Read an Excerpt
LeadeReliability
Where Leadership, Culture, and Profitability Collide
By Jeff Dudley iUniverse LLC
Copyright © 2013 Jeff Dudley
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4917-0169-0
CHAPTER 1
Why Reliability?
Simplicity is a prerequisite for reliability. —Edsger Dijkstra
Why reliability? I start this book with this question, and I finish this book with the answer. Reliability is not what you do, but it must become how you do everything. It ultimately can provide the answer to many things that are troubling you and your organization. If you don't do everything with a focus on reliability, you will never be consistent in what you do. It is virtually impossible to consistently deliver on your commitments without it becoming how you do everything. Reliability is how you do everything instead of what you do. To create reliability it requires three distinct facets depending on whether you are talking about individual reliability or organizational reliability. However, you can't develop organizational reliability unless you first develop personal reliability within the organization.
Personal
• changing the way you think
• changing the behaviors you perform
• unwavering commitment to learn and to teach
Organizational
• development of culture
• leadership by everyone in the organization
• patience and bravery to take on the challenge
In each case, they are interrelated and necessary. Without them, LeadeReliability will fail somewhere along the way. LeadeReliability is where culture, leadership, and profits collide.
What will reliability deliver? Reliability will deliver satisfied customers, completely engaged employees, and significantly better margins. Your business model, products, and services determine your ability to be profitable, but if your model allows it, reliability will maximize that profit. You will maximize your profits, engage your employees, and satisfy your customers if you minimize unplanned events, which is what LeadeReliability focuses on.
Constant and consistent delivery on your commitments is my definition of reliability. You have to do it—and each individual in an organization has to do it. Each group has to do it, each department has to do it, and each function has to do it. Your entire organization has to do it, and that is where leadership comes in. Reliability starts with an individual and spreads to the organization, and as the organization creates reliability, it spreads to each individual. Now you understand why LeadeReliability is so hard. When you do everything with a focus on that constant and consistent delivery of your commitments, the lyrics to a song come true.
It doesn't matter what you've heard
Impossible is not a word.
It's just a reason for someone not to try.
LeadeReliability is not impossible, but it is not easy either. In the world of integration or isolation, complexity or simplification, cutting-edge or basic, regulation or deregulation, growing or shrinking, expanding or contracting, global or local, multifaceted or straight-lined, broad or narrow, there are not many corporations that can be classified as highly reliable.
Why is it more impossible than easy? We aren't reliable because we have not developed the required individual commitment and culture. We have not insisted that everyone in our organization becomes a leader. Most of all, we are not always brave or patient. If you could develop a culture where everyone leads and develops patience, you would constantly and consistently deliver on your commitments to your customers—and you would differentiate yourself from your competition. You would become unique. You would be different. You would be completely reliable. LeadeReliability would be your culture.
Why LeadeReliability instead of the other movements that we have talked about for decades? For years, corporate initiatives and movements have been designed to deliver customer satisfaction. They focused on the quality of products and the processes that delivered them. Why not just do one of those and do it well? W. Edwards Deming and his fourteen points set off to transform American industry. By adhering to his fourteen points of production and service, industry would stay in business and protect jobs and investors. In Good to Great, Jim Collins shows that this is not necessarily true. Some companies stumbled on their way to success.
Another of Deming's principles was to create consistency of purpose toward improvement of product and service so that customers would always be satisfied. Although many companies adopted all fourteen of the points and made them a way of life, they failed to become highly reliable—and some have failed to stay in business.
Total Quality Management is an integrated philosophy for continuously improving the quality of products and processes. Its success works on the premise that everyone in the organization is responsible for the quality of the final product, which they are. However, in many organizations not everyone takes on that responsibility; quality is thought to be solely the responsibility of the quality function. If we engage management, the workforce, and our customers, we should be able to meet and exceed the customers' expectations. The concept is absolutely correct, but few have achieved this state. Very few have constantly and consistently delivered on their commitments.
Joseph Juran was a pioneer in quality in the 1950s. His interests blossomed after his first visit to Japan. He wrote The Quality Control Handbook in 1951, and it is now in its sixth printing. Juran created the concept of the Pareto Principle, which separates the "vital few" from the "useful many." Even though millions have followed these principles and steps for quality management, reliability has not been achieved. All these focused on product quality and have been around for decades, but still we don't have LeadeReliability.
