The Potato Factor

With all apologies to my family in Idaho--I actually coined this term about 8 years ago while I was Executive VP of SE(shithole enterprises), a strategic grouping of 5 different companies.

I woke up early this morning to get some work done--made some coffee and I'm hesitantly looking east out my window...with my binoculars (just kidding) (see previous post about my neighbor in her underwear). This is a funny story (at least it started out being funny in my mind), so I have to get it down somewhere...but a little history is required...

The owner of this company, Greg, was absent for most of the time and played an odd role in the company's leadership--he had another full-time job as a fireman and would actually take extra shifts for the money. Before I got there, he hired a lot of his friends and they would completely rip him off, so he was very paranoid that everyone was always ripping him off--this carried over after I came along and was something we always had to deal with.

Greg was truly a visionary and had found a small niche in the market that was "throwaway" business for other companies because it had low margins. Greg had some very creative ideas about making contacts, obtaining equipment, and bribing customer representatives to give us business, but he was also very good at representing our business as more than it really was (smoke and mirrors)--even to banks to obtain financing, which requires a poker face unlike any other. Greg's strategy was to keep our margin extremely low by renting an old building, having everyone use old equipment, old computers, unscrewing every other light bulb, having no benefits, etc.--about as bad as it gets...and then he hired me, which was a big risk since I unapologetically had a large salary demand. This was also a committment to change(improve), which I made clear before I came aboard.

My job was to fix the place--apparently Greg was inspired by an article about improving efficiency and really didn't know where to begin. I had created a job for myself at a previous company because I did an efficiency analysis of a particular workflow function and had written a program that had saved quite a bit of money and had a direct effect on the bottom line. They had rewarded me with unprecedented treatment including a private office, flexible hours, and little accountabiity (still don't know exactly why they did that). Greg found out I was doing this and offered me flex hours, more money, and the ability to work from home--that cinched it. I was trying to finish up a degree and needed this flexibility--but this was a huge risk for me to take since everybody knew that SE was a crappy company--the only deceptive thing was that everyone thought Greg was actually making some money doing it...

So I show up at SE and took 2 months to do an efficiency report in every function of the company. I was blown away by how we were bleeding money through inefficiency (there were several funny stories about people who superstitously carried out jobs that led to no endpoint) so I made several key recommendations. Of course, as in all B movies where this happens, a bunch of people got pissed and left, and not all of them were the right people that we wanted to leave, but I lived with it. Almost immediately I was made a manager so I could hire and fire and make changes with authority (I was extremely careful about making too many changes--I tried to stop the bleeding first through administrative processes before touching anything operational). Those were pretty lonely days--I didn't have too many people that I trusted there, and I didn't have a staff in place so I did all my own work from beginning to end, and had to learn a lot about clearly communicating my ideas to others. After another year I was Executive VP, the highest ranking officer in the company and, since Greg was always gone, I was the "go-to" guy. I even had the chance to hand-pick a good management team with a trusted IT manager, Gar, who was smart and could help me implement changes in administrative work. In the first year, we cleared a 5% profit. Doesn't sound like much, but the company had been on the verge of collapsing. The next year, 10%. The next year, 20%! I added a whole Limited Partnership at 36% margin! This was the only time that I got absolute control over all employees, financing, contracts, and supervision, so I claim this as a huge personal victory. When everything collapsed after I left, this LLP remains today as a money-maker.

But back to the Potato Factor. By now, Greg was very excited about his success as a businessman (a little sarcasm isn't too harmful to the point here, is it?), and started interjecting ideas into our recommended improvements. Of course, he was entitled to so this, because he owned the joint. But we hadn't been doing things without a lot of thoughtful planning, and it was pretty deflating that he gave so little regard to the massive changes that we had carefully made, and, in effect, didn't give us credit for the extremely creative means and loads of sheer effort we had used to bring this change about. Gar and I had actually started wearing workclothes to the office to be less threatening and we routinely scheduled days to ride along with all levels of our business, work alongside them, and listen (unbelieveably, at one point, Greg confronted us about being too casual at work and "goofing off" because we were working in these menial jobs!). By doing this we increased our credibility with all levels (although mid-managers were always very distrustful of us--mostly because they were very afraid of our discoveries). Our change philosophy was very nonjudgemental and we purposely incorporated ideas from all levels, sometimes unnecessarily, just to get some ready-made buy-in to our overall plan. It made people feel empowered which was a very efficient way to go about changing. We would then compare notes after hours at my apartment or at a restaurant--we would chart out workflow and calculate the impact of every change--and it worked!

