<![CDATA[Tony Pashigian

<![CDATA[Tony Pashigian - Blog]]>Thu, 31 Jul 2025 21:01:48 -0400Weebly<![CDATA[Do results still matter?]]>Tue, 13 Feb 2024 14:58:12 GMThttp://www.tonypashigian.com/blog/do-results-still-matterEverything I read online about the work environment talks about employee’s feelings, cherishing your team, or is a contemporary mob that’s gang tackling anybody that suggests that anything less that 100% remote work is leadership tyranny. Almost all of them speak about the hypothetical productivity improvements and I can’t recall any that referred to data to back up their claims. I’ve worked with, and for, plenty of tyrants and those SOB’s made what was a difficult job infinitely worse. Of course, any good leader would hold a team in high regard and be sensitive to their feelings and, in the post-COVID world, give some consideration to remote work. But where is the conversation about results?

It seems to me the conversation should be to:

Define the objective.
Share the vision.
Set expectations.
Ensure the team has the tools and training to reasonably expect them to deliver on results.
Get consensus on a reasonable credible plan.
Hold the team accountable.

Cherishing the team, being nice, and concern for team members feelings are leadership style factors that good leaders will work to maximize. It’s a “mission first; people always” approach to leadership. Mission first implies that the results of the program are inherently granted primary status. The rest of those things should be maximized to the extent that they do not negatively affect progress or the outcome of a project. The challenge for any leader is to optimize the balance between the following two fundamental truths:

The creation of the credible plan should take human factors, decency, fairness, and work/life balance into consideration.
The circumstances of the execution of the credible plan could require some extra hours or someone’s feelings getting hurt because of something like accountability revealing they didn’t do what they said they were going to do.

The conversation about employee satisfaction from feelings, caring for the team, and entitlement to remote work, to the exclusion of results, ignores the incredible satisfaction a team, and its individual members get from knocking a program out of the park.

The whole conversation seems to start with employees and, sometimes, never gets around to the companies that employ them, leaders, or results. The only reason companies need employees is to get results. There is no doubt that some companies and leaders have got it wrong and continue to do so. But it’s dangerous to implement changes based on feelings without some experimentation to prove what will and won’t work. In the real world, the unintended consequences are currently being felt.

A recent Automotive News study concluded that increases in warranty and decreases in quality could be traced back to leadership failing to emphasize Program Management and Program Managers being left without a method of recovery from the negative impact on collaboration that remote work has had.
As an example of failing to balance the two maxims, above, I had a recent experience on a pre-launch program turnaround that seems to support their findings. The program was off the rails, there was no credible plan, and no two people agreed on the status of the program. Management was unaware of the trouble they were in because the red/yellow/green charts camouflaged the actual status. The office was almost always empty with everyone working remotely.
When I suggested we meet in the office once or twice a week to get aligned I met significant resistance. The team members preference and comfort were discussed to the exclusion of the program results. In fact, one young team member openly argued that his work was much more effective when he was isolated at home. Of course, it was! HIS work for his functional team was optimized at the expense of the program results. So, like always, the unintended consequences of a “feel good” wave of social media sentiments that lead to untested overcorrection without a balance that considered a credible plan and a path to results cost the company dearly. How long can the company afford to pay these employees for activity instead of accomplishment? Don’t they eventually need to sell something to generate the money to pay these employees?

Maybe people on the team could’ve learned from his incredible organization skills while he learned to focus on the program if they had sufficient face-to-face interaction Maybe he could’ve learned something about being a part of a team. Regardless, he chose (and was PERMITTED!) to sit in his bubble and missed the opportunity for two-way learning.

Of course, companies and leaders need to support their teams and consider employees feelings. And it seems clear, for indirect labor, we have demonstrated that some amount of remote work is possible and could even be healthy for a team, though it varies by industry. But failing to balance those things with a credible plan, accountability, and results creates a social club rather than an effective, results-oriented, successful team.
]]><![CDATA[Do You Build a Culture or Does it Just Happen?]]>Thu, 06 Oct 2022 17:02:11 GMThttp://www.tonypashigian.com/blog/do-you-build-a-culture-or-does-it-just-happenHow do you go about creating the company culture that attracts, motivates and retains people?  First of all, what is culture?  Culture is the environment that’s created when people believe in the company, clearly understand how to be successful in their job, and are fairly compensated.

There’s a common thread that flows from believing in the company and clearly understanding how to be successful in a job.  It’s comprised of expectations, logic, transparency and consistency.  The culture is not something you actively build.  It’s something that results from the decision making, logic, transparency, consistency, conduct, and behavior of leadership and cascaded expectations from the top to the bottom of the organization.

It starts with a leadership team that shares “the vision”.  I don’t mean a vision statement on a placard in the lobby.  I mean something tangible.  For example, a leader that believes profit will follow making the customer’s life easy, delivering on commitments, and being fair in negotiations can make such a statement to the organization.  Then comes the test.  Remember, this is about culture.

