8
WHEN THE RUBBER MEETS THE ROAD
Do a Timeline
Imagine the Battle of Normandy if the strategy of the invasion were not governed by a timeline. Although temperamental weather affected how that timeline unfolded, the coordination of the Allied forces and their numerous challenges demanded a careful mapping out of the steps of the invasion and when they would occur.
While few of us face the magnitude of the challenge of a military invasion, most of the challenges we face can be met with the same effectiveness as Normandy if we take the time to develop a timeline—a simple graph, list, or chart with projected dates or time frames lined up alongside key steps or milestones.
I developed a sense of the importance of a timeline in my days as a securities/corporate lawyer. Whether I was working on a public offering of stock or a merger, the filing and other regulatory deadlines forced us to prepare a list of assignments and deadlines or completion dates to ensure the transaction’s success.
The lawyers, accountants, company officials, printers, and legal assistants would all collaborate and coordinate their roles in the transaction so the deals would get done on time. A common timeline that we distributed and updated guided us through the maze of all the arduous paperwork and required submissions.
If you are not a securities lawyer or a general coordinating an invasion, you may hesitate to undertake a timeline because it is not traditionally done in your business or for the challenge you face. You may just say you don’t have time for writing timelines—you can imagine the steps in your head.
Or you may even dread that timelines will be used against you. A timeline invites scrutiny that is often far too facile. For example, I have a friend who is a project manager for a real estate development company. Part of the company’s routine is for him to meet his boss once a week to give a project update. The subject of each meeting is the budget and timeline. Because the boss is not engaged on a day-today basis with the obstacles that affect timelines, he does not understand why there may be delays. Indeed, a running joke among project managers at the company is the reaction of the boss to delays. The project managers do their timelines halfheartedly because of the feeling that it will be held against them.
But take a moment to consider four reasons why timelines, when properly treated, are an invaluable step in tying up your project preparation.
First, the mere exercise of writing a timeline instills a sense of trajectory into your work. Momentum is as critical in business as in sports, and as you complete each milestone you develop the psychological benefit of momentum like a tennis player winning successive games or sets.
Second, the timeline becomes a good source for collaboration. It instills a sense of teamwork into an undertaking. The deadline becomes the opponent, or the time to beat, or the scoreboard, and you can use it in a way that builds a sense of challenge and teamwork. Milestones motivate.
Third, on the most practical level, we all know that projects can take on a life of their own unless you control the time factor. Without a timeline, you may find yourself unable to move the project along to meet real or conceptual deadlines. A timeline is a vital step as you prepare to control the course of a project and not let it control you. Without one you may even end up going on beyond a logical or appropriate stopping point and thereby consume time that might have better been used on other challenges.
And fourth, a timeline may be a good vehicle for fleshing out how to accomplish tasks. The act of writing a timeline encourages you to brainstorm the steps required to succeed. By laying out your milestones in a row, you can shake out new steps, envision contingencies, or even develop new strategies that you otherwise might not have considered. And, despite a timeline’s great value, it’s the preparation principle that often takes the least amount of time.
Think about a Springsteen concert and the E Street Band’s confidence. I bet that the set list and even each foray into the crowd are prepared down to the minute. The result is a seamless and usually peerless rock show. View your timeline as your set list. Your performance will be more confident and clear.
A common criticism of timelines is that they inevitably go off track. Certainly the weather and the difficulty of assembling landing craft delayed the planned D-day invasion from May to June 6. And I’ve had a securities offering or two in which market conditions forced us to revamp the schedule. Over the course of my career, I reckon that a minority of my tasks stay true to their timeline. Some tasks beat their projected milestones and time frame; most take detours that erode early timeline projections. Some resistance to doing timelines arises because of this inevitable slippage. But look at it another way: make examples of timeline slippage a precedent item whenever you proceed through the preparation checklist to prepare for a task. Also, there is nothing wrong with variations or time-outs. It is important to not look at deviations from timelines as flaws or failures.
Timelines are not measurements of success and failure; they are mere road maps and organizing tools. So if you are proceeding step-by-step on your timeline in a more or less timely fashion, you are succeeding. The structure, collaboration, and motivation that timelines can generate should be the point, not a lockstep fixation with their predictive accuracy.
Next in this chapter, you’ll read about how Wendy Webster of Wegmans gets a business and its team up and running by guiding the process with a timeline. Television executive Arnie Kleiner used a timeline to transform the technological infrastructure of his station without disrupting operations. Political consultant and campaign manager Larry Gibson used timelines to coordinate the complex international components of a history-making election. All three show how timelines can help teams cohere. But I think, more important, all three show that timelines do not have to be drudgery; in each case they are exhilarating parts of preparation.
