- When you initiate new activities, find things you are currently doing that you can discontinue–whether reports, activities, etc. It works, but you must force yourself to do it. Always keep in mind your “teeth-to-tail ratio.”
- Watch the growth of middle-level management. Don’t automatically fill vacant jobs. Leave some positions unfilled for six to eight months to see what happens. You will find you won’t need to fill some of them.
- Reduce the layers of management. They put distance between the top of an organization and the customers.
- Find ways to decentralize. Move decision-making authority down and out. Encourage a more entrepreneurial approach.
- Prune–prune businesses, products, activities, people. Do it annually.
- Develop a few key themes and stick to them. It works. Repetition is necessary. “Quality.” “Customers.” “Innovation.” “Service.” Whatever!
- That which you require be reported on to you will improve, if you are selective. How you fashion your reporting system announces your priorities and sets the institution’s priorities.
- People do better in staff jobs if they have had operational experience. It helps to look at things from others’ perspectives.
- Reduce the number of lawyers. They are like beavers–they get in the middle of the stream and dam it up.
- Beware of the argument that “this is a period for investment; improvements will come in the out years.” The tension between the short term and long term can be constructive, but there is no long term without a short term.
- Too often management recommends plans that look like Bob Hope’s nose or a hockey stick. The numbers go down the first year or so and then up in the later years. If you accept hockey-stick plans, you will find they will be proposed year after year.
- The way to do well is to do well.
- Don’t let the complexity of a large company mask the need for performance. Bureaucracy is a conspiracy to bring down the big. And it can. You may need to be large to compete in the world stage, but you need to find ways to avoid allowing that size to mask poor performance.
- “No plan survives contact with the enemy.”–Old military axiom
- Remember: A’s hire A’s and B’s hire C’s.
- “The advantage of a free market is that it allows millions of decision-makers to respond individually to freely determined prices, allocating resources–labor, capital and human ingenuity–in a manner that can’t be mimicked by a central plan, however brilliant the central planner.”–Friedrich A. Hayek
