As the only staff (i.e. not line) manager reporting
to Jerry, the COO, if fell on my plate to organize and create the agenda for the ADI
Operating Council's quarterly meetings. I had heard the story of how Bob
Galvin, Motorola's CEO, signaled his commitment to quality improvement: He
had review of the quality metrics placed at the start of the agenda of their
Operating Committee's meeting (which he previously did not attend) and promptly
left the meeting upon completion of the review. So I decided to
follow his lead. Each meeting, I'd put the metrics review as the
first agenda item and I placed review of the financial
results somewhere later in the agenda.
And at each meeting, when I put up the
agenda slide, Jerry would change the order to place his primary interest, the financials
at the start of the meeting. But I persisted. After several of these
meetings, Jerry called me into his office and said: "I understand
your motives and you understand mine. This game that we're playing is not
productive. You figure out a way to satisfy both of us, or we'll just do
it my way." Nice challenge!!
At home a few nights later, I was
half-watching the TV when a familiar commercial aired for Reese's Peanut Butter
Cups, a candy bar consisting of a core of peanut butter covered with milk chocolate.
As I remember it, a jar of peanut butter and a chocolate bar are walking along
two intersecting streets and as they round a building they collide. The
resulting exchange went something like, chocolate bar: "you got peanut
butter on my chocolate", peanut butter jar: "no, you got chocolate on
my peanut butter." Suddenly the light bulb lit: combine the financial
and non-financial metrics as a single agenda item. So I added a small
number of key financials at the top of the scorecard, and the problem was solved
to everyone's satisfaction. The argument that we should limit the number
of financials because they had such high historical organizational weight was persuasive
and so we adopted a rule of 1:6 for the ratio of financial to non-financial
metrics.