At the turn of the century, Six Sigma and Lean technologies became prominent. They focused on expansive toolkits that would deliver permanent solutions to industrial problems, cut waste, and streamline the ability to deliver. Not many companies developed a constant and consistent ability to meet customer expectations and requirements. The concepts described above set the foundation and transformed into Six Sigma and Lean philosophy.
Six Sigma was developed by Motorola in 1986 and is used throughout modern industry. It seeks to remove the defects from the process to minimize the variability of the process. It uses statistics and other methods to minimize errors. Since it deals with statistics and methods, it usually morphs quickly into what you do—rather than how you do everything. It becomes a project rather than a way of life.
Lean manufacturing—sometimes referred to as value-stream mapping—attempts to eliminate any actions, behaviors, or steps that do not create value for the end customer. Derived from the Toyota Production System, it is targeted toward preserving value by doing less work. It is a remarkable initiative, but quality issues at Toyota prove it is not always reliable.
Lack of reliability resulted in a loss in consumer confidence as a result of Toyota's 2010 recall, which was the automobile manufacturer's biggest in its seventy-year history. The brand had been synonymous with quality and reliability. What started as an innocuous issue of improperly laid-out mats resulted in a recall of four million vehicles—and was followed by eight million more for sticking accelerator pedals and loss of braking on its Prius, Lexus HS250h, and the Sai models.
Lack of reliability impacts customer confidence and is terribly expensive. Your level of reliability helps create your brand. It takes many actions to create trust, which is an extension of reliability, but it only takes one action to destroy that trust. The Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico had significant negative effects on BP. The spill went on for three months in 2010 and significantly damaged the BP brand.
A single problem can change the perception of a brand overnight. Reliability can offer brand protection—and many other things. The more reliable, trustworthy, and confident those outside your company become in your ability to do whatever you do, the more secure you can become. This even translates to the individual level. We all have a personal brand. Deliver constantly and consistently on your commitments, and your personal brand will be elevated. Reliability can be applied to one individual—or to the largest corporation in the world.
Why choose reliability? Coming to this solution has not been a quick process. It develops over time. I want to save you that time so you can get started on your journey today.
I started my journey in the early nineties and solidified my thinking over the last twenty years. The only way to create a sustainable and highly profitable business that will stand out from its competitors and other corporations is to become highly reliable. Being reliable creates the time and resources that allow you to innovate, which will keep you ahead of the game.
The cornerstone of my belief focused on product quality. I began to develop my thinking about what we did—and how we did everything. I thought that if we did everything right the first time, we could satisfy our customers' needs. DRIFT (Doing It Right the First Time) or Zero Defects was pioneered by Philip Crosby in Quality Is Free. This philosophy shows how you can achieve high quality in the most economical fashion by reducing the cost of failures. Minimizing the impact of unplanned events is the basis of becoming highly reliable.
The concept of doing it right the first time became the basis of my philosophy and the start of my journey toward LeadeReliability. However, I soon realized that product quality could not be the only focus. Product quality is just a small portion of the total picture. If you want high reliability, it has to go across the organization. Whether it is a small business with a few people or a global corporation with tens of thousands of employees, the formula is the same. You have to create a culture where every person is focused on minimizing the effect of unplanned events and constantly and consistently delivers on his or her commitments. It must become how you hire people, how you sell yourself to customers, how you market yourself to the public, how you schedule your production, and how you pay your bills. It is how you do everything.
Without the concept of reliability being practiced across the entire organization, you will only get incremental improvement. I think it is fair to say that many organizations incrementally improve over time, but few get the quantum improvement that enables them to differentiate their companies. That incremental improvement typically comes in a few areas. For years, companies focused on product quality—and some were successful at improving it. However, if you haven't put that same effort across the entire organization, you may deliver a product that meets customers' needs, but they don't know when they will get it, they don't know if they will be invoiced properly for it, and they don't know how it will be delivered. You may have met their product quality requirements, but your customers would never call you reliable.
