Good Riddance Reviews

Methods for Finding Subtraction Targets

• Identify “stupid stuff.” Lisa Bodell, CEO of FutureThink, asks, “If you could kill all the rules that frustrate you or slow down your efficiency, what would they be?” A similar spirit propelled the Getting Rid of Stupid Stuff effort at Hawaii Pacific Health. Dr. Melinda Ashton asked healthcare workers to nominate anything in the electronic patient records system that “was poorly designed, unnecessary, or just plain stupid”—which generated 188 subtraction targets.

• Figure out the value and cost of your meetings. In their Meeting Reset, sixty Asana employees rated each of their standing meetings. They identified more than five hundred meetings that were of low value. And don’t forget the time that people spend getting ready for meetings. Bain, the management consulting firm, calculated that one company devoted three hundred thousand hours a year preparing for a weekly executive team meeting.

• Measure the burdens imposed by performance measurement. Are you spending so much time evaluating one another that you don’t have time to do your work? Deloitte’s leaders were appalled after they “tallied the number of hours the organization was spending on performance management— and found that completing the forms, holding the meetings, and creating the ratings consumed close to two million hours a year.”

• Catalog sources of email overload. The average employee spends 28 percent of their time dealing with emails. Is this true at your company (or is it worse)? Review the number, length, recipients, and timing of the emails that people send and receive. What can you subtract? Perhaps an email policy like that used at the consulting firm Vynamic will help. They call it zzzMail, as in catching some z’s: “team members are to refrain from sending emails to other team members between 10pm and 6am Monday through Friday, all day Saturday and Sunday, and all Vynamic holidays. In urgent matters, a call or text is preferred over email.”

• Observe and interview users. To identify unnecessary and confusing questions in a benefits form completed by more than two million Michigan residents each year, Civilla researchers conducted over 250 hours of interviews with residents and civil servants—and observed them as they filled out and explained the form. Civilla identified dozens of obstacles that jeopardized residents’ ability to get benefits.

• Build a journey map. Diagram the stages that customers or clients travel through as they try to get information, obtain services, or buy products from an organization—and how they, and employees, feel along the way. Our students Elizabeth Woodson and Saul Gurdus used interviews and observations to map the slow and bewildering process imposed on families of disabled children who sought services from the Golden Gate Regional Center, a social services agency in the San Francisco area. They identified numerous bottlenecks that marred clients’ journeys—especially botched handoffs between silos.

• Try a perfectionism audit. In The Systems Bible, John Gall proposed the Perfectionist’s Paradox: in complex systems, “striving for perfection is a serious imperfection.” Pressures for perfection cause needless effort and delay, interfere with learning from imperfect prototypes, and provoke despair. Many things that are worth doing—or are required by others—aren’t worth doing well. Or, as Gall preaches, ought to be done poorly. In that spirit, ask people to identify tasks where the standards are too narrow or too high, or that are enforced with too much zeal.

Some organizations fight back with strategic subtraction. Like the monthlong Meeting Doomsday pilot program that Rebecca Hinds at Asana ran with that small group of marketing employees. As we explained above under “Good Riddance Reviews,” the first stage was a meeting audit, where employees studied their calendars and identified recurring meetings that lacked value. The second stage was the Meeting Doomsday part, in which employees removed all of the standing meetings with less than five people from their calendars for forty-eight hours. Then, as Rebecca put it, after people lived “with their newly cleansed calendars” for a couple days, they repopulated them “only with those meetings that are valuable—according to their own meeting audit.” Employees eliminated some meetings, reduced the frequency of others, and made many shorter—cutting thirty-minute meetings to fifteen minutes, and sixty-minute meetings to forty-five minutes. Meeting Doomsday packed a wallop. Rebecca reports participants saved an average of eleven hours per month. One Asana employee, Francesca, in the marketing group, believed her calendar was already in “top shape” before participating in the pilot. But she turned out to be the Doomsday “all-star,” saving thirty-two hours a month.

