Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency - Hardcover

DeMarco, Tom

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 076790768X ISBN 13: 9780767907682

Publisher: Broadway, 2001

Synopsis

To most companies, efficiency means profits and growth. But what if your “efficient” company—the one with the reduced headcount and the “stretch” goals—is actually slowing down and losing money? What if your employees are burning out doing the work of two or more people, leaving them no time for planning, prioritizing, or even lunch? What if you’re losing employees faster than you can hire them? What if your superefficient company is suddenly falling behind?

Tom DeMarco, a leading management consultant to both Fortune 500 and up-and-coming companies, has discovered a counterintuitive principle that explains why efficiency improvement can sometimes make a company slow. If your real organizational goal is to become fast (responsive and agile), then he proposes that what you need is not more efficiency, but more slack.

What is “slack”? Slack is the degree of freedom in a company that allows it to change. It could be something as simple as adding an assistant to a department, letting high-priced talent spend less time at the photo copier and more time making key decisions. Slack could also appear in the way a company treats employees: instead of loading them up with overwork, a company designed with slack allows its people room to breathe, increase effectiveness, and reinvent themselves.

In thirty—three short chapters filled with creative learning tools and charts, you and your company can learn how to:

∑make sense of the Efficiency/Flexibility quandary

∑run directly toward risk instead of away from it

∑strengthen the creative role of middle management

∑make change and growth work together for even greater profits

A innovative approach that works for new- and old-economy companies alike, this revolutionary handbook will debunk commonly held assumptions about real-world management, and give you and your company a brand-new model for achieving and maintaining true effectiveness—and a healthier bottom line.

About this title

About the Author

Tom DeMarco is a principal of the Atlantic Systems Guild, a New York--and London-based consulting practice. His clients include Hewlett Packard, Apple, IBM, Bell Laboratories, and many others. He is also the author of seven books on management and technical development methods, including The Deadline, a business novel, and Peopleware. In 1999, Tom was awarded the Wayne Stevens Prize for lifetime contribution to software engineering methods, and he continues to work in areas of organizational change, project management, and litigation. He divides his time between New York City and Camden, Maine.

Reviews

DeMarco (Peopleware), a management consultant, says that in today's competitive, fast-moving economy, managers work far less effectively than before. Responding to restructuring and staff reductions, managers overemphasize deadlines and rush employees, sacrificing quality. Instead, says DeMarco, executives should encourage teamwork, discourage competition and allow training time. Unfortunately, tedious, jargon-heavy writing dulls DeMarco's worthwhile message.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

A recent national survey found that as many as one in six American workers are so overworked that they cannot use up their annual vacation allowance and nearly a third are so busy that they must eat lunch and work at the same time. These employees will welcome DeMarco's admonition to corporate America. He warns employers that it is time to "cut some slack." More than a decade ago in Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams (1987), DeMarco suggested that management problems were more likely to be "sociological" than technological, and he now shows that doing more with less has its costs. Emphasizing the difference between efficiency and effectiveness, he argues that "organizations tend to get more efficient only by sacrificing their ability to change." Opportunities for growth, organizational learning, and risk-taking are also lost. Noting that employees who have no "down time" suffer stress and burnout, DeMarco catalogs the effects of stress on organizations. Employees might want to buy a copy for their boss! David Rouse
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

International consultant DeMarco (Peopleware) presents his views on how corporations can become more effective. He states that in an age of acceleration, in which more work is crammed into less time, knowledge workers need slack time for reinvention, creativity, and growth. Slack time here is defined as "zero percent busy" and knowledge work is "think-intensive." The author offers his philosophy to all levels of management and gets to the core of what he thinks is wrong with today's modern corporations. Some of the problems he addresses include operating with meager staff, extended overtime, and unnecessary organizational meetings. His contention is that too many meetings take away from normal workday hours and create a need for managers and workers alike to incur overtime. While his views may sound innovative, they appear to be unrealistic and provide little direction for management trying to figure out how to keep with the competition. A marginal purchase for public libraries with business collections. Bellinda Wise, Nassau Community Coll. Lib., Garden City, NY
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

