The Schwarzenegger Principle
Success demands singleness of purpose
Vince Lombardi
I don’t like Arnold Schwarzenegger much. He is at best smug, and at worst, well, I shouldn’t go there, but despite what I think of him, there is a lot that he can teach us:
- At the age of 15, he started weight training.
- When he was 23, he won the Mr Olympia bodybuilding title.
- By the time he was 30, he was a millionaire businessman with a successful construction company.
- When he was 35, he had his first major Hollywood success with Conan the Barbarian. We can argue that it was a cinematic triumph, but it did launch a career in the movies.
- Not content with that, he became the Governor of California, the 9th biggest economy in the world.
Not too shoddy for a postman’s son from an Austrian backwater.
The thing that sets Arnold apart is not his physique; it is his focus. He is the living embodiment of what you can achieve if you have a clear sense of purpose and then do something about it. Perhaps he deserves to be smug.
What Works in the Gym Works in the Office
Dr W. Edwards Deming was a statistician and consultant. Some credit him with the turnaround of Japanese Industry after the Second World War. He had 14 key management principles. The first of these was:
Create constancy of purpose for continual improvement of products and service to society
W. Edwards Deming
Deming didn’t have Arnold’s body, but he did have a similar mantra and approach. Create consistency of purpose – be clear about what you are here to do – for continual improvement – keep improving until you achieve it.
That statement sounds a little Mickey Mouse because it is so blindingly obvious. “Keep focused and keep improving”. What, as they say, is not to like? All our organisations are focused on clear goals that urge us to save money or build market share, but a goal and a purpose are not the same.
Lacking a Little Focus
The taxi firm
I have a friend who catches a taxi from London to Heathrow and back twice a week, without fail, as regular as clockwork. The other night he booked a cab with his usual firm. He was feeling a little adventurous, so he did it online for a change. Unfortunately, the website didn’t work. After he typed in his booking, he expected to get a confirmation. Instead, he got nothing, not even a broken link. As he is not easily perturbed, he decided to have another go and dropped an e-mail to their customer service address. Again he received nothing. In the end, he got frustrated and booked online with another company. London is not short of taxi firms.
The following morning two taxis turned up. “No-Reply-Cabs” got turned away. They got turned away to the tune of £4,000 every year just because their website didn’t work.
I wonder if the taxi firm knew if their site was broken. Either they did and decided to live with it, or they were soldiering on in blind ignorance. Neither answer is very compelling. I don’t know precisely what the taxi firm’s purpose would be, but I guess it is something like “take customers to where they want to be”. If they had written it down and focused on building a continuous improvement programme around it, they might have fixed their web service and booked a few more customers.
The management consultants
It’s not just badly run taxi firms that miss the point. There is an apocryphal tale of a firm of management consultants working with the National Health Service in London. Their task was to tell the N.H.S. how to save money. One of the solutions they came up with was to cut appointment times. Instead of allowing 10 minutes per patient, they recommended that general practitioners see their patients for only 6 minutes. That way, a doctor could see more patients on any given day. The doctors would become more productive, and the N.H.S. could employ fewer of them – ingenious.
Unfortunately, there were some flaws in the logic. A GP’s fundamental purpose is to “resolve the patient’s problem“. Targeting doctors to complete each consultation in 6 minutes changed that purpose to “finish the consultation in 6 minutes”. This was particularly true if they received “management help” if they didn’t hit the target. The doctors met their 6-minute target by several cunning methods:
- Asking the patient to come back later for another consultation.
- Sending the patient off with some aspirin.
- Referring the patient unnecessarily to a specialist at a hospital.
I suspect there were many other ruses that I haven’t thought about.
Unfortunately, none of these methods resolved the patient’s problem. He would either go back to see the doctor again for another six minutes, spend time with a hospital doctor or, in extreme cases, die. Each of these options was more expensive than the 4 minutes shaved off the original general practitioner’s appointment. And that was before The N.H.S. employed an army of administrative staff to track, measure, and audit compliance with the 6-minute rule. The target cost money; it didn’t save a penny.
If the management consultants had been more competent, they would have recommended that the G.P.s focus on their purpose — “resolve patients’ problems” — and implement a continuous improvement programme to remove anything that got in the way.
- If the doctor couldn’t resolve the patient’s problem because he didn’t have the patient’s file, they should organise the files, so they were easy to find.
- If the doctor couldn’t resolve the patient’s issue because he didn’t find the symptoms in his reference book, they should give him a searchable electronic reference book.
If they had removed all the things that got in the way of a doctor being able to “resolve the patient’s problem”, he would have been able to resolve the patient’s problem faster, which, incidentally, would also have been cheaper.
If you focus on getting the right outcome or meeting your purpose, costs will drop. The counterintuitive point is that if you focus on cutting costs, then costs will increase.