Leaders have to follow through on their stated vision with consistent, logical decision making that passes the smell test for alignment with the stated vision.  Once they do something like delay kicking off the critical path tooling for 6 weeks, to push funding into the next quarter, for a customer project so they “make their numbers” to get a bonus, the rest of the organization is correct to question their commitment to the vision.  Not only that, but when their decision makes the project 6 weeks late and they criticize the project team for not making up the time, the rank and file see right through supposed leaders.  It still creates a culture; just not the one that leadership had hoped for.

If leaders stick to their vision by making consistent, logical decisions that align with the vision, they need to set expectations for the next level of management.  They need to define the expected output of their managers.  A dedicated inputs/outputs (SIPOC) discussion needs to be had between Vice Presidents and the managers that report to them to set expectations.  This step is almost always skipped because the assumption is their managers know what to do and it would be overkill to “state the obvious”.  It’s a fatal mistake to fail to clearly define expected outputs and allow the manager to define the inputs they require to get the job done. Understanding expectations is critical to a fun, productive, successful culture.

The inputs/outputs conversation doesn’t need to list every bit of minutia to get the job done.  You can skip “order more paperclips when you run low”.  Using Engineering as an example you could say that their expected output in a new product development project is to create drawings for the product that meets performance and budget expectations.  The Engineering manager could reply that required inputs are performance specifications, budget, and project timing.  They might be inclined to guess that things like CAD or DFMEA’s are part of their expected output, but those are just their tools of the trade required to create the drawings that Purchasing and Manufacturing can use to do their jobs.

To ensure the culture is spread from the top of the organization to the people doing the work, the expectations have to be cascaded down through every level of the organization.  What starts out as a general statement that “we’ll make customer’s lives easy, deliver on commitments, and be fair in negotiations” at the top of the organization distills down to “achieve 37 second cycle time on operation 9” for the manufacturing engineer or process operator.  Seeing the connectivity from top to bottom with consistent, logical decision making builds a predictable, reliable environment which is fertile ground for a fun, productive, successful culture.

A March 11, 2022 Forbes article titled “What is Company Culture” says having a customer-first philosophy, be transparent with employees, always be learning, demonstrate respect, fail fast, fail publicly, and a “do it now” mentality as values will create an amazing culture.  I believe that placard statements or one-off “ask me anything” transparency meetings fall short of creating a culture that everybody wants to be a part of and other companies want to recruit from.  It’s more than an event.  It’s more than a team building social gathering.  It’s the communication and consistency in every action taken every day.

I’ve been on teams that had remarkable cultures within organizations that had poor overall cultures.  We didn’t need the organization to hold us accountable.  Our self-accountability dominated because we all shared the same project vision and had clear expectations.  So, we were naturally attentive to results.  The only downfall of experiencing a magical culture is when the project is over or people get reassigned to other teams more aligned with the poor company culture, they are often dissatisfied and consider leaving the company.

The points just made are a high level walk from vision to expectations to accountability.  There are countless micro-behaviors that will contribute to the constantly being defined culture.  Some examples include:

Do you follow up?  It’s one thing to EXpect a thing to get done; it’s another level of engagement to INSpect to be sure that it was actually done.  Do you assign things to people by forwarding an email or do you discuss it with them face to face?  Do you attempt to hold people accountable to an outcome without discussing the specific expected output and allowing a reasonable time to get the thing done? Do you walk by the assembly line without talking to the operators?  Do they even know your name?  Do you know theirs?  Do you tolerate disorder and unclean work areas or do you expect everything to be in its place?  How clean are the washrooms and how many light bulbs are burnt out in them?  Do you tolerate unsafe actions or working conditions?  When someone quits do you expect one of their peers to pick up the work or do you replace them?  Do you do what it takes or “do your best”?  If it takes more than you have to give do you solve the resource limit or do you live with substandard results?  Does politics have a place in your organization or are people rewarded based on merit?  Do the “good” people watch you tolerate the lack of productivity of the “bad” people or are there consequences for not delivering on reasonable expectations?

The point is that every action and inaction places a brick in the foundation of the culture is being created.  “Is being created” is intentionally chosen language.  Culture isn’t something you necessarily directly build.  It happens.  It’s the result of doing things.  As much as it’s out of fashion to point out the difference between right and wrong behavior, your resultant culture will betray whether your organization, top to bottom, does things right or does things wrong.  You WILL create a culture by your actions.  Whether it’s amazing or toxic depends on the concepts discussed above.
]]><![CDATA[Lean in Construction: What’s missing?]]>Sun, 06 Jun 2021 21:26:05 GMThttp://www.tonypashigian.com/blog/lean-in-construction-whats-missingWell, first, what is Lean?  In its simplest terms, it’s elimination of waste.  What’s waste?  Any effort or material for which the customer perceives no value and for which they are unwilling to pay.