“1. Pause to Start Right

When you launch a new project, team, or organization, pause to consider the talent, roles, norms, and resources that you will need to succeed. A great way to begin is to harness the human capacity for imaginary time travel: Pause to pretend that you have succeeded (a “previctorem”) or failed (a “premortem”) and write a story about the events that led to your wonderful or awful fate. Then build those lessons into how you design and do your work. Psychologist Gary Klein uses premortems to help teams identify dangerous risks and delusions. Gary asks teams to imagine that it is, say, a year after they’ve made a decision, and it is a massive and unambiguous failure. People look back from that terrible future and develop lists and stories to explain what happened. Gary’s research finds that premortems are “a low-cost, high-payoff” method for making better decisions and running better projects. Huggy Rao and his Stanford colleagues conducted a “back to the future” study that suggests doing a previctorem, in which you pause to look back from an (imaginary) successful future, may be even more effective than doing a premortem. Both forms of time travel can improve decisions and designs because treating an event as if it did rather than might happen—thinking about it in the past tense—makes it seem more concrete and likely to happen, which motivates people to unpack its nuances....

2. Ask Questions That Make People Stop to Think—Before They Do Something Stupid...

3. Where’s Your Times Square?

We learned this lesson from Becky Margiotta, who led the 100,000 Homes Campaign that we talked about in chapter 1. Becky is now CEO of the Billions Institute, where she advises leaders of nonprofits and government organizations on how to imagine and implement large-scale change. Becky has many impatient clients who want to go big with half-baked and unproven ideas. She asks them, “Where’s your Times Square?” That’s because, before she led the nationwide 100,000 Homes Campaign, Becky was hired by Rosanne Haggerty, founder of the nonprofit Community Solutions, to reduce the homelessness problem in New York City’s Times Square by two-thirds over a three-year period. That goal turned out to be unrealistic—it took five years. Becky’s team spent from 2003 to 2007 on the Street to Home initiative in Times Square. It took them until 2007 to develop the mindset, skills, and methods for tackling the problem, but that year, they surpassed their original goal and achieved an 87 percent reduction in street homelessness. It was a long, frustrating slog. Becky’s team tried many methods that failed before they figured out what worked. For example, it took them years to identify who was homeless in Times Square. They finally learned the best way to “get the count” wasn’t to visit Times Square during the day and to ask people if they were homeless. It was to go out at 5:00 A.M. and count the people sleeping there. They also learned to find homes first for people who had been homeless the longest and who suffered from the most severe health problems—because they faced the greatest risk of premature death. Becky says that, without those five years of frustration, failure, and—eventually—development of a “playbook” that would work elsewhere, she and Rosanne couldn’t have launched the 100,000 Homes Campaign in 2010. And the campaign wouldn’t have reached its goal of finding homes for one hundred thousand chronically homeless Americans as it did on June 14, 2014....

At Rippling, Parker’s approach was the opposite of what he did at Zenefits. In 2021, Parker admitted, “it was almost too easy for us to close customers early on” at Zenefits, and leaders made the mistake of believing that their employees could do the manual work for clients “with an eye toward automating those processes afterward.” They were wrong. The bigger Zenefits got, the harder it was to automate processes. Parker said that employees were doing so much manual work that costs soared and profits plummeted, and “that’s when a lot of things started to come apart.” In contrast, during Rippling’s first two years, Parker said, it was “basically me and like fifty engineers.” They focused on building a robust product, on “pruning any operational function and trying to replace it with software.” Parker prohibited employees from doing the manual chores that Zenefits employees did. Parker insisted, instead, that Rippling employees work with customers until they developed sound automated solutions. To assure that engineers understood customers’ needs and challenges (and to save money), Rippling didn’t hire any customer support staffers in those early years. Parker said, “I was personally doing—and the engineering team was personally doing—all of the customer support.” Parker learned other lessons from Zenefits that he applies at Rippling, including selling bundles of software to customers rather than individual products—and developing each kind of software, from the start, so it is easy to integrate with other Rippling products. Parker’s focus on getting things right before going big, and other lessons he learned the hard way at Zenefits, seems to be working. By May of 2022, venture-capital firms had invested almost $700 million in Rippling, and it was valued at $11.25 billion—nearly twice as much as Zenefits’ $6.5 billion in its (brief) heyday...

