 Little Susie attends her first football game with her dad, a former player. She is caught up by the excitement of the game, even if she knows little about it. He explains that people in the green uniforms are his team, and they win by moving the ball to the far end of the field. After the excitement of the game, he takes Susie down to the sidelines and introduces her to his old coach. As they discuss the game, she wanders off, picking up a football in both arms. She carries it on to the field. When he notices that she is gone, he spies her, still carrying the ball, coming back to their area. He motions her to come and watches as she carefully sets the ball back where she found it. Where did you go, baby? She just points to the far end of the field and says, I knew it couldn't be that hard. The lesson of this story is how little we commonly understand about performance. Susie has done in five minutes the same performance that had taken 22 powerful athletes an hour to do. She had moved the ball to the end zone. She had performed. It also holds a lesson for us. The first is that there is no less effective way to attempt performance than to divide into competing camps, each trying to prevent each other from doing what they need to do to succeed. Susie's dad was too much into the game to even address performance. Performance was not the purpose being served. It was the competition that was valued, not moving the ball. It was success defined by overcoming the other team. The purpose was entertainment, not moving the ball. Competition is so much a part of the American culture that this sort of confusion of competition with performance has become common. Consider our politically divided Congress. We have over 400 congressmen engaged in their internal conflicts for the last 25 years. And you have to ask, what have they managed to accomplish in these last 10,000 man years of congressional effort? The answer is simple affirmation of our earlier observation that privileged leaders are very poor at performance. And if they enter into competition with other leaders, it just gets worse. They create drama rather than results. Their efforts may be rewarded as entertainment, but little else should be expected from their conflict based corporate endeavors. Would an innocent 8 year old child be more effective at running our nation than our Congress? But this rule is not just for big things. It is for any group of people. Consider the family as a unit that gets things done for the family members. What happens if the parental leaders of the family enter into competition instead of working together? We know the answer. It is divorce, the termination of the family. It is separation and damage to the children. It is cost set upon everyone involved and potentially a threat to others if the competition goes public. The family is only powerful when it is able to act as a unit. The family is only powerful when it serves its members in cooperative efforts. As previously stated, the family does not get ahead by beating out other families, but by being productive, producing what other people value. It is horse sense. You do not hitch up one horse and pull up the plow to the east and another to pull it to the west. That does not get the job done, no matter how hard they pull. Our written constitution is a truly amazing performance document, far too forward in its approach for many to even consider what is written into it. What it does is simple enough. It describes its purpose in terms of an agreement among we the people. That purpose includes the unity and welfare of citizens. Then it describes the structure of that government, how it is arranged and a number of things that it is to accomplish. In that sense, it is a document that assigns duties and responsibilities to those who will take an active role in the structure and operation of this government. That is the purpose for leaders who take an oath of office. Separate and equal? Just try to find anything in that document that implies that one part of government is to serve some separate purpose. To the contrary, the purpose to be served includes unity. It does not document how to settle disputes between branches of government. It does document how they are to work together for the purposes of we the people. Just listen to our own political leadership. They deal in privilege in running things. The key for saying this? Elect me. I am someone who will fight for you. The performance answer? Just who do you intend to fight against, other Americans? In our current political environment we are electing champions to fight in a civil war. And nobody ever wins a war. Everyone who takes part in it suffers damage. Back from scientific management, bringing people together in coordinated efforts gets more than twice as much done as the same people acting as individuals. It was a comparison between just paying workers to do the best effort at what was assigned and providing coordination and support for cooperative efforts involving many workers. There are actually two separate concepts of contract. The contract under business law is a way to arrange for some stated result or service to be accomplished. It is a mutual agreement on what the parties will do in order to get what the parties value from their efforts. It is as a plumber being contracted to fix a leak in the plumbing. The plumber only gets paid if the purpose for the contract is satisfied. Or if it is a sale, the customer only pays what for what the customer receives. The other concept is an employment contract under master and servant law. The employer purchases hours of authority to direct the skills and efforts of the employee to a generally accepted purpose. The employee gets paid by the hour for accepting the authority of the employer to direct his or her efforts. Are congressmen employed to accomplish something that we the people value or to provide hours of direction to what we as employer directed their efforts? Our wonderful constitution serves as an assignment document. It assigns duties and responsibilities to federal employees as a basis for their being employed. Here is where the simple lessons we all learn can be applied in new ways. Consider the neighborhood kids who gather for a game of football. They