For many industries other than commercial construction, every citizen is a likely customer.  The customer pays for the product or service and uses or consumes it themselves.  So, they are sensitive to both cost and quality.  Consider the following as an example of how customers react when they don’t perceive value.  In the 1970’s American cars required frequent service, they didn’t last long, and they just didn’t seem to embody craftsmanship.  Meanwhile, engineers in Japan were rethinking processes and products with a goal of eliminating waste.  The result was a higher quality product with several feature improvements.  So, American consumers started to give their business to the Japanese auto makers.

In the construction industry, an owner is less likely to be the person occupying the project at the completion.  They’re somewhat of a third-party buyer.  They are buying something often with money that is not theirs, personally, and they will not personally use what they buy.  That relationship seems to insulate the industry from the necessity to improve to realize their potential.

The value stream from general contractor to subcontractor seems to have hundreds of years of tradition that is unaffected by the lessons learned about elimination of waste in other industries.  In fact, layers of waste (expense) are added to protect themselves from each other and owners will find it more difficult to import a building than consumers found it to buy a Japanese car.  So, if we can’t import a competitor, we’ll have to stop tolerating the waste.  So, we want to fix the industry and there’s an increasing acceptance that Lean is the right methodology.  But, what’s missing?

Practicality.  A starting point.

Lean practitioners often start at a high-level discussion like Quality “experts” did in the auto industry in the 1970’s.  They correctly include words on their posters and slide decks like efficiency, productivity and optimization as they attempt to appeal to senior managers in the construction industry.  Appealing to leaders is the right thing to do because Lean is a company-wide culture.  The CEO contributes as much, or more, than the construction worker or the person cleaning up the construction site.  This irrefutable lesson was taught by Deming in the auto industry, adopted by the Japanese, and resulted in a formidable – and almost existential – challenge to American auto makers.

So, leadership in the construction industry pays handsomely for Lean consultants and some even buy into the idea.  But they don’t know what to do next.  Posters are hung up proclaiming “we’re a Lean company”, directing people to eliminate waste, and talking about value for customers.  But the people that are selling, bidding, or building projects want to know: “What am I supposed to write on my task list that, if I do it, will be a step in the direction toward Lean?”

People that understand Lean need to be inserted in construction projects where the work is happening.  They need to be empowered to overrule the “but this is the way we’ve always done it” resistance to change.  It’s not that their ideas are going to be revolutionary.  On the contrary, at the working level the ideas will seem like they are no big deal.

Waste isn’t taking a million dollars out of the corporate checking account and setting it on fire.  Waste is the plumber showing up to the job site at 6:00 AM only to learn that the plumbing material isn’t expected to arrive at the job site until 2:30 PM.  Waste on a construction project is a death of a thousand cuts and eliminating it requires rethinking accepted habits, conduct, and behavior.  It requires a new culture.  A culture of Lean.

I contend that teaching Lean in the context of current project will better teach people how to think Lean than a presentation or classroom setting.  Someone trained in Lean thinking that is assigned to a current project might:

Optimize the performance of the enterprise versus letting each department fight to have their work optimized. A business development team coming in at the last minute with a hot job that needs to be estimated in half the normal time is setting the project up for costly errors. A strong pre-construction department taking a “my-way-or-the-highway” without getting feedback and buy in from the eventual field team might be setting them up for issues in the field.
Evaluate processes to look for gaps or redundancies. Companies that are more mature are likely to have processes that were created and modified by several managers over years. Each manager had their own experience (or lack of it), knowledge, and motives. The result is often a Frankenstein of process quilt work that is less efficient and effective as it could be. Process mapping critical processes is essential to ensure Lean.
Question why a temporary lay-down area hasn’t been created to store material near where work is being conducted. Craftsmen moving material instead of performing their craft is a waste.
Not accept “I think so” when they ask if material is on hand. They’ll trust, but verify. They’ll ask for a picture of the material on-site to be sent to them.
In fact, they’ll smell a rat every time anybody says “I think so”, “maybe”, I have a gut feel”, or “kind of”. They deal in facts, data and commitments.
When the project manager creates a schedule that relies on the superintendent making creative arrangements with subcontractors, he’ll realize the schedule was created with the “curse of knowledge” and requires more communication, coordination and planning than is customary. If the schedule is released as-is and everybody was left to figure it out on their own, there would be chaos. The superintendent, if not properly communicated with, will resort to the industry standard “those guys in the office don’t know how to build buildings”. The Lean expert would insist on a written plan that accompanies the schedule and explains the site choreography and ask those involved to approve and accept it before the work was started.
Lean thinkers will communicate frequently with subcontractor’s management. They provide complimentary feedback if everything is going as planned. They provide a performance review if there are things like poor quality, people not showing up to the site, or materials being wasted. They’ll assume that no self-respecting manager at a subcontractor wants to be known for those indicators of wasteful performance.
Break the schedule down into specific date-driven tasks and reconfirm commitment from those responsible to performing the work.
Not accept a disorderly construction site.
Conduct project review meetings with the field team, preconstruction team, and business development team at appropriate milestones to ensure what was planned is what is being executed and look for opportunities to improve the quality of handoffs through the process on future projects.
Recognize that all rework is waste and insist on high quality the first time.
Ensure lessons learned from mistakes are communicated to the whole team so they are not repeated.
Only accept clear scope documents and credible plans and document everything else as an issue to be solved. Lean thinkers will look at gaps in scope, schedule, buy-out, and methods planning as the potential to drive change orders or rework later in the project when it’s more expensive and will add to the duration of the schedule. Intense and detailed planning eliminates waste downstream.
Optimize the execution of the entire project rather than allowing the sub-optimization of individual subcontractor scope because of personalities, conduct, or behavior.
Create appropriate collaborative coordination between trades for sequential dependencies or when expediency requires that they work in the same area at the same time.

