1392: On Running an Office Like a Factory by Cal Newport on Business Management

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[00:00:56] [SPEAKER_00]: This is Optimal Work Daily Episode 1392.

[00:00:59] [SPEAKER_00]: On Running an Office Like a Factory by CalNewport of CalNewport.com.

[00:01:05] [SPEAKER_00]: And I'm Dan, I'm your host and narrator here on Optimal Work Daily

[00:01:07] [SPEAKER_00]: and I welcome you to another edition.

[00:01:10] [SPEAKER_00]: And with that let's get right to our post for this Tuesday as we optimize your life.

[00:01:18] [SPEAKER_00]: On Running an Office Like a Factory by CalNewport of CalNewport.com.

[00:01:24] [SPEAKER_00]: I was recently browsing the archives of the MIT Sloan Management Review, as one does,

[00:01:29] [SPEAKER_00]: when I came across a fascinating article from the fall 2018 issue titled,

[00:01:34] [SPEAKER_00]: Breaking Log Jams in Knowledge Work.

[00:01:36] [SPEAKER_00]: The piece starts with a blunt observation.

[00:01:39] [SPEAKER_00]: Quote,

[00:01:39] [SPEAKER_00]: If you work in an organization, you know what it's like to have too much to do

[00:01:43] [SPEAKER_00]: and not enough resources to do it.

[00:01:45] [SPEAKER_00]: End quote.

[00:01:46] [SPEAKER_00]: This is not accidental.

[00:01:48] [SPEAKER_00]: Quote,

[00:01:49] [SPEAKER_00]: Many leaders continue to believe that their organizations thrive when overloaded,

[00:01:53] [SPEAKER_00]: often both creating pressure and rewarding those who deliver under duress.

[00:01:57] [SPEAKER_00]: It's a popular but pathological approach to management.

[00:02:01] [SPEAKER_00]: End quote.

[00:02:02] [SPEAKER_00]: The knowledge sector, it turns out, wasn't the first to deal with a misguided commitment to overload.

[00:02:07] [SPEAKER_00]: Quote,

[00:02:08] [SPEAKER_00]: U.S. manufacturers suffered mightily under this approach for decades,

[00:02:12] [SPEAKER_00]: the article's authors write, until many found a better way.

[00:02:15] [SPEAKER_00]: End quote.

[00:02:17] [SPEAKER_00]: In the 1980s American factory managers believe that keeping every machine and worker perpetually busy

[00:02:22] [SPEAKER_00]: was the key to productivity.

[00:02:23] [SPEAKER_00]: If everybody was busy, the thinking went, the plant would produce more.

[00:02:28] [SPEAKER_00]: But then more advanced manufacturing techniques originating in Japan spread to American factories

[00:02:33] [SPEAKER_00]: and replaced a simplistic commitment to busyness with a much more flexible and efficient approach to production.

[00:02:39] [SPEAKER_00]: Though the details of modern advanced manufacturing techniques are complicated,

[00:02:43] [SPEAKER_00]: just ask any Six Sigma Black Belt.

[00:02:45] [SPEAKER_00]: The authors claim that some of the basic ideas from this sector can be translated to the office setting

[00:02:50] [SPEAKER_00]: to solve the problem of chronic overload and help everyone work more productively.

[00:02:55] [SPEAKER_00]: In particular, they focus on the crucial shift from push to pull.

[00:02:59] [SPEAKER_00]: A traditional way to build things is with a push system in which you move something along a production process

[00:03:05] [SPEAKER_00]: to the next step as soon as you're done with it.

[00:03:07] [SPEAKER_00]: There are two problems with this approach.

[00:03:10] [SPEAKER_00]: One, it creates bottlenecks as certain steps in the process inevitably receive more work than they can handle,

[00:03:15] [SPEAKER_00]: eventually slowing down everything else.

[00:03:17] [SPEAKER_00]: And two, it complicates prioritization by distributing these decisions to the individual places where bottlenecks arise,

[00:03:25] [SPEAKER_00]: leading to a jumbled approach that often doesn't synchronize neatly, further delaying production.

[00:03:31] [SPEAKER_00]: The manufacturing sector eventually realized there were great advantages to instead move to a pull system

[00:03:36] [SPEAKER_00]: in which you pull work to your step in the process only when you're ready for it.

[00:03:41] [SPEAKER_00]: This approach eliminates local bottlenecks because you don't take on work you're not ready to handle.

[00:03:45] [SPEAKER_00]: In addition, because backups are now concentrated at the beginning of the process,

[00:03:50] [SPEAKER_00]: it simplifies the task of prioritizing efforts as these decisions can be made upfront in a more systematic fashion.

[00:03:57] [SPEAKER_00]: Factories that deployed a pull model ended up functioning more productively.

