VP of COBS

As you know I am (still) reading Tom Peter’s Re-Imagine!. In one of the chapters, he talks about how people are trained to follow rules and regulations and not to question certain processes as they are a “tradition”.

 

Tom explains how these processes are created. In a company, there is one expert, lets say Mr.Pro. He knows how to do stuff in a particular manner. His manager asks him to document the process to create this stuff so that others can also do the stuff in the same expert manner. This document is then given to others who start doing the stuff as well as Mr.Pro. However, over time one of the less-than-expert-worker , say Mr.Cess follows the document and comes up with the stuff that is not perfect. Mr.Cess assumed step A meant something else. So, Mr.Cess then adds more stuff to the document so that no one else assumes step A to be something else.

 

Together Mr.Pro and Mr.Cess create a huge document with several unnecessary steps which gets to be called Process( since both pro and cess contributed).  Many of the steps added by Mr.Cess are totally useless and could even cause the final result to be less than perfect. However all other workers continue to follow the document because Mr.Pro wrote part of it.

 

Tom Peters says for companies to survive in the future, especially those that have existed for a long time to have another post – VP of COBS created to re-imagine the company. If you are wondering what the post is, it is Vice President of Cutting Out Bull Shit. Oh yes, Tom Peter’s writing has changed quite bit since his “In search of excellence” days :-). He talks quite a bit about his days as a junior member in McKinsey. In fact he says he was able to write in search of excellence in McKinsey only because the senior management did not notice the work of a junior partner. If he was a senior he says his research would have to follow certain processes and it would never have succeeded.

 

According to Tom the main problem is that people have been trained not to take risk, not to think creatively since school days. In a school a student who takes risk and writes imaginative answers gets the least grade while rote answers are preferred. The author says this is because while we have re-imagined and changed the way we do business, the way we teach the youth remains stuck in industrial age of 1920s. During those times most of the work was blue-collared factory work where there was only one expert way of doing things. The school was modelled so that students are trained to follow all the rules set out by the teacher. Any imagination is frowned upon. This worked really well as you would not want to buy a car that was built by a staff that was experimenting a new brake setup!

 

However, industry has moved to white collared jobs while school still crushes all imagination, creativity and innovation. The result is that the workers in the white-collar still obey all rules and regulations without questioning the purpose.In fact, I am afraid of joining an MBA program. I prefer the self-reading method of Personal MBA so that I can maintain my COBS record. Tom says that the job of VP of COBS is to look at all the processes and ruthlessly cut out all BS from it.

 

Whenever I think of BS,time sheets come to my mind…I think it is time for a blog on the many ‘merits’ of it…  

 

I think this is going to be last post on Re-imagine… truly wonderful book that is highly recommended.