I’ve noticed that people who have never worked with steel have trouble seeing this…that the motorcycle is primarily a mental phenomenon.
—Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
That a company looks great and feels great is still insufficient for a company to act great. For a company to act great, it must think in a significantly different way about what it does and how it does it than most companies are prepared to do. That is because most companies are people-oriented rather than process-oriented.
People-oriented companies focus their attention on who is doing the work.
Process-oriented companies focus their attention on whether the right work is being done, and more importantly, if the right work is being done, how it is being done.
People-oriented companies depend on “good” people to produce results, where good is defined as experienced, successful, self-motivated—in short, people who can be depended upon to produce good results. Someone is always shouting, “Find me someone who knows how to get the job done!” in a people-oriented company.
Process-oriented companies depend on good processes to produce results, where good is defined as the process’s ability to produce the very best results in the hands of inexperienced (or less experienced) people than the competition needs to produce the same results.
It’s valuable to note that most of the people-oriented companies I have known (and I have known thousands of them) are almost always intolerably self-righteous about their great people orientation (“We’re a people company!”), when in fact they are usually far less people-oriented than they would have us believe.
When something goes wrong in a people-oriented business, someone invariably asks the question “What’s wrong with Jack?”
(It’s a sine qua non that in people-oriented companies, somebody’s always letting the company down. If the definition of good people is people who produce good results, logic would tell us that when people fail to produce good results, they’re not good people. Not a cheery position to be in.)
When something goes wrong in a true process-oriented company, the question that invariably is asked first is “What’s wrong with the process?”
(“Jack” isn’t the problem; the process is.)
One might argue, “Ah, yes, but who creates the process in the first place but ‘good’ people?”
And I would respond, “People using a process!”
A people-oriented company’s strategy is almost always different than a process-oriented company’s strategy.
A people-oriented company first looks for the best person for the job—somebody who already knows how to do it, has done it very successfully in the past, and is self-motivated to do it.
Should such a person be found, the people-oriented company will most often provide the new person with an “orientation,” a generalized review of housekeeping principles—“This is where you get the grease; this is where we keep the pencils; this is where you can buy some coffee; this is Fred; this is Jocko; this is Myrtle”—then leaves the new person to get on with what the company hired him or her to do, to find his or her own way, to do the job the best way he or she can.
Failing to find the best person, a people-oriented company will resort to teaching as “good” a person as it can find the skills needed to perform effectively on the job, then show him or her where the grease is, where the pencils are, where he or she can buy some coffee, this is Fred, this is Jocko, this is Myrtle, and finally give the new person “the room” to decide how he or she prefers to do the job.
(Skills must be differentiated here from process, in that skills, as they are commonly taught in people-oriented companies, are those basic abilities used by all companies of the same category—for example, all auto repair shops, or all poodle-clipping shops, or all insurance companies—to get the job done in an undifferentiated way. Process-oriented companies, in contrast, design processes that are unique to their company so as to get the job done in a way that preferentially differentiates that company from its competitors—faster, smoother, less expensive, with a unique flourish.)
Process-oriented companies know that the discovery of a better way to do something is significantly more empowering than finding a better person to do it.
Process-oriented companies know that you can always lose the better person (indeed, in this day and age, you always do!), but that it’s much more difficult to lose a better process. (People aren’t the exclusive property of your company, but your processes can be.)
In short, process-oriented companies know that a better process can be liberating in that it has the power of turning ordinary people into extraordinary people. (The best people can be a limiting factor, in that there are so few of them, you have to pay a premium to get them. Once you do get them, they can hold you for ransom if they decide they’re bored with the present arrangement. Or if it’s just not quite right today. Or if they need a vacation you hadn’t planned for. Or for any reason—of theirs—at all. Then try to replace them.)
Now, I know that if you’re what would be categorized on the job as a “best person” this whole concept may offend you, and I apologize for the offense, but the good news is that a great process in the hands of a great person is a wonder to behold.
Witness Hamlet and Laurence Olivier.
Witness Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony and Leonard Bernstein.
Witness Eric Clapton and a well-tuned guitar.
Witness Brett Favre, or Tom Brady, or Peyton Manning and a football.
Witness a star at anything, and you’ll understand what I mean.
Every great person uses a great process.
The question here is, who owns the process?
For a process to be liberating, it must liberate everyone—the employees, the customers, the suppliers, and the lenders.
