Are You Shooting for Sheboygan?

Now that Standard time is upon us, I started thinking about time and how we use it (and abuse it).

I've always had an internal clock that ran fast. I always wanted to get tasks accomplished so I could get onto the next one. I guess you could call it a heightened sense of urgency. I can't explain it. Its just there. My business associates would say that I don't let the execution details get in the way!

Don't get me wrong. For some jobs, I can procrastinate with the best of them. But generally, when a task needs doing. It needs to be done.

I can relate to the story of Lee Iacocca (former President and CEO of Chrysler) , who had asked his engineers to come up with a convertible version of a popular model (back in the days when there were popular Chrysler cars). Faced with an estimated timeline of many months of engineering and modelling, in frustration, he allegedly shouted "Just cut the damn top off!"

As any student can relate, the time when term papers are usually started is the night before they're due. Tasks always seem to take the allotted (or expected) time. Give them a month. It'll take a month. Give them a week. You'll have the papers in a week.

In many cases, more time does not guarantee more effort or necessarily better results.

It's important that from time to time, you test this theory. If you have a project that should take an average person three weeks to accomplish, assign it to someone with a deadline of two weeks. The artificial constraints sometimes yield surprising results. Assumptions are challenged. Priorities are acted upon.

No one could break the four minute mile, until Roger Bannister did it. Benchmarking accomplishments helps drive improved performance.

And once someone has "broken the four minute mile", expectations are raised. And once expectations are raised, accomplishments can follow. Current mile record? 3:43.3 (by Hicham El Guerrouj) - more than 16 seconds faster than Roger Bannister!

I've worked for a big company who took ten days to close the books each quarter. Why? Because they'd always taken ten days. No one within the accounting department had looked outside our industry to see what other (larger) companies were doing. Some large companies could close their books in two days. We took five times longer than best practices for a routine task. No one challenged the timeframe. No one challenged the process. So we wasted eight days each quarter.

Our I.T. department took ten days to deliver a new laptop. Why? Because we purchased laptops one at a time, whenever a new employee started. We waited for about ten days to receive the laptop from our supplier, loaded the company's software image, then physically shipped it to the employee. No one had ever challenged the process.

The big constraint in this process was the wait time until we received the laptop. The obvious solution? Keep a small inventory on hand. But no one within I.T. could envision the answer because "we didn't have the budget for it." A small inventory would have allowed us to deliver new laptops (locally) the same day they were requested and the inventory carrying cost would have been more than offset by our (tenfold) reduced purchasing costs.

My neighbor's Dad was a very successful entrepreneur, located in a small lakeside Wisconsin town northeast of us, called Port Washington. At night, looking northward you can easily see the lights of Sheboygan, WI.

His favorite saying was; "You can't hit the Moon, shooting for Sheboygan!"

His sights were always set higher.

Are yours?