form two Sandlot teams and set to it with entertainment being in the contest. The team with the most skilled players usually wins. Now consider that the Sandlot team gets to play against an organized school team where the students have had opportunity to practice together. And with organization arranged by a coach, their plays are planned and practiced. They enter contests with the Sandlot team and promptly trounce them because they are arranged to work as a performance unit. The common lesson is that people who work together in coordinated efforts are far more effective than those who do not. Back to our congress example, I see them organizing in two or more Sandlot teams to compete against each other with their purpose being more in drama than in accomplishing anything. Just like those neighborhood kids, they give loyalty and pledge to their best efforts to the team. They act to win. Accordingly, they accomplish very little. But do seem to cherish it whenever their team is able to overcome the other. The purposes stated in this constitution include unity, effectively denied by political leaders. It is as we note in business, leaders work for their own goals and objectives, effectively denying any performance purpose. Is there even a potential for establishing the sort of unity that would make our congress into a performance group, one that accomplishes what we the people value? Their competitive attitude is part of our political culture. How could anybody even consider any change to that? The wonderful answer is that you are not just citizens. You are the United States. You are the nation. You are the public that has hired these leaders. Consider that you hire a work crew to tend your lawn and find them at the local ball field playing baseball. They intend to get to your lawn once they finish their game. At the very least, you would tell them that you were not going to pay them for playing baseball. If you were a little less tolerant, you would send them packing without pay and call in replacements who are a little more interested in doing what you paid them to do. We have the performance example of the military unit, a group of people who are trained to act as a unit. They each are trustworthy in doing their part of the group effort because it is how they get things done. Failure to team could spell disaster for themselves and their friends. They rely upon each other. If you should ask any of them why they might put themselves in danger for the benefit of others on the team, the answer is the same. They do it because the others would do the same for me. The purpose of work group balancing was not spreading the work equally. It was assuring that the performance result could be accomplished. It was first assuring that every work effort would have enough resources to see the successful completion. This is necessary if people who are doing the work are to rely upon each other to get various parts of a larger effort completed so that their combined efforts can be a success. We can take this back to the family, that basic human team for common sense. There is nothing equal about the chores that get assigned to the children of the family. The older child gets assigned more work to do in running of the family business than do the younger siblings. They all receive the same basic family support in terms of sitting at the same table for meals, being provided clothing and the like without concern for how much they accomplish on behalf of the family. The important focus was always the running of the business for the benefit of the family. The building of work groups to function as a team is an art form, one that is both practical and ultimately human. It is not a common skill, but one that most people can learn to develop so far as serves personal purposes. Industrial engineers like myself developed the technical skills required. Those who became foremen focused more on the application. We formed balanced teams. The worker teams were balanced around the need to accomplish a group product to meet a production requirement. The foreman was a part of that team as a group leader and a sport. I was a part of a management team that provided support to a number of foremen and their teams. The entire production area had a performance requirement that defined a success operation. Our larger purpose was assuring that the work groups were successful in their parts of that larger effort. Foremen did not have privilege based on the number of workers, only the resources that were needed for the task at hand. Balance was more important than their scope of authority over workers. Directing workers isn't about privilege. What really makes the team work is the common purpose, some end result that all the team members can see as having value. For the work group, it is a production requirement. For the worker, it is being part of some larger effort that accomplishes a valued result. And then we have the alternative. Going back to origins, it is like ships at sea. The very lives of the sailors depends upon working in and coordinating a group effort. And that is promoted by having a competent cap that our ships master to serve as a central directive authority. The same seemed to work good in military organizations, though it did separate out as a special class of people as officers who did not team with common military members. Directive authority lost much of its performance orientation on becoming governance, especially when it was hereditary rule rather than being based on the skills of the one in authority. And then we see the same negation of the team through reliance upon employment contracts as establishing temporary bonding of employees. The purpose was fulfillment of contract, not some shared value in results. It isolated workers in the sense of performance purpose, and their purpose was soon caring for one another as workers, rather than serving any business purpose. It took scientific management to point out the benefits of restoring group efforts and balancing work to accomplish corporate level results was part of that movement. Balance is part of how you have to work with others if you are to gain your shared values. It will affect cost in terms of what you might be willing to commit of your