Such process-oriented companies as Supercuts, LensCrafters, Pizza Hut, Subway—and, of course, McDonald’s, the Walt Disney Company, Apple, and FedEx—and many, many more, all produce liberating results for their employees, their customers, their suppliers, and their lenders.
The process assures all of them a measure of predictability that few businesses produce for anyone, let alone for all four.
Supercuts possesses a process for cutting hair that enables a beginner to produce a professional result in short order at half the price a professional must charge.
LensCrafters possesses a process for creating quality eyeglasses “in about an hour” for people who simply can’t, or don’t want to, wait any longer.
FedEx possesses a process that virtually guarantees satisfied customers with its amazing record of reliability and its willingness to make the delivery, no matter what.
All differentiate themselves not by the people who work for them, but by the process through which these people produce a predictable result each and every time.
And because they possess a process that works, their people are perceived to work better than most.
Think about it this way: there is a way to do everything.
And if that is true, then there must be a better way to do everything.
And if that is true, then there must be a best way to do everything.
Not the only way, mind you, not absolutely and forever the best way. But the relatively best way, the way that produces the best results as perceived by the people with whom it interacts, the way that performs best in relationship to all the other options available at this time and for the foreseeable future.
That is what process-oriented companies are all about, discovering the best way.
But where they start is not with how to do it, but with the question “What is the best thing to do?”
And the question “What is the best thing to do?” can only be answered by understanding what people want most.
A best way process is discovered by answering the following questions:
What one thing would our customers, employees, suppliers, and lenders most like us to do for them that we and our competitors can’t currently do?
Has anyone ever tried to do this thing?
If yes, why did they fail?
What would it mean to us if we could do it?
Why can’t we do it?
What would be the best way to do it?
How much would it cost us to be able to do it the best way?
Is it worth the cost?
If yes, what would be the impact on our customers, employees, suppliers, and lenders?
If negative for any or all, how would we overcome that negative?
If we can’t overcome the negative, do the benefits outweigh the negative aspects?
If we can, should we do it?
The best way is always the way that eliminates the primary frustration experienced by any one of the four primary influencers of a business.
What is the primary frustration?
Just what you might think.
The primary frustration is the negative experience most commonly complained about concerning someone’s interaction with a business.
It’s not difficult to find out what the primary frustration is.
For example, ask a hundred people who have done business with a building contractor about the transaction, and at least seventy-five will say, “The job wasn’t completed when they said it would be; there was always an excuse.”
Ask a hundred people who have had their auto repaired about the transaction, and at least eighty will say, “I felt totally out of control, and they make me feel worse.”
Ask a hundred people who have been to a doctor about the transaction, and at least ninety will say, “I waited too long to see the doctor!”
Stereotypes? True. But it is in these stereotypical responses that one finds the primary frustration and the best way.
What would happen to the general contractor who says, “At Heartfelt Construction, we are always on time, on price, and deliver a spotless performance—or we pay for it! Guaranteed!”
What would happen to the auto repair shop that says, “When something goes wrong with your car, the one thing you don’t need is more worry. At Hearthstone Auto, you’ll always have a good experience—or the job is on us. Guaranteed!”
What would happen to the medical office that says, “At Sweet Water Medical Office, we always keep our appointments on time—or we pay for the visit. Guaranteed!”
What would happen if they actually did these things?
If they actually pulled off those guarantees?
If they eliminated, once and for all, the primary frustration normally experienced by most people who interact with their kinds of businesses day after day?
If they were to set their attention on it until their businesses became masters at performing the impossible?
Wouldn’t that make a difference to the people who buy from them, the people who work for them, the people who sell to them, and the people who lend to them?
Wouldn’t that have a positive impact on everyone involved?
Wouldn’t that set their business apart?
Isn’t that obvious?
Well, that’s what process-oriented companies are all about: inventing an unobvious way to do the obvious, every single time.
To make a promise—and to accept full responsibility for the delivery of that promise—requires control, the kind of control that only a process-oriented company can hope to exercise.
Let me tell you about just such a company, Santos Construction, a small business that determined what the primary frustration of their customers was and decided to do something bold about it.
Marino Santos used to wear black to work every day, except for a bright red scarf he wore as a sweatband that also served to tie back his crow-black hair.
