The Case for Management Standards
The quest for success in business today begins in the repeatable,
day-to-day disciplines of management and in something as prosaic as
standards.
Standards are our defense against the complexities of life. Because of
standards, we can pick up an extension cord, a light bulb, a can of
motor oil or a music CD and just use it. Where there is no standard,
life gets messy. Does each member of your family have a different cell
phone with a different charger? And does each have a different digital
camera requiring its own unique plug for the PC?
On the other hand, in the company you work for surely everything that
can be standardized is - customer account numbers, paychecks, email
systems, operating software, decision rights, budget procedures,
metrics, recurring management processes. No? Ah, complexity.
Anything that can be standardized should be, for a simple reason:
standards free your people from fussing over routine, repetitive
matters and allow them to focus on the things that will differentiate
you from your competitors. Imagine the time and energy you would waste
if there were no standard for light bulbs or if every new piece of
office equipment required a different voltage. How much time do you
waste deciding how to make decisions that you know in advance you will
have to make? How much opportunity do you lose because each division
captures customer data in a different way?
If you examine your organization - everything it has and does - from
the perspective of standardization, would you discover that you are
trying to re-invent the wheel each time on too many non-strategic
activities?
The paradox is that through routine and standardization we create an
environment conducive to innovation. The process is similar to the
progression from commodity to brand: settle on one way to do what is
known and reliable, and devote your mental energy to what is new and
not yet known, which is where the real action and payoff lie.
Standards have always been critical in business. They were necessary
for the Industrial Revolution to happen. Leading U.S. machine tool
makers, for example, sat down a century ago and agreed on a standard
screw. The birth of a national economy in the United States required
connections among isolated cities, and this required standard railroad
track gauges and standard time keeping.
At the same time that these things were being standardized, and as work
was moving to the large factory from the small shop, various
industrialists and thinkers such as Henry Ford and Frederick Taylor
were developing new ideas about standardizing work. Tools such as the
Gantt chart came into being. Ford's real innovation was not the car but
how he organized people to work.
With the Digital Revolution, new standards were needed, the World Wide Web being a prime example. Much as trains did for the national economy, the Internet and the Web opened up and connected the global economy.
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