time and attention. It will affect the extent of what your concentrated efforts can accomplish and the certainty of your accomplishing it. One of the early efforts by Mr. Gilbreath resulted in a pit and a patent for a platform to hold bricks and mortar for a mason who was working on a wall. It moved with him, keeping the materials just where he needed them. This subject addresses two matters, specialization and support. Specialization addresses scarce, difficult to gain skills. Skilled people are generally more productive than others. Their efforts are even more productive when they are supported in their exercise of skills. Like a mason, you want that skilled workman doing masonry work, not climbing up and down a ladder and mixing dry mortar with water to get a good material. You get someone you do not have to pay as highly as a skilled workman to do those tasks. So the mason can concentrate on building a wall. It promotes a different sort of teaming. The mason values the assistant and the assistant values the mason. When they work together, they are both assured that the wall gets constructed, they both earn their pay. In general, teaming will make them noticeably more productive than two masons working independently and without support. And this just gets more important for a production line where any worker turning aside from their performance tasks will impact on the whole line operation for all those later in the production process. The line has to continue in operation to gain the commonly valued production result. The material handler serves the production line minimizing any need for line workers to interrupt the flow of work to those later in the effort. The material handler is part of the team. The success of the individual workers in achieving the task that others trust them to do is dependent on this material handler supporting their effort. It is part of the trust relationship. It is not that this person shoves materials at them to keep them working. It is that they have what they need to be a success. And the success of the workers is the success of the larger effort. In a like sense, we have the utility operator, a well skilled worker who stands ready to step into any production position on the entire group. This is a worker who has no assigned work. He or she has assigned responsibility to support. If any worker has to step away from their position, the utility operator steps in and keeps the production effort moving toward their defined production requirement. Where there is no utility operator as is common on smaller production groups, I have seen the foremen step in, filling in the workers station while they attend to other things. That is all part of teaming. It makes the same sort of common sense as a father stepping into mow the lawn when his older child who was assigned that task is ill. Family supports family. The production team supports production workers. When the intelligently designed production goal is met, everyone on the team is a success. That includes the foremen, utility operator, and material handler being a success in their supportive tasks. And then we have the management team. We have the quality control inspector, the industrial engineer, the production maintenance worker, and others who serve many work groups. They can only be a success when the work groups they service are a success. Success is not determined by their individual assignments. But by the performance area performing its valued process, converting what comes from the business customers into the goods and services that will be distributed to those customers in fulfilling the business's performance cycle. For the larger performance, it all has to fit together. The lesson is in the absence of effective exercise of authority in this teaming effort. When the central value is accepted, people naturally tend to work together. The roles of the team members, once established, are not driven by assignment. They are treated as filling a need that is generally valued by others. The workers on the production line have people relying upon them doing their part. And their success is appreciated by others who rely upon them. The foreman has people relying upon his being there to establish the work process. They rely upon him or her to step in, removing distractions, and preventing challenges to their continued efforts. The industrial engineer is appreciated by the foreman for assuring that the work process can be done and done effectively. The same is true for the quality control inspector, the one who assures that the production effort has valued results. Performance management is getting things done through the efforts of those who are managed. It is not limited to the work of paid employees. It is just as effective getting things done through volunteers. It is just as effective when getting things done through family. It is just as effective when getting things done through managing our government or economy. And what brings this potential to reality and action is a shared sense of value in what people are to accomplish by their efforts. For production in a business environment, pay is just a way to bring people together for what others value. It is human to value working together, which is also part of the value that people find in joint efforts that succeed. That is something that people can share. I would also touch briefly on the effective senior management on teaming. In general, the term for it is hostility. It is focused on the employment contract and urging each worker to best effect as an individual. It is promoting competition, identifying the best workers, and rewarding them more generously as an encouragement for others to strive to be like them. In short, it is dismissal of teaming as not being central to performance, as being a matter of less consequence than competitive orientation. This interference has been so common an attitude in business leadership that production areas have suffered a common new problem. It is generally termed a business culture. And establishing that business culture has become a consistent goal of administrative management. First, internal competition tends to interfere with teaming, rewarding individuals for stepping out of their teaming roles. Then