Building Everyday Excellence: Karen Martin on The Outstanding Organization

Karen Martin shares insights from her book The Outstanding Organization on reducing organizational chaos, improving daily work, and building systems that support everyday excellence through clarity, focus, discipline, and engagement.

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Joining me for episode #151 is my friend Karen Martin, talking about her newly-released book The Outstanding Organization: Generate Business Results by Eliminating Chaos and Building the Foundation for Everyday Excellence. Karen is the founder of Karen Martin & Associates and she is previously the co-author of The Outstanding Organization: Achieving Rapid Improvement in Office, Service, and Technical Environments.

FastCompany.com has an excerpt from The Outstanding Organization here.

For a link to this episode, refer people to  www.leanblog.org/151/.

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If you have feedback on the podcast, or any questions for me or my guests, you can email me at leanpodcast@gmail.com or you can call and leave a voicemail by calling the “Lean Line” at (817) 372-5682 or contact me via Skype id “mgraban”. Please give your location and your first name. Any comments (email or voicemail) might be used in follow ups to the podcast.

In this conversation, Karen Martin explains the four behaviors she sees consistently in outstanding organizations: clarity, focus, discipline, and full engagement. These principles form the foundation of The Outstanding Organization and show up across industries–from healthcare to aviation to software.

Podcast Transcript: Karen Martin on The Outstanding Organization

Here is the cleaned-up transcript of the conversation between Mark Graban and Karen Martin.

Mark Graban: Hi, this is Mark Graban. Welcome to Episode 151 of the podcast for July 9th, 2012. My guest today is a good friend of mine, Karen Martin. She is the author of a brand new book titled The Outstanding Organization: Generate Business Results by Eliminating Chaos and Building the Foundation for Everyday Excellence. I hope you enjoy this discussion. Karen, thanks for joining us today as a guest on the podcast.

Karen Martin: Thanks so much for having me, Mark.

Mark Graban: As most guests do, could you introduce yourself and your professional background? In particular, it's always interesting to hear how you first got introduced to Lean.

Karen Martin: It's a bit of a circuitous path. I was introduced to Lean in 2000 after working with quality and operations design and managing operations for many years in different startups. I had no manufacturing experience when I was first introduced to Lean. I had been using more of the TQM (Total Quality Management) approach to operations design.

When I was introduced to Lean manufacturing, I was sitting through a program I was actually managing, and it became abundantly clear to me that everything they were talking about applied to the world that I knew, which was primarily healthcare and the white-collar world. That's when the fire got lit, and I decided that was going to be my dedicated career from that point forward.

Mark Graban: What was it about Lean, as opposed to previous approaches, that caught your fancy?

Karen Martin: I felt that Lean has a much more practical, tactical application to it. TQM had quality circles and many wonderful principles and philosophies, but regarding actual tools to help get stuff done, I felt like it was lacking. Now, of course, we've gone the opposite direction in the earlier years of Lean, where people got a little too concerned with tools and not enough about practices and principles. Fortunately, that is being corrected now. My clients have experienced much better results because of the practical nature of Lean.

Mark Graban: You're right, the application in different settings is something a lot of people don't see initially. I know you've worked in a lot of different service industries. Can you share a little bit about the breadth of where you've applied these methods?

Karen Martin: I think the only industry I haven't worked in so far is entertainment. I'd very much like to get into filmmaking–not to make films, but to help. There is so much waste in filmmaking, and I believe there's no reason why we have to pay $12 a ticket for movies. But I've worked in law enforcement, healthcare, oil and gas, utilities, financial services, distribution, education, hospitality, research, and insurance.

Mark Graban: Let's talk about the book, The Outstanding Organization. It's not narrowly about “Lean”; it's about organizational excellence. Tell us the story of the book–what inspired you and how did it come to be?

Karen Martin: It was brewing for quite a while. Over the years, I had been increasingly concerned with how much money, time, and angst companies were spending trying to implement Lean, Six Sigma, TQM, or CQI, and not really seeing the results that they were capable of seeing. I started thinking about what allows anybody else in any other endeavor to be excellent.

I looked outside of business to sports, the military, the arts, and science to see what fundamentals they all had in common. This is not heavily research-based from an academic perspective; it's more of a grassroots, in-the-trenches conclusion. I realized that fundamentally, excellence requires that four behaviors be in place: impeccable clarity, tremendous focus, tremendous discipline, and full engagement.

Mark Graban: Looking at those four, how did you zero in on those ideas? Were any of them surprising to you?

Karen Martin: When I looked at the things that cause organizations to have a “cracked foundation,” there were about 20 different problems, but they all fit very well under these four umbrellas. They aren't sequential steps, but they are progressive and interdependent.

Reflecting on my clients, the lack of clarity was fundamentally the biggest problem. Then, as I tested my hypothesis, people asked about the difference between clarity and focus. I got much clearer on what I meant by focus, which was avoiding “organizational ADD.” If you are clear and have focus, you realize that organizations have a woeful lack of discipline. They almost resist discipline because they fear rigidity and bureaucracy, but those don't necessarily go together. If you have those three in place, you are in a far greater position to have full engagement of the workforce because they know clearly what they should be working on.

Mark Graban: What are some of the organizations that you uncovered? You mentioned the Blue Angels regarding clarity. Does clarity refer to that clarity of purpose–why are we in business?

