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About 3,000 years ago, the wise King Solomon wrote: “Of making many books, there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh.” I suspect that if most modern executives
could send a message back to Solomon’s time (and don’t bet that modern
technology won’t find a way), they’d say, “Your Majesty, you ain’t seen
nothing yet.” In truth, today’s executive is in the
center of an information explosion, and bringing order out of this chaos would
tax the wisdom of Solomon. More than 2,000 books are published every week. More
than 1,600 daily newspapers spew out 62.3 million copies a day in the United
States alone. The nation's top 100 magazines produce about 240 million copies
per issue. But this is only the beginning. Almost every
office has its fax machine, spouting messages throughout the day. Computerized
data bases offer libraries of information that can be tapped with a modem
plugged into a telephone jack. You can’t get away from the telephone.
It’s in your office, home, hotel suite and car. In most cases, your cell phone
goes wherever you go! Some 16 million miles of fiber optic cable spin a
communications web around the globe, and each cable can handle 10 million
communications at a time. Much of the exploding information is highly
useful. A great deal is worthless to you. How do you separate the wheat from the
chaff? Equally important, how do you organize the information and put it
together in a meaningful pattern? We recommend to our clients ten strategies
for coping with the explosion. Briefly: Strategy 1: Have an information plan. The plan should provide a concise statement
of the information you need to fulfill your corporate mission. It should
designate individuals who are responsible for gathering, processing, updating
and making available the required data. The plan should also provide a practical
system for key people to gain access to the information quickly and easily.
It’s useful to provide for a formal periodic review of all information
requirements and all systems for collecting information. Strategy 2: Focus on action, not on
reports. Every report is an overhead expense. A
useless report is a dead weight. So before you request a report, ask yourself,
“Is it necessary?” If it isn’t, save the staff time and expense. Useless reports encourage mediocrity. I’ve
known middle-management people who spent more time filling out reports than they
did doing their jobs. I’ve known others who specialized in doing
things that made them look good on reports but contributed little toward
corporate objectives. If you don’t want to be blown away by the information
explosion, make sure your middle managers understand that they are being
evaluated on what they actually accomplish and not on what they write in their
reports. Strategy 3: Simplify. Some corporations have reports to explain
other reports, meetings to figure out what happened at other meetings, and vast
data banks of information they’ve never used. Don’t unnecessarily complicate the
gathering and storing of information. The simpler it is, the more meaningful it
is to more people. The first step in simplifying is to focus
clearly on your objectives. Decide what you want to accomplish. Then make sure
that the only information that comes to you is the information you need to make
rational and solid decisions. Strategy 4: Clarify. Teach your staff to prepare reports and data
that are simple and easy to understand. Don’t tolerate jargon. Show that you
value clear, precise language that everybody understands. Encourage your staff
not to over communicate. Let them know that they don’t have to cover every
possible detail, contingency, or outcome. Strategy 5: Qualify. You qualify information by deciding whether
it will be useful to you. Ninety percent of the information we wade through will
be useless. Selecting the 10% becomes a challenge. The secret: Look for the
specific. Discard all generalities and focus on the particular information that
might have practical application in your business. Strategy 6: Systemize the routine. An executive should not be saddled with
routine, repetitive tasks. That’s staff work. Teach your staff the most
efficient and cost-effective way to accomplish such tasks, and get them to
follow the routine invariably. This leaves you more time for creative thinking. For instance, most business correspondence
is routine and falls into specific categories. An executive shouldn’t have to
dictate a separate response to each inquiry. Instead, you might load some
standard letters into the computer or some standard paragraphs that might be
inserted into appropriate letters. Strategy 7: Process papers; don’t just
shuffle them. Don’t just lay papers aside and “come
back to them later.” That’s paper shuffling. When I go through my mail each
day, I do three things: 1. With each letter, I decide whether this
letter is something I will act upon or whether it will be referred to someone
else for action. When I’ve finished this process, my desk
is cleared off and I’m ready to get on with other meaningful projects. Strategy 8: Update, then eliminate. The sharpest executives I know keep their files and data banks as lean as they keep their payrolls. They do this by updating, then eliminating. Each time a book, magazine, report or other
communication falls on your desk, ask yourself, "Why might I need this and
how might I use it?” If you can’t think of a specific answer, throw it out. Strategy 9: Constantly synthesize
information. Synthesizing data means pulling together all
its parts to form a whole system of information and ideas you can act upon. Have
your staff put this information together in the context of the corporate
mission, constantly synthesizing it to keep all divisions and departments
informed. Synthesizing involves three important considerations: 1. Accessibility.
Everyone who needs the information should be able to get to it quickly and
easily. Strategy 10: Educate your people to
control data. People in middle and lower management
positions need to be freed of the paper burden just as upper management does.
Teaching them to manage information will result in more productivity and more
creative thinking. The experts tell us that human knowledge is doubling every 32 hours. That’s a lot of information to keep track of. You can keep track of it more easily if you determine what information you need and make sure it’s available when you need it. The information you don’t need can be routed to those who can use it. If it’s information nobody needs, then it should be routed to the landfill or purged from your electronic files. |
