The following is another in a new series of columns that will provide answers to small business questions. The new question and answer column is written by Dr. Leonard Bertain, Ph.D., the president of The Bertain Consulting Group of Oakland, CA a consulting firm specializing in the improvement of business processes and business re-engineering. Dr. Bertain's book, "The New Turnaround", contains a fictionalized character known as "Dr. Elbie". Should you have a question regarding business management issues, write or fax them to Dr. Elbie, Bertain Consulting Group, 3758 Grand Ave., Suite 25, Oakland, CA 94611, phone (510) 653-6355 or lbertain@bertain.com Dear Dr. Elbie: The other night I attended a meeting of the National Tool and Machining Association and I heard one of your clients introduce you as the Jenny Craig of productivity consultants. You seemed to like that. Any comments? Curious in Fremont Dear Curious: I have to admit it, when I first heard him do the introduction I was a bit taken aback. I didn't know where he was heading. Once he let the cat out of the bag, I had to agree. His point is this. When we do our productivity or performance improvement work with companies, we declare a war on waste. We attack wastes in the business, as one of my clients says, "with the same direction of intensity of a Norden bomb site." We really focus the company on eliminating any extra fat (hence the comparison to Jenny Craig) in the system. So in this program, we look at waste in a business as fat on the body. The analogy went on. And here is where the power of the analogy exists. Some of the companies that we work with keep the fat off and some don't. Others go right back to the wasteful organization that existed before we arrived on the scene. It isn't easy to stay slim and it isn't easy to change the way you run your business even if it means that you are going to make a lot of money by doing so. I have never understood this. Why would a CEO not want to make money for his business. I think it is the same reason that the dieter doesn't follow his diet. It's discipline. Everybody knows that if you go on a diet, it is hard to keep the weight off. You can go to Jenny Craig and lose weight. The trick is keeping it off. Every weight watcher on this planet knows how hard it is. The dieter has to change his/her ways. No more snacking on potato chips and dip. No more beers after work. It takes discipline. And as has been said, "no one said that this was going to be easy." Believe me, it isn't. So given the example of the unsuccessful dieter, it is not surprising that many of the companies that we deal with are unable to keep the "waste" out of their businesses. Waste is habit that is built into the stru cture of the company and it is very hard to eliminate. Managers and owners that we have worked with over the years have verified the difficulty that our war on waste created for their organization. It creates difficulty. It is something that they wanted to do. They want to lose waste and keep it off. But the new organization requires that the CEO change, the managers need to change, and the workers need to change. And all this change creates pain. This is what dieting is about. It is about change. And for the dieter, the change is never comfortable. It requires discipline. And it causes pain. Probably the most significant observation about this process is that for many years, I believed that the failures that I had were failures of our process. The process of improvement works, but the process of teaching discipline does not. You need to be there everyday or at least talk by phone to make sure that all of the little things are being followed. When you realize that for each client that we worked with, we ended up delivering projects that would eliminate waste on the order of 20 to 1 benefit/cost ratio. For the last 30 projects, the average benefit/cost ratio has been over 40 to 1. This means that for every dollar invested to eliminate waste in the system, the dollar creates a $40 benefit. We eliminate $40 of waste for every $1 invested. These are very good numbers. It would make sense that as a CEO if you got that good of a return you would continue to follow the program. But as we know from the dieter, from the Jenny Craig student, initial success does not a svelte figure make. Jenny Craig figured this out. After she demonstrates to the dieter initially that weight loss is possible, she has the dieters come together to discuss their progress in groups. They come to share their progress. And their failures. So we have initiated a similar program. We are creating a course at the CEO University for graduates of our VAMMS and VAP programs. The purpose of this course is to give these CEO's an opportunity to continue the weight loss program that we started. The gathering of these CEO's can help reinforce the learnings of our earlier training with the idea that continued improvement is possible. As the introduction at the banquet made clear, it isn't the initial success of dieting that measures the success of the program, it is the long term prospect. Hopefully, many of you who have tried to lose fat in your organization by eliminating waste, have learned from this analogy. I think it helps make the point. Changing a business is very difficult and our initial work with companies is just the beginning. Dr. Elbie's Corner is copyrighted by Leonard Bertain, 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998. Dr. Elbie's Corner is a monthly article published by the Bertain Consulting Group, in the CEO University Website @ Bertain.com or CEOU.com. This article is reprinted from May 1994.