Marino Santos loved the color black. To him, black signified mastery, singleness of purpose, seriousness, and also danger. Black was the color by which Marino Santos marked the barriers that distinguished him, and therefore separated him, from the rest of the world. Black warned the world that Marino Santos was a serious fellow, not to be fooled with. Black was his shield.
On the other hand, red was the color of Marino Santos’s heart.
His bright red scarf signified to Marino Santos the passion of his interest. It was the hot, restless flame at the center of his life, the intense fire that burned inside him, inside the black container, the cold shield of his distance.
While his black clothes said, “I stand alone,” his red scarf said, “I’m about to explode!”
And explode he did, every day at work. It was in the nature of the work that he did.
Marino Santos was what is called in the construction trade a framer. He and his small crew subcontracted the framing of homes in Southern California, Arizona, Nevada, Colorado—wherever the work was.
To the general contractors who hired them, they were simply known as Santos’s crew. Inside the small company, however—more like a small band of men than an actual business—they thought of themselves as los apasionados sin igual—“the only ones.”
Everyone in the trade knew Santos’s crew. Among their peers, Marino Santos and his band were the stuff of folklore. It was not only that they were the best at what they did—and there was no doubt in anyone’s mind that they were—but there was the mystique, the machismo, that accompanied them everywhere they went.
Like the stars they were, Santos’s crew remained aloof. At breaks, they would gather together, seated in a small, tight circle on a concrete slab facing each other while they quietly drank their coffee, ate their burritos, and whispered among themselves—star talk, no one knew about what.
But when Marino Santos and his crew went to work, there was nothing quiet about them at all. Their framing hammers fairly flew! Walls went up in record time—first one house, then another, emerging as though miraculously from the concrete slabs. You could literally watch the houses grow, they went up so fast. Marino Santos was in the middle of it all, his muscular arm with its shining blue steel hammer, as if growing out of his hand, whaling away at the wood, thwack, thwack, thwack; his strong melodic voice leading the songs, calling out names, swearing at the sky.
And they did it to music! For Marino Santos’s crew, every day on the job was a performance, a dance, a physical and visual crusade. Los apasionados sin igual—“the only ones.” It was what they did. It was their signature. It was what they were known for. It was what they lived to do. It was who they were.
Then, early one Wednesday morning in the middle of July, on the way to a job in Barstow, Marino Santos’s pickup blew a tire and flew off the road at ninety miles an hour and turned over five times until it finally came to rest upside down against a boulder. For thirteen hours, Marino Santos lay trapped in his truck with a broken back before he was finally discovered by the Highway Patrol.
That he survived the accident was a miracle.
But he was out of the framing business for good.
What does a framer do when he can’t frame anymore, especially when he’s a man like Marino Santos?
What does a star do when the very thing at which he excels is suddenly taken away from him?
What does a man who uses his body for a living do when his body can no longer perform?
What does a company do when it has built its ability to perform on the skills of a handful of good people and they’re suddenly gone?
For the first six months or so, Marino Santos did little or nothing but drink. He woke up in the morning and drank, and he didn’t stop until he passed out at night.
At times he would get so furious with his condition that he would heave an empty whiskey bottle through the closed bedroom window and into the street, then sit there in his wheelchair amid the shards of broken glass, screaming into the night at anyone who would listen. The police would come by, but they wouldn’t do anything other than threaten to take him in.
His crew came to visit him every day. They hated to see him like he was. They called him names. They cried with him. They sat silently by and said nothing. They threatened that they wouldn’t come back anymore. They played music and drank with him. They did whatever they could for both him and themselves—sometimes just to be there was enough.
And then, as suddenly as it began, it was over.
One day he seemed just as bad, and the next day he was better.
He called his crew together.
“I want to apologize to all of you,” he said.
“Not for the past six months, not for the drinking—I couldn’t help that.
“I want to apologize for the framing, for the arrogance, for the belief I had in my body, for being so stupid.
“I don’t want to be stupid anymore,” Marino Santos said.
“It’s time to start a new business.”
Marino Santos didn’t care what his new business was, although he knew it would have something to do with construction. Construction was in his blood. He loved the smell of raw wood. He loved seeing things start from nothing and become something almost overnight. He loved the physical impact it had on the world. It was a mark of his having been there. It was something you could touch and look at for years after.
Yes, it had to be construction, but other than that it didn’t matter what kind of construction it was.