1
Madmen in the Halls

THE LEGACY of the nineties has been a dangerous corporate delusion: the idea that organizations are effective only to the extent that all their workers are totally and eternally busy. Anyone who’s not overworked (sweating, staying late, racing from one task to the next, working Saturdays, unable to squeeze time for even the briefest meeting till two weeks after next) is looked on with suspicion. People with a little idle time on their hands may not even be safe. As one of my friends at Digital Equipment Corporation told me during the company’s darkest days, “There are madmen in the halls, looking for someone to ax.” Of course, the ones they were looking to ax were the folks who weren’t all that busy.

Crisis of Confidence

Your company may not now have actual ax-wielding crazies roaming the halls, but their specter is almost certainly still with you. This is the remnant of the crisis of confidence we’ve just come through. Consider: As this is being written, American and western European business is in a period of extraordinary prosperity. The rest of the world is a basket case and we are healthier than we’ve ever been. And yet just a few short years ago, we were all in an agony of doubt. How could we survive, we wondered, against the competition of the ravenous third world, willing to work for peanuts and liable to undersell us in any market anywhere? How could we stay even with the superbly educated Japanese, or those clever and hungry workers coming out from behind the Iron Curtain, or the Taiwanese and Koreans with their superhuman work ethic and their awesome skills? Acting on our doubts, we went through a purge of excess capacity (i.e., people with homes and families). We trimmed as though our very survival depended on trimming.
Wasn’t it reasonable to put our house in order in this fashion? Maybe it was in the short run. It probably contributed at least somewhat to our present strength. Yet the lasting side effect of the purge–the notion that busyness is the essence of business–can only do us long-term harm.
The Price of “Putting Our House in Order”
During the last ten years we have downsized, “right-sized,” laid off, and fired people’s butts. We have cut payrolls, closed plants, sold off divisions, and generally scared all our remaining employees to death. We nodded in approval as characters like Chainsaw Al (at one time the worst CEO in America) did their dirty work. We bid up the stocks of companies like AT&T who led the trend, i.e., led the retreat.
The principal target of the cuts has been that bugaboo of organizational efficiency: middle management. We asked ourselves, “What are they, after all, those middle managers? What are they but fat? What do they really exist for other than to be cut out in the interest of efficiency?” And so we cut. We surgically removed the middle layers of our organizations, flattening the charts and widening the scope of management at each level.
Was that a good thing to do? I have my doubts.
Maybe middle management exists for some reason above and beyond filling the space between the top and the bottom of the hierarchy. Part of my purpose in this book is to examine what’s supposed to happen in the middle of a healthy organization, the critical role of middle management.
The main activity of those managers is reinvention. It is the middle of the organization where reinvention takes place. This is where the dynamic of today’s organizational functioning is examined, taken apart, analyzed, resynthesized, and assembled back into new organizational models that allow us to move forward.
What got cut out of the most aggressively purged organizations is the capacity to change. The so-called restructurings have, in most cases, optimized the present steady state, only at the expense of the future.

Does It Matter?

Well, so what? Some companies have always been prone to trade away the future to make the present look a little more rosy. In the short term they prosper, and in the long term they don’t. What’s different this time? The difference is that today even the companies that didn’t cut the heart out of their effective change centers have made it more difficult for those centers to operate. Change and reinvention require a commodity that is absent in our time as it never has been before. That commodity–the catalytic ingredient of all change–is slack. Slack is the time when reinvention happens. It is time when you are not 100 percent busy doing the operational business of your firm. Slack is the time when you are 0 percent busy.
Slack at all levels is necessary to make the organization work effectively and to grow. It is the lubricant of change. Good companies excel in the creative use of slack. And bad ones can only obsess about removing it.