Then came Greg and his suggestions. Unfortunately, Greg had fantasies about running a large corporation and had some very unrealistic ideas about what that would entail (champagne taste and a beer budget). Within this fantasy, there is so much redundancy that error becomes non-existant. Things become so automated that people can move from one job to another with almost no training. In effect, this fantasy came about because he feared relying on people (If you read the book "Social Style/Management Style", his personality style was an analytical--mine is an Expressive Driver. Even today, when I run into people who fit this Analytical profile, I have a hard time dealing with them because I think I'm just wired to drive that personality style crazy). I didn't see it at the time, but he feared relying on me specifically as well. Little did he know that my strategy was to create "checkpoint" functions for myself and then automate them into the process so the function is accomplished without me. That's the beautiful thing about having control of the entire mechanism from beginning to end--it was a business model that I could tinker with and (ideally, by keeping some variables constant and changing others) directly measure change in output. If only my education in accounting were more refined, I could have been really dangerous--but I have to think this situation would have been a dream for someone who really knew what they were doing.

I had been very successful in designing jobs to incorporate these functions (Thank God for my previous job which was Nazi-like about job descriptions and had a simplified workflow that lent itself well to discrete job functions. Also: they were big on organized training, employee documentation, punctuality (which I'm a little too uptight about still), and recordkeeping. Another thing I learned there is about working with minorities (I had only known about 4 people who weren't white in my life personally before I got my job there...)).

So here's a Greg suggestion: We have someone who attaches a job ticket to a signed document--about 500 generated per day. Why don't we create a log book at each level of processing, where the tickets and documents are counted and logged? That way, if the count is off at some level, it will be logged and someone will notice that the count is off...

Okay--here's the deal--the tickets are inherently a double-check (, dumbass)! If there is a ticket, that means that a bill needs to come in. Adding a count is redundant and doesn't ensure any greater accuracy--in fact, it is more likely a source of error in itself which decreases efficiency even more.

Enter the Potato Factor. Privately with Gar, I suggested the following: Why don't we install a large hollow pipe down to the basement which leads to a huge bin. Each time the sorter (unbelievably, a position which didn't exist until we designed it, by the way) prints a ticket, she takes a potato from a nearby bag and puts it into the pipe. At the end of the day, she goes down to the basement and counts the potatoes in the bin. This count must match the number of tickets and bills. Our straight-faced justification was at least she would get some exercise and then we could also hire someone to monitor the progress of potatoes during the day and keep up with production. It was a tongue-in-cheek suggestion to illustrate how random and retarded the log book suggestion was. But it really hit Gar in the funny bone, and he couldn't stop laughing about my paraphrasing of this issue...

One problem was that the level of person that would be content matching tickets and bills all day, every day for 8 hours would perhaps not be inclined to write down that she got an erroneous count. Plus--who is checking her to ensure that this step is done, and done honestly? I think that over time, jobs drift toward their most basic, skeletal components and lose the fluff that all well-intentioned job description writers originally intended--Also, because I know that it's extraneous...--say we got busy and this person had to stop and count their tickets--I may be inclined to tell them to skip that step for now and move on to something else more productive (although I would fight this urge to avoid sending the unintended message and preserve the integrity of our job descriptions)...Before long, there's an old, dusty log book sitting with the last entry from a month before.

Over time, "potato" became our codeword for introducing additional work with the empty promise that it increases overall accuracy. A sense of inappropriate redundancy or wasted effort when labor hours are precious. A finer point to make here is that sometimes you improve accuracy, but not to a degree that the equivalent energy/labor time could make somewhere else. Kind of like using "significant digits" in a scientific equation. It doesn't make sense to know that one number is 1.04323934323 and the other is "about 2" and then add them together and say the result is 3.04323934323. The variability of "about 2" makes your other, extremely accurate measurement insignificant...

I know this is about exciting as a root canal.

However, once we identified the problem, we were able to identify other "potato" situations as they developed. This is very likely to occur when a huge emergency problem arises which reveals a deficiency in a double-check process--people (especially managers) get disproportionally focused on the area where the random error was generated and overreact ("Well, we aren't ever gonna let THAT happen again!") A lot of times human error just overcomes whatever you put in place, like the time the sorter stuffed all the non-matching tickets and bills into a box that we found 6 months later. I always think of NASA and take a little comfort that the entity with the most profound redundancy still has these things slip through the cracks (isn't that a crappy thing to take comfort in?).

Well, this was a long way to go to get to the point, but I use the Potato Factor all the time now to ensure that I'm not just running around without effectiveness. Which is why I sent my Palm Pilot flying across the country :)--I was spending so much time trying to figure out how to make it do exactly what I want, and the process of updating my info regularly enough for it to be effective was costly (in hours, a precious commodity) and I was constantly outdated anyway because I'm always on the road. I realized that the return on time invested wasn't going to be worth it. I'll wait out new technology, I guess.

But now I can sniff out the Potato Factor from a mile away now, because we had developed such a clear model of it.

By the way, here's another superhuman trick I can do: I can instantly calculate the maximum calories for my money at any restaurant or fast-food place (and then I'm drawn to it like a moth to flame)--Hello, fat boy!