problems arise from interpersonal conflicts that this encourages, that culture has to be enforced. And so the loss of performance is met by calling people away from their performance efforts to learn how to get along with each other in the business culture that results. The simple reality is that calling people away from their performance efforts reduces what they are able to accomplish. The more you gain performance orientation, the more amazing this effect. One of the observable effects of working in a military unit is the lifelong relationship that builds between those who are doing the operation. It is seen when common soldiers who serve together as young men find themselves together as seniors. Those who served in combat roles meet after decades of living separate lives. After marrying and raising their own families, it would seem that they should have little in common, but memories from their distant youth. But there they are. And the bond between them is still there. It is forged in what they experienced. The reliance they had to have in one another to survive in a hostile environment. Not only are the soldiers to be survivors, their personal bond survives as well. It survives even if they no longer have much basis to agree on anything beyond what they had when they were much younger men. What is amazing is not that this is true. It is that people are surprised by seeing that bond demonstrated after living separate lives for such a long time. And why would this be challenging when we see it? The answer is that we have been taught something very different. It is a repudiation of our ultimate independence, our ability to shuck off the past and become independent adults. The performance challenge is an offense to our culture. It is the potency of our relationship to each other. But then there is a still greater challenge and we call it family. Parents are never really disconnected from their children and grandchildren. It is not as our culture would redirect where each person becomes an isolated adult. It is something we share with every other human being. It is in the value of not being alone, value in not being isolated and denied the trust and companionship that is being given to humans. It is value of being able to rely upon each other for support. It is value of social beings, finding comfort and mutual reliance. Our lesson is not just the value of performance-based gatherings. It is seeing our cultural bias toward competition, drama and isolation. It is a bias, not a directive. It is one option, one that is generally preferred by people who have learned to accept their own isolation and somehow desirable. It is a choice and if you would be free, that choice is yours. One choice is isolation. The other is to enter into trust relations. As children born into a family, we learn to trust parents to see to our needs. A child learns that other siblings in the same family can trust each other to take his or her side on any dispute with those who are not family. A soldier in a military unit learns to trust others in the group to do what helps the unit and its members survive in the stress of battle. Trust of the support of another person is an essential for people who form a family. In the negative, any behavior that challenges that sense of personal trust will threaten the dissolution of the family unit. It steals away the value of being family. With greater connection to our history of performance, trust cannot be purchased. It is not a result of being paid to trust, nor does employment serve as some sort of a substitute. Rewarding leaders for hiring others to do what they want done, doing the right things the right way, will continue to be less effective than people who team based on mutual trust. The lesson from our production history is front and center in this. If you are a worker, do you trust the business owner who pays you more than those who work beside you every day? The same lesson is in our political environment. Who do you trust more to run things? The one who seems to share your values and purposes? Or the one who is intent on representing the right people? If you are forced to take sides, then you have the answer in terms of not really having a choice of your own. You get to support or reject the choices that leaders have already made for you. A comedian, Mort Saul, noted in his presentation the size of the United States at its founding with leaders such as Thomas Jefferson and George Washington. Then he contrasted the current size of our nation and those pointed to presidential candidates as the best that we have to offer. The conclusion was the Darwin was wrong about evolution. So how trustworthy are our family leaders? The newborn babies have no choice, no option, but to accept what family leaders decide and trust to their humanity to best assure personal welfare. We learn to team as we grow and experience the value of our family unit. Our first source of trust as human beings is consistency. A person is trusted not to change, not to become someone else who is better or worse than they are today. That person who steals from your family today can be reasonably trusted to steal from you tomorrow if he has that choice. How trustworthy are our business leaders? Looking back, we can see amazing consistency in the family business. Family always came first. The leadership could be trusted to do what was beneficial for the family that was consistent. With business incorporation, we found a new basis and that is profitable operation of the business. How much can you as a potential investor trust that the profitability of the business is indeed the purpose being served by modern corporate leadership? It is then that we can see that almost shocking lesson of scientific management. It was an open and obvious challenge to what senior leadership was doing. It was an understanding that faith in the developed corporate approach was not what worked to the benefit of others. Management resistance exposed the difference in purpose between business leadership and the profitable operation of the business. Leadership was not intent on profitable operation which was the purpose of business investors and owners. So what can we learn from the production area changes that enhance