Too Much of a Good Thing

How many management techniques can you use at once?

In high school and college I worked as the tropical fish expert at a few pet stores. Guppies are pretty fish that are prolific breeders. If you put one male and three female guppies in a tank you get lots of little guppies. If you put one male and twenty females in a tank you get no babies and an exhausted male guppy.


At our firm we are currently pursuing several management techniques simultaneously. Among them, we use High Performing Organizations, Balanced Scorecard, Lean Six Sigma, Whole Goals, and at least two internal efforts as well. Even if each of them held all the secrets of the business universe, how effective could you be if you tried them all at once?

Assume your typical executive has one day a week to devote to strategic planning. The rest of their time is devoted to tactical matters such as budgeting, VIP meetings, program reviews, travel and the like. With 6 simultaneous management efforts going on, that means that each gets 80 minutes of their time per week.

Each of these techniques is a new tool. Like any new tool you need time to become facile with it. How good would you be with a scroll saw with only 80 minutes per week of practice?

Individuals do not use management techniques. In order to be effective, management teams must use them. That means that after each individual manager learns the technique, they must learn to use it together. They can’t really start learning to use them together until a majority of them have mastered the tool. Then they can’t use them until they can synchronize their schedules to meet and discuss it.

Meetings are inefficient things. Before decisions are made, everyone has to achieve a common understanding. That takes time. Remember, you’ve only got 80 minutes a week per tool. How long do you think it will take to achieve results from any of these techniques? Will you ever achieve results?

Most of these management techniques are mandated upon us by our parent organization in answer to some specific incident or need. They each have strong track records. Individually, they should improve our performance. In the aggregate it’s like the guppies. A lot of work with little payoff.

Update

I attempt to give an accounting perspective discussing the costs to the organization for one such effort at this link.

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