It's the last week of the year, so let's end on a light note. Here are five general principles that I've picked up from working in many organizations over the years.
Hard, but easy
1. The more sophisticated a task, the easier it is to get authorization to proceed.
2. The more far-reaching the implications of a proposed policy, the easier it is to get approval.
Easy, but hard
3. The easier a task is to describe, the more time it takes to complete.
4. Procedures that are easy to write, are hard to implement.
Law of purchase requests
5. No Purchase Request can be approved until the cost* of the discussions justifying the decision exceeds the cost of the item to be purchased.
Do you have others? Send me yours.
And to all my readers, have a very Happy New Year!
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* (calculated as the sum across all participants of the hours spent in discussion times each participant's hourly rate of pay)
The length of a discussion is inversely proportional to the importance of the topic. - David Jones
ReplyDeleteI found the inverse of number 1 to be true. I am an advocate of Eli Goldratt's theory of constraints. Simply put, one puts the bottleneck at the front and works to minimize it. I spend 35 years as a Manufacturing Director for a global optical disc manufacturer. Our plant in Huntsville was by far the most efficient turning our inventory 42 times a day. Our sister plant turned every two days. They sent a guy to study what we did. I simply explained it and gave him Eli Goldratt's book The Goal. He left it in the guest office. If I would've advocated a $500k production control doohickey, they would've written that check in an instant. They closed that plant first as the optical disc demand began to wane.
ReplyDelete#5 explains so much. I guess I should approach this by increasing the number and length of discussions and inviting more high level leaders to these discussions. We’ll get there in no time 😂
ReplyDelete