June 09, 2024 | Read Online
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-- John le Carré (British novelist and spy)
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Dave Packard and Bill Hewlett, the founding fathers of Silicon Valley and HP, believed in personal involvement and one-on-one communication with their people.
As a result of this philosophy they developed a management practice called “Management by Wandering Around,” or MBWA for short.
MBWA is a technique whereby managers spend time listening to problems and ideas while “wandering around” the office or factory floor.
Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard managing by wandering around, 1965.
Photo credit: hewlettpackardhistory.com
Using MBWA, Hewlett and Packard gained critical insights that informed their plans for the company. Insights which might otherwise have been hidden from plain sight had the duo only relied on traditional reports and information provided by middle managers. It also provided an outlet to proliferate their vision and strategy for the company in a hands-on way.
Despite its name, which would lead one to believe that it's an unstructured activity, MBWA is hardly aimless. Instead it’s a deliberate practice that curious leaders use to get closer to their people, customers, and partners.
Management consultant and author, Tom Peters, popularized MBWA in his 1982 book, In Search of Excellence. He boils it down to being in touch:
…what I really am in love with is it is more or less a metaphor, a metaphor for being in touch, a metaphor for not losing touch with your employees, your vendors, your customers or what have you.
Take, for instance, the story of Allergan, who launched a new product line aimed at contact lens wearers. Allergan’s Chairman, Gavin Herbert, didn’t settle for aggregate clinical data from eye doctors, the middle-men of the optical industry. He insisted that product designers talk with users themselves. In doing so they uncovered complaints of “itchy-scratchy eyes.”
Here’s what Herbert had to say about the discovery:
Now you and I both know that no ophthalmologist, after twenty years of professional training, is going to write down has his diagnosis ‘itchy-scratchy eyes.’ It’s just not professional language. Yet it was the problem. […] That was the genesis of this immensely successful product line.
The insight gained from "being in touch" with customers unlocked a $100 million (in 1980s dollars 😳) opportunity for Allergan.
Or you might like the story of Gordon McGovern, chairman of Campbell's Soup, who routinely spent Saturday mornings helping to stock shelves in his neighborhood supermarket.
According to one supermarket operator:
Gordon made it his business to be out in the marketplace, getting to know his customers, whoever they may be.
A senior executive who practiced MBWA at Levi-Strauss put it this way:
We haven’t burned the market research data, but I’ll tell you it’s a different view.
Given the recent shift toward remote work, MBWA is perhaps more difficult than ever to implement. But curious and creative leaders will find a way. And, in doing so, will differentiate themselves from competitors whose leaders rely solely on reports and spreadsheets—proxies for what’s really going on—to guide their business decisions.
So what are some ways you can implement MBWA in the distributed world in which we live? Here are a few ideas:
Sign up for a demo or free account on your own website.
Conduct “naive listening” tours. Schedule time with customers and a loose agenda. Be ready to ask a few questions and mostly listen (pro tip, ask every customer you meet with the same set of questions so you can compare their answers).
Hold regular one-on-ones with your direct reports.
Hold skip-level one-on-ones with front-line employees.
Sit virtually or physically with a support rep for half a day and shadow their calls (the most daring execs will actually handle a few calls themselves!).
Schedule on-premise customer tours (I once joined a Dominos Pizza exec on a single-day, 12-store tour across the greater Baltimore, MD area. A longer story for another day...).
Attend a new customer kickoff call.
Watch 5-10 recorded prospect and customer calls per week. (At this point, there’s little excuse for not recording customer and prospect calls. It makes team members more efficient, and these calls are chalked full of insights that have largely been hidden from senior leaders in the past.)
Attend industry events and find communities to engage with. There are slack groups, online communities, associations, and professional trade groups out there for every industry and role you can imagine.
Hold regular “office hours” sessions with customers. Choose a topic and be ready to facilitate a two-way discussion.
I can hear it now… Some of you are saying, “but Jay, none of these activities scale!”
Yes, you’re right. And that’s the point.
To succeed in today’s uber-competitive world, you must choose effectiveness and deep insights over spreadsheets alone, and the desire to scale every process to the nth degree.
Creativity is the only limiting factor in how you manage by wandering around.
How often are you getting out from behind your desk?
🤘
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