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: Last month you mentioned that a "quantum leap" in performance occurs in some of your clients. How do you measure the quantum leap and how do you know you have made it? Signed. Puzzled in Oakland. Comment: You'll have to bear with me on this subject. It is a new observation and all of the characteristics of the quantum leap are not entirely clear. But there are a few things that are clear about the quantum leap. First of all, the CEO had to endure our training program. It is a 12 week program that re-engineers a company by looking at waste in the business and then systematically looks at what can be done to eliminate as much of the waste as possible. The key to this first step is the involvement of all employees of the business in this analysis phase. From this initial work, ideas are submitted to the CEO for implementation and if they meet our criteria of 20:1 benefit to cost ratio, the CEO approves as many of the suggestions as he can. Once these are completed, the business has improved in some way. The question is how much? Did the time to complete an order get reduced? Did the cycle time to process an engineering change get compressed? Are new ideas continuing to come in after the training is over? There are very measurable business improvements that can be identified to assess whether the business is getting better. But remember, the objective of our efforts is not just to improve the bottom line, it is to improve the bottom line and create a new culture that will continue to improve the bottom line. This culture change is integral to the quantum leap. Because it is only through an altered culture that these significant improvements can be made. Most businesses are not organized to respond to good ideas from their employees. In fact, most businesses are organized to do just the opposite, they discourage good ideas from employees. So one of the characteristics of the company that is going to make the quantum leap is whether new ideas are encouraged and whether they get acted on in a timely manner. So that is one of the first measure of the quantum leap company. How many new ideas have been submitted this week? How many were acted upon? How many have been completed? And are ideas coming in regularly? Surprisingly, or maybe not so surprisingly, we can tell when a company is slipping back to old habits by just getting this list of new ideas each week and the status of other ideas in the system. When ideas stop, something negative is happening in the organization and we should be involved. The drop off of new ideas indicates that the "forces of evil" are at work to pull the organization back to the "good old days." Once the flow of ideas is encouraged, then the company will have started in the right direction. One of the concepts that we attempt to get across is the idea of teams and teamwork. These concepts are not difficult to understand, they are difficult to implement. There are not a lot of good examples to use in establishing references for successful team implementations. There are a lot of teams that are being formed in the workplace and there is an awful lot of literature about high performance work organizations (HPWO). But most of the success comes from an understanding of the goal of a work organization and how the employees can best be organized to eliminate waste in the process. My logic tells me from experience that teams are the most efficient way to organize work because the team is much like a family and most people like the good feel of working with people that they enjoy. Teams cross-train everyone in the work of the team (some players may not be as good as others at certain tasks but in an emergency they can be effective substitutes), and so forth. I have other documents that can detail what these teams would look like and I can be contacted at my office to get that information. So let's summarize what we now know about the quantum leap organization. It has the following characteristics: 1) the CEO must be active in the process of business improvement and the cultural change that takes place; 2) a system is in place to measure and encourage the input of new ideas; and 3) the work place is organized on the basis of teams. The additional characteristics of the quantum leap will be covered in the next two columns. 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 March 1994.