Except for this: the construction his new business did was going to have as profound an impact on the people around him as his old business did, except that the new business would not depend on his, or his crew’s, physical skills. The business would work without them.
At first his men didn’t understand. They had always worked with their bodies. They had always taken pride in their extraordinary physical skill. Not to work like that anymore didn’t make sense. Their joy was to express themselves physically, to move on the concrete slab, to raise walls, to walk the rafters. To think of not doing these things anymore created great sadness in all of them.
But because they cared for and respected Marino Santos so much, they listened. And gradually, it came to them that what Marino Santos was talking about wouldn’t deprive them of anything, but would give them something they had never had.
In one of their many conversations together, Marino Santos said, “I have thought about this a good deal. It comes down to this: either we work for a living, like burros, until we can’t work anymore (he spread his arms as if to say, “I am the proof”), or we find a way to build a business that works for us. We think about this business, we put our minds to it; we shape it so that it works like we have learned to work, with precision, with joy, with energy. But we must find a way to do this without people like us, people like us who take pride in being separate from the world, people like us who need to be alone. People like us will eventually kill our business, as I have almost killed our business. No, we must build a business that can make it easy for people who are not like us, and who will never be like us, to act like us. It is our fierce pride that makes us so good. We must learn how to give this fierce pride to people who do not possess it naturally. We must make it possible for everyone who works in our business to become as good as we are as long as they work in our business. That will be our gift to them. We must find a way to do this.
“Our business will give them something they can’t get elsewhere in the world. And, as a result of that, they will stay, and our business will flourish. That will be their gift to us. Those who are like us, however, the other los apasionados sin igual in the world, must do what they must do. There is nothing we can do for them.”
As always, once they made their mind up, Marino Santos and his crew took their path seriously.
In accordance with Marino Santos’s instructions, each man took it as his personal mission to find work in some segment of the construction industry that was new to him.
They segmented the industry into new construction and reconstruction, and into commercial and residential. They then broke each segment into parts, to find out which segment and which part of that segment was most promising as a business opportunity.
Marino Santos told them that time was not important. What was important was making certain of their ultimate selection—that it be the single segment of the construction industry that could provide them with the greatest opportunity to achieve their objective.
It had to be a segment of the industry that had a consistent growth pattern, did not experience sharp up-and-down swings because of the economy, was relatively compartmentalized—that is, repeated the same tasks much the same way from job to job—wasn’t capital intensive to either start or maintain, and could be operated independently of other contractors—that is, could secure, start, and complete a contract without having to depend on subcontractors or general contractors to do their parts of the job.
Marino Santos’s kitchen served as their operations center.
Every night after work, the men reported their findings over a cold beer.
There were heated arguments. Each man came to conclusions that others refuted. But gradually, as the men became smarter about their mission, more intelligent about their conclusions, and more eloquent in the positions each took, their arguments became less heated, though no less intense.
Marino Santos’s strategy was simple: as one industry segment after another was excluded as an option, the men who were employed in those segments would leave them to find work in the remaining segments, until finally they would all be working in the same industry segment—the segment of choice—but for competing contractors.
And that’s exactly what happened.
After two and a half years of dedicated work, research, and planning, Marino Santos and his men found themselves decided.
It was such a simple, uncomplicated decision when they finally came to it.
They would go into the kitchen remodeling business.
And they would call it Three Day Kitchens.
On the face of it, there is something so ordinary about business.
Something so unimportant, so trivial.
For Marino Santos and his men to apply themselves so determinedly, to expend so much effort and time to the ordinary task of deciding what business to go into, to spend all that energy merely to start a kitchen remodeling business, when instead they could have done…what?
What also would a man like Marino Santos do? Join the Peace Corps? Graduate from MIT or Stanford? Enter a monastery? Try out for the Olympics? Write a book?
What better could any of us do than he?
How many people do you know who have expended as much effort, intelligence, care, or attention on the selection of a path?
How many people do you know who have taken such a passionate interest in every single thing they do?
How many people do you know who could remember their aim for as long as two and a half years with only their own interest to remind them of it, who could bring the energy and attention of a group of strong-willed people to bear down on a problem that had no end in sight, and still maintain that energy and attention as well as Marino Santos did, and who could keep that attention from wavering, from getting lost among the daily concerns that plague us all, and certainly must have plagued him?
Who do you know who possesses such force of purpose, such impeccable will?
What difference does it make what the business is, after all?
Or that it is a business?
