Perfect Institutions
In pretty much every major city in this country, there’s a Hollister Co. clothing store — there are over 500 of them in all. Walk inside and it’s like being transported: the windows are shuttered so they control the light, the entrance has an L-shaped route so that you don’t catch a hint of the outside world, the floors and ceilings have been replaced with new patterns, thumping music controls the sound, special scents are pumped into the air to control what you smell. An attractive young person greets you at the door. You’re in a different world.
And, to a first approximation, this new world is perfect. Sure, if you search hard, maybe you can find a ruffled edge on a shirt somewhere, but it’s hardly enough to spoil the illusion. And this is what strikes me: that in every major city, in this deeply-flawed country, you can find a little bit of perfection.
No one person, I am sure, can accomplish this kind of perfection. Think about yourself being responsible for creating such a place. Surely there’s some part of it you’re not capable of doing — do you know where to find the perfect music and the perfect scent and someone to tile the ceiling and someone to take a perfect photograph for the wall and on and on? And even if you are that kind of heroic generalist, who can handle all of that, could you maintain it without flagging, day after day, without loosening your standards, without giving in to the exhaustion that maintaining such a perfect appearance takes? OK, perhaps you have more willpower than I — but unless you’re Amy Goodman, even you must take ill sometimes, must have a family emergency to attend to, or something! Nobody’s perfect, right?
And yet, here they are, five hundred stores of perfection. (You may detest what they are perfect at, but that’s not my point. The point is that they have a vision and make it stick.) How do they do it?
“It’s obvious,” you say. “They don’t just have one person — they have a whole bunch. When one falls down on the job, or skips out sick, the others pick up the slack.” But those others are imperfect too. It seems far from preordained that a bunch of imperfection combines to create the perfect — it seems just as plausible that combining imperfect people causes the imperfections to multiply, that the whole is far less than the sum of its parts (I’m sure we’ve all been in such situations).
The difference between these two fates — between people’s imperfections canceling each other out versus amplifying each other — is institutions, the social structures that guide people in their actions. Hollister seems gifted with an amazing set of institutions. I don’t know the details, but we can imagine them: Everyone must show up for their shift an hour early. If you don’t show, a manager calls in a replacement. The managers keep an eye on your performance and if you don’t do a good enough job folding shirts, you’re reprimanded or replaced. Perhaps a roving “brand protection squad” goes around ensuring local managers are upholding the high national standards. And on and on. Every failsafe has a failsafe.
If you’ve ever tried building an organization yourself, you know how hard it is to get something like this right. And yet the world is filled with organizations that seem to do it effortlessly. This is the paradox at the heart of Kafka’s The Trial and it’s one that continues to astonish me. How do they do it? And how come no one else is curious about the details of their success?
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June 8, 2012
Isn’t there a huge industry devoted to analysing business practices to try and work this out? (I’m not saying that in a “you fool” way, I just always assumed that was the intent of a big chunk of business studies.)
And if that’s true, I wonder if it’s actually like what I think the movie industry is. Essentially, there are some necessary conditions to producing a viable product, and then the rest of it is pretty much undeterminable. Nobody learns much from the necessary conditions apart from really slow aggregation, because you fail anyway for uncontrollable reasons even if you do them.
posted by Danny
on June 8, 2012 #
Isn’t there a huge industry devoted to analysing business practices to try and work this out? (I’m not saying that in a “you fool” way, I just always assumed that was the intent of a big chunk of business studies.)
If there is, I haven’t found it yet. There’s a “business books” market that sells highly-oversimplified anecdotes about especially-quirky things some CEOs do, but that hardly seems like the same thing. Any ideas where else to look?
And if that’s true, I wonder if it’s actually like what I think the movie industry is. Essentially, there are some necessary conditions to producing a viable product, and then the rest of it is pretty much undeterminable. Nobody learns much from the necessary conditions apart from really slow aggregation, because you fail anyway for uncontrollable reasons even if you do them.
