Harvard business review guide to stress management(2)

RICARDO SEMLER'S GUIDE TO STRESSMANAGEMENT

There are two things all man-agershave in common-the 24-hourdar and the annoying need to sleep.Without the sleeping,24 hours mightbe enough. With it, there is no wayto get everything done. After yearsof trying to vanquish demon sleepand the temptation to relax, I triedan approach suggested by my doc-tor, who put it this way: "Slowclownor kiss yourself good-bye."

Struck by this imagery, I learnedto manage my time and cut my workload to less than 24 hours. The firststep is to overcome five myths:

1. Results are proportional to efforts.

The Brazilian flag expresses thismyth in a slíghtly different formo"arder and Progress," it says. Ofcourse, it ought to say, ."Order orProgress," since the two never gotogether.

2. Quantityof work is moreimpor-tant than quality.Psychologically,this myth mar hold water. The exec-utive who puts in lots of hours canalways say, "Well, they didn't pro-mote me, but you can see how un-fair that is. Everyone knows I gethere at 8 A.M. and that my ownchildren can't see me without an

appointment. "3. Thepresentrestructuring requires

longer working hours temporarily.We think of ourselves as corks ona mountain stream headed for LakePlacido But the lake ahead is Loch

Ness. The present, temporary

emergency is actually permanent.Stop being a cork.

4. No onee/secando it right. Thetruth is, you arereplaceable,as every-one will discover within a week ofyour funeral.

5. This problemis urgent.Come on.The real difference between "impor-tant" and "urgent" is the differencebetween thoughtfulness and panic.

Those are the myths. The secondstep is to master my eight cures:

l. Set an hour to leave the office

and obey it blindly. If you nor-mally go borne at 7:00, start leav-ing at 6:00. If you take work borneon weekends, giveyourself a monthor two to put a stop to this perni-cious practice.

2. Take half a dar, maybe even anentire Saturday,to rummage throughthat mountain of paper in your arriceand put it in three piles.

Pile A: Priority items that requireyour personal attention and repre-sent matters of indisputable impor-tance. If you put more than four orfive documents in this category andare not currently the president ofyour country, start overo

Pile B: Items that need your per-sonal attention, but not right away.This pile is very tempting; every-thing fits. But don't fall into the trapoLoad this stuff on your subordinates,using the 70% test to help you doit. Ask yourself: Is there someoneon my staff who can do this task at

STRESSMANAGEMENT (CONTINUEO)

least70% as well as I can? Yes?Thenfarm it out. Whether or not yoursubordinates are overworked shouldnotweighin your decision.Remember,control of your time is an exercisein selfishness.

Pile C: Items that fall under thedubious rubric "a good idea to lookat." One of the most egregious exec-utive fallacies is that you have toread a líttle of everything in arderto stay well-informed. If you limitthe number of newspapers, maga-zines, and internal communicationsthat you read regularly, you'll havemore time to do what's important-like think. And remember to keep

your reading timely; informationis a perishable commodity.

3. In dealing with Pile A, alwaysstart with the most difficult or themost time-consuming. It also helpsto have a folder for the things thatmust be done before you go bornethat dar and to make a list of thethings that simply cannot go undonefor more than a few days or a week.Everything else is just everythingelse.

4. Buy another wastepapér basket.I know you already have one. But ifyou invited me to go through thatpile of papers on your desk, I couldfill both in a trice. To help yO\!decide what to toss and what tosave, ask yourself the questionasked by the legendary Alfred P.Sloan, ]r.: "What is the worst that

can happen if I throw this out?" Ifyou don't tremble, sweat, or growfaint when you think of the conse-quences, toss it.

This second wastebasket is a crit-ical investment, even though you'llnever be able to fill both on a reg-ular basis. Keep it anyway. It has asymbolic value. It will babysit yourin-basket and act like a governessevery time you wonder why youbought it.

5. Ask yourself Sloan's questionabout every lunch and meeting invi-tation. Don't be tímidoAnd practicethese three RSVPs: .

