To: Corporate Managers Re: Bureaucracy Don't Send Memos!
Peters, Tom
To: Corporate Managers Re: Bureaucracy DON'T SEND MEMOS! by Tom Peters "I find it mind-boggling. We do not shoot paper at the enemy:' —Admiral Joseph Metcalf, on the 20 tons of paper and...
...It's also why managers will never reduce bureaucracy until they stop treating people with contempt...
...It was to quit treating them like kids...
...This article is adapted from his book Thriving on Chaos: Handbook for a Management Revolution...
...About nine-tenths of my suggestions cost little or nothing to implement...
...Unfortunately, the conventional wisdom is true...
...I can simply tell you that it can be done, that it must be done if we are to move faster and liberate people—managers and nonmanagers alike—to perform up to their potential...
...Like Napoleon, who reputedly tossed out all written reports from his generals, figuring he'd already heard the important news, Perot prefers to conduct all of his business by personal contact...
...The Mickey Mouse rules that reek of contempt and distrust are part of the negative signals we send...
...use the phone or personal contact instead...
...Prune the number of reports they receive by 50 to 80 percent in the next 6 to 12 months...
...He was successful, and grievances were cut to a trickle...
...Send back without comment all "information copies" of memos...
...it is a block to survival...
...Much of our entry-testing makes clear that we assume the candidate is a misfit or a thief or a drug addict or all three...
...He replaced them with one color—green —for everyone...
...He explained: "That wasn't the point, cutting costs...
...It liberates Nordstrom employees from an astonishing amount of Mickey Mouse...
...Why not the rest of us...
...for madness...
...Everyone talks about cutting red tape...
...They were there, as they saw it, to administer the contract on management's behalf...
...Steel ignominiously became USX in 1986...
...Following imposition of the new standard, spending plummeted 60 percent...
...Boise Cascade recently suspended a worker for smashing a camera hidden in the ceiling of a locker room to detect theft...
...Very little, by the old standards...
...One senior political appointee in the Installations and Logistics secretariat of the Department of Defense arrived on the job to find that tiny architectural changes were sent from the field all the way to Washington for approval...
...If little kids don't aspire to make money like I did, what the hell good is this country...
...This business of eliminating rules and regulations is a-big deal—a matter of replacing detailed, written "what if" strictures with trust...
...At a Mars, Inc...
...The brother of the president of Toyota was the first NUMMI chief...
...Smashing the hidden cameras I would be greatly remiss if I failed to note a caveat here...
...Other humiliations are more subtle...
...Copyright © 1987 by EXCEL/CALIFORNIA LIMITED CORPORATION...
...Nucor's Ken Iverson found multicolored hard hats when he arrived at the company: white for workers, blue for foremen, green for department heads...
...More than 90 percent of several hundred memos I analyzed were of the "cover your ass" variety—designed only to clear the writer of any kind of blame should anything subsequently go awry...
...many remarked that they were stunned to see him eating regularly with line workers in the common cafeteria...
...So what's holding everyone up...
...by Tom Peters "I find it mind-boggling...
...A rookie management negotiator set an objective about which most of his peers were highly skeptical—to replace the inch-thick document with one of five pages or less...
...The New York Times recently reported that antibureaucrat Ken Iverson of Nucor Corporation, a steel manufacturer, maintains an "executive dining room": "[He] has designated as the executive dining room the Chinese restaurant and delicatessen—usually the deli—in the shopping center across the street from Nucor's headquarters in Charlotte, N.0 ." .Nordstrom, a $1.9 billion retailer, gets by with a one-sentence policy manual: "Use your best judgment at all times...
...My point is pragmatic: How do you humiliate and demean someone and then expect him or her to care about product quality and constant improvement...
...A labor contract was up for renewal...
...It costs $140,000 a year to heat one parking garage...
...It is presumed you are a cheat and want them for personal use, so you have to fill out a 15-line form to get them...
...How do you reduce the policy manual to a sentence...
...A few do it...
...In The Intuitive Manager, journalist Roy Rowan reports: "[Ross] Perot claims he operated a memo-less company...
...Have you ever heard of anyone going to a rule book to figure out how to speed things up...
...Sanders says the supervisors' chief duty is to coach salespersons on "exactly what it means to `use your own best judgment?' " Hardly a design More than 90 percent of the several hundred memos I analyzed were of the "cover your ass" variety—designed only to clear the writer of any kind of blame should anything go awry...
...Then we confirm it daily after he or she comes aboard...
...I suspect that Perot would have been equally peeved at Lee Iacocca...
...When asked how he reconciled his $20.6 million compensation in 1986 with cuts in merit pay for other Chrysler employees, Iacocca replied, "That's the American way...
...we can't do anything for you,' but then say, 'By the way, we're going to pay ourselves a $1 million bonus,' " Perot said...
...Though top management strongly discourages applying pressure to decertify, five of the operations have done so...
...Fill out a two-page form, get two supervisors to sign it (if the machine is worth more than $25), and then pass through the doublelocked door to the supply room...
...What's left for them to do...
...Fortunately, there are people and firms that have beaten back bureaucracy's seemingly inevitable encroachment: .A division general manager in a large hightechnology firm raised from $25 to $200 the amount his engineers could spend without getting approval...
...The absence of rules manuals at Nordstrom has been anything but an invitation to chaos...
...Written reports stifle creativity,' he says...
...I want to scream...
...He just returned them without comment...
