Relentlessly Pursue Perfection
Written by Dan Roberts
“Gentlemen, we will chase perfection, and we will chase it relentlessly, knowing all the while we can never attain it. But along the way, we shall catch excellence.”
- Vince Lombardi
Known for his achievements on the football field, Vince Lombardi has had a legacy of impact in business as leaders apply his approach as a coach to disciplined business practices. In a run of 5 championships in 7 years as a head coach of the Green Bay Packers, his focus on discipline to the fundamentals of the game were further reinforced with his relentless pursuit of perfection. He didn't believe that perfect was achievable, but knew that understanding the reasons for imperfection, adjusting actions to achieve a better outcome, applying them consistently, and then a re-evaluation of the results was a recipe for excellence.
In Operations, we sometimes forget that relentless focus on perfection is necessary to achieve true excellence. We normalize failure and accept sub-par results and the operational practices that deliver them. One of the most debated Key Performance Indicators in operations is Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE). Introduced as a key indicator of productivity in his work on Total Productive Maintenance, Seiichi Nakajima’s Introduction to TPM, OEE has become one of the consistent standards of productivity measures across industries. He clearly defined the measure, it's subcomponents, and the approach to capture improvement in productivity. Widely used today, an OEE measure of 85% is considered among top performers. Variability in this depends heavily on the process being measured. Though, knowledge of this "world class performance level" has become the bane of many operations across the globe. These operations report 85% or greater OEE, while labor productivity reduces, capacities become restricted, and maintenance and capital investments increase. This dissonance between a high reported "efficiency" and poor or stagnated business performance is often a direct result of normalizing losses that cause imperfection, sometimes even removing these losses from the measure, because "it's out of our control".
Top performing companies understand the hazard of normalizing failures, while relentlessly pursuing perfection. In the spirit of Vince Lombardi's words, these organizations know that perfection will not be attained but excellence achieved. While operations are complex, this relentless focus can be narrowed to the same few simple principles of excellence.
Organizations in pursuit of perfection focus on loss elimination. They understand the real capacity of their operation (i.e., what it was designed to do), the actual output, and record the details of all losses which are prioritized for elimination.
High performing operations define actions to address top priority losses and deploy resources based on the effort required and improvement impact.
Teams are taught new ways of working to consistently deploy improvement actions.
Leaders monitor the results of the improvement actions for effectiveness and adjust depending on the result.
Oversimplification of complex operations can have the same result as passive normalization and acceptance of failure, so it is important to recognize that these simple principles must be applied relentlessly within the construct of an overall operational improvement strategy.