"Thanks, but I just can't fit it in.""1 can't go, but I think X can." (If

you think someone should.)"I'm sorry I can't make it, but do

let me know what happened."Transform meetings into telephone

calls or quick conversations in thehall. When you hold a meeting inyour office, sit on the edge of yourdesk, or when you want to end thediscussion, stand up from behind

your desk and say "OK, then, that'ssettled.", These tricks are rude butalmost foolproof.

6. Give yourself time to think.Spend half a dar every week awayfrom your office. Take your workborne, or try working somewhereelse-a conference room in anotheroffice, a public library, an airportwaiting room-any place you canconcentrate, and the farther away

STRESSMANAGEMENT (CONTINUED)

fram your officethe better. The pointis, a fresh environment can do won-deIs for productivity.Just make sureyou bring along a healthy clase ofdiscipline, especially if you're work-ing at halle.

7. About the telephone, my prac-tical but subversive advice is: Don'treturn calls. Or rather, return callsonly to people you want to talk te.The others will call back. Better Jet,they'll write, and you can spend ten

seconds with their letter and thengive it to the governess.

Twoancillary bits of phone advice:Ask your assistants to take detailedmessages. Ask them always to sayyou cannottakefuecallat fuemomento(Depending on who it is, your assis-tants can always undertake to see ifyou can't be interrupted.)

8. Clase your door. Oh, 1 knowyou have an open-door policy, butdon't be so literal.

we work at the high end on quality and price. So ourcritics mar be right. Perhaps nothing we've done can bea blueprint for anyone else. Still, il) an industrial worldwhose methods show obvious signs of exhaustion, themerit of sharing experience is to encourage experimentand to plant the seeds of conceptual change. So whatthe hell. .

PARTICIPATORYHOT AIR

The first of 5emco's three values is democracy, oremployee involvement. Clearly,workers who controltheir working conditions are going to be happier thanworkers who don't. Just as clearly, there is no contest

between the company that buys the grudging complianceof its work force and the company that enjoys the enter-prising participarían of its employees.

But abolir 90% of the time, participatory managementis just hot air. Not that intentions aren't good. It's justthat implementing employee involvement is so complex,so difficult, and, not uncommonly, so frustrating that itis easier to talk abolir than to do.

We found four big obstacles to effectiveparticipatorymanagement: size, hierarchy, lack of motivarían, and

MANAGING WITHOUT MANAGERS. 131

ignorance. In an immense production unir, people fedtiny, nameless, and incapable of exerting influence onthe way work is done or on the final profit made. Thissense of helplessness is underlined by managers who,jealous of their power and prerogatives, refuse to let sub-ordinates make any decisions for themselves-sometimeseven abolir going to the bathroom. But even if size andhierarchy can be overcome, why should workers careabolir productivity and company profits? Moreover, evenif you can get them to care, how can they tell whenthey're doing the right thing?

As Antony Jay pointedout back in the 1950s in Cor-poration Man, human beings weren't designed to workin big groups. Until recently, our ancestors were huntersand gatherers. For more than five million years, theyrefined their ability to work in groups of no more thanabolir a dozen people. Then along comes the industrialrevolution, and suddenly workers are trying to functionefficiently in factories that employ hundreds and eventhousands. Organizing those hundreds into teams ofabolir ten members each mar help some, but there's stilla limit to how many small teams can work well together.At Semco, we've found the most effectiveproductionunir to consist of abolir 150 people. The exact numberis open)to argument, but it's clear that several thousandpeople in one facility makes individual involvementan illusion.

When we made the decision to keep our units small,we immediately focused on one facility that had morethan 300 people. The unir manufactured commercialfooGl-serviceequipment-slicers, scales, mear grinders,mixers-and used an MRP 11system hooked up to anIBMmainframe with dozens of terminals all ayer the

planto Paperwork often took two days to make its wayfreIDone end of the factory to the other. Excess inven-tories, late delivery, and quality problems were common.We had tried various worker participarían programs,