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December 22, 2003
Knowledge management: maximizing input, minimizing output
By Gerry McGovern
"The number of hours worked by American couples has increased by more than 10 percent in the last 25 years," according to USA Today (December 17, 2003). Monster's 2003 Work/Life Balance Survey found that 83 percent of people are not satisfied with their job, while 80 percent are not happy with their work/life balance.
Cynthia Ekberg is the CEO of HealthExpo, a company that organizes health fairs around the USA. She arrives early, works through lunch and may not leave the office until 1 a.m. "Do I have the sense that people are working harder? Yes," Ekberg tells USA Today. "Most people overcommit. We haven't learned the magical word of 'no.'"
Times may be difficult but they used to be far worse. Go back a century and most people had it a lot harder. Grinding physical work wore down the body and spirit. Given a choice, I would certainly prefer to be alive today than during any other period in history.
Technology has served us well and will continue to serve us well. The computer has transformed our societies, mostly for the better. The problems that we face are by no means insurmountable. We just need to be a bit cleverer. We need to adapt a little better to the new age we now live in.
We are not farmers anymore, though sometimes we behave that way. We think about having and doing more. In the back of our heads are fears of scarcity. In this new age, we should be more worried about glut. We eat like farmers but we don't burn off those calories out in the fields, so we get fat.
We have been taught that the key to success is to minimize input and maximize output. That's not how Johnny Cash wrote songs. "I must have written three dozen pages of lyrics, then painfully weeded it down," Cash related about writing The Man Comes Around.
Throwing more hours at our work, producing more emails, making more calls; that's not clever. Doing more and producing more is a brute force approach. Farming seeks to minimize input and maximize output. Knowledge management may have to maximize input so as to minimize output.
It's harder to write 500 well-crafted words than 5,000 words of waffle. Those 500 words will be 10 times more effective.
I'm writing a new book. The basic theme is that in order to achieve more today, we need to produce less -- but produce it better. Less communication but better. Less content but better. Fewer sales calls but more targeted.
If you'd be interested in commenting on the first draft, please drop me an email. I expect to have this draft ready by April 2004.
Also, do you know of situations where doing less has achieved more? For example, I've been told that the support center of a technology company has found that, on average, the less time support staff spend with customers, the more satisfied customers are. Basically, the better support staff are able to solve problems faster. Do you have any more examples like this? I'd love to hear them.
Seasons greetings to all my readers, and may you have happiness and health in 2004.
The next New Thinking will be published on January 12, 2004.
Gerry McGovern
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