 The focus of this section will be on efficient and effective operation of management. It examines some of the basic principles that arrange for management to team with performance. These principles promote the entire organization becoming focused on getting things done. More specifically, it is optimizing operation of that value-based performance cycle with customers that assures the life and welfare of the organization. At the very top of the list, there is no way to improve something that does not work. We step all the way back to the concept of work itself that it is moving something through a distance. It is based on accomplishment, not on activity. When we are addressing business relations, it is accomplishing a corporate purpose. With greater performance focus, it is accomplishing the purpose for there being a corporate entity, the purpose defined by owners and investors. In a word, the continuing purpose is performance. It is completing a symbiotic performance cycle with those outside the corporation. It is delivering value to customers so that their purchase decisions will support the continuation of the corporate effort. In this sense, we are not going to fix modern management. The very concept of a management system improving what it does will cause failure, as management does not do performance. Our challenge is witnessed by the division of management from labor, a challenge to the very concept of management as bringing the resources of the business together to gain a performance result. And then we have measurement of management by what it accomplishes, a purpose that defines the valued result from management and it is gaining performance through those who are managed. It is measured by how much it costs to gain valued results. As noted from the beginning, privilege-based management does work, but it works poorly as it is focused on doing something else. It sees to the maintenance and enhancement of privilege. In general, it is focused on running organizations as something different than performance. Our performance measure for smaller management effort is an hour of non-performance effort supporting four to six hours in productive work. That same measure applied to layered, large corporate management has that management system hour supporting only two to three productive hours. The best that management improvement efforts can accomplish is reducing the damage. The best result is not achieved by modern efforts at management improvement. Instead, we have the sort of improvements indicated by the modern military supply effort. It focuses on the support group and what it can do and how to do it most effectively. The mission of the military supply includes gaining what military needs at least cost. It includes warehousing and transport to where materials are needed. It includes support for management in terms of tracking where everything is and where it goes. What internal customers need was of secondary importance. The supply system was there to get whatever was needed. Modern efforts to assure supply was not part of the system. It supported customers through training their people to make effective use of what management supply could provide. The result was shifting supply work to the customers. It was dividing the cost of supply support between the support service and those who would receive from the system. The result was a supply system that did what administrative support was most able to do and did it very inexpensively. The cost was largely shifted to the customers. There is that witness of administrative directive to all military supply customers that they would have to pick up the cost and use the system. It was having to order the customers to use the system or they would start getting some of the supplies and materials outside the system then there would be loss of central control. The directive was for military unit customers to support the supply system, not for the supply system to provide support that the units would most value. It changed the definition and direction of support. Again, administrative approach does work, but it tends to be very expensive. It does not support the teaming of administrative support efforts with the performance efforts of the larger organization. One of the common directives for improving management has become cutting costs and a common direction for cutting costs has been shifting support responsibilities to those who are to receive the support. It provides for the support element to claim improvement even as it increases what it costs to operate the larger organization. The concept of cutting away the fat of the performance area is indeed a central theme and productive efficiency work. It is eliminating those things that are wasteful, those efforts that do not contribute effectively to performance. When the concept is administration rather than performance, the cost cutting effort is focused on the cost of the support effort rather than the whole cost of the organization. It also rewards support system redesign to limit the support provided or to pass support duties to those who are supposed to be supported. There are some directions assumed with management that cause division instead of teaming. These cannot be improved. Improvement comes from eliminating those divisional efforts. The first thing to challenge is the very concept of management goals and objectives. If it is not focused on corporate purpose, it is by definition not performance. The idea that pursuing these alternative purposes can improve performance takes a practical blindness to reality. Improving the ability to accomplish these goals and objectives does not add to performance but becomes a source of cost. It reduces the ability of the organization to team with organizational customers. It reduces the ability to operate the organization's performance cycle. Consider that improvement effort in terms of attempting to improve something that does not work. Again, we have effort to improve business culture or sensitivity training to prevent workers from dishonoring one another. Consider behavioral training to prevent sexual discrimination or abuse by those in authority. I see it much in the bold of training senior leaders not to expend corporate funds where owners or investors might disapprove. The training is a cost and while it may have