Those bullet points do not define Lean.  Each item is an example of a Lean thought.  The list is intended to demonstrate Lean thinking.  It’s about questioning everything.  The more of an industry custom something is, the more consideration should be given to the question of whether it can be done more efficiently.

When you read those bullet points you probably thought they were underwhelming.  You might’ve even been thinking that you already do these things.  Does everybody in your company do them?  Is it in your culture?  Is your senior leadership auditing to ensure the culture is being respected?  People will perform to the lowest standards senior management is willing to accept.

I believe a practical starting point introducing Lean into your construction company is to start the continuous improvement process of questioning everything.  If it ain’t broke, break it.  Start with the projects you’re working on now.  If your team is so steeped in tradition that they can’t imagine a way to improve, you might consider bringing some Lean minded people in from other industries to come in and immerse themselves on to your teams.  The Lean questions will start immediately and they can begin process mapping for more broad improvements across your company.  The elimination of waste more than funded the effort in other industries.

Starting with the context of actual plans, tasks, and actions that have to take place on current projects is the birth of your new culture.  It transforms Lean from an academic idea-of-the-day to a real mindset of continuous improvement.  You’ll develop the habit of not taking things for granted and starting to ask “why am I doing it this way?”.  Ultimately, you won’t just look, but you’ll see.  Waste will jump out at you and you’ll be ready to receive the bigger message the next time you sit through a Lean workshop or presentation.]]><![CDATA[The ‘Ready, FIRE, Aim’ Approach to Turnarounds Never Works]]>Sat, 01 Aug 2020 18:03:37 GMThttp://www.tonypashigian.com/blog/the-ready-fire-aim-approach-to-turnarounds-never-worksWhen results aren’t matching forecast, it’s all too common for companies to reorganize by moving people around, firing people, or hiring new people.  It’s important to start by evaluating the enterprise to determine if the current resources are aligned such that it is reasonable to expect the desired outcome.  It’s always advisable to aim before you fire.

When engaging in organizational turnaround it’s important to first understand the expected output of the organization.  Then work backward through the steps required to create the output.  Finally, the inputs that are the raw material (whether that is information, component parts, or tools) the organization will process to create the desired output can be defined.

Only then can the current processes be evaluated to determine if they are designed to generate the output with the given inputs.  And only then can the organization be assessed for whether it is structured correctly, and the required skillsets are employed to perform the tasks that are a part of the processes.

Both assessing the processes and the organization are necessary steps in ensuring the organization can achieve the desired results.  It’s clear that the current conditions are not satisfactory, or a turnaround wouldn’t be required.  It makes no sense to jump into a reorganization prior to understanding the optimal roles and processes are required to generate the desired outcome.

A byproduct of this analysis will be a lean sequence of processes and a lean organization.  Over time processes are changed or added as the ‘good idea of the day’ or as a layered activity to mask an issue.  Also, customer expectations change over time and processes or organizations that were designed to achieve a particular result might now be obsolete or require adjustment to get the job done.  By considering the logically sequenced steps required to achieve the result, gaps and redundancies are automatically revealed.

It’s also important to remember that, while consensus is nice, it has to be a low priority in your turnaround efforts.  Leaders that seek peace instead of results end up hiring consultants to turn their businesses around in the future.  You aren’t looking for peace first and then assessing how close you can to the right inputs, processes and organization.  You’re looking for results.  There will be organizational inertia.  Expect it.  Then plow through it.

So, rather than immediately reorganizing or firing everybody, the necessary steps to get the results you are looking for are:

Understand the desired output of the organization
Work backward through the steps necessary to create the output
Define the input required as raw material
Evaluate processes to eliminate gaps and redundancies
Evaluate the organization for having the right skillsets and structure

Those steps will point you in the direction your turnaround must go to get the desired results.
]]><![CDATA[Launch Readiness Assessment / Launch Recovery]]>Fri, 07 Feb 2020 17:49:43 GMThttp://www.tonypashigian.com/blog/launch-readiness-assessment-launch-recoveryDid you just attend another program review meeting 15 months before launch and have an uneasy feeling about a program team that seems too comfortable missing milestones or are 20 days past start of production and are unable to meet delivery and quality requirements? For the former you are wise to invest some energy to determine if the program is still on track. For the latter, while it would’ve been great to discover this earlier, it can still be fixed. You just have the additional burden of propping up production while you go back and put all the pieces for success in place.

