Breeding What Works
Paul Orfalea started Kinko's in Southern California back in 1970, and quickly expanded his simple copy-shop operation into several stores. His management style was rather unique. By his own admission, he felt under-qualified to tell the people running each of his stores what to do, so he left the stores to their own devices, without issuing a lot of top-down directives.
Instead, he traveled around between the stores and learned from each store manager. He listened to the stories about what small processes were working, and how they was being done. He would take these success stories with him to the next store, spreading the knowledge to each manager in the hopes that it would help each of them improve their own store. It was a strategy that worked very well, and helped grow Kinko's into a nation-wide chain. (They've since been bought out by a larger company...hence the Dave Chapelle Show parody.)
The approach is simple: find what works, and help it replicate.
Authors Dan and Chip Heath call this finding the "bright spots". In their book Switch, they share the story of Jerry Sternin, then working for Save the Children, who went to Vietnam charged with the task of fighting malnutrition. He wasn't micromanaged, so the organization pretty much dumped him into a village in the jungle and told him to get to work.
Quickly, he learned that trying to educate everyone about malnutrition was too big a task to work. Instead, he found the few children in the village who weren't affected by malnutrition and studied what their mothers were doing differently. Then he asked those mothers to share their knowledge with all of the others.
Focusing on what works and trying to spread it is a great idea. As humans, we're not wired to problem-solve this way. It's easy to try and improve any system or process by weeding out all of the problems, and that's a useful strategy, but past a certain point, you just can't eliminate 100% of the problems.
Culling the problems will thin the herd; but eventually you have to become a breeder or the herd might die out.
Instead, he traveled around between the stores and learned from each store manager. He listened to the stories about what small processes were working, and how they was being done. He would take these success stories with him to the next store, spreading the knowledge to each manager in the hopes that it would help each of them improve their own store. It was a strategy that worked very well, and helped grow Kinko's into a nation-wide chain. (They've since been bought out by a larger company...hence the Dave Chapelle Show parody.)
The approach is simple: find what works, and help it replicate.
Authors Dan and Chip Heath call this finding the "bright spots". In their book Switch, they share the story of Jerry Sternin, then working for Save the Children, who went to Vietnam charged with the task of fighting malnutrition. He wasn't micromanaged, so the organization pretty much dumped him into a village in the jungle and told him to get to work.
Quickly, he learned that trying to educate everyone about malnutrition was too big a task to work. Instead, he found the few children in the village who weren't affected by malnutrition and studied what their mothers were doing differently. Then he asked those mothers to share their knowledge with all of the others.
Focusing on what works and trying to spread it is a great idea. As humans, we're not wired to problem-solve this way. It's easy to try and improve any system or process by weeding out all of the problems, and that's a useful strategy, but past a certain point, you just can't eliminate 100% of the problems.
Culling the problems will thin the herd; but eventually you have to become a breeder or the herd might die out.