[Category:Books]
https://inside.bwater.com/publications/principles_excerpt
This was the book for EcoMark’s book club for the months of February - April, 2019.
Discussion questions:
- Do we have a culture of radical honesty and transparency? Is is something that we value?
- James has, at other jobs, specifically set aside time to get brutal honesty & critique
- I think we have an average level of honesty and transparency, and would need to have a discussion about
- If we were to create a “baseball card” showing people’s stats in different areas, what are the stats that we would keep track of?
- Responsiveness / Speed of work / Productivity
- Ability to juggle many varied responsibilities
- Communication - volume, scope, quality
- Thoroughness of planning
- Thoroughness of execution
- Ability to give clear instructions, hand off well-documented plans during transition
- Creativity / risk-taking vs. consistency / routine
- Records of specific achievements and failures at past projects
- What is our decision-making process? Do we have a clear one?
- IT: Whoever is dealing with the scenario mostly makes the decision, and that’s the policy until we find a reason to change it
- IT: We started allocating time for post-project evaluation to take a look at the decisions that were made during the course of the project
- Warehouse: A lot of room for individual decision making, as long as you assume responsibility for the consequences and learn from the results
- Do we have company-wide principles, either explicit or commonly understood?
- Core values
- Need-to-know basis (not very transparent). We also don’t have a good, commonly shared and understood platform for allowing people to share/find information
- Top-down communication could be better
- Dogs are valued
- Tacit principle: we do things however we want, or whatever way seems appropriate at the time. Better principle we might want to install: We do things with forethought and planning, and we’re methodical about how we operate and make decisions.
- Principle we should have: “We have an “EcoMark Standard” way of doing things, that’s the best way we know of to do each thing. If someone comes up with a better way to do it, we can update the “EcoMark Way” of doing it.
Feedback:
- As a warehouse team, there is more we could do to be more cohesive/in line with each other
- We could be more proactive about detecting future trouble in advance
- As we overcome obstacles and surprises, we could be better about codifying the solution
- On the IT team, we don’t, but should have principles for how we prioritize our work and issues that come up, and which of our responsibilities take precedence over others
Other takeaways:
- When hiring, character and capability should take precedence over skills. Peter thinks that we’re already doing a pretty good job of this
- Choosing people you want to work with is very important