To assess launch readiness on a new product development program any time before start of production, start with a broad look across the program at a high level. Another way to say that is to “manage wide”. This has to be done by someone (internal or consultant) with enough experience to know how to sense danger. They should review tracking and summary tools to look for disconnects, missing execution steps or tasks performed out of sequence.

Here are a few examples of observations and analysis the troubleshooter should be doing:

Is the program team executing tasks out of sequence? Did they write the DFMEA before they got a signed statement of work? Did they create drawings without writing a DFMEA? Was the control plan written before, and does it inform, the operator instructions.
Is the timeline an actual credible plan? Are lead times based on commitments from suppliers and functional groups or is the plan “the best you could do” with the time available? If supplier timing doesn’t support requirements, has expediting been sought? Have customer expectations been adjusted to match what is possible?
When weaknesses are found, transition from managing wide to managing deep. For example: The plan will probably include a PPAP required date. So, test the validity of the ability to meet it by asking questions. Is there a bill of materials? Yes? Good. When is final PPAP? What is the component PPAP date for each component? Have all suppliers been selected? Have purchase orders been issued? Have all suppliers committed to their PPAP timing? Mastery of all of that is required. Any signs of weakness are a point of risk for the program.
Look for red flags in the basic program tracking tools or program outputs. For example, ask if they have an open issues list. If they don’t, it’s a huge red flag. If they do, dig deeper. Which issues have to be closed to support the next big project milestone? How many issues are 30, 60, and 90+ days old? Are any of the aging issues holding up downstream activity that will affect the timeline?

"It is much less expensive to bring in a consultant for a short time to keep a project on track than it is to hire a team of consultants to pick up the pieces after a start of production for which you weren’t ready."

So, the approach is to manage wide until something suspicious is found and the switch to getting into the details by managing deep. The investigation is in no way limited to the examples given above. The approach applies to every facet of a new model development program. If there is concurrent engineering, as is often the case, the investigation can take you beyond the walls of the client to the customer or suppliers designing adjacent subsystems. The bottom line is you are looking for total commitment to parts on the floor at the expected time and quality, as opposed to tidy red/yellow/green charts.

The success of this investigation and the resultant prescribed corrective action, if any is required, is largely dependent on who runs the process.

The program team led execution to where they are today.  They were influenced by management, budgets, politics and the limits of their own experience.  Egos, pride, and job security being with they are, they are likely to conclude everything is fine or “I already knew about that problem”.  To know and not to fix is to not know.
The PMO is often staffed with well-intended, smart people that create systems and processes for everything.  With each customer and product being different, emerging technology, ever changing sourcing strategies and many other variables, no two programs are alike.  So, as much as it’s attempted to automate program execution, an experienced person with focus on parts on the floor needs to know when to pivot from systems and processes to guerilla warfare to get the job done.

The best alternatives are either: a) An experienced outside consultant that can quickly assess a program, determine if they sense danger, identify the source, and prescribe a corrective action and credible plan. b) A trusted resource with the same experience and talent but from within the enterprise that is selected by the head of the organization.  The relationship would allow them to prevent being blocked by politics or fear of a shoot-the-messenger response.  These relationships are increasingly rare.

Given sufficient resources at the onset of a program, any of them can launch successfully.  However, competing priorities, budget ‘adjustments’ to “make the quarter”, lack of experience, turning off your brain and letting the system handle execution, and countless other causes often lead to results that fall short of requirements and expectations.  It is much less expensive to bring in a consultant for a short time to keep a project on track than it is to hire a team of consultants to pick up the pieces after a start of production for which you weren’t ready.

]]><![CDATA[Strategy Camouflage]]>Mon, 30 Sep 2019 17:53:48 GMThttp://www.tonypashigian.com/blog/strategy-camouflageMost people don’t dispute the importance of having a strategy. It’s the overarching plan that an organization will use to achieve their objectives. Of course, this implies the organization has overarching objectives.

Senior management owes the organization overarching objectives. Not only that, they must be provided with sufficient time for managers and directors to develop credible plans to meet the objectives. Even though that sounds incredibly obvious, it is surprising how often a manager or director is asked to describe what they plan to accomplish in the coming year prior to having meaningful objectives identified. Of course, you can’t have a meaningful discussion about strategy without mentioning objectives.

Some organizations think of creating a strategy as an annual task that they have accomplish instead of doing “real work”. Nobody argues against creating a strategy because it’s an insupportable argument. However, once created, the organization can get back to the “real work” until strategy time next year. Only the most effective enterprises systematically monitor progress from top to bottom to ensure expected movement toward the objectives.