Another funny model we came up with is "Moo Bar". This came from Gar's nickname for a very gross employee that worked for us named Janie, who was about as dumb as a box of rocks. Gar and I were roommates in college, and among the funny things we used to do as a result of being completely poor was that we would steal 1 Moo Bar apiece every time we left the cafeteria (they allowed you to take an ice cream bar to go, but you had to (every time) appear to be opening it and about to eat it as you walked by the person at the front door.) Soon, our mini-fridge was packed with Moo Bars which we would eat when we ran out of meals on our plan. During one of our job process design meetings at SE, Gar was saying that we needed to make a job so well-defined and dumbed-down that a (minimum wage earning) Moo Bar could do it. If we could do this, we could "staff up" rather than be reliant upon specially-trained people who had us over a barrel since their job was so complex it made them very difficult to replace. It soon became a euphamism for a perfectly written job that was an effortless cog in the wheel with such cleanly written functions that it was fail-safe. Like perpetual motion-a beautiful work of art...and we did achieve it in a couple of cases.

Other Highlights from SE:

1. We had several poop incidents (perhaps we should really be named Shithole Enterprises, after all):
a. The guy who purposely pooped his pants because he didn't want to do a particularly hard job (we aren't talking Einstein, here)
b. The guy whose colon exploded (not good at all, actually)
c. The funniest one--the guy who had a tremendous, world-record-setting diarrhea (although who judges such things?) all over himself and made Gar call his wife to tell her so she would come pick him up. Ask me about that conversation sometime...I was there and it still cracks me up!

2. The guy who faked his own death. And then he came back. And then he really died (I think?!).

3. The guy who died and we didn't miss him for 5 days (what the hell kind of manager am I, anyway)? He was in a room with no air conditioning and his face reportedly rotted and slid off (after he died)--(By the way, this wasn't at work, although we had no air conditioning there most of the time, either).

4. The atomic fireball of death generated by my guys on the loading dock (aka-forklift driving off the dock and catching fire complete with flaming mushroom cloud and near death).

5. The manager of our company who embezzled $30k in a complicated scheme where he used a fuel card and had employees selling fuel for cash at the pump and then pocketing the cash (sick, huh?).

6. Our "front desk" girl who interviewed in a 3-piece suit and was very prim and proper (way overdid it and completely fooled me) and then came to her first day of work with cut-off sleeves and huge, black tribal art down her arms (I'm not being judgemental, but it was funny as hell). (Reminds me of the song--"The sign said, long-haired hippie people--need not apply"--then--"Imagine me, working for you?!" Taught me a lesson, though).

7. Finding out about dishonesty in ways my naive mind could never have imagined: kickbacks, bribes, prostitutes, coercion, blackmail, tax evasion. By the way, I NEVER participated in any of these things just in case you may be wondering.

8. Having to work with an actual genetic-freak troll. Seriously, she super-glued her teeth back together occasionally (yes, really). Another favorite thing that she did: Kept lifting up her shirt and scratching her (hot air balloon-shaped, pasty-white) belly.

9. Seeing toys stolen from a Christmas toy function for underpriveliged children ("they won't miss 'em").

10. Getting to go to several fantastic sites of vehicle wrecks on the highway to investigate accidents. In one case, our guy fell asleep and flipped over an 18-wheeler and the trailer was laying across the dark highway. Another truck came along and plowed through the middle of his trailer and emerged from the incredible wreck--drenched head to toe in prune juice from the load--but he was freaking out because he thought it was blood! (okay, he could also be freaking out from having just been in a horrible accident, too...)

11. Firing a girl who was really losing it at work and snapping at everyone, as well as not doing any work. She disappeared and showed up, completely incoherent and disheveled, 3 weeks later at her mother's house in Chicago after having gone crazy, sleeping in her car and driving all over the country.

12. Firing a guy and giving him very candid advice about what he could do to improve at his next job (Note: this is NOT a good idea in general). I actually called him at home and had him come in to be fired so I could look him in the eye and tell him exactly why (start with giving the finger to one of our 2 million dollar customer's executives). I knew that this was the kind of guy that went through life as a victim and I was going through a very idealistic phase about being up front and completely honest (I get that way sometimes--I know, give it up!). After spending an hour telling him exactly why he was getting fired, he hugged me and thanked me. (Once you're inside their head, it's all downhill from there!)

13. The time I desperately hired a guy in a hurry and sent him for driver training. When the trainer sent him on a test run 4 hours later, he purposely rammed his truck into a brick mailbox (sending it flying 200 yards). Later found out this was a scam that he was pulling at multiple companies (but he still got $20,000 from our insurance company and totalled our truck which had just been paid off).

14. Learning new, inventive ways to cuss. I still can't shake that wonderful habit.

15. The time I solved the mystery of the guy who stole one of our vehicles. To everyone's amazement, after a week I figured out where he went and tracked down our missing truck in an empty parking lot. Yes--I'm Sherlock Holmes!

Oh, I could write a book!