These men—these apasionados sin igual—could have been climbing the Himalayas, and it wouldn’t have added one thing to their journey.
In fact, it was at least two more years before Marino Santos and his men completed their first kitchen for pay. They installed hundreds of kitchens for practice. Every conceivable problem was faced, agonized over, dealt with, and overcome.
They worked at night and on weekends in a warehouse Marino Santos rented, in which they constructed dozens of practice kitchen sites. Every kitchen problem his men faced during their day on the job was put on paper at night and analyzed, scrutinized, discussed, argued about, until every peculiarity, every exception, every unpredictable variable faced in the kitchen remodeling business had been reviewed at least a dozen times—and sometimes even more often than that—looking for the similarities, the predictable, the standardizing opportunities.
No one, they were sure, had ever spent as much time, trouble, and intelligence to solve the problems associated with kitchen remodeling.
They were determined to get it right.
They were going to create a kitchen remodeling system such as the world had never seen, that could produce an absolutely predictable result in the hands of novice workers trained only in their system, and they were going to figure out how to do it—how to completely renovate and remodel any kitchen—walls, windows, floors, cabinets, lighting, plumbing—all within no more than three days. Guaranteed!
And they were going to figure out how to do it at a cost significantly below the competition, at a quality significantly better than any one around, and at a profit that would justify it being done at all.
The competition, Marino Santos discovered (though he wasn’t surprised), was not the problem. There was no competition. Not for the company he intended to create.
His men reported daily on the waste, inefficiency, lack of skill, disinterest, and lack of management on the jobs they were working.
Materials and men rarely showed up on time, and sometimes never.
The job site was usually a mess.
“They are pigs,” one of his men reported disdainfully.
Where heavy reconstruction was required and surprises were discovered (as they often were), the job could be delayed for hours, even days, until the almost always absent contractor, or his foreman, if he had one, showed up to personally solve the problem.
No, as Marino Santos knew only so well, contractors were not fastidious men.
Shoddy work was normal; there was no training.
Experienced people were either hired out of the hall, off the street, or as subcontractors. The margins were so thin that there was no time or money, nor people to spend on developing new people.
No, other contractors would not determine Three Day Kitchens’ success or failure. He and his men would.
They worked like they had never worked before. They were determined to get it right.
A kitchen, more than any other room in a house, is built to certain predictable standards.
Approached randomly, that is, without a database of quantified experience, it might seem that every kitchen presents a unique problem—that every one is different. This is not the case.
Unfortunately, few small remodeling contractors have ever quantified any of their experience, and so what they find themselves dealing with day in and day out are seemingly uncommon, or problematic, conditions that always call for uncommon and, usually, costly reactions.
Indeed, what Marino Santos and his crew discovered is that most of the kitchen work they monitored over the two years of the study was predictably and monotonously the same, presenting measurably few variations on a repetitious theme.
Therefore, to invent a kitchen remodeling system that could guarantee an installed kitchen in exactly three days meant only that Marino Santos and his men had to determine what those variations on the theme were; create a variety of preplanned kitchen solutions to address each and every one of them; design a preprogrammed construction and installation strategy for each kitchen solution; recruit, hire, and then rigorously train a small crew of inexperienced technicians in their construction and installation system; and establish a management system that would assure Marino Santos and his men that their system would be used exactly as planned, each and every time.
And then, practice, practice, practice these processes, over and over and over again, until there wasn’t a question in anyone’s mind that they could be implemented faithfully and impeccably every single time.
Marino Santos and his men boiled their mission down to five essential ingredients:
The failure of a contractor to exercise control over any one of these five control points, as Marino Santos and his men referred to them, meant that the job wouldn’t be completed as promised.
That would not be a problem at Three Day Kitchens.
They renewed their intention each day.
The night following their first paid kitchen installment was a special night for Marino Santos and his men. It had gone off without a hitch, but they had known it would turn out that way long before the job began.
They had planned it that way, and they had practiced their process diligently. Nothing was taken for granted.
Their customer was astonished.
Not only was the job done exactly as promised, but the men who did it were astonishingly clean, well organized, and fastidious in their comportment—“joyful,” the customer said, expressing her delight to Marino Santos about not only having the job done exactly as promised, but having experienced people who obviously loved their work so well.
“How do you find such good people?” she asked.
Marino Santos smiled. “I wish I knew,” he said.