Left without a strategy that cascades a plan throughout the organization, managers and directors often plan ad hoc improvements or departmentally specific optimizations. The issue is that these ad hoc actions in different departments across an entire organization can work against each other as they are not components of a coordinated plan to achieve a common objective. So, rather than subordinate the metrics of a department to those of the organization you get un-choreographed actions in departments that result in some unpredicted, unplanned and, often, unwanted outcomes for the organization.

For the sake of discussing some typical pitfalls related to strategy creation and cascading, let’s assume objectives are in place.

Once the strategy that is designed to achieve objectives that are satisfactory to stakeholders is in place, it can, and should, be broken down into department specific objectives that will logically combine to meet the overarching organizational objectives. These objectives must be cascaded down through the organization to end up as very specific tasks or required outcomes for departments and the people in them. It is, after all, the most meaningful content for setting expectations related to future performance reviews: individual actions that combine to achieve the desired results for the enterprise. But that’s, often, not how it goes.

Arguably, worse than not having a strategy at all is thinking you have one but daily actions of peers and other team members are not linked to any strategic plan. Management is confident a strategy exists but team members have no earthly idea how their daily actions contribute to the goals of the enterprise. The thin veneer of what appears to be a strategy camouflages the absence of one.

Here are some examples of “strategy camouflage”:

The “Management Strategy”.

Management has been told that they must create a strategy. So, they gather to create something that appears to be a strategy. However, it isn’t shared with the team that would deliver it. Objectives that would support the strategy are not cascaded down through the organization. The objective is to fulfill the requirement with a check-the-box activity to develop a strategy as opposed to defining a plan to bring about a desired future.

The “File-Cabinet Strategy”

The effort is data driven and many different levels of the organization are engaged in the creation of this strategy. Growth objectives are proven to be real with credible targets and customers identified. Logical continuous improvement or profit enhancing vertical integration ideas are identified and high level plans are included. The bottom line is that reasonable goals are created and thought is put into what would need to happen to reach them. The results are presented to stakeholders and are met with a mood of acceptance. And that’s where it ends.

These come very close to becoming applied strategies. However, the process of developing the strategy is looked at as the objective of this project. Once completed, the strategy is placed in a file cabinet to serve as a starting point for next year’s strategy. It is not made a part of the daily “corporate conversation” and people return to the “real work” when it’s complete.

The “Public Display Strategy”

This is usually some blend of a Quality Policy creation and the development of an actual strategy. Some noble, concise statements are made about the kind of company yours either will or won’t be and boiled down to mission and vision statements. These are proudly displayed throughout the enterprise and each employee gets a laminated copy. Employees read them and don’t object to the high-level, logical ideas that are the equivalent of “don’t run with scissors”. However, they can’t bridge the high level statement to their daily activities.

The “Moon and the Stars Strategy”

This goes a step further than the concise statements made in mission and vision statements. It includes a list of ambitious, ambiguous and/or vague ideas that, in the best case, would be long-term goals. However, they lack any ties to the daily operations or management’s commitment to install the appropriate infrastructure to make them realistic. The rank and file ready these fluffy, idealistic ideas and can’t imagine what they are supposed to write on their task lists to help achieve them. Regardless, they are confidently in favor of solving world hunger - once someone tells them how they can contribute.

The better versions of the Moon and the Stars Strategy have very specific statements about financial goals or goals for growth, like “increase EBITDA by 2% next year”, but they stop there. To be effective, senior management would need to work with managers and directors to develop credible plans that define how the objective can be expected to be accomplished. Activities could be broken down into specific tasks, cascaded to team members at all levels in the organization, and tracked to completion. Leaving “increase EBITDA by 2% next year” as the “detailed strategy” does nothing but frustrate those expected to deliver.

Conclusion

Having a strategy is essential to meeting the objectives of any organization. Successful entrepreneurs understand this, intrinsically. The entrepreneurial spirit can be a casualty of the systems, processes, and procedures culture of corporate America. It is paramount that competent leaders implement strategy from top to bottom in the company. It’s one thing to trust that your team is effective, but if you really want to ensure results you’ll trust, but verify with regular evaluations. What is employee doing if not contributing to the execution of a strategy to achieve an objective? It’s the difference between activity and accomplishment.

As a competent leader, you need to protect against strategy camouflage. Strategies are not created to check a box or because “it was assigned to you”. You owe it to the stakeholders of the company to be able to commit to results and have a credible plan with reasonable confidence they can be achieved.

]]><![CDATA[Change to Transform]]>Sun, 29 Sep 2019 22:35:45 GMThttp://www.tonypashigian.com/blog/change-to-transform

The methods that created the crisis are not the same methods that will transform to the expected performance level.

Once your enterprise realizes results are not meeting expectations and they insist performance is improved, it is essential to realize that change is required to transform trajectory and results.

There are early indicators your enterprise is not performing to meet expectations but, often, the early indicators don’t have a significant cost, timing or quality impact so the warning signs don’t result in a call to action. With no real negative impact, the same methods that caused the gap between expected and actual performance continue to be employed causing the performance deviation to grow.