some benefits in some sense, it is not expected to have much effect on performance in terms of reducing customer costs or increasing corporate income from sales. It distracts from performance. Eliminating management waste is a threat to modern leadership. It is an equivalent threat to that of the foreman to the 1800s boss. It is elimination of much of the benefit now claimed for being the one in charge. If performance orientation gets a footing in management and actually works, it will replace our current privileged leaders with people who serve performance and who join in the productive effort. Resistance will be stiff. It will be consistent and intense. Those modern leaders will be fighting for their way of life. With that said, we can at least develop the vision and understanding of what will work to much greater effect in management. The most immediate effort to eliminate is that alternative to performance. And that comes to immediate focus on eliminating the alternative goals and objectives. There is only one source of purpose for the performance organization and it is set upon the organization by those who own it. It is the purpose for which leaders are given authority over corporate assets. We also know the resistance. It is that this would somehow eliminate planning for the future and planning to handle changes. The unrelenting answer is that performance is not a goal. It is the purpose for the organization. Plans for performance or reacting to changes are not separate management goals or objectives. Focus on performance is the value delivered by exception managers. It is not a matter of privilege but of performance. Another area for elimination is attempting to manage by slogans and attempts to influence workers outside their performance purpose. Another wonderful lesson is that workers on a production line have no need for something else to bring them together to get the work done. It is coming together that has value. It is being able to rely upon each other to get something done that has recognized value. Problems with disagreements and interpersonal dislikes are not a characteristic of performance. When there is a shared purpose, even those who dislike each other personally can come together because they have that central sense of value in what they accomplish. Will a foreman use his position to sexually harass a worker on a production line? The answer is that this is most unlikely while the line is running and their common focus is on accomplishment. Interfering with the worker would be interfering with everyone else on the line as well. They have a shared result. The whole work group would turn on the manager who refused to service their performance effort. With variability of humans, it will eventually happen, but probably result in getting rid of the offending work leader. As in the Westinghouse studies, management trying to support those who perform is far more effective than management actually accomplishing something through its efforts. The value is in working with those who are productive rather than exercising authority for their benefit. In a like understanding, we can find value through eliminating administrative requirements upon workers and foremen. All those workers and foremen efforts that are not performance have a cost that is being placed upon those who are doing the work of the organization. If there is a need to recognize failed or exceptional performance, then it needs to be the team that recognizes that person, not those in privilege. Administration of course will raise the specter of being a matter of contract that they are bound by law to force others to accept everyone they hire as a fellow worker. Can you guess who writes contracts that would put such requirements on workers? Those elements of contract that do not serve performance are to be eliminated, not raised up as some sort of reason to justify failure to perform. There are few, if any, valid reasons to require performance people to support the management system efforts that should be supporting them. The more time and effort it takes to gain support, the less valuable that support is and the less reason for it to continue as part of management. The quality of support is not determined by what the support people do, but by the benefit that is received by those who are supported. Value is in the needs and wants of performance efforts for the provided support. So how much value is there in the support that is provided? The answer has little to do with assignment. It requires evaluation by those who receive the support. The challenge for leadership is balancing the cost of providing support with the value that is realized. And we can eliminate the whipping of the horses. It goes all the way back to the idea that punishment is needed to get people to work. It is a concept of isolation, of bossing the behavior of the hired servant who would avoid working if he or she could. You do not need to whip the one who will not team. Those on the team are quite capable of identifying those who refuse to support the rest, and will, given the opportunity, get them out of their efforts. Administration needs to support the team that accomplishes the purpose of the organization. Frederick Taylor did not just eliminate unproductive work, but studied the work to discover and implement an efficient performance process. With modern leadership, one that has not even addressed its ongoing waste, we have the challenge of a lack of examples for efficient process. What we will experience on eliminating management waste is necessarily speculative. The reality of this has been somewhat oddly recognized by modern management. It has an administrative approach that is suitable for hands-off improvements. Others look at various options, the way management has done things to see which process seems most acceptable and effective. That process is then directed to those in the management system. Of course, it suffers immediate performance challenge due to the purpose being served by modern administration. It presents an alternative to organizational performance, but it does make sense as a general approach. Consider, for example, the use of the military supply system as a model for constructing a corporate business supply system. It is highly recommended as a supply approach and seems to be remarkably