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: You've told me now about the first 4 characteristics of the quantum leap. Those seem pretty obvious. Are there any other critical characteristics. Signed. Getting educated from the Chamber. Comment: For those who haven't been following the column, we've identified a number of characteristics of major business improvement that follows certain of our clients. We call this improvement a "quantum leap." It is a quantum leap in performance because the major indicators of performance go off the chart. So far we have identified 4 characteristics of this phenomenon: 1). The CEO is heavily involved in the change; 2). Ideas for improvement are encouraged from all the employees and most important, they are implemented in a timely fashion; 3). The workplace is organized on the basis of team concepts; 4). Employees are not only encouraged to come up with ideas but they must be given a framework in which to analyze ideas for submittal, like waste elimination to cost of solution (benefit to cost) ratios of 20:1. These 4 characteristics serve as the framework for starting the quantum leap. The next several steps start to put a strain on the organization. We see the fifth step of the quantum leap taking the form of ideas which challenge the status quo and which extend across organizational boundaries. In order for substantive change to occur, major business practices need to be challenged. Waste in business operations need to be challenged as precisely what they are, drains in the profits of the business. If it fails to add value, why are you doing it? These are the questions that need to be embedded in the daily dialogue of employees. If there is no clear value apparent in company business practices, if they fail to deliver value to your clients, then it is a suspect practice and should be challenged. This is where the major improvements occur. Clearly, you need to do all the little things that are suggested by the employees in their proposals, but you really need to encourage radical approaches to improving the business. Let me give you an example. We were working with a client and the CEO could see that ideas were being discussed but the real challenges to the organization were not occurring. As soon as an idea would challenge the current management structure, one of the managers in the middle of the discussion would become defensive. He began to lock in his heals. So what did we do? We didn't really need to do much. The employees worked through the issue with our facilitation by noting that the organization problem really reflected itself in the business's inability to ship orders on time. In other words, the organization was not delivering the added-value function of making good on its commitments to customers. So we measured that capability with a "Yes/No" chart. Did we ship all orders on time today? Yes or No! Not maybe. And guess what happened? The organization succeeded in beginning to ship orders on time. And the organization had to be changed to respond to this new goal. And the resistant manager came on board to accept the new organization arrangement. The message from this story is that unless we had gotten to this issue the resolution of the organization problem would have to be resolved with another approach. But it was one of the serious problems that needed to be fixed. Our major observation here is that in order to make a quantum leap in business performance, you have to have at least one major issue that crosses organizational boundaries. In the example above, that one issue was enough. The reason for this requirement is obvious. Unless you challenge the organization while the facilitators are still there leading the change process with a "No Blame" approach, the business will have no experience in doing the same thing when the facilitators leave. Perhaps, a point, not lost on most of the readers, is that this type of tension involvement leaves people angry that someone may be out to get them. What we try to do at this point, is spend time with the management team working through these problems, as problems, not character assassinations. We do not get involved with behavior problems, that is the domain of others. We get involved with business problems. In summarizing, if you have good ideas, they should be implemented. But if you want to make a quantum leap, you need good ideas, a method to analyze them and a system to implement them. Then you need an idea which challenges the system. Not just any idea, but an idea that puts everyone in the company on a course to fix a nagging boundary problem in the business. In the next several months, we will continue to explore the characteristics of the quantum leap phenomenon. 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.