Chapter 13 Perfection as Only You Can Imagine It Step Five: Identify the Theoretical Best Practice This chapter introduces the fifth of the six perspectives outlined in the Foreword: a call to go for the maximum result that can be achieved with reasonable risk and resources, far beyond merely exceeding tomorrow's best practices. This chapter shows you how to identify what can realistically be achieved as a maximum result. It is axiomatic: Tomorrow's best practice is bound to be better than today's. And the day after tomorrow's best practice will be better than ever. It is helpful, therefore, to use the concept of theoretical best practice to try to see where we are eventually headed so we can get there sooner--an insight both new and revolutionary for most organizations. The theoretical best practice is simply the most effective process that can possibly be accomplished by anyone. It will usually exceed the future best practice by a wide margin. In corporate communications, for example, a theoretical best practice would mean having everyone hear and act on a message in appropriate ways within a few seconds. We know that is possible because those seeing a fire, smelling smoke, and hearing a fire alarm in a building will respond appropriately in that amount of time. You must understand that your organization's actual performance today represents a tiny fraction of what is possible. The theoretical-best-practice concept can help you set more appropriate goals to take advantage of this. We will begin by saying that it is a lot easier (and more instructive) to identify the theoretical best practice than to identify the future best practice. With future best practice, you have to take many precise measurements in many places. This measuring is not easy if, for example, you set out to determine the distance between the Earth and a faraway star. But with theoretical best practice, you can usefully extrapolate by relying on the many dimensions of your imagination and your own personal experience. You should be able to imagine ways of doing something better than has been done by you or anyone else before. Theoretical best practice has to be a big stretch. So the purpose of this step is to set an optimum, but realistic, goal. Set your sights far enough beyond tomorrow's normal best result so that you don't settle for small improvements when you can have much larger ones. Goal setting using theoretical best practice may be the most important lesson in this book. It is the key to the most effective way to 2,000 percent solutions. How High Is Up? Managers often complain that they do not know how tough to make corporate goals. Imagine that output from your operations has been rising at 5 percent per year in units while revenues per employee have grown at 3 percent per year. Many will be tempted to set this historical performance as a target. However, if you now learn that you have been losing lots of market share because competitors have been growing at 12 percent a year in units, you may feel differently. You may want a higher target. If you also learn that launching a planned new service this year will expand your total volume by more than 20 percent this year, the target may grow further. Then if you find out that you have just signed a major customer who will double your volume, the goal will probably rise again. Add more information that tells you that you have not been calling on the twenty largest potential customers, and another quantum goal increase occurs. Like the salespeople tossing wadded paper into wastebaskets mentioned in Chapter 12, most leaders strive for goals that are 30 to 50 percent likely to be reached. The setting of goals that have to be stretched for can expand performance by creating more realistic interest in employees. Usually, managers set goals that are too easily reached, but sometimes the goals are simply unattainable. Either way, easy or hard, the leaders get lots of complaints about the goals. There is considerable negotiating by affected persons who want the goals at lower levels. Solving this problem effectively can bring major success. Utilizing theoretical best practice provides a major improvement in goal setting by identifying both a higher standard and one that is achievable and credible to employees. You get more stretch with the same degree of psychological comfort. This story about the creation of a large fortune is instructive concerning how theoretical best practice can be useful for guiding action. Early in the twentieth century, no one knew how to get at the oil and gas under a body of water, whether the water was in a lake, a bayou, or the ocean. One wildcatter had the foresight to realize that someday it would be possible to drill inexpensively in shallow water. He looked for fields where there were successful oil or gas wells surrounding bodies of water and bought the rights to drill under the water, even though no one yet knew how to drill there. He was confident there was oil or gas there and he was mostly right. For pennies per acre, he ultimately added tens of millions of dollars to his family estate. Here was a man who understood the reason for determining the theoretical best practice. The actual best practice of his day didn't permit drilling for petroleum in shallow water. The technology of the day did allow the building of structures in shallow water (he had seen piers and bridges jutting from the ocean floor and lake beds) and building watertight pipelines. If these capabilities were combined, he reasoned, you could drill and transport petroleum products from wells situated underwater. He estimated that this approach would cost four times the usual cost. To offset his added cost, he then looked for wells on dry land that produced much more than four times what normal wells produced. This is exactly the thought process needed to identify the theoretical best practice. This kind of abstract thinking applied to your potential can put lots of money in your organization's pocket, and in yours, too. Bill Gates Shows You the Money Bill Gates, founder and largest shareholder of Microsoft, may be providing another such example today. He believes that electronic images will be cheap to provide and of high quality in five years or so. Gates, widely reputed to be the richest man in the world, has focused on the theoretical-best-practice opportunity presented by personally buying the electronic rights to every piece of art that he can acquire, even when he does not own the artwork itself. These rights were purchased when there was little electronic communication via the Internet and other media, and detail portrayed was poor. So the rights were purchased cheaply. The situation is changing already. When we use the Internet in the future to order electronic copies from Gates's archives, we will be making him even richer. Meantime, Microsoft's ubiquitous software is another way we all make him richer. You will recall the operating system he first sold to IBM was so primitive that would-be rivals turned up their noses at it. Gates focused on theoretical best practice and won by anticipating that a large market would develop for personal computers and that most software would be for the IBM PC standard. His thought process involved extrapolating Moore's Law (that integrated circuits double in effectiveness at the same cost every eighteen months) and banking on customers' preference for IBM. Warren Buffett Pumps Up the Money Warren Buffett, chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, has added new meaning to the term "getting full credit." Buffett is a great student of finding good stock value. From his studies, he learned that human psychology can