Most organizations have processes in place to discover performance issues. For example, in the case of projects, regular project review meetings are held to check status at defined milestones. Unfortunately, Project Managers have reason to attempt to put the most positive spin on the interpretation of the status of the project. Also, managers either assume the project is under control or often lack the experience to interpret the data and accurately envision the outcome if the current unacceptable trajectory is followed to conclusion. It’s essential for managers to have the experience and wisdom to be able to “smell a rat”. Without it, the troubled project is doomed. Whether because the status is presented with the most positive spin or management lacks the ability to smell a rat, the same methods continue to be used thereby driving the enterprise further into the ditch.

When a project, department, or enterprise finds itself off track, something has to change if it can be expected to improve. The methods that created the crisis are not the same methods that will transform to the expected performance level. The resistance to change has to be removed to maximize effectiveness.

The ideal recovery would be for someone with the experience of having accomplished the objective or meeting performance expectations to work with the existing team or leader to turn the business around. Not only do you end up with the desired results, but the team or leader learns from the process and will be of more value to the enterprise in the future. They learn to see the distinctions between actions and processes that worked and those that didn’t work.

Having said that, times of crisis are rarely situations that you can tolerate a large learning curve. Decisive action is required because you are not meeting stakeholder or customer expectations. There are some very real personal, political and corporate factors that can introduce defensive roadblocks to transformation. People’s egos and weaponized accountability in myopic, short-term thinking in public company boardrooms are examples of compulsion for defending past methods. True transformation requires that results have primary consideration. Defending past actions and explaining how those same processes, systems and political barriers must be respected going forward have no place in a recovery initiative. Again: The methods that created the crisis are not the same methods that will transform to the expected performance level.

So, if your project, department, or enterprise truly wants to close the gap between expected and actual performance, it is essential to realize that change is required to transform trajectory and results.

]]><![CDATA[Back to Business-as-(un)Usual]]>Wed, 27 Dec 2017 18:30:53 GMThttp://www.tonypashigian.com/blog/back-to-business-as-unusualIt just doesn’t make sense. Everybody is doing exactly what they should be doing. Nobody is doing anything wrong. They’re following the processes and using all of the systems. But you’re not getting the results you expect. Customers aren’t happy with product quality. Management and shareholders expect better financial performance. Is business-as-usual the problem?

An enterprise is, of necessity, attentive to results when getting started. They measure success based on profit, happy customers, pride in craftsmanship or any of a number of other merit-based responses from the market. Over time, the focus on important factors like performance, efficiency, and profit often lead to the introduction of key performance indicators, system enhancements, and processes that are intended to be followed and automatically result in success. In short, goals shift from enterprise output to individual department metrics and from doing what is necessary to achieve the desired result to turning off your brain and doing what you are supposed to do according to the systems and processes.

The resulting problem is difficult for any organizational culture to resolve. Departments have to continue to present KPIs, whether or not they are tied to company results. They are rewarded on sub optimizing their results instead of subordinating them to those of the enterprise. Management, far away from the day-to-day decision making in the work that generates the output, demands better quality, efficiency, and profit from people that were told to follow the systems and processes and the results will follow. It’s an endless loop that requires an intervention.

You have to take your foot off first base in order to steal second. It’s a scary decision that requires courage and confidence. Courage, because you are abandoning the safety of a previous success. Confidence, because you have to know that your knowledge in the light of experience will advance you beyond your previous accomplishment. It might sound like an over-used catch-phrase, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t work: You have to get back to basics.

What matters to your customer? Minimizing the gap between expected and perceived performance levels of the product or service that was the basis of a transaction. You need to get to the end of the assembly line and go over the product like your customer. Like your customer matters. Like your customer is not your Quality Control department that exists only to find your performance shortcomings.

This isn’t about finding fault, but that’s what it will feel like. Root cause analysis is, by definition, fault finding. In a perfect organization, finding and fixing root causes are celebrated as long as the enterprise learns from mistakes. Organizations that are managed by fear give finding root cause a bad name because fixing a problem means someone is going to have a really bad day. If you are in a management position in a company for which a transformation is required, your job will be to create an environment of trust so the path to success isn’t painful.

When you start at the end of the assembly line, in an environment of trust, and start working your way back through the concurrent engineering development and manufacturing processes you can always identify the decision or behavior that resulted in sub-par outcomes. You can then implement corrective action. Once the enterprise cares more about outcomes than their individual department metrics or being able to say “it was someone else's fault” the organization benefits from synergies. Everybody needs to understand: their soul might belong to their functional area, but their ass belongs to the enterprise and its results. The bottom line is that business-as-usual is the enemy of transformation and achieving results. It’s time for Business-as-(un)Usual.