Karen Martin: That's the highest level of clarity, and absolutely essential. You need to know where you're going in the next six months or year to galvanize the workforce. When I looked at star performers in sports and the arts, I connected the dots that they were supremely clear about what they were hoping to achieve.

The Blue Angels have been my “most outstanding organization” model that I've been looking at. They are so clear in everything they do–not just goals, but language, expectations, roles, and responsibilities. Everything is extremely clear, which makes responding to the truly unpredictable much easier to do.

Mark Graban: What are some practical lessons that come from the Blue Angels?

Karen Martin: One thing they do that I found really intriguing relates to Kaizen events. I recommend organizations attempt Kaizen events because there are behaviors you build there that are difficult to build any other way. One of them is blocking out everything around you and focusing on one thing at a time. We've become addicted to what some people call multitasking, but that's not possible–it's switch-tasking.

The Blue Angels have a model where, before every show, they block out everything. No one is allowed in the room, and they focus on the show. After the show, drenched in sweat, they come back into the room and don't let anyone in for up to two hours. They go over the film over and over, seeking perfection. Organizations just don't discipline themselves to allow that kind of focus so that people can get stuff done well and quickly.

Mark Graban: That study, reflection, and analysis after the fact is a really interesting idea. I'm sure they could get complacent because they put on amazing shows, but it sounds like that is an important part of their approach.

Karen Martin: People can argue that the Blue Angels are performing death-defying maneuvers, but every business has their version of critical mistakes that can make or break the relationship it has with its customers. To not take the time to deeply reflect on what's working well and what's not–and being honest about it–is missing a huge opportunity.

Mark Graban: I wonder how many surgical teams actually do a formal debrief. People are so busy they just fly into the next procedure.

Karen Martin: Surgical room churn is a big thing because it's revenue-producing. But if you don't take that time to reflect immediately, no one remembers anything. The Blue Angels doing it immediately is a great model for all of us.

Mark Graban: Who are some of the other organizations you cite in the book?

Karen Martin: Toyota is, of course, one of our models. W.L. Gore is an organization that has shown consistent outstandingness. I mentioned Intel. I also have a couple of stories about Menlo Innovations, a software shop in Ann Arbor, Michigan, led by Richard Sheridan. They operate with a Toyota-esque approach. Another is a wonderful small hospital group, Florida Hospital in DeLand. I worked with three of the Adventist hospitals in central Florida, helping them in their early stages of transformation, and they have done a phenomenal job.

Mark Graban: One thing I like about the book is that it's not just “here's a bunch of things from other companies you should copy.” You've conceptualized it. Would it be fair to say a reader should figure out how to apply these ideas in their own organization?

Karen Martin: Absolutely. I'll even go out on a limb and say that I'm pretty anti-benchmarking. The only way benchmarking is good is if you go into it with a curiosity mindset and not a duplication mindset. It's good intel to see how competitors handle situations, but saying, “Oh, I like that, let's do that in my organization” is not the way to become outstanding.

Mark Graban: I want to delve into the employee engagement piece. You talk about full engagement being one of those four principles. Would you say it's the most important principle?

Karen Martin: You're asking me to choose between my four children! I don't think you can have full engagement without having a pretty good handle on the other three. When you look at Clarity, Focus, Discipline, and Engagement, I would say Engagement is the result of setting the conditions for the others. You can't force people to do what we want them to do; they will do what they're going to do based on what they're experiencing. It might be more important to put the other three in place to create the environment that entices people to be engaged.

Mark Graban: The idea of forcing someone to be engaged is not a very engaging style. It's about engaging not just the head, but the heart. Who are the target readers for The Outstanding Organization?

Karen Martin: The book has two audiences. One is the people dedicated to improvement, either full-time or as a shared responsibility. The other is managers, all the way through executives, who are running operations and are interested in finding more effective ways to accomplish their goals.

Mark Graban: If you had one piece of sage advice for business owners or chief executives, what would that be?

Karen Martin: I would say: Ruthlessly prioritize. Jerking people and departments around causes more dysfunction and chaos in an organization than anything else. You need to get clear on the direction so you can ruthlessly prioritize, then take an honest look at what is in process. Reprioritize based on what will get you where you need to go the most quickly, and stop doing much of the rest until you complete other projects.

Mark Graban: What's another piece of advice?

Karen Martin: Number two is to start telling and seeking the truth. Clarity is the non-charged way of saying “stop lying.” Lying is either omission or commission–it's everything from data that doesn't represent reality, to unclear terminology, to sugarcoating messages. The toughest nut to crack for many organizations is creating a safe environment where people seek the truth about how processes are performing or what customers really think.

Mark Graban: That idea of truth and honesty is a big part of the Toyota notion of respect for people. Do you see that generally outstanding organizations are better at practicing respect for people than organizations that aren't performing well?

Karen Martin: Absolutely. It is a direct correlation. Respect isn't just how you treat them; it's also whether they are given the opportunity to be creative and have a say in how work is done at a tactical level. There is a direct correlation between how much respect someone is shown and how the organization performs.

Mark Graban: Congratulations on the book. How can people reach you to talk about this or find the book?

Karen Martin: My website is www.ksmartin.com. That has links to all the different ways to buy the book. I welcome everyone to check it out.

Mark Graban: Thanks for joining us today.

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