B (3:53)
Throughout your empire. How do I make that happen? Well, the first thing you've got, and I always like to start with this as the condition is it's so obvious, it's ridiculous. But some of the organizations we work with sometimes miss this, which is to scale excellence. You have to have excellence to scale. So the first thing you gotta do is make sure it actually is excellent. But assuming that's the case, there's a number of principles that we've come up with. One is just making a rational argument for spreading. It doesn't usually work. It turns out the way that we human beings operate, and there's lots of research to support this is you kind of got to get some emotional arousal or excitement around what you're doing. So we call this linking a hot cause to a cool solution. Just one example. One of the cases we talk a lot about in the book is the 100,000 Lives Campaign, which was led by a small nonprofit in Boston called the Institute for Health Improvement. And to kick off their campaign to get US hospitals to do really simple life saving things like getting physicians to wash their hands. Really very simple things. They started out with a conference where there was a mother whose child had died as a result of mistakes that were made at Johns Hopkins Hospital. And also one of my favorite parts, they had a nun, Sister Mary Jean Ryan, who runs a large health care system, basically say that it was a moral imperative. I guess maybe the implication was internal damnation if you didn't sign up for the program. But then what they did was they had people sign up there and they had them filled. Follow these specific evidence based practices. And it really does look like the number of preventable deaths in US hospitals between 2004 and 2006 went down over 100,000 as a result of the campaign. So to us, that's the first one hot cause, cool solution. Another one that we see over and over again is when you've got an organization or a program and it's expanding, it tends to get more and more complex. If you just think about it, the case of the 100,000 Lives campaign, the case of Google going from a couple hundred people in Palo Alto to now 30,000 was one case that we looked at. Even little organizations, one called Pulse we studied, went from four to 20 people. In the process, you always want to worry about keeping the cognitive complexity down, because as organizations get bigger, there's this tendency to put on more and more process and more and more structure. And we're. With all due respect to my colleague Gary Hamill, we do not believe that you should tear down the bureaucracy or have no hierarchy. What it looks like, and there's quite a bit of evidence to support this, is that, yes, you should keep things as simple as possible, but in the process, the way that I think of hierarchy, you use hierarchy to build good bureaucracy and destroy bad bureaucracy in this notion. We learned a lot of this from talking to a guy named Chris Fry, who's now head of engineering at Twitter, but before that, he was head of the development organization@salesforce.com, and he's got this really sort of clear view, which is that your job as a leader is to create conditions where people actually will be more rather than less successful in their work and to remove obstacles that are in their way. So I guess that would be another principle. A related piece of advice that I would give you if you were trying to. To scale is a good sign, and this is straight from the Chris Fry sort of handbook, is you want to give people just a little less structure and a little less process than you think they need. And sometimes there's this expression, give ground grudgingly. So it should feel like they've got to think about it actively and there isn't quite enough for them more to do, as opposed to the feeling that you're walking in the muck. He argues as a sign that we've got a little bit too much. So obviously there's a balancing act. There's a couple of other bits of advice. This notion that when you've got excellence to spread, you don't spread it like a thin coat of peanut butter is something that we see over and over again. When we see excellence spread, what tends to happen is there tends to be pockets that are developed, made wonderful, and then spread to the next pocket, often by the people who developed it in the first place. To give you two kind of different examples, where one example we looked at the spread of basically the computerized medical records at Kaiser Permanente, which is the largest healthcare system in the United States, done by a team called the Tiger Team, led by a woman named Louise Lang. And what they did was they first got things really, really cranking in Hawaii, which is actually their smallest region. And once that region was great, then they spread it to the next region, then they spread it to the next region. And over nine years, they had one excellent rollout after another, because what you had was real pockets of expertise. We saw the same thing in the case study we did at Wyeth of manufacturing improvements. And in that case, what they would do with implants is they would do mini transformations where they would get the efficiency and the quality going. And once they got that team trained, that team would then help train the next. This idea of connecting and cascading is something that we see over and over again as a principle and, and I guess as sort of a final principle. If I was going to really emphasize kind of a play on Jim Collins famous book. Our argument is that good to great is nice, but bad to great is really the sign of what it takes to spread excellence. Because in the situations that we see excellence spread, the problem is that bad behavior, bad norms, bad beliefs are so destructive that that if you don't clear them out of the way, there's no way that you can spread excellence. Just a little case study. One of the cases that we did, we actually had the CEO come and talk to our class. Well, he described how he turned around a set of retail stores in the west coast called Cost Plus. And he said we basically had to get people to clean the bathrooms and to greet customers. They weren't doing either one. And once we sort of got rid of that kind of badness and. Oh, and also got. Got rid of the most incompetent and destructive employees, once we did that, actually the turnaround ended up being quite easy, relatively speaking, because the bad stuff was out of the way. And there's lots of other examples in the book, but the key point is that the first job of a manager is to get rid of the bad stuff. If you want to spread excellence, meet Rovo, your AI powered teammate. Rovo connects to your organization's knowledge and lives on Atlassian's trusted and secure platform. Connect Rovo to your favorite SaaS, apps to get the personalized context you need, unleash AI with AI powered search, chat agents and studio. Get started with Rovo, your new AI teammate powered by Atlassian@rovo.com.
