its 100% or out the door”.
This got me thinking. I specialise in helping technical people move into management and they bring this perfection thinking into management with disastrous consequences. Decisions do not get made, people get demotivated and workloads increase. I learned the 80/20 principle a long time ago. It is based on an observation by Italian economist Vifredo Pareto that 80% of the peas in his garden came from 20% of the pods and that 80% of the wealth in Italy was owned by 20% of the people. Applying this non-linear cause-effect ratio changed my life at the time. I started looking for those few companies that generated the majority of the revenue, and by focussing on them, got an exponential return on my investment in time. In 20% of the time, you can get enough information to make fast decisions. By prioritising those 20% of customers, the customer management issues simplifies dramatically. By deliberately not going for perfection but extracting 80% of the value, a manager’s life can be transformed overnight.
So was the perfection driven CEO wrong? The answer is no! Apple didn’t get the i-product success through applying the 80/20 principle to quality. Steve Jobs was famous for caring about the inside of the product that only technicians would see. In engineering, perfection is king. Just sit in a German luxury car to feel the over engineering and attention to detail that creates that emotional attachment to the car. But in management, where speed of a decision is often more important than a perfect decision, the 80/20 principle is, and should be, alive and well.
This got me thinking. I specialise in helping technical people move into management and they bring this perfection thinking into management with disastrous consequences. Decisions do not get made, people get demotivated and workloads increase. I learned the 80/20 principle a long time ago. It is based on an observation by Italian economist Vifredo Pareto that 80% of the peas in his garden came from 20% of the pods and that 80% of the wealth in Italy was owned by 20% of the people. Applying this non-linear cause-effect ratio changed my life at the time. I started looking for those few companies that generated the majority of the revenue, and by focussing on them, got an exponential return on my investment in time. In 20% of the time, you can get enough information to make fast decisions. By prioritising those 20% of customers, the customer management issues simplifies dramatically. By deliberately not going for perfection but extracting 80% of the value, a manager’s life can be transformed overnight.
So was the perfection driven CEO wrong? The answer is no! Apple didn’t get the i-product success through applying the 80/20 principle to quality. Steve Jobs was famous for caring about the inside of the product that only technicians would see. In engineering, perfection is king. Just sit in a German luxury car to feel the over engineering and attention to detail that creates that emotional attachment to the car. But in management, where speed of a decision is often more important than a perfect decision, the 80/20 principle is, and should be, alive and well.
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