Masters of the Obvious

As singer Jimmy Buffett once put it, “Some things in life
are a mystery to me, while other things are much too clear.” This is pretty much sums what I’ve learned
from studying organizations and trying to help managers apply the best
evidence. There are some things that are
really hard to solve, perhaps impossible. Take leadership. There is some good evidence out there about what
effective leaders do, but uncovering it is challenging. There is so much bad evidence and so much
ideology running through writings on effective leadership that virtually any
leadership style can be justified by some writings. When Jeff Pfeffer and I
were writing Hard Facts, he put “the leadership secrets of” in
Amazon. The first book to pop-up was
“The Leadership Secrets of Attila the Hun.” The second was “The Leadership Secrets of Santa Claus.” I just did it again, and found that Santa was
replaced by “The Leadership Secrets of Colin Powell.” If you can see a pattern there, let me know.

 At the same time, I’ve become convinced that managers and
their people would make a lot more progress if, rather than trying to just
solve complex riddles like “what is a great leader,” if, instead, they focused
more energy on things that, in fact, are both known to be true and that aren’t
that hard to implement. To quote Jeff
Pfeffer, my co-author and dear friend, one big “secret” of the best managers is
that they are “masters of the obvious.”

Consider my favorite example in Hard Facts: stand-up versus sit down meetings. A study at the
University of Missouri compared groups where people
stood-up during short (10- to 20-minute) meetings to groups where members sat.
Groups where members stood-up took about 34 percent less time to make the
assigned decision, without loss of quality. Do
the math: How many people work in your organization? How many 10- to 20 minute meetings do you
have a year? Sure, there are times when people need to sit down during
meetings, like when emotionally hot issues are discussed. But there are plenty
of times when standing is fine. Let’s consider a company that is getting a lot
of heat these days for keeping too much money from consumers, energy giant
Chevron-Texaco, which has over 50,000 employees. If each employee replaced one
20-minute sit-down meeting per year with a stand-up meeting, this study that
each meeting would be about 7 minutes shorter and be just as effective. That
would save about 6,000 hours per in employee time. The upshot is that you might
pull the chairs out of some of your conference rooms and put in some stand-up
desks instead. It might save a lot of time and money.

Or take medicine. Cancer and heart disease are tough to
cure, and billions of dollars are devoted to them – as it should be. But some
problems can be tackled with a little soap, water, and elbow grease. Almost
100,000 Americans die from infections that they catch from health care
providers and in health care settings. One of the most effective ways to cut
this number is to simply getting doctors to wash their hands after they touch
each patient; yet recent research suggests that less than 50% of doctors wash
their hands as often as they should. Some forget. Some are rushed. And some
doctors don’t believe the evidence. One
hospital that I know of in Florida fights this problem by displaying signs and
giving out buttons to patients that say “It’s OK to ask,” which means that it
is OK to ask if your doctor to wash his or her hands. The CEO of this hospital
told me that the doctors hate these buttons, as they don’t like being told what
to do. But he also reported that they seem to be more conscientious about
washing their hands!

Sure, it is worthwhile trying to solve hard problems like
what effective leaders do or how to manage creative work. But it bewilders me
why so many managers and organizations chase vague shadows, while electing to
ignore so many small, simple, and obvious things that can have such a big
impact.