teaming? Where is the trust? The answer is that workers can trust one another when they are paid to accomplish the same end result. They can even trust some to work harder than others if that is what is required to achieve that result. The workers can trust the foreman as the one who shares the purpose of gaining the productive result. The foreman will arrange the workplace, define the tasks and support their personal efforts that will achieve the group result. The foreman is the center of the team that has the purpose defined by group performance. While the leader may have personal quirks, preferences and prejudices even as all people do, group performance will still be at the center of his dealings with workers. Each worker can trust the material handler to keep them supplied with what they need to be a successful part of a larger productive team effort. The workers can trust that the performance management will be intent on their being successful at what they do in their team effort. And perhaps more of a lesson for us is in the study. There is no problem with the personal quirks, prejudices and the like while the work is flowing. When people team, that is what is important. It is when they stop working that these individual personal challenges are brought up and given vent. It is when they are getting ready to start work at the beginning of their work period. It is when they pause for breaks. It is when they finish for the day. That is when they again revert to conflict and competition. This is human. When we are focused on what needs to be done to be a success, that is when we act effectively. Is this all about money? Is that why people sell their time to employers? Of course that is the reason for entering into employment. Well, not really an example. Consider how much more you would have to pay a worker to just stop working on a production line and disappoint everyone else who was taking part. How much would you have to pay before it would require someone to upset the trust that others have developed toward them? For this study we need a sharp and consistent understanding of the meaning of employment. This has become a significant part of our dealings with each other, a basis for establishing a set of commercial interactions. In one sense, it is like a personal barter. Your time and effort has value and you provide it to someone else as a basis for bargain, for gaining something that you value. Barter is an ancient concept. One more one person has something that the first values. Barter is the trade. Barter is a concept where each person feels they come out with more value than they had before the trade. It is a win-win concept. In barter there is a sense of independence in those who barter. The only trust is that the people who trade will be honest in their dealings, properly presenting what they offer and receiving like honesty from the other person. We have example of barter in the establishment of those early apprentices to family businesses. These were people, again often relatives, who would agree to work on behalf of and under the direction of a skilled family leader for surrendering their time and effort to the purpose of the other family, they would learn a trade or skill that they valued. This is not the source of employment. We have an entirely different area of law called master and servant. It is someone who does as another directs. It addresses servants and slaves whose purpose is set by someone who is in charge. It is founded upon one person acting in authority over the other. It even applied to slavery, where there was no bargain, only authority to direct the time and effort of another person. The concept was ownership, one person effectively owning another. I also note that the concept applied to family leader authority over minors in the family. This had many similarities with slavery. It was authority and a master to direct the time and effort of children. We also have it used in early employment where a wealthy family would hire servants to care for their homes, estates, and family members. An effective maid or butler was treated as a skilled employee. But then gaining the services of a skilled practitioner was under commercial law and handled as a bargain. You paid a doctor or a lawyer for exercising their professional skill to meet your purpose. They did not answer to your direction as a servant would do, but provided a service that you accepted as a value. For our purposes, the one who hires the service of his ships captain for a voyage does not get to exercise authority over that captain. The captain knows and accepts the purpose of hiring and sees to it. There is no master and servant relationship and attempting to direct the actions of that captain will likely break the bargain and the deal be lost. The captain's duty is to fulfill the purpose of the agreement by serving the ship for a specified voyage. Our parallel in master and servant laws are demonstrated by the hiring of sailors for the same voyage. They do not determine what they do, nor do they sell their expertise as a bargain. They rather signed on to serve the ship under direction of a captain. They accepted the authority of the ship's captain or master to receive a sailor's wages. They agreed to do what he would direct. It addressed a very different relationship. These two concepts of people working have developed in parallel. As in earlier lessons, the authority-based bond servant status was important to the founding of our nation. It is a way to get workers to come to the American colonies to perform work under direction of another. When the bond was satisfied, the former indentured person was again an independent person. The industrial revolution sparked a huge change in opportunities and availabilities. The family business was belittled in favor of larger corporate businesses. If common workers wished income, they would have to provide their time and effort for direction under the authority of another. There is a great difference between trust relations in purchasing professional services and basic employment. Our next lesson will focus more directly on the subject of administrative management and some of the principles and techniques applied in the running of large organized efforts.