efficient at what it does. The question is one of learning from those who seem most able to succeed at the function. The variation from Taylor's effort is immediate. She studied each element of the workers process, not selecting from among those that they were doing, but looking for how to accomplish each necessary and additive element of the performance. Each was an additive part of the larger performance effort that he was directing. Modern leadership does not engage fully in teaming, but rather taps into the expertise of the best subordinates to model subordinate efforts for the rest. For a supply approach, it might be to modify the military system to allow expanded local purchase of items that the military system would also feel compelled to track. It might be to downsize a central purchase and distribute the operation to various locations with different support needs, as there would be less whole organization consistency in supplies and demands. Again, there is certain intelligence to this approach. It is just not based on teaming leadership with those who do the support work. It hands them a best in class direction for activities, and then has them do management improvements on their local operation. The equivalent effort in the production group would have the foreman let workers figure out how to do the job, as workers did in the 1800s, and then pick out the one that is most productive. It would be to direct all the workers to use that workers method, making such changes that seem necessary or beneficial. The teaming approach is actually simpler. It has leadership doing what it can to support performance, instead of handing it off to subordinates as an assignment for their completion. It would be to study the support wants and needs of those who are to receive management system support. It would be to recognize how these might be efficiently and effectively met my centralized support efforts. Consistent needs could then become the basis for the management system. And these studied for how to deliver the support at least cost to the organization. It is not assignment-based, the best way we have done it, but setting the support requirements as the basis for group activity. The work elements that were studied become the basis for assignment, and it is how these support efforts are to satisfy the customer's support needs. It also has the promise of exception management. Senior leadership will be there if there are support needs that are so exceptional that the planned approach cannot satisfy customer needs. Senior management efforts can include goal-type planning for workarounds, delivering support when the demand exceeds the planned capacity for support. Before looking at how best to build a support effort, it is reasonable to use a support effort that does work as an example. In this case, it is a supply support person who works as part of a production line. First, not every production effort has a supply person dedicated to its efforts. The material handler is only used for larger efforts, so those that pausing in performance at one station will threaten the performance efforts of the group. That is an immediate key to application. Using an independent material handler is an investment, not a requirement. This person is used for it is highly convenient, or the work requirement cannot be met without support being provided. Here is a flag on the field. It is in terms of a directive that all the production efforts must use the supply services of the established supply support group. It is the avoidance of any investment by customers of the service. It is administrative mandate to working elements of the business that they will get their supply needs met only through the organization supply system. It is a directive to the customers of the supply effort that they have no choice but to use the centralized supply system. It is the only supplier for their efforts. If customers have to be ordered to buy a product, you know something is wrong. On servicing the production line, the material handler is given responsibility of support and provided carts and other working tools as aids for support effort. There is no complaint if the material handler uses a hand truck instead of a cart or decides to just pick up some materials and walk them to where they are needed. The focus is on the production workers having all they need to continue their performance efforts. It is the foreman's responsibility to provide what workers need to do their jobs. The material handler is performing an element of work management. It must be under direction of the responsible manager. There are no separate material handling standards. The measure of performance is that the production effort of the group never stops for lack of supplies and materials. There are no records keeping tasks that are considered part of performance of a production supply effort. The material handler's first task is servicing the production effort and feeling to keep accurate records of what he or she does will not be a failure and the reason for having a material handler to serve the group effort. So now we can look at the corporate supply group function for performance orientation. We are dealing with investment, with having such value in the supply effort that users will value the results of its efforts. The corporate supply purpose is part of providing what others need to perform their assigned tasks. It includes what the production workers need to complete the performance cycle with organization customers, the lifeblood of the organization. The function for the group is not an assignment but a duty to provide what working people and that could include other management groups need to continue their productive efforts. This is a success when productive efforts do not stop for lack of supply. Again, a central supply effort will not be the sole source of supply for the organization. Records keeping is not a function that overrides performance. Supporting performance, providing what people need to do their productive efforts, is not some sort of mastery that can only be resolved by requiring work managers to submit paperwork that can then be recorded. That is internal records for the supply system, not a support service. The support service will generate and maintain its own internal records, not put requirements