About Dan Markovitz
Dan Markovitz is the founder and president of TimeBack Management. Prior to founding his own firm, Mr. Markovitz held management positions at Sierra Designs, Adidas, CNET and Asics Tiger. Learn More...
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Leveling; smoothing out the flow; e.g., doing two performance evaluations a day for 3 weeks, rather than ten a day for three days -- and then needing to take a vacation because you're so burned out.
Overburdening people, process, or equipment; e.g., people working 100 hour weeks for months on end -- come to think of it, like most lawyers and accountants.
Uneveness or variability; e.g., leaving work at the normal time on Thursday, but having to stay at the office till midnight on Friday because the boss finally got around to giving you that project...at 4:30pm.
Waste; activities that your customer doesn't value and doesn't want to pay for; e.g., billing your customer for the really expensive 10am FedEx delivery because you didn't finish the document on time.
I have to disagree.
Mark,
I agree that a CEO's biggest problem is unlikely to be a messy office. But I do think that setting a good example is a key part of leadership. What if the CMO of a hospital didn't wash his hands regularly? That's a pretty minor thing -- after all, he's probably not operating on a regular basis -- but it's an important signal.
But even leaving the messy desk aside, what about other concepts, such as making work visible (a la Jon Miller's white board experiment? See it here: http://is.gd/2oID7). Or creating standard work for himself to not only improve his own performance, but to show that there's always room to think about improving the efficiency of how we work.