Switch - Chip Heath [22]
You can’t script every move—that would be like trying to foresee the seventeenth move in a chess game. It’s the critical moves that count. Recall that, in West Virginia, the researchers decided to focus their campaign on milk because it was the source of the most saturated fat in the average diet. The researchers didn’t offer suggestions about bread or soda or butter or potato chips. They scripted the critical move: Switch to 1% milk.
Similarly, Behring’s four rules were focused on financial triage. He didn’t have the luxury of long-term planning. He needed his people to move, immediately, in a new direction, in hopes that they could buy ALL enough time to make a fuller transformation. (Notice that he didn’t say a word about other important issues such as employee morale or marketing or R&D.) By staying focused on the critical moves, he made it easier for his people to change direction.
In 1998, for instance, the company had to turn down business hauling grain because it didn’t have enough locomotives. While its competitors were negotiating for new locomotives, ALL’s engineers worked around the clock repairing old locomotives. (Faster is better than best. Minimize up-front cash.)
Also, ALL’s engineers figured out a way to boost the locomotives’ fuel capacity so they could operate longer without refueling. This reduced downtime, allowing more routes per locomotive, just as Southwest Airlines gets more flights per plane than its competitors because of its quick turnarounds at the gate. (Unblock revenue.) Engineers also found a creative solution to the nagging problem of damaged tracks, which limited a train’s speed. Rather than purchasing new metal rails, which cost US$400 per ton, they ripped up tracks at abandoned stations and installed them on active routes. (Use what you’ve got.)
Three years later, Behring’s discipline was paying off. ALL’s performance improved from a net loss of 80 million reals in 1998 to a net profit of 24 million reals in 2000.
Knowing what we know about the Rider, it’s no surprise that Behring’s strategy worked. Behring had scripted the moves that helped his people make hard decisions. What tires out the Rider—and puts change efforts at risk—is ambiguity, and Behring eliminated it. For every investment decision, his rules suggested the correct choice.
To see the power of this, let’s return to the doctors and the patient with the arthritic hip. Imagine that the leaders of the hospital had scripted their critical moves, and that one of those moves was this: Use invasive options only as a last resort. Does anyone doubt that this guideline would have caused a big shift in the doctors’ decisions?
4.
In the shaded area that follows, we present a feature that we call a “Clinic.” In each Clinic, we describe a real-world situation and challenge you to think about how to apply the Switch framework to create change. At the end of each Clinic, we give our own suggestions, but we encourage you to generate your own game plan before you look at ours. The Clinic is intended to be a kind of pause button, a chance to step outside the text and think about how to apply what you’ve read. We hope you find this a useful way to practice applying the framework. The Clinics are written to be sidebars—if you prefer to plow through the prose uninterrupted, you can return to them later.
—————————— CLINIC ——————————
Can You Get People to File Their Expense Reports on Time?
SITUATION Barbara, the controller of a consulting firm, is fuming again about expense reports. Why do people always turn them in late? The monthly due date was yesterday, and she’s still missing 38 percent of the reports. That puts pressure on members of her team—especially