...Thousands of success stories, spurred by the development of a wordofmouth network reflect an increasing efficiency and responsiveness...
...subsidiary as well, fewer rules have meant less fuss—and more focus on the business task at hand...
...After getting a memo from the boss, managers should pop into his or her office with an answer, not retire to an office for three days to write a treatise in response...
...You won't reduce the rules and regulations until you remove the underlying causes for them— mistrust and adversarial relations...
...Now, suddenly, no rule book, no time clocks, no scheduled breaks [you take a break when you conveniently can], no locks on the tool-room door, no forms to be signed to check out a tool or a spare part...
...NUMMI), the auto company operated jointly by General Motors and Toyota, the separate entrances for managers and workers were eliminated, as was the executive lunchroom...
...After a year and a half of negotiations, they reduced the contract from 200 pages to 14, the first page being a statement of shared philosophy...
...In fact, the absence of childish rules shifts the employees' focus of innovation from how to evade toilet break rules to precisely where the firm wishes it to be: in pursuit of serving the customer better...
...Ross Perot captured the spirit while he was at General Motors: "In Pontiac [Michigan], GM executives' parking garages are heated, while the poor guys who work in the plant freeze their tails off walking to work in the snow...
...M oaning about bureaucracy is a timehonored management prerogative...
...I cannot provide you with the will to do it...
...Take the last suggestion...
...employees hadn't been consulted about its installation...
...Some don't make the transition...
...Stop...
...For instance, say you want a dollar's worth of stamps in a hurry to get a customer letter out in a timely fashion...
...There are simply no nitpicking details— "subparagraph 7.13b.2ii" —for either side to get hot and bothered about...
...Psychological assessment tests and, certainly, urinalyses are demeaning...
...Yet Business Week reported acidly in 1985: "On the 61st floor [of USX's headquarters] in Pittsburgh, uniformed stewards deliver coffee on silver trays to executive suites ." During a visit to Columbus in 1986, a Worthington employee and I struck up a conversation about the American steel industry...
...Quoted in Newsweek, May 1987...
...The same thing applies to all the others...
...So be it, she adds...
...I don't say this for humanitarian reasons, much as I believe in them...
...Worthington senior managers observe that employees have had little problem living without the protection of a union contract...
...Also send back, without comment, decision documents that aren't addressed to the right level...
...But you know what happened, of course...
...Dayton Power & Light followed a similar path...
...No union has been able to organize any of the company's field operations, but Worthington has acquired several unionized companies...
...Or stop sending memos...
...Cut every procedure manual in half over the next 12 months...
...And cut it in half again the following year...
...The accountants screamed...
...Now, however, bureaucracy is beyond moaning about...
...The way to eliminate lengthy supplier contracts is to join in long-term partnerships with a small number of quality suppliers...
...Or raise engineers' spending limits, in one step, by a factor of almost ten...
...it has reduced its United Steel Workers population from 94,000 in 1974 to less than 30,000 today...
...It can be done...
...Here's how managers could encourage nonbureaucratic behavior: Demand that reports be reduced to, say, three pages or less...
...Their supervisors, however, have had a devil of a time adjusting...
...Consider Worthington Industries, a steel and plastics manufacturer, which also has no rules manual...
...They were there to catch guys goofing off...
...We do not shoot paper at the enemy:' —Admiral Joseph Metcalf, on the 20 tons of paper and file cabinets aboard the Navy's newest frigates...
...The campaign against bureaucracy must become a priority of the first order...
...In short order a profound change in attitude ensued, with people working together to confront problems...
...I'd shut that thing down ." U.S...
...At New United Motors Manufacturing Inc...
...Finally, urge the lawyers or contract department—none too gently—to experiment with handshake agreements or contracts of no more than two pages...
...Refuse to send memos...
...The task is daunting, but the proper philosophy is now taking hold...
...People quickly caught on, and the flow stopped...
...With the $25 limit, it was 'Let's see how many $24.99s we can tack together without authorization .' It was a time-consuming game `We can out-Mickey Mouse you, boss ' Now, with the $200, people say, in effect, 'Hey, that's a lot of money I'm responsible for' They look at it as theirs ." Tom Peters is a frequent contributor to the Monthly...
...Need a spare part to fix a broken machine...
...Reprinted with the permission of Alfred A. Knopf Inc...
...Sad to say, rule books are referred to only to slow action, defend turf, and assign blame...
...Can you imagine what would have happened if the firm's security chief had secretly installed a hidden camera in the executive washroom...
...It was right after LTV declared bankruptcy...
...Betsy Sanders, vice-president of Nordstrom, acknowledges that the one-line "policy manual" drives Nordstrom's lawyers crazy...
...The guy just couldn't fathom how the chairman of that company had the nerve to bring home a $700,000 salary, and pay himself a whopping bonus to boot, for driving a firm over the edge...
...This is why 9.9 out of 10 "paperwork reduction" committees fail to achieve enduring change...
...You can't look the troops in the eye and say, 'It's been a bad year...
...Neither could I. In fact, the final break between Ross Perot and GM came when that firm's problematic performance in 1986 led it to refuse to pay $1,000 profitsharing bonuses to hourly workers—while giving executives all they were "entitled" to by traditional practice...
...And then we turn around and have the nerve to ask people to "do it right the first time...
...One executive notes: "You just took away their reason for being...
...Mars bars Start with the voluminous rules...
Vol. 19 • November 1987 • No. 10