Many companies have been audited by external organizations and have received awards and certificates of qualification. J. D. Power and Associates declare which companies are leaders in customer satisfaction, but these same companies struggle with reliability. ISO certifications are handed out to companies who are, by definition, practicing good quality management, but many are not reliable. If all these initiatives are out there—and companies can even be audited to be labeled as practicing good quality management—why aren't many companies or corporations constantly and consistently meeting their commitments? It is hard work to get an entire organization to act like leaders. It is hard work for a company or corporation to be patient. It is hard work to create a culture that looks at reliability as how you do everything rather than just another thing to do.
The journey toward creating a reliability culture is a long one, and it is not for the faint of heart. Like any cultural journey, it will not come easy—and it will not be without its moments where you might believe it is just too hard or that results will never come. Although it is a hard journey, the rewards so greatly outweigh the effort that it is well worth taking. Those brave and diligent enough to create a culture where all people consistently and constantly meet their commitments will differentiate themselves from everyone else.
The dynamic of reliability is an interesting one because it is completely different from any other undertaking your organization has attempted. Reliability contains many of the parts of other initiatives that are described above, but the development of a LeadeReliability culture is much different than anything the organization has done before. The creation of this way of being or doing work is not an initiative or a program—it is the way you do everything for the rest of your life. As an individual, it will transform more than what you are working on. If you are working on it in your organization, it will transform your professional life and your personal life. If it is undertaken and created this way, it will not fade or die like so many other initiatives and programs have. It will change your life forever.
Why reliability? Why not reliability? It will change how you do everything.
CHAPTER 2
Sounds So Simple! What Makes It So Hard?
Life is either a daring adventure or nothing. —Helen Keller
Conceptually, keeping our commitments seems pretty simple. All we have to do is do what we say we are going to do—and then we are considered reliable. Doing this is much easier said than done. What makes personal reliability so hard? Why can't people constantly and consistently keep their commitments? In order for an individual to become reliable, he or she must practice minimizing the impact of unplanned events. Over the years, I have surveyed individuals and discovered that most people waste forty or more days of their year managing unplanned events. Forty days! People lose more than a month of their year managing unplanned events. What makes up those unplanned events? It is mostly little things.
If you get in your car one morning and it doesn't start, you are unable to leave for whatever you had planned to do. How much of the rest of your day will be consumed by dealing with the car that doesn't start? How can you minimize the impact this unplanned event? Was your car telling you it was about to have a problem? Was it harder to start your car recently? Was it making an odd sound that you failed to pay attention to? Was it leaking something that you ignored? Are you a driver who doesn't pay attention to those gauges and noises in your car? Cars are just supposed to work.
You can see how an event can be completely disruptive, but you also have a glimpse of how the impact might be minimized. Now extrapolate this one incident to all the incidents that happen to you at home and work over the course of a day, a week, or a year—and you will see the magnitude of the picture. You might be saying forty days; I am probably closer to eighty. There goes January, February, and some of March!
Imagine getting to work fifteen minutes early because you blocked off your entire morning to work on an upcoming presentation and are anxious to get started. You get a cup a coffee and settle in, but the phone rings just as you log on to your computer. One of your most important customers did not receive the shipment they were expecting the day before—and their manufacturing operation will shut down that afternoon if they don't receive it. How much of your morning will be spent preparing for that presentation? You are the client's salesperson. You don't make the product, store the product, or deliver the product, but you are the face of the company for the customer. Unplanned events are disruptive, and they waste your valuable time and resources. Your morning has now been disrupted—and you don't know for how long.
These are just a few examples of how unplanned events can be disruptive. Apply that to a group of people and multiply the impact; becoming reliable seems impossible. Remember the lyrics to our impossible song? Even though it feels like things are out of your control, there is a pretty good reason to try. To get an entire organization engaged in LeadeReliability, each individual has to work on his or her own reliability. That can be very hard.
• Individuals will choose to engage in reliability. If they don't, the chances for organizational reliability are diminished.
• Each individual has to figure out why he or she cares about reliability before he or she engages.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from LeadeReliability by Jeff Dudley. Copyright © 2013 Jeff Dudley. Excerpted by permission of iUniverse LLC.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