on customers. The very idea that a supply group needs someone to come and tell it what to provide smacks of waste. It is a duty of the group to know what others need and to assure that they haven't. As the material handler observes the operation of the production line to assure that his or her services are meeting their needs, so the central supply group should be observing operating areas to assure that their needs are served. And when it comes to changing the supply requirements, the supply group is part of the larger performance team. Performing as a team member to identify what management will have to provide for the people who do the work under their management. In summary, the problem of how to efficiently and effectively provide support to a performance effort has already been solved. Our change effort will not require reinventing the wheel, but learning from what we know works. The deeper challenge is the teaming itself. Teaming is not a problem as people will naturally team, the challenge is in leadership doing effective management and providing support for the performance. The challenge is that leadership is busy doing other things and have a culture where such things get handed off to subordinates. Teaming for performance is unacceptable to the privilege-based culture. It crosses the barrier that leaders put in place. Having a production manager act as a team leader for support and efforts requires him to exercise privilege and be the center of the performance, eliminating even the need for leaders to run the business. Having subordinate managers operate through authority over elements of the management system interferes with teaming. Leaders do not have a way to continue in privilege through organizations like this. They must either start to manage it themselves or deny the teaming approach. They face much the same challenge with the handling of a human resource function. We do not have an easy equivalent in the production team, but do have some performance examples. Consider that a production group has two no-show employees who are sick. This specific production effort is critical to operation and there is only ability to continue with a single person out. There are three general ways for this to be handled. The HR office might contact temporary worker sources and rapidly get someone there. The form and action might be to team with other farm and whose efforts are less demanding. Having a worker reassigns for the day to fill the critical need. Higher level performance management may be called in to direct the reassignment in accord with senior level priorities. The HR office involvement requires teaming and probably requires coordination with the production management to authorize the use of a temporary employee. The team reassignment from another group would be noted to the HR office if there was a records keeping requirement. The higher level manager involvement would be as an exception manager stepping in at need to support the efforts of those who do the work. Our performance orientation adds a second vision to this activity. None of these happens as work that was assigned from organizational leadership. They involve subordinates taking charge and making things happen because a failure to do so will be threatening to the larger performance of the organization. Senior leadership probably would not even be notified about the need or action as part of getting it done. The reason for this is that privileged leadership has isolated itself from the production area and the actions of production leaders is not a matter of immediate concern. Simply in the administrative culture, the involvement of senior leadership was minimized by assigning responsibility for performance to someone across that barrier between management and production. As a matter of history, interference in production managers, even though a necessity for running the business, has a history of reducing organizational performance. Leaders commonly hand the ball off to production area managers and assume that they will take care of the details. As with the supply support effort, we have a separately authorized admission HR effort. The same management challenges arise as in the use of an established internal HR process to provide services. We have the same reliance upon the service to define and limit the service and the same basic requirement for support by customers to do the effective paperwork the HR internal system maintains. What is true for almost all internal support efforts in modern management is that they have historically established and approved ways to perform. The focus is on process, on running the existing systems instead of on results. Those who are employed in these support efforts are schooled in the common support systems and how to get them to work for you. They support each other in this and have the general support of senior leadership that accepts them as experts in the support that they provide. When it comes to providing people to work in the business, we have three general approaches that are commonly applied. The first and far most common is employment, a business arrangement under master and servant law. It is historically promoted by privileged leadership. It approaches workers as business resources, the foundation for the exercise of privilege. The second is temporary employment and it is often through a third party provider who has a separate relationship with the workers. It provides the time and effort of temporary employees as a business product. The third is contract workers provided under business law, which should be used in any particular case. The answer is that the customers of the HR function are looking for someone to do the work to team with others who are also involved in performance. They have some preference for more permanent assets as limiting the amount of training and orientation that direct supervisors are required to provide, but are otherwise focused on what they can accomplish rather than the methodology used to provide their assets. Privileged leaders strongly favor employees as they can be treated as business assets as part of the corporate feud. The temporary workers are often assets of other businesses and are not corporate assets. Contractors come to do specified acts and deliver specified results. They are purchased third