[00:04:01] [SPEAKER_00]: The authors of this article argue that this model can deliver similarly positive results to office settings.

[00:04:07] [SPEAKER_00]: The specific case study they present concerned research and development at MIT's Broad Institute.

[00:04:12] [SPEAKER_00]: Before their intervention, Broad implicitly followed a push model in which ideas were haphazardly pursued and bottlenecks were common.

[00:04:20] [SPEAKER_00]: Quote, when knowledge work processes are managed via push, it's difficult to track tasks in process

[00:04:27] [SPEAKER_00]: because so many of them reside in individual email boxes, project files, and to-do lists.

[00:04:33] [SPEAKER_00]: Complicating matters, talent employees, particularly those in innovation focused environments,

[00:04:38] [SPEAKER_00]: have a knack for continually pushing more new ideas into an organization than it's equipped to process.

[00:04:44] [SPEAKER_00]: End quote.

[00:04:45] [SPEAKER_00]: To switch to a pull model, the R&D group mounted on the wall a flow chart that captured the steps required to move an idea from conception to deployment.

[00:04:54] [SPEAKER_00]: They then represented projects as posted notes on this flow chart affixed to their current step in the process.

[00:05:00] [SPEAKER_00]: This visual tool made it simple to enforce limits on works in progress at each step

[00:05:05] [SPEAKER_00]: by having projects be pulled from one step to the next, preventing overload.

[00:05:10] [SPEAKER_00]: This shift made a big difference. Quote, the exercise led to two insights.

[00:05:15] [SPEAKER_00]: First, there was an obvious lack of common prioritization.

[00:05:19] [SPEAKER_00]: Nobody was aware of every project, there was little consensus about which ones mattered most,

[00:05:24] [SPEAKER_00]: and many projects overlapped or competed with others.

[00:05:26] [SPEAKER_00]: Second, the system had too much work in process.

[00:05:30] [SPEAKER_00]: Comparing the number of current projects with recent delivery history showed that employees had at least twice as much work as they could complete in the best of circumstances.

[00:05:39] [SPEAKER_00]: End quote.

[00:05:40] [SPEAKER_00]: By implementing a pull system that made all of the ongoing work transparent and placing limits on work in progress,

[00:05:46] [SPEAKER_00]: the Broad Institute was able to significantly improve the efficiency with which they completed projects.

[00:05:51] [SPEAKER_00]: This shift from push to pull is just one idea among many that could help make better sense of the chaos that defines modern knowledge work.

[00:06:00] [SPEAKER_00]: As I argued recently, the time has come to start seeking these ideas.

[00:06:04] [SPEAKER_00]: We can no longer allow the efforts in this sector to unfold as a haphazard cascade of email messages and hastily organized Zoom calls.

[00:06:12] [SPEAKER_00]: We need to take seriously not just how much we work, but how this work is organized.

[00:06:21] [SPEAKER_00]: You just listened to the post titled On Running an Office Like a Factory by Cal Newport of calnewport.com.

[00:06:28] [SPEAKER_00]: This show is sponsored by BetterHelp.

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[00:07:25] [SPEAKER_00]: That's betterhelp, H-E-L-P dot com slash workdaily.

[00:07:30] [SPEAKER_00]: And thank you to Cal who is a super popular writer with a book that's being talked about everywhere it seems

[00:07:35] [SPEAKER_00]: and that is called Deep Work.

[00:07:37] [SPEAKER_00]: It's one of six self improvement books that he's written.

[00:07:40] [SPEAKER_00]: And to give you a little more background about Cal, he completed his undergraduate studies at Dartmouth College in 2004

[00:07:46] [SPEAKER_00]: and then received a PhD from MIT in 2009 in computer science.

[00:07:51] [SPEAKER_00]: Then for a couple years he was a postdoctoral associate in the MIT Computer Science Department

[00:07:55] [SPEAKER_00]: and in 2011 he joined Georgetown University as an assistant professor of computer science

[00:08:01] [SPEAKER_00]: and was granted tenure in 2017.

[00:08:03] [SPEAKER_00]: His work today focuses on distributed algorithms in challenging network scenarios.

[00:08:08] [SPEAKER_00]: You know, the basic stuff.

[00:08:10] [SPEAKER_00]: And again he has multiple popular books that are definitely worth your time

[00:08:14] [SPEAKER_00]: plus his blog called Study Hacks and also you can check out his relatively new podcast

[00:08:19] [SPEAKER_00]: which is called Deep Questions and you can find all of that and more at calnewport.com

[00:08:25] [SPEAKER_00]: But that's going to do it for me today.

[00:08:27] [SPEAKER_00]: I hope you're having a great one and I'm going to be back here tomorrow reading to you

[00:08:30] [SPEAKER_00]: and that's where your optimal life awaits.