Sunday, February 13, 2011

One of the TV shows I started watching this holiday season was "Undercover Boss". The premise is quite interesting - make a CEO go undercover in his own company, perform the most menial tasks possible and see him get new insights into his business. In practice, the show is a bit of a letdown - most episodes wind up with the CEOs finding inspirational employees. I guess no CEO would want to see his company trashed on national television.

One of the interesting pieces of the show is when the CEO discovers terribly inefficient processes or rules that make no sense (often, he/she would have been the creator of said rule). These are the fun episodes and you can see the epiphany dawn on the poor executive's face. A typical example is a packaging process that made great sense on paper but gets in the way of employees doing their jobs.

What does this have to do with Costco? I visit Costco often to buy a few cartons of my favorite protein shake. Every single time, I go through the checkout process and I see the attendant transfer my four protein box shakes into a new cart. I often wondered what's the logic in transferring boxes from one cart to another and finally asked one of the bored attendants. It turns out that it is store policy to always do a transfer, even if you have a single item in your cart. The policy seems to have been instituted to guard against shop-lifters who hide items in the clutter of their shopping carts. However, since the attendants weren't empowered to use common sense, they had to do such ridiculous things as transfer one lone TV box from one cart to another.

A smart firm would find a way to make sure that their executives stay in touch with the work their frontline employees do. In technology companies, this often translates to code - do you know how hard it is for your engineers to enlist, check-in fixes, debug? If you don't do it yourself once in a while, the chances are you're out of touch.

In my favorite episode of Undercover Boss, the executive is so overwhelmed by the things he learned that he instituted a process where every new senior executive they hired had to repeat what he did and work on the front lines. Something definitely worth emulating!