Good and Great - Culture of Discipline

Thanks to you all for checking out the next installment in our look at how to apply principles of greatness to the world of CAD and Design.  For anyone just joining the conversation you may want to review the previous "Good and Great" postings available in the archive.

As many of you know this is a look at the principals discussed in the book "Good to Great" by Jim Collins.  We have already discussed the first two main points

Disciplined People - Level 5 Leadership and First Who Then What

Disciplined Thought - Confront the Brutal Facts and The Hedgehog Concept

The next discipline is that of Disciplined Action.  And, the first principle is that of a Culture of Discipline.

Think of two employees, Jim and Sarah. 

Jim

Jim is  a 9-5 employee.  He shows up everyday on time and sees his job as a job.  He performs his duties well enough to maintain his current employment but has little ambition for himself or his team.  Jim isn't really interested in learning new software features or increasing efficiencies because the way he does his job has always been good enough.  That is exactly the problem..."good enough".

Sarah

Sarah is a 24 hour employee.  She shows up to work everyday on time and probably goes home at the same as Jim.  Not a workaholic but a person who cares about her craft, her skills, and her team.  The term "good enough" only passes her lips when the deadline has arrived and the client makes a last minute change, with no chance to postpone. 

When she goes home at night her mind thinks about what she could have done different or more efficient during the day.  Sarah knows that she has a responsibility as part of the team to be excellent.  Not, good enough.

I know what you are thinking.  That is not a culture of discipline, it is an example of a disciplined person using disciplined thoughts.  That is true to a point.  But the culture of your work environment is, at least in part, determined by the people that fill it.  Some practices that can only be regulated through tyrannical standards and policies would  simply handle themselves in a disciplined culture.

Here is a personal example.  In my current job I am responsible for training new employees.  One of the things that I always try to impress on them is a drawing shut down procedure.  It goes like this.

When the markups are finished and the printing is done they are to switch back over to paper space, if the are in a file with a title block, then zoom to the extents of boarder before saving.

That is it, and the reason is this.  The next time they have to go back into the drawing may be six hours or six months later.  If for some reason all  they have to go on is what the sheet looks like, then they will be able to see the sheet in the preview thumbnail that is created when a file is saved. 

Not to mention the fact that the next edit to be done will probably not be in the same location within the drawing as whatever they just changed.  The next time, when I open the drawing after them, I can simply zoom in on the area of interest and go to work without having to do several additional steps.  This can save anywhere from several seconds per time a drawing is opened to several minutes if you happen to have big files and a slower computer.  Even if it is only few seconds per drawing.  How many times do you open drawings in a day?  10?  15? 100?  Lets say I open 15 drawings per day, (An unrealistically small number but then we are just talking here.)  and it saves me 5 seconds per occurrence, or 1 minute 15 seconds a day.  That adds up to nearly 5 hours over the course of a year.  More than a half a days production time gained by simply being disciplined in habits.

My number is probably a lot closer to the 100 files per day than 15.  If 15 files a day gains nearly 5 hours 100 will gain nearly 35 hours in a year.  That is almost one week of production gained through disciplined action and I didn't even have to actually work any harder or longer.

This is a very CAD oriented example, but I hope that everyone can grasp my meaning.

A culture of discipline encourages everyone to work in a disciplined way because they see the benefit of their actions to themselves and the team around them, not because of a dictate from an executive on high.  If you are an executive reading this; you can rest assured that the CAD Technician in your company does not care one little bit about wether you want him to close down the drawings he is working on in a certain way because it will increase the overall productivity by up to 2%.

However if the principle of First Who is applied rigorously then he will care about how it effects his ability to do a great job and achieve great things.

A culture of discipline is about thinking ahead and practicing the things that will increase not only the productivity and quality of the product, but also the overall quality in our work experience.