Well, there are two things here: strategy and execution. I agree strategy may be like this, but execution seems like a much more solvable problem, and that’s what I’m focused on here. I don’t have any a priori reason to believe that having stores as perfectionist as Hollister will make money (strategy), but clearly someone likes them and has figured out how to make them en masse (execution).
posted by Aaron Swartz
on June 8, 2012 #
A few people have written about “evidence-based management”; there may be a bit of overlap with what you want. http://openlibrary.org/books/OL3414690M/Hard_facts_dangerous_half-truths_and_total_nonsense by two of those people features less about quirky CEOs than most business books.
posted by Mike Linksvayer
on June 8, 2012 #
I lost you somewhere, especially at “how come no one else is curious about the details of their success?”. Do you mean, how to build a functioning franchise? McDonalds, for example, has whole handbooks about the details. You can take classes in it at various service schools.
You’re hanging out too much with geeks, venture capitalists, professional blowhards, and high-class grifters 1/2 :-). This is NOT a mystery to people who actually work in service and retail.
And it is not “effortlessly”. You’re being misled by one of the cardinal rules of retail, which is don’t show the customer what goes on behind the scenes. There’s a whole genre of expose about that.
posted by Seth Finkelstein
on June 9, 2012 #
FYI
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000024.html
“The other secret of Big Macs is that you can have an IQ that hovers somewhere between “idiot” and “moron” (to use the technical terms) and you’ll still be able to produce Big Macs that are exactly as unsurprising as all the other Big Macs in the world. That’s because McDonald’s real secret sauce is its huge operations manual, describing in stunning detail the exact procedure that every franchisee must follow in creating a Big Mac. …”
“The rules have been carefully designed by reasonably intelligent people (back at McDonald’s Hamburger University) so that dumdums can follow them just as well as smart people. In fact the rules include all kinds of failsafes, like bells that go off if you keep the fries in the oil too long, which were created to compensate for more than a little human frailty. There are stopwatches and timing systems everywhere. There is a system to make sure that the janitor checks if the bathrooms are clean every half hour. (Hint: they’re not.)
The system basically assumes that everybody will make a bunch of mistakes, but the burgers that come out will be, um, consistent, and you’ll always be asked if you want fries with that.”
posted by Seth Finkelstein
on June 9, 2012 #
See this New Inquiry article for one of the tools of “perfection” (spying on workers): http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/the-secret-shopper/
So change “Perhaps a roving ‘brand protection squad’” from “perhaps” to “almost certainly”.
“How do they do it? And how come no one else is curious about the details of their success?”
The New Inquiry article is evidence of curiosity about the details of their success. Whole libraries of leftist literature are filled with the products of curiosity about the details of their success. One might then ask why is there no concomitant desire to emulate their success — but the question answers itself.
posted by Yarrow
on June 10, 2012 #
Get your head out the books and get out more, there’s nothing special about Hollister, or the franchise process that produces clone after clone of the same boring cookie cutter store to sell to stupid kids who haven’t grown up and still think fashion is the most important thing in the world. If you shop at Hollister, you’re a sucker.
posted by Jim
on June 13, 2012 #
We do a fair share of catastrophic accidents (think of airplane / boats crashes, industrial plant explosions, construction scaffold collapses, et cetera), and IMHO the best practice is to understand and accept the “swiss cheese” model:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_cheese_model
No one level should try to be perfect — if they try that, they’ll just focus too much on perfection in little things while ignoring big things. Instead, multiple overlapping but distinct levels should be imposed so that failure can only occur if errors make their way through multiple levels.
One big problem we’ve noticed is when people are given roles that are too specific and are not encouraged to always maintain “situational awareness” about everything going on. How do 20 people all miss some extraordinary failure or hazard? Because each is focused entirely on a little piece. What you instead need are 20 people each of whom takes on big, overlapping chunks, and each is told to just look about them and find weak links or choke points or hazards, etc.
posted by Max Kennerly
on June 19, 2012 #
You can also send comments by email.
Comments
Isn’t there a huge industry devoted to analysing business practices to try and work this out? (I’m not saying that in a “you fool” way, I just always assumed that was the intent of a big chunk of business studies.)
And if that’s true, I wonder if it’s actually like what I think the movie industry is. Essentially, there are some necessary conditions to producing a viable product, and then the rest of it is pretty much undeterminable. Nobody learns much from the necessary conditions apart from really slow aggregation, because you fail anyway for uncontrollable reasons even if you do them.
posted by Danny on June 8, 2012 #
If there is, I haven’t found it yet. There’s a “business books” market that sells highly-oversimplified anecdotes about especially-quirky things some CEOs do, but that hardly seems like the same thing. Any ideas where else to look?