party service providers and do not owe anything particular to the business except what is written into their contracts. It is difficult to run things through temporary workers or contractors. They answer to their contracts not to the leadership purposes. They will not honor attempts to redirect their efforts from contract provisions, but again applying master and servant law comes with significant legal and administrative costs. Where our Constitution forbids interference with business law contract obligations, it is not so with these master-servant relationships established through employment. There are laws that put taxation and tax collection duties upon both employers and employees. There are laws that put workplace safety and health requirements on employers in working areas. There are laws that support union activities for employees. Consider that union involvement in the activities of temporary employees or contractors would involve interference in contract and would be addressed as criminal. Criminal conduct is supported for employee relations. Office workers can refuse to work under certain circumstances where a contract employee would have his contract revoked. Again we have the HR office providing payroll services to the larger organization and requiring internal customers to use that support service. The office's internal customers are ordered to use a payroll system to provide paperwork or actually do data entry in the personnel system to assure that the office can effectively provide that service. Whenever a support effort requires the support of its customers, the warning flag should go up. Services being demanded instead are provided. If it is more efficiently done by the internal customer, perhaps it is better to have these groups do it for themselves. Is it possible for the human resource function to succeed in its efforts while the organization fails for lack of personnel? Ever consider the real meaning of a strike against a company where the union employees simply refuse to work? What is even worse is that they interfere with others who might still want to work. It is such anomalies that we see in the failure of senior leadership put on display. How is it even possible for the people hired to take part in the operation of the corporate enterprise to be so divided? And there we see administrative management fully displayed, building the division between management and labor as a necessity for privileged leadership to run the organization. The only reason there are unions is to contain the excesses of leader privilege that would significantly harm working citizens. It only gets worse when we realize that the HR office has been directed to operate two different systems serving management purposes as something different than serving performance purposes. And then it is not the workers as employees who strike. It is the workers as a corporate body that would not even exist except that the exercise of privilege was harmful to the common working citizen. Bad though that is, there is an even more damning perspective. Privileged leaders accept their own privilege and that they are doing the right things as well as they can be done. The stirring up of the workers couldn't be their fault. Privileged leaders accept no blame when their efforts yield damage instead of performance. They blame others, those commenters who have gotten out of line. They blame people who react inappropriately to privileged actions that would create threat or damage to them personally. Performance comes from teaming. What then comes from a strike? We have a performance orientation answer. There is no less effective way to do anything than to divide it to opposing sides to prevent the other side from succeeding. For our performance alternative, we have the historical comparison of the 1800s boss manager with the 1900s foreman. When they could be compared, there was no equality between them as to the ability to gain results through workers. The boss learned to function as a foreman or could expect to be replaced. The business tool is investment. The foreman is not hired to work but to manage the work of a performance group, to team their efforts to best assure the productive result. The foreman does not produce but can multiply what the workers can accomplish. This is the heart of performance management and was codified into a general knowledge area in the early 1900s. It included investment in the use of a foreman to bring the team into reality. It included investment in support people such as a material handler to support their team to efforts. This works. It is not a theory. It is a reality demonstrated every day for over a century. If leadership is to operate a highly productive organization, this will be effective guidance restructuring and operating its internal support efforts. Leadership will have to actively promote a performance team for those who complete the business cycle with its external customers. Performance teams are not a theory, they work. For performance, leadership will have to actively insist on support efforts providing valued support for those working elements to multiply what they are accomplishing. That is an investment not a purchase of services or a separate internal performance. The value is in the effect on their internal customers, not on what they are able to accomplish through their office efforts. The family with parents who disagree on the purpose for their marriage leads to separation and divorce and it damages everyone involved. If parents are unwilling to act as a team for the welfare of the family, they cease to be an effective family. This is our human foundation, the family that teams is effective. If we create a business entity with internal divisions, it will not be an effective corporation. The business leadership that succeeds in running the business to leader goals and objectives will damage the business as an economic operating entity. The more effective leadership is in its internal authority based operation, the less effective the organization will be at performance. The consistency of the damage created by exercise of privilege in leadership provides a consistent and reliable source of waste. Effective communication of the vision of that waste is an opportunity for owners to come together to direct value generating changes.