There is a silver lining to this story. The management consultants responsible for the approach undoubtedly lived in London. Sooner or later, they would have needed to see a doctor.
The Magic of Focus
The pit-stop
If you have ever watched Formula One, you will have seen a pit stop. They are fascinating:
- It is obvious what the team needs to do; change the tyres and fill the fuel tank.
- Everybody understands their role, and they are trained to complete it.
- The people who are there are the people who need to be there. Nobody else is milling about and getting in the way.
What is interesting though, is that for most of the race, the pits are full of people standing about doing nothing. Absolutely nothing. The action happens in about ten seconds flat, and then the car is gone, and it is all over.
My friends, the management consultants would see this as a real cost-saving opportunity. If they could get rid of all those people doing nothing, they could save a whole bucket full of money. Fortunately, the guys at Formula One are cleverer than that. They have worked out that their purpose is not to “save money” but to “win the race”. I know that sounds pathetically obvious, but how many of us see our most important day-to-day challenge as finding ways to save money?
Focus in healthcare
I know what you are thinking. “It is easy to change tyres, and Formula One has loads of money; it will never work for us.” It could; take the Aravind Eye Hospital in India as an example.
The Aravind Eye Hospital in India proves that focusing on your purpose works wonders. Dr Govindappa Venkataswamy founded the hospital in 1976. He had one aim, “to eradicate needless blindness”. In 2009 the Aravind Hospital treated 2.75 million patients. It exceeded the care benchmark set down by the Royal College of Ophthalmologists. Half of those patients were treated free of charge, yet the Aravind Eye Hospital still managed to turn a profit.
There are many ways that the hospital managed to do this; it utilised economies of scale, transferred technology from other sectors, constantly streamlined its activity, and has industry-leading productivity. All of this is great, but it doesn’t explain how the hospital achieved what it has done. The answer is simple; they just made sure that everything they did contributed toward their purpose and minimised everything else that didn’t.
They didn’t focus on cost reduction; they concentrated on “eradicating needless blindness”.
What Has This to Do with Rubber Ducks?
We don’t all work for organisations that worry about operational performance. Perhaps you work for a bank, restaurant, or a firm of accountants. In your business, success is all about risk, quality, technical expertise, or maybe customer service.
There is a well-known management book, The Discipline of Market Leaders. No doubt you have heard of it. The authors claim that there are three key strategies you can take in any market:
- Operational Excellence: “deliver a combination of quality, price, and ease of purchase that no one else in the market can match.” McDonald’s is an excellent example of an organisation that falls into this camp.
- Product Leadership: focus on delivering the “best product, period”. This is the tactic Apple use.
- Customer Intimacy: give “the customer a total solution, not just a product or service”. The example cited in the book is Nordstrom. I have never shopped there though I guess it isn’t a million miles away from John Lewis.
Each of the companies has taken a very different approach, but they are all crystal clear about what their purpose is:
- Apple “…design Macs, the best personal computers in the world…”
- Nordstrom “…work to deliver the best possible shopping experience…”
- Mcdonald’s “…goal is quality, service, cleanliness, and value for every customer…”
The way to succeed is to be clear about what your purpose is. Then, make absolutely, categorically, positively sure that everything you do lines up behind it.
Or, to put it more prosaically, get your ducks in a row.
If your ducks are always in a row, then you probably only have two ducks
Anon
Homework
Work out how focused your organisation is:
- Find a copy of your organisation’s mission statement. Writing one would be a good place to start if you don’t have one.
- Have a look at your department’s purpose, objectives or mission. Once again, do you have one, and does it line up with your organisation’s mission?
- Ask yourself if the purpose is something that a customer would be prepared to pay for. Is it something an employee would get excited about doing? If it isn’t, it needs to be more precise or robust.
- Write a list of all the activities you undertake. Do they contribute to that purpose, or do they get in the way? If they get in the way, what could you do about it?
- Finally, set up a discussion to review and discuss what you have found. Your aim is to create a mission statement that meets a customer’s needs and engages your employees. The actual test is this; will it help you get out of bed next Monday morning?
In the next lesson, we will discuss how your management information reinforces your purpose.
Thank you for reading
To forget one’s purpose is the commonest form of stupidity
Friedrich Nietzsche
Related posts:
- Clarity of purpose is greatly overrated: How engaging is your purpose?
- The princess and the library book: The organisation that got it right.
- Do you know where you are going?: Organisational versus departmental purpose.
Across the web:
- How great leaders inspire everyone to take action: Simon Sinek on the T.E.D. stage.
- Hemingway App: This will help you write your mission clearly.
- The comfy chair mission statement generator: An example of how not to do it.
Further reading:
Simon Sinek’s book explains how great leaders inspire others to take action. The book’s inside cover asks, “Why are some people and organisations more inventive, pioneering, and successful than others? And why are they able to repeat their success again and again?” Fundamentally it comes down to purpose.
Post Script
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