2
Busyness
IMAGINE that you took on an assignment to direct a film about happenings inside a hugely successful company. How would you portray the company? How, in particular, would you make it look successful? One tempting answer is to convey its great success by showing everyone who works there to be immensely busy all the time. After all, you might reason, how would the company have become so successful if its people weren’t putting in substantial extra effort?
My own experience consulting inside some highly successful companies (Microsoft, Apple, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Dupont, to name a few) cannot corroborate a relationship between busyness and success. Very successful companies have never struck me as particularly busy; in fact, they are, as a group, rather laid-back. Energy is evident in the workplace, but it’s not the energy tinged with fear that comes from being slightly behind on everything. The companies I have come to admire most show little obvious sense of hurry. They are more like an extended family, embarked upon a project whose goal is only partly expressed in getting something done; the other part of the goal is that all involved learn and grow and enjoy themselves along the way.
Work, particularly knowledge work, can be extremely enjoyable. That’s why so many of us become addicted to it. If you take sensual pleasure in your work, and those around you are doing the same thing, if it’s clearly okay in your corporate culture to enjoy what you’re doing, chances are that yours is a company headed toward success. Sign up for the stock plan.

The Busy Worker

Extreme busyness is injurious to the real work of the organization. I will make that point as carefully as I can in the chapters to follow, stressing the effect in particular on management. But first, I ask you to consider how busyness may hurt the effectiveness of even the lowest-level workers.
Take, for example, the secretary. (You remember secretaries, don’t you? A once-common element of corporate life.) A secretary’s job may involve document preparation, appointment scheduling, coordinating, and generally facilitating the smooth functioning of one manager’s work life–let’s say yours. We’ll call her Sylvia.
A good secretary is a treasure, as anyone who has ever worked with one knows, and Sylvia is definitely a treasure. With Sylvia around, everything goes more smoothly. When you’re away from the office–it never looks this way officially, but whom are we kidding?–Sylvia is effectively in charge. She is the one who coordinates and distributes work to be done. If she ever left, it would set you and your organization back a few months, at least.
But now into this happy scenario drop a consultant with a charter to reduce cost, the “corporate restructuring agent.” Whoa, he says, what’s this? A secretary? And what’s she up to this very minute? He parks himself beside Sylvia’s desk with his trusty stopwatch in hand. To no one’s surprise, he finds that Sylvia is really only busy 43 percent of the time. The rest of the time she is . . . available. She’s available to do stuff that you or your people find you need to have done. That’s part of what’s so great about Sylvia: When something comes up, she can usually get cracking on it right away.
A look of triumph now comes over the consultant’s face. If Sylvia is only busy 43 percent of the time, 57 percent of her cost is potentially savable. Why, all we have to do is dump Sylvia into a “pool” and allocate 43 percent of her time to you and the rest to other people. Or have you share her with some other manager who needs only 57 percent of a full person. Or even get rid of Sylvia entirely and hire a temp for that 43 percent of the time that you really need someone. (You can be sure that the consultant will be checking back later to find out if you really need that much help.)
What an improvement. Sylvia’s gone or gone 57 percent of the time, and 57 percent of what she was costing the organization goes directly down to the bottom line. Wow. In place of a person who was idle 57 percent of the time, we now have someone who is busy 100 percent of the time. Talk about efficiency!
The problem, of course, is that the now-slackless secretary or portion thereof is simply not as responsive as Sylvia was. This highly efficient person doesn’t get cracking right away on anything new that comes up, because this highly efficient person is too busy.

How We Work Together

Modern organizations are huge networks of interconnected work. The nodes of this network are you and your coworkers. The connections are pieces of work in progress that get passed from one person to another.
As a practical matter it is impossible to keep everyone in the organization 100 percent busy unless we allow for some buffering at each employee’s desk. That means there is an in-box where work stacks up.
With enough buffer at each desk, the work flow can now be organized to keep everyone busy all the time.
A side effect of this optimally efficien...

Edition details

• Publisher: Broadway
• Publication date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 076790768X
• ISBN 13: 9780767907682
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 240