]]><![CDATA[Question Everything]]>Thu, 16 Nov 2017 15:02:53 GMThttp://www.tonypashigian.com/blog/question-everythingYou can't hide from me

A symptom is that objectives are not being met. In fact, it’s not even clear what the objectives are. Is the system a tool to track and execute projects or is the system your job? What outputs are expected of the department? What inputs are required to deliver on the expected outputs?

People are doing exactly “what they’re supposed to do”. They’re following the processes. They’re filling in all the forms. Yet, the quality of results seems inversely related to the rigor with which the processes are followed. Those on the “inside” audit what was done and can’t find any violation of protocol. So, they endorse repeating the same approach to execution for future projects as though that advice will yield more acceptable results.

This is what happens when people get so programmed that they believe they can turn off their brains and go through the motions and the results will be satisfactory. The project, department, or enterprise have become a tangled mess of systems and processes replete with gaps, redundancies, and an overall lack of connection to results.

The team might not mean to, but they end up using the very systems and process that were designed to deliver results as something to hide behind when the result isn’t achieved. They just don’t want to be blamed. They were told to follow the process and they did. Therefore, they’ll say, it isn’t their fault that things didn’t go as they had hoped.

The fastest way to fix this issue is to remove all of the hiding spots. Get back to basics and identify the desired outcome and work backwards to develop a credible plan and secure buy-in from everybody that has to contribute to the plan to get parts on the floor, the software project complete, or the building built.

You have to question everything. Give them no quarter. There is no place to hide. We are here to get the job done. There are many team-dynamic behaviors that are related to this like manage-by-walking-around or insisting on organic interaction of carbon-based life forms (two or more people talking) rather than hiding behind the comfort of email. But the most important action is to question everything.

The reason performance degrades is because we lose focus on parts-on-the-floor and we apply Band-aids to systems and processes. The result is a complex IRS-tax-code quilt work of poking-it-with-a-stick tweaks to a process that was never as universally applicable as the authors intended. That’s not to say we shouldn’t attempt to standardize and write solid processes and use effective systems. However, when they no longer yield the desired outcome, you owe it to employees and shareholders to focus on results. So, I believe you should:

Identify the desired outcome with a clear statement of work
List all of the tasks necessary to get the job done
Be sure the tasks are logically sequenced
Identify, and fiercely defend, the critical path
Fill any gaps and eliminate unnecessary redundancies
Determine logical milestones to assess status
Track all open issues to closure with permanent corrective action
Work the plan
Do not accept generalities – insist on details

Go deep when you hear “I think”, “maybe”, “gut feel” or any other statement that suggests people are taking the easy way out rather than doing the work to confirm hypotheses in situations where certainty is required.

I suggest doing this in parallel with any systemic or process tracking. If your plan, execution, and results don’t pass the smell test of this bare-bones approach to consideration, then the system and process are probably not taking you in the direction of success.

]]><![CDATA[Mountain Climbing - Taking on a Challenge or Project]]>Sun, 10 Sep 2017 14:20:45 GMThttp://www.tonypashigian.com/blog/mountain-climbing-taking-on-a-challenge-or-project

If you’re in a profession where you might be asked to take on a task, solve a problem or execute a project there are two things that are almost certain. First, you will work to develop a credible plan. Second, people will line up to tell you things that you didn’t consider and why your plan will not work. This is where you have a decision to make. You will be in a position to either admit defeat or deal with the data you know and press on with a willingness and ability to adapt to new information.

When you start to climb a mountain and all you know is what you see in front of you, you have no way of knowing what is behind it. You look up to the top of the mountain and, unless what is behind the mountain is taller than the mountain, you will have to summit the one in front of you before you can assess your appetite for dealing what is on the other side.

Undoubtedly, when you start, you’ll assess the challenge that you are facing to create a plan for you or your team to execute to accomplish the objective. Your assessment will be limited by the information that is available to you and you will almost certainly be basing your plan on partial information. Failure to act, or analysis paralysis, is often worse than getting started toward your objective, even with gaps in information. How would you know if you had all knowable data related to your project, anyway? How do you prove there is nothing more to be known? You can’t. That’s why you were assigned to this project. It’s how you apply your knowledge in the light of experience that guides you toward your objective.

So, the questions you have to ask before you set out to achieve the goal is:

Is the objective worth the effort?
Are there any gross and obvious factors that are missing for consideration that unreasonably raise risk?
Does your plan address all known characteristics of your challenge (the mountain in front of you)?

If the answers to those questions suggest you’ve done everything that you can do to prepare, then it’s time to get started. Team members, management, and casual observers will be happy to inundate you with “what-ifs” that lack substance. Just get started.

In addition to executing your plan, your challenge will be to adapt to new information, as it becomes available, by modifying your plan. It’s not failure to have to adjust your plan. In fact, it is a failure to continue to execute a plan that doesn’t address challenges presented by new information. Furthermore, it’s either a miracle - or a very simple project - if a course correction isn’t required to deal with new information.

Those who act, get things done. If you’re paralyzed by fear, the project might be too risky or you might not be experienced enough for the mountain in front of you.

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