The struggles that we’ve seen in so many teams provoked us to suggest, and sometimes coach and lead, an exercise that Harvard Business School’s Tsedal Neeley calls “a team relaunch.” This intentional pause entails convening one or two meetings in which a team considers its goals, norms, rhythms, rituals, and use of resources. The team starts by discussing what is working and what isn’t. Then members decide what ought to change and how to implement their decisions...

Members generate wild and practical ideas about norms and practices that once worked but now get in the way. The team then selects up to three of these “targets” and commits to getting rid of each. Next, Kathryn guides them in “the strengths game,” following Gallup research that shows the best employees and teams play to their strengths. The team identifies and rallies around a few cherished norms, skills, or strategies that are (and will continue to be) crucial to their performance and sanity...

5. Use Friction to Create Cadence

Friction fixers can dampen confusion, reduce wasted effort, enhance coordination, and strengthen relationships by slowing down to implement routines and rituals that create a shared cadence...

John emphasizes that, as Mozilla grew from one team to multiple teams, rather than adding a lot of rules and specialized roles to bolster coordination and communication, his leadership team developed a “drumbeat that the organization marches to.” As Mozilla grew to roughly fifty people, confusion emerged—especially among newcomers—about how to fit in, whom to talk to and work with, and when to ship changes in code. Life got less chaotic after Mozilla’s leaders added a “closed” meeting every Monday where they made decisions and plans. Later that day, the leadership team convened a company lunch and an all-hands meeting where they announced goals, answered questions, and talked about challenges Mozilla faced. When Mozilla grew to about eighty people, the leadership team added more “pacing mechanisms,” including data reports every night at seven (to help people make short-term decisions) and quarterly company goals (to help people blend individual and collective efforts). Then, when Mozilla grew to about 120 people, and companywide goals were too vague, the top team added quarterly group goals. Mozilla also started holding a worldwide summit every two years for employees, people from outside the company who wrote open-source code for Mozilla, and other key stakeholders, as a “time to see everyone, reconnect, and remember humanity.”...

6. Communicate a Lot, or Not at All

Shared rhythms also help people get work done and avoid exhaustion because they know when to work with others and when to work alone...

Patty McCord, who was Netflix’s chief talent officer for the company’s first fourteen years, told us, “The most important role I played at Netflix was, at the end of every executive meeting, to say, ‘Have we made any decisions in the room today, and if we have, how are we going to communicate them?’”...

The differences between well-crafted and badly crafted endings are striking during employee layoffs. If you must lay people off, pause and remember there is a difference between what you do and how you do it.

The lesson for friction fixers, in the words of UCLA’s legendary basketball coach John Wooden (who won ten national championships in his final twelve years as coach), is “If you don’t have time to do it right, when will you have time to do it over?

I then proposed that, based on my reading, we had five ninety-day priorities:

• Stop hemorrhaging cash. We were precariously close to running out of money.

• Make sure we would be profitable in 1994 to send a message to the world—and to the IBM workforce—that we had stabilized the company.

• Develop and implement a key customer strategy for 1993 and 1994—one that would convince customers that we were back serving their interests, not just pushing “iron” (mainframes) down their throats to ease our short-term financial pressures.

• Finish right-sizing by the beginning of the third quarter.

• Develop an intermediate-term business strategy.

Finally, I laid out an assignment for the next thirty days. I asked for a ten-page report from each business unit leader covering customer needs, product line, competitive analysis, technical outlook, economics, both long- and short-term key issues, and the 1993-94 outlook.

I also asked all attendees to describe for me their view of IBM in total: What short-term steps could we take to get aggressive on customer relationships, sales, and competitive attacks?

What should we be thinking about in our long-term and short-term business strategies?

Short-term agenda, long-term agenda - the time frame doesn’t much matter if the organization is not operating smoothly enough. “One of the biggest contributions a leader can make, although it’s often underrated, is defining the operating mechanisms - the meetings, the information flows, and the decision-making process used to conduct day-to-day business,” says Dan Kerpelman, president of Kodak’s Health Imaging Group. Sometimes you need to be directive.