OPENING ON TIME
Wendy Webster
If you have ever walked into a spacious and elegant supermarket like Wegmans on its first day of operation, you feel the excitement of a premiere. Getting a Wegmans store opened on time requires devotion to a demanding timeline of tasks that also provides its own kind of rush to the Wegmans team. Wendy Webster, a manager for Wegmans, shows how preparing with a timeline can help get a business up and running despite the daunting demands of numerous moving parts. The night before game day, Wendy Webster visualizes the grand opening: people rush into a store the size of four football fields, her team is masterfully answering questions about rare cheeses and organic meats, and local politicians and food banks are marveling at the result of their collaboration with the new Wegmans superstore.
The morning arrives and Wendy feels the adrenaline in her blood. The crowd is massing at the doors; Wendy does one last walk-through; she holds a brief meeting with her department managers; she fills her cup with coffee for the third time and checks her watch; she gives the sign to open the doors to a new Wegmans and trusts that two years of preparation will yield the results that she visualized the night before.
A Wegmans opening matches any big opening night in terms of fan appreciation. Communities treat the store like royalty as it arrives. But the preparation requires a level of methodical preparation years in advance that reminds me of Eric Mangini laying out every day of his coaching staff’s calendar even in the off-season.
“We are not in the grocery business but in the people business,” Wendy said. “I played a lot of sports growing up and the preparation of a team is what this is all about. And you need a good timeline that coordinates hundreds of moving parts to do that.”
Indeed, as one of Wegmans’s key store openers, Wendy manages two timelines that have to intersect as opening day approaches. First, she is building and training her team, negotiating with local entities, and managing public relations on one timeline. And on the other, she is constantly interacting with the Wegmans construction manager to track progress and make sure that the two timelines dovetail prior to opening.
Based on her experience opening four Wegmans, Wendy developed a manual that covers every topic and contingency imaginable, and she constantly updates each timeline and reviews them weekly with her key team members. On a wall in her office she has names of job candidates that she updates much like the general manager of an NFL team preparing for the annual draft of college players.
As she sits in the café overlooking the entire store in Hunt Valley, Maryland, Wendy watches the teeming shoppers push their carts through the layout of fresh fruits and vegetables from around the world. The floor is bustling; the variety and color and scents of the products seems to lift people out of themselves.
“They are an old-fashioned tool, but timelines work,” Wendy said. “The preparation that goes into an opening is so vast that you have to do it in a coordinated way. The manual really guides you through the milestones on the timeline, and we have a great team to provide support in all areas.”
In terms of her construction timeline, Wendy and Wegmans leadership first must identify the location of a suitable construction office near the site. Wendy likes to have it within view of the site so that there is a visual reference when the team timeline meetings occur.
The construction piece is managed directly by Wegmans’s own construction manager. He prepares for contingencies such as roofing supplies not arriving on time because of bad weather; the health inspector demanding to reinspect a water line; the fire marshal seeing the back door propped open one day on a surprise visit. The construction manager and Wendy work so closely that each knows the other’s business as well as most project managers in either trade. And they get backup from a coordinator at the Wegmans headquarters in upstate New York who constantly assesses the joint timelines.
“The staffing and stocking of the store occurs side by side with construction, so I attend all those meetings from day one,” Wendy said.
Since construction usually takes twenty-four months, Wendy begins her store timeline by setting up local infrastructure. The first step is establishing a hiring office near the construction site so job candidates and the Wegmans team can see the store taking shape. Wendy and her staff also set up training rooms for customer service, safety, and computer training. She identifies and begins coordination with the local food banks to supply them with excess product. She develops alliances with local workforce initiatives and nonprofits. And she negotiates with local officials on issues like the provision of public transportation for her new team and for customers alike.
“There are different challenges whenever we go into a new state,” Wendy said. “We have to build that into our timeline so we familiarize ourselves early on in the preparation process. For example, laws for our type of business are done county by county in Maryland but in Virginia they are statewide. So here in Maryland I had to figure out the network and the laws up front.”
With eighteen months to go, Wendy starts to build her version of a pro football draft board. She literally fills a wall with cards that track candidates, interview results, offers, and acceptances for every position in every department in the store.
“My wall is really a big part of my timeline,” Wendy said. “It is the first thing I review each day. I set a goal every week for my hires. When you know you have found a good person, you hire them even if it means carrying them for a year. I build my training budget to allow for this.”
