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executive
management
Solving the Jigsaw Puzzle of Leadership
To lead to repeatable success with decisions, you
need to establish common ground rules or a framework
for your team. The framework should define how your
business invests in time, people and money. The
decision rules need to be easy to use and easy to
transfer to managers and individual contributors.
The process is comparable to that of putting
together a jigsaw puzzle.
Let’s start at the beginning. When you put together
a jigsaw puzzle, what is the first thing you do?
Some people answer that they start with the edges.
Some start with the colors. For others, the first
step is to sort by shape. What if your task was to
put together a jigsaw in the form of a business?
Assume for a minute that your team has 20 minutes.
If you make that schedule, you all get $20,000 to
share. If you beat that time, your team receives an
additional $1,000 per minute. However, for every
minute that you miss the target, you lose $4,000.
Finishing in 15 minutes gains you $25,000. When you
hit 25 minutes, you get nothing. With that
incentive, how would you ask your team to start?
Edges? Colors? Shape?
Before you start looking for the
edges, wouldn’t you look at the box top? Why?
Because it gives you a clear picture of what you are
trying to recreate. To get the right results at the
right time, you’d start with the picture that you
want to build.
The box top is what allows a person or a team to
decide where a particular piece belongs. It
Look at your physical and electronic in-boxes. As
with puzzle pieces, you must sort and organize Your task as the leader is not to
make the decisions but to make the box top clear. To
illustrate this, let’s look first at how a very
small company beat a brace of giants in a hot
market. BEATING THE GIANTS WITH THE
PALM OF YOUR HAND Jeff Hawkins of Palm Computing had
a mission to build a successful handheld computing
product. Palm was not the first company to try. IBM,
Southwest Bell, Casio and Apple were among the
companies that worked to create that market and
failed before Palm. Hawkins thought that he had an
answer. His box top was simple: four specific design
goals that he would not negotiate. He told his team
that the Palm Pilot had to be:
Tiny—thoughtlessly portable. Able to
communicate seamlessly with a personal
computer—to be an accessory, not a separate
computer. Fast and
simple—the primary competition would be
organizers, not PCs. Able to sell for
less than $300. Whenever members of
his team would bring up a new idea, Jeff would pull
a block of wood from his shirt pocket, the shape and
size of the thoughtlessly portable Palm Pilot. He’d
show it to the team and ask if the new idea fit
within the four goals. If it didn’t, he asked the
team to set the idea aside. Quickly, every employee
knew the box top the firm’s leader would support.
That was the box top that achieved market
acceptance, and still leads the market today.
ASK THE CEO ABOUT DRINK CARTS? Here’s another
example of the box-top principle in action. It
involves Jan Carlzon, chief executive officer of SAS
Airlines. At the time Carlzon
first headed SAS, the company was hemorrhaging
money. Asked to return it to profitability and
growth, he faced hundreds of decisions. The
challenge: how could he lead the team to good
decisions without wasting people, time and money? Early in the job,
Carlzon found himself looking at a $2 million
decision to buy new food carts for the planes. This
decision had been taking time and attention away
from the carrier’s executives for more than five
years. Proponents argued that new carts would
improve customer service and flight attendant
morale. Opponents argued that the airline couldn’t
afford either the expense or the message it would
send to the employees. Carlzon chose not to make the
cart decision, but to work with his team to develop
a box top. The box top they
chose: to become the premier business traveler’s
carrier in Europe. It was a By telling his team
to build an airline focused on business travelers,
he made it easier for them
LEADERSHIP FOR A GREAT BOX TOP Great leadership has
always been a blend of precision and vision. Setting
the box top creates the overarching vision, but how
precise do you want to get? This is tricky. If you
tell people how to assemble a puzzle, the assembly
usually slows. Start by attaching
success criteria to the goals. Hawkins used that
block of wood as a metric. Any features that
exceeded that size would be unacceptable. Carlzon
simply told his team that any projects that appealed
to non-business travelers were outside the box top.
How the experts When your company
isn’t under the pressure it has today, your team has
plenty of time to evaluate ideas and do cost-benefit
analysis. In a rapidly growing business, it hurts to
invest in something outside the box top. A week off
now and then is a big deal when your business is
stretched. No matter how attractive each idea may
be, you need to drop those that don’t fit. You don’t
have enough time, people or money to chase each
alternative. Using box tops helped
Hawkins and Carlzon to improve the culture of these
companies. Are there issues in your business that
take up meetings and pull people off more important
projects? At SAS, Carlzon cleared a decision that
had taken too much time and energy for five years.
Getting to a decision quickly doesn’t just save the
resources for that decision. If done often enough,
it has the potential to change the tone of your
business so that it emphasizes speed and
responsiveness. If your team is
assembling a puzzle with a time limit and real
penalties for being late, the team The more pressure
your organization endures, the more dependent you
are on how well you and those near you can make
decisions. As a leader, you can tell people what
pieces matter, and what box top they should emulate.
Playing with puzzles can help you extend your
leadership to accomplish more in less time.
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