First things first - Urgent Vs Important

In his book, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, Steven Covey,  presents an approach to being effective in attaining goals by aligning oneself to what he calls "true north" principles of a character ethic that he presents as universal and timeless

Third habit - First things first, defines a desired approach to time management.

People 'should' spend more and more time in Quadrant II to prevent the necessity to spend time in Quadrant I.

Corporate leaders swear by this matrix but at the same time struggle to tame the urgent. In the process important gets compromised every time, sustaining the vicious cycle.

Looking around one finds that there is no opposition to the above principle.

How is it that there is so much struggle when the buy-in is complete?

What is missing?

"What" is clearly articulated but "How to" is left very vague and open to interpretation.

Is there a scientific way to reach the desired goal?

Discovery of this way would be akin to finding the Holy Grail!

To my understanding, the key lies in the word "Focus".

What to focus on?

Is it a "one thing / issue"? or, Is it a set of themes?

How to find what to focus on?

How to be sure, that this is the only thing and there is nothing else?

Do the numbers that you look to navigate your improvement journey give you the right picture?

The din about Management Accounting practices, especially those related to Product Cost Accounting, not helping at all the leaders / top managers as well as operational managers, has been around for quite some time.

Dr. Eliyahu Goldratt in his famous 1983 presentation at APICS proclaimed “Cost Accounting is enemy number one of Productivity”.

Tom Peters’ published an article in 1987 “The Accountants Are Letting Us Down” where he gave numerous examples how the Cost Accounting numbers instigate the operational and top managers to take decisions and actions which are detrimental to organisation’s medium term performance as well as long term endurance and survival.

Many decades before the above two, Henry Ford had stated his “common sense” principle – “We should not let Cost Accounting run the business!”

Even Taiichi Ohno, founding father of the Toyota Production System was quite alergic to cost accounting. He famously said – "It was not enough to chase out the cost accountants from the plants. The problem was to chase cost accounting from my people's minds"

If such has been the vehemence with which certain practices are being continuously denounced, what keeps these practices afloat? 

As per The American Institute of Certified Public Accountants, both IFRS and GAAP recommend direct production cost and overheads allocation to arrive at value of the inventory. http://wiki.ifrs.com/Inventories (See 13.8 and 13.9). This is precisely at the root cause of some of the distortions and incorrect decisions.

Still the "authority" recommends!

Completely beats me.

Can someone throw light on this?

Efforts to strengthen links other than the weak link are wasted

According to a survey of manufacturing executives conducted in May and June 2011 by AlixPartners, the global business-advisory firm.

•  Most large manufacturers last year failed to reach their cost-savings targets, despite significant investments in lean manufacturing, Six Sigma, and other productivity programs.
•  70 percent of manufacturing executives say that their manufacturing-improvement efforts led to a reduction in manufacturing costs of less than 5 percent, the typical minimum threshold for successful productivity programs.
•  36 percent of respondents indicated that their cost savings due to productivity efforts were 3-to-4 percent of total manufacturing costs, while 18 percent said their savings were less than 2 percent.
•  Fully 14 percent of manufacturing executives said they didn’t even know how much they were saving through their productivity-improvement efforts.
•  Illustrating a gap between industry perception and reality, 91 percent of the respondents described their improvement efforts as “very effective” or “somewhat effective.
• 60 percent of the respondents believe that half of the savings that they generated last year will be unsustainable.
• Only 13 percent said they could sustain more than three-quarters of the identified savings.
•  Most of the respondents worked at companies or divisions with annual revenue of more than $500 million, with some two-thirds of the participants based in the United States. Nearly half of the respondents oversaw operations that generated more than $2 billion in annual revenue.
• The survey also found deep skepticism that productivity-improvement investments would be recouped quickly. When asked to identify their average annual return on their continuous improvement investments, only 15 percent cited a full payback within one year. Four in 10 respondents simply aren’t sure when it comes to an expected return on investment.

The study findings are not very surprising. 

In fact, it is predicted that unfocused efforts would disappoint.

Parts of organisations are interlinked. Total output (Throughput) produced by an organisation is outcome of these interconnections.

Late Dr. Eliyahu Goldratt gave an analogy of chains for viewing functioning of organisations. There are two possible ways at looking for improvements in a chain.

•  Improvement in weight  
•  Improvement in strength.

If we look for improvement in weight of the chain then every improvement in all the links would add up to the total improvement.

But, if we look for improvement in strength of the chain, the above additive feature does not hold true. The strength of the chain is governed by the strength of the weakest link. So only the improvement efforts to increase the strength of the weakest link would result in improvement in the strength of the chain. 

The efforts put into increasing strength of links other than the weak link would be totally ineffective.

Working on weight of the chain is equivalent to working on COSTS. Cost reduction efforts are additive in the first glance.

Whereas, working on strength of the chain is equivalent to working on THROUGHPUT. Throughput improvement efforts need aligning the entire organisation to focus on a very few things which are important.

An organisation not having a mechanism to focus its improvement efforts courts two dangers:

1. If it fails to improve the weak link, then it is deemed UNRELIABLE. It does not live up to the promise of delivering the projected improvements.
2. If it fritters away the resources in strengthening links other than the weak link, then it is deemed INEFFECTIVE. It wastes away costly resources.

I agree with Andrew Csicsila, director in AlixPartners’ manufacturing practice. Ultimately, it’s not about chasing a process or philosophy. It’s about the  CASH.

Expect results only when the efforts are focused on the above  GOAL.