WENDY WEBSTER’S WEGMANS TIMELINE
With nine months to go, Wendy has interviewed and hired the store’s entire upper management.
With six months to go, she has hired the entire full-time staff and is preparing them for sixteen full weeks of live training. Some of that will occur at the training center for the new site, and some will be done at Wegmans stores around the country.
Wendy also begins the leadership intern program at the store. She starts to get a sense of which new staff members show the qualities that will make them a good team leader for, say, fruits and vegetables or dairy. These team leaders start to become trainers as much as trainees at this point: Wendy encourages them to participate in the actual training of the team even before they have completed their own training.
At this juncture, the entire staff also enters into the so-called practicing with partners program. Wendy and headquarters collaborate to assign each trainee to practice with an existing Wegmans employee at stores around the country.
“It is very important that they train at an existing store,” Wendy said. “We try to let them pick the store, put them in hotels, and really integrate them into a functioning operation and into the customer experience. Some travel for six to nine months.”
With two weeks to go, the practicing with partners program adds a new, and even more important partner, selected community members. Three months before the opening Wendy and her staff had identified these individuals and invited them to serve as practice customers. They now come onboard with two weeks remaining. That way, her staff completes its training on its home turf instead of in far-flung stores across the country.
Finally, with three days to go, members of the Wegman family come to town to give a pregame pep talk. In the weeks leading up to this, team members have stocked nonperishable products and they have gained a full familiarity with the layout of the store. The night before opening, the fresh goods arrive.
“This is a private company, still a family company in many ways,” Wendy said. “We instill that message throughout the timeline, but like to end the timeline with a direct communication. I was privileged to see Mr. Wegman do one of his final programs before he died. That really motivates the team.”
The final step in her timeline is rest before the storm. Wendy gives everyone the final two days off to rest up for the big event.
By sticking true to this preparation method and timeline, Wendy wins the game. But opening day is only the first day of an endless season, and many of the same timeline techniques still serve the store well now that it is up and running.
“Wegmans is a preparation culture,” Wendy said about a company that is regularly voted by employees as among the best employers in America. “I was a huge preparer all my life, but here they give you a stronger background and methodology. The whole structure that guides the opening of a store is founded on thorough preparation and that I think carries over into operations.”
Proof of the carryover might be the booming business that almost all Wegmans stores continue to do after the initial community excitement about an opening. Adherence to a well-prepared timeline is a critical part of each Wegmans store’s foundation.
TIMELINES ON TELEVISION
Arnie Kleiner
Preparing with a timeline can be the fine line between keeping a business operating without disruption and losing the public’s confidence altogether, as the story of Arnie Kleiner and ABC-7 in Los Angeles makes clear.
Arnie, the head of ABC-7, does not sleep much. He usually wakes up on the hour, looks at his alarm clock—his nocturnal timeline—and reviews his critical tasks timeline in his head for the next day. Then his thoughts turn to the timeline of critical projects for the station, including the relocation of their studios or the conversion of their technology to high-definition format. Arnie lives and breathes timelines more than anyone I know.
Arnie’s business has undergone incredible technological change in the past decade. At sixty-four, Arnie could use his age as an excuse to let others deal with this challenge. But he leads one of the most technologically advanced and largest local television stations in the United States for two reasons: he knows how to manage people, and he knows how to make people and projects cohere around a timeline.
“It’s really that old trick about hiring people you know can do the job and then letting them do it,” Arnie says. “The only thing I throw in is that they know that when they tell me they will have a job done on a certain date, I want it on that date and I want to see the steps laid out along a timeline to get us there. You have to think about the nature of our business—it is all about deadlines, starting shows on time, moving to get a story, and delivering it as fast as you can.”
Timelines drove two major overhauls at his station. The first was a physical overhaul and relocation of the entire station; the second was the overhaul of the technology and staffing of ABC-7’s production room. ABC-7 until 2000 was a scattered hodgepodge of studios and offices. It was an incredibly effective channel serving one of the largest and most diverse audiences in the world, but its physical chaos undermined its production efficiency.
“We were on an old movie lot for fifty years,” Arnie said with his hearty laugh regularly interrupting his vivid recollection. “It was an old Hollywood studio lot, and General Hospital people and various production services were running all around it alongside us. The station itself was housed in seven different buildings. The newsroom and the studio were two blocks away from headquarters. You had to climb down fire escape steps and sneak up alleyways to arrive to very critical places. And fundamentally it was so hard to know who worked for you. There were fifteen hundred people on the lot. One of the first things I did was put up a picture board near the commissary so we could know our colleagues weren’t extras on a soap show.”
