Sebastian Abbott - Business

Frog, Toad and bureaucracy

The other night I was reading my 3 year-old a bed-time story from one of our favourite series of childrens' stories, Arnold Lobel’s “Frog and Toad” collection, when this little exchange between the two got me thinking:

{Frog’s List has blown away in the wind}

“Hurry!” said Frog. “We will run and catch it."
“No!” shouted Toad. “I cannot do that.!
“Why not?” asked Frog.
“Because,” wailed Toad, “running after my list is not one of the things that I wrote on my list of things to do!"

This resonates with so much of business life; procedures, workflows, instructions, audits, filling out forms. We all have lists of things to do, from our (largely ignored and occasionally conscious-pricking) task lists, to those procedures. We need to realise that we can make the choice between “merely” following the procedures to the letter, and rehumanising them.

Naturally, this all applies to the bureaucracy of life, too (I recently married and had a child, so I know all about filling out forms and chasing the right administrator at the right time…) but since I have been thinking has been about business life lately, that’s where the brain cells decided to resonate with interest.

At work, I have a great collegiate friendship with a quality manager who is also a trained auditor. He is (it sounds strange to write this), a human being. By this I mean that he treats the audit procedures as a frame within which he must operate, but not as a constraint. He is a detective who understands that humans have created these constructs around them to force themselves into doing the right thing, in the sense of doing the best for the company and (by extension) the best for society in general. He also knows that humans tend to cut corners, in order to maximise leisure time. He understands that rigidly following an audit checklist is the surest way of ruining a day and of missing the real issues that a list can paper over. Yet without this list, even he is lost.

We need to force ourselves to get things done properly. These constructs, sets of instructions, whatever we call them, that we have placed for ourselves - in business, bureaucracy, religion and in every walk of life - do not necessarily stifle or strangle creativity. They can postpone the effort of thinking to more important tasks. Yes, they take time to complete and yes, they require an effort of willpower; but no, it is often not really time or energy wasted. And if there is waste involved, then it is a business benefit to eliminate this waste.

(If there is waste involved, then it is a religious necessity. If there is waste involved, then it is a bureaucracy…)

With all of our lists, we must ensure that the free thinkers - the frogs - amongst us have room to breathe, to innovate, to dream; and we must ensure that the petty list-followers - the toads - do not exceed their remits or relish their “powers” excessively.

A Night flight and a right fright

My business trips are now rare in comparison to how things were a few years ago. I count myself lucky as this dip has coincided nicely with starting a family. So from monthly trips to Asia and almost weekly trips to Germany from the UK, I now occasionally fly to Italy to meet suppliers and drive around Germany meeting customers. And read bedtime stories.

This week I ended up on a more unusual trip, to Dacia in Romania, to discuss some issues that they have been having in production. It was to have been a relatively relaxed journey, flying to Bucharest from Frankfurt airport early in the afternoon to stay in an airport hotel until my colleague from Turkey arrived early the next morning. Alas, though, systems happened.

We have the Egencia travel booking system at work; it is the business version of Expedia. Egencia turned out to be a nightmare for rapid turnaround travel as it has an - in itself eminently sensible - approval system built in. The problem is that these approvals need to be completed within a certain time, presumably in order to protect us all from monstrous price rises as the flight date nears. As soon as I had understood the need, I booked my flights on Friday afternoon. The approval deadline (written in very small letters in the confirmation email) was set for 20:00 that evening, when my manager and his boss were unlikely to be reading emails. The same happened on Monday, as the pair were out of the office. When it came to my flight on Tuesday, I thought that it had been confirmed, as Uwe had submitted his consent; but I discovered when I arrived to collect my eTicket - no ticket. My seat had been cancelled.

So, following a frantic round of internet bookings, phone calls and awaiting confirmation, I ended up on the late flight to Bucharest. On that flight over clouds lit by a full moon we passed a thunderstorm in the distance; the flashes of light within that dark mass of cloud were awe inspiring. We landed uneventfully at a quarter to midnight.

Bucharest airport has a new terminal that is perfectly inoffensive, but the signage is terrible. When I asked the infodesk how to get to my airport hotel, they sent me down a flight of stairs and a ramp into a dark car park occupied by an off duty, wide-boy taxi driver who convinced me to part with 20 Euros (the smallest note I had at the time) for a 2 minute ride to the hotel and, in the meantime, proceeded to tell me how insignificant 20 Euros was to me, especially as the company would pay for it, how the French were so arrogant, the Maroccans working for Dacia even more so...

My room was fine, though blighted by that most east european of curses, the endlessly barking and yapping dog outside. It reminded me of my earlier 'adventures' in Liberec but I was at least tired enough to get to sleep relatively quickly this time around.

The next day I met my colleague Ilker at the airport and we found the taxi that he had pre-arranged. It was an ageing Dacia Logan that took us lumpily (with noticeable wheel wobble) through an ageing, shabby Bucharest suburb onto the motorway. Half way along that obviously European money edifice, the taxi was suddenly surrounded by a cloud of black smoke and then white steam, the engine revved out of control, we stopped on the hard shoulder and got out to survey the damage.

The engine was obviously not going to restart, despite the taxi driver's best efforts, so he started to make some phone calls. He initially offered a replacement taxi, but that, too, would have taken 45 minutes to get to us. Instead, he started to wave the traffic down. Astoundingly, within a few minutes a van transporting another (new) Dacia on its flat bed stopped and agreed to take Ilker and I to Pritesti, a town near to Mioveni which was our ultimate destination (well, my ultimate destination was home, but I couldn't possibly write that in LinkedIn). We were met there by another taxi and finally we arrived at Dacia.

We were offered a small coffee.

The meeting wasn't terribly effective as our customers didn't seem to have the faintest idea of what we were talking about; which meant that they would not change their view that we were at fault for a particular issue. However, when I pointed out that there was no evidence whatsoever that what they were experiencing was linked in any way to our parts, they seemed to go a little bit quieter still.

I got home again, in the end and thanks to the worst "quiche lorraine" on the planet courtesy of a certain large German airline, I even arrived with a little bit of energy to spare.