Well, there are two things here: strategy and execution. I agree strategy may be like this, but execution seems like a much more solvable problem, and that’s what I’m focused on here. I don’t have any a priori reason to believe that having stores as perfectionist as Hollister will make money (strategy), but clearly someone likes them and has figured out how to make them en masse (execution).
posted by Aaron Swartz on June 8, 2012 #
A few people have written about “evidence-based management”; there may be a bit of overlap with what you want. http://openlibrary.org/books/OL3414690M/Hard_facts_dangerous_half-truths_and_total_nonsense by two of those people features less about quirky CEOs than most business books.
posted by Mike Linksvayer on June 8, 2012 #
I lost you somewhere, especially at “how come no one else is curious about the details of their success?”. Do you mean, how to build a functioning franchise? McDonalds, for example, has whole handbooks about the details. You can take classes in it at various service schools.
You’re hanging out too much with geeks, venture capitalists, professional blowhards, and high-class grifters 1/2 :-). This is NOT a mystery to people who actually work in service and retail.
And it is not “effortlessly”. You’re being misled by one of the cardinal rules of retail, which is don’t show the customer what goes on behind the scenes. There’s a whole genre of expose about that.
posted by Seth Finkelstein on June 9, 2012 #
FYI
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000024.html
“The other secret of Big Macs is that you can have an IQ that hovers somewhere between “idiot” and “moron” (to use the technical terms) and you’ll still be able to produce Big Macs that are exactly as unsurprising as all the other Big Macs in the world. That’s because McDonald’s real secret sauce is its huge operations manual, describing in stunning detail the exact procedure that every franchisee must follow in creating a Big Mac. …”
“The rules have been carefully designed by reasonably intelligent people (back at McDonald’s Hamburger University) so that dumdums can follow them just as well as smart people. In fact the rules include all kinds of failsafes, like bells that go off if you keep the fries in the oil too long, which were created to compensate for more than a little human frailty. There are stopwatches and timing systems everywhere. There is a system to make sure that the janitor checks if the bathrooms are clean every half hour. (Hint: they’re not.)
The system basically assumes that everybody will make a bunch of mistakes, but the burgers that come out will be, um, consistent, and you’ll always be asked if you want fries with that.”
posted by Seth Finkelstein on June 9, 2012 #
See this New Inquiry article for one of the tools of “perfection” (spying on workers): http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/the-secret-shopper/
So change “Perhaps a roving ‘brand protection squad’” from “perhaps” to “almost certainly”.
“How do they do it? And how come no one else is curious about the details of their success?”
The New Inquiry article is evidence of curiosity about the details of their success. Whole libraries of leftist literature are filled with the products of curiosity about the details of their success. One might then ask why is there no concomitant desire to emulate their success — but the question answers itself.
posted by Yarrow on June 10, 2012 #
Get your head out the books and get out more, there’s nothing special about Hollister, or the franchise process that produces clone after clone of the same boring cookie cutter store to sell to stupid kids who haven’t grown up and still think fashion is the most important thing in the world. If you shop at Hollister, you’re a sucker.
posted by Jim on June 13, 2012 #
We do a fair share of catastrophic accidents (think of airplane / boats crashes, industrial plant explosions, construction scaffold collapses, et cetera), and IMHO the best practice is to understand and accept the “swiss cheese” model:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_cheese_model
No one level should try to be perfect — if they try that, they’ll just focus too much on perfection in little things while ignoring big things. Instead, multiple overlapping but distinct levels should be imposed so that failure can only occur if errors make their way through multiple levels.
One big problem we’ve noticed is when people are given roles that are too specific and are not encouraged to always maintain “situational awareness” about everything going on. How do 20 people all miss some extraordinary failure or hazard? Because each is focused entirely on a little piece. What you instead need are 20 people each of whom takes on big, overlapping chunks, and each is told to just look about them and find weak links or choke points or hazards, etc.
posted by Max Kennerly on June 19, 2012 #
You can also send comments by email.