So Arnie and the station’s owner, Disney, began the search for a more appropriate space. The only problem was that everyone realized immediately the devastating complications of relocating a television station. ABC-7 runs forty and a half hours of local news each week: two hours in the early morning, an hour at midday, two and a half hours in the early evening, a half hour at night, and four hours on Sunday morning. That is a lot of footage, a lot of airtime, and a lot of loyal viewers to keep entertained and interested. In his business, given fickle viewer loyalty and critical advertising revenue, Arnie could not afford to lose a minute of airtime, let alone the week or two needed to relocate that would strike any industry outsider as reasonable.
“We realized early that the only way to achieve this was going to be to set very specific timelines for every piece of the puzzle,” Arnie said. “I engaged my staff not from the top down but from the bottom up. I told them to tell me what was reasonable for planning, packing, and moving each of their divisions or sections. Then I scrutinized them, not necessarily pushing back but making sure they were realistic. I could tolerate a long process. But I couldn’t deal with delays. We had to tie together so many different timelines that one going awry would blow up the whole process.”
Take a look at the next page to get a sense of the complexity of the move of ABC-7.
And you thought that planning for the Normandy invasion was complicated. During and soon after the move, ABC-7 also began a complete overhaul of its technology, becoming one of the first high-definition local stations in the country, as well as the largest.
Now, how on earth did so many moving parts cohere on a specific day at a specific place? Arnie loves to talk about how many station employees would come in on their days off just to watch this great choreography take place.
“I had set timeline goals for myself, then went through the process of asking people to set their own goals,” Arnie said. “If I found their answers to be reasonable but not what I wanted, I would still side with them. If I felt they were stringing me along, I would go with my date or time frame. Then I plotted everything together on paper with my top managers. We reviewed the timeline at least twice a week during a special meeting. Of course we made some adjustments, but the overall timeline was met. Otherwise there would have been huge costs—advertising loss, overtime, mover contracts.”
ARNIE KLEINER’S TIMELINE
So if you are like me and think you could probably never learn from or even have any interest in the relocation of a television studio, I hope you are thinking twice now.
Arnie and ABC-7 provide an example of what preparation with timelines can do for organizations and careers. They may seem arduous and irritating, but in the right hands timelines can become elegant and reassuring.
A TIMELINE FOR SAVING LIBERIA
Larry Gibson
Electing the president of a country is a complicated task. A timeline makes that seemingly impossible job more manageable and in one recent case helped to make history with the election of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf as president of Liberia in 2005. Larry Gibson, a former associate deputy attorney general of the United States and campaign manager for former Baltimore mayor Kurt Schmoke, advised Sirleaf, and she is now the country’s greatest hope for not suffering a relapse of its interminable civil war.
The story of her election is in large part the story of a timeline. If you think you have difficulty sticking to a timeline on a project, imagine doing it in Liberia, an impoverished country, obliterated by war, and heedless to time in a hopeless sort of way.
As Ellen Johnson Sirleaf’s campaign planner, Larry installed a timeline (see the next page) and consequently helped instill hope that an election could finally change things for the better. He also addressed some old grief: one of Larry’s close friends, C. Cecil Dennis, then Liberia’s foreign minister, was killed by rebels in a firing squad at the start of the civil war twenty-five years ago.
On his first trip to Liberia after a twenty-seven-year absence, Larry conducted a feasibility assessment for Sirleaf’s long-shot campaign. The last words of his written report to Sirleaf were: “Opportunity plus preparation equal success.” Larry’s timeline guided that preparation.
Larry determined that the best way to perform the first step on his timeline, a feasibility study, was to do it himself. To give a complete opinion, he needed the complete picture firsthand. No hiring Western polling groups, no fancy technology. Just hit the road and see what the people are saying. He traveled through Liberia for two weeks with a driver and a guide. He kept introducing himself to as many people as he could talk to as simply Professor Larry Gibson of the University of Maryland School of Law. He didn’t identify himself with the campaign so as not to taint people’s attitudes toward his candidate.
Larry found that about 80 percent of his interviewees said that education was the most important qualification for a candidate; 15 percent said the candidate’s experience; 5 percent said platform; and no one said the candidate’s party was important. This was a shocking and important discovery at the outset of his timeline. Liberia, Larry realized, was so exhausted by its civil war that party politics, normally a major factor in African elections, no longer mattered. Political parties reminded people of the divisions that the civil war fed upon. He immediately saw strength in Sirleaf’s stellar educational credentials, with three degrees from U.S. universities, including Harvard. On the basis of his interviews, he determined that she stood a chance.
