Switch - Chip Heath [95]
Ironically, operations people are supposed to be the folks who make the trains run on time—they deal with logistics and bottlenecks and supply chains and cycle times. For a psychology journal to outperform an operations journal—that’s as disgraceful as Michael Phelps being trounced in the 100m freestyle by Dr. Phil.
Cachon’s goal was obvious—make things move faster. But what could he do? He had no power over any of the reviewers. They didn’t report to him. Reviewers are volunteer labor who perform a difficult task for free. How would you like to verify the logic of someone’s mathematical derivations in a paper on optimal serial transport systems?
Cachon’s game plan provides a great review of the Switch framework. First, he spoke to his constituents’ Riders by pointing to the destination. “I knew there was a collective goal that I could appeal to,” he said. “Every author wants fast cycle time and is willing to provide it if everyone else does. But no one wants to be the one sucker who provides the fast lead time, and then when they submit their papers it takes forever.” Cachon announced that MSOM would review papers within sixty-five days—that was 72 percent faster than its previous average!
Second, he appealed to identity. We’re operations people, for Pete’s sake. We should be leading the way on efficiency and turnaround time! Third, he defined a clear behavior: Every reviewer had to submit feedback within five weeks. Cachon got the reviewers to commit up front that they could meet the deadline.
Finally, Cachon found a way to rally the herd. Every Friday, he posted an Excel spreadsheet on the internet that showed the status of every paper submitted to the journal. Every reviewer could see what the other reviewers had done (and when). If they violated their five-week commitment, the tracking sheet created powerful pressure, especially when Cachon called them and said, “Look, other people are doing this on time, and, by the way, here’s the data.” When people saw the data, they realized, Whoops, I’m the bottleneck.
With the online tracking sheet, Cachon was using the hotel-towel strategy. He was publicizing the group norm. Other people are getting their work done on time. Why won’t you?
Cachon set out to make good behavior contagious, and he succeeded. As a result of Cachon’s brilliant plan, MSOM now has the fastest turnaround time of any journal in the field of management science. And, because of his work, Cachon was asked to take over the flagship journal of the whole field, Management Science.
Cachon said, “Now, when people get their reviews in fifty days, they come back and say, ‘Wow! I can still remember the paper!’”
3.
We’ve seen that behavior is contagious at the individual level (obesity and tip jars) and at the group level (Cachon’s on-time reviewers). It probably will not surprise you that behavior also is contagious at the societal level (see bell-bottoms and organic food and the phrase “at the end of the day”). But what may interest you is that there’s a particular behavior, now ubiquitous in America, that we can trace back to its origin. What follows is the story of a guy who, at the end of the day, changed the way a society behaved.
In the 1980s, Jay Winsten, a public health professor at Harvard, got interested in the idea of a “designated driver.” He’d picked up this concept from Scandinavian countries, where it was already a norm. At the time, the concept did not exist in the United States. No one here knew