LARRY GIBSON’S TIMELINE
One last issue, though, was her gender. The civil war was primarily a male event, and something along the lines of the rebellion of the women in the Greek play Lysistrata was taking place in Liberia. Larry found women across the country who said, “Men have failed us and they are too violent.” Many women expressed the view that men should step back from the stage since they had been at one another’s throats for twenty-five years. He even found that a surprising number of men held the same opinion: “I knew at that moment the bottom-line conclusion of my feasibility study.”
The next steps on his timeline were developing the campaign strategy and designing the campaign materials. Larry allowed himself three weeks for this essential work. His designs included the poster which was both a message poster and a portrait poster, that would carry Sirleaf’s campaign across the nation.
“I was in Ellen’s house one day and saw an old picture in a frame on the floor,” Larry said. “We were struggling, about to get off-track on our timeline. We just couldn’t come up with the imagery that felt right. Then I saw that photo out of the corner of my eye. Ellen was being let out of jail in 1986 and was defiantly raising her fist in the air. I had Ellen pose for a new photo with her giving the same gesture with hand raised. Then I juxtaposed the young Ellen and the Ellen of today on a single poster.” That poster with 1986 and 2005 images of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf became the “message” poster of the campaign.
The next milestone on his timeline, the actual production of the campaign materials, provided the most challenging time frame for Larry, because it required transcontinental coordination.
Larry traveled to China and arranged for the production of the posters, stickers, banners, flyers, and brochures, and other materials. That was the easy part.
“Getting the material back to Liberia was the hard part.” Larry said. “We did not have enough time for the first shipment to come by boat. So I staggered it—we sent the first third of the materials by much more expensive airfreight, the next third by sea in one shipping container, then the final third by another boat. If the airfreight portion had been just two days late, we would have missed the critical opening of the campaign period and would never have recovered.”
The campaign staff was organized and trained while awaiting arrival of the materials, which came right on schedule. Then, armed with tons of paper and glue, push brooms, tape, staple guns, T-shirts, and banners, the campaign bombarded the country with images of Ellen that conveyed the desired themes.
But Larry had made a critical decision to hold back some of the materials. His feasibility study gave him the confidence to bet that no candidate would get a majority on the first round and that there would be a runoff between the top two vote getters. He urged Sirleaf and her partisans to maintain good relations with other candidates and their supporters. He preached that they be considered “not enemies, but just players on a different team.” Losing candidates and their supporters would later be valuable allies in the runoff election. Larry added the runoff time period to his timeline and held back campaign materials for this period at the end of his timeline. Many people in the campaign, eager to win on the first round of voting, questioned the extension of the timeline to include this runoff. But Larry turned out to be right.
The leading candidate in the first round, former European soccer player of the year George Weah, distributed all his materials and spent all of his funds. Larry used his timeline to pace Ellen’s campaign efforts and investments to a comfortable win in the runoff election.
In the final days of the runoff campaign, using a technique Larry had witnessed in a 2001 election campaign in Madagascar, the Sirleaf campaign used a rented helicopter to drop thousands of posters and stickers on two hundred remote villages across Liberia.
Ellen Johnson Sirleaf—a younger, defiant version alongside an older, mature one in traditional African dress—was literally “falling from the sky” across Liberia. Even the heavens appeared to be on her side.
Timelines, when used creatively and with nuance, can make for magical moments like this. Larry Gibson, for all his soulfulness and nonchalance, knows that such magic can come from rigid devotion to tracking project milestones. And something so basic as a timeline can help guide the complex process of transforming a country.
KEY POINTS
TIMELINES
• Timelines can be viewed as drudgery. Because of an inadequate understanding of their impact, they are often disregarded as simplistic or, on the other hand, too cumbersome and destined to fail.
• But timelines are really nothing more than an organizational tool and a way to guide and test your vision of a project. You may or may not meet the dates aligned with the milestones on your timeline, but the sheer process is part of preparation. Timelines are not your taskmaster—they’re a vehicle to clarify your preparation in general and your strategy in particular.
• The point is that you are thinking through the steps that form the strategy you have set to fulfill your objectives.
• Wendy Webster uses timelines as a tool to organize complicated store openings that would otherwise succumb to chaos without the regular review of milestones by team members.
• Arnie Kleiner uses timelines to help his team collaborate better. He does not view them so much as tools for evaluating performance but as a means for improving collaborative performance.
• Larry Gibson uses timelines to inform and strengthen his strategy. He lays out his strategic steps on a timeline, reviews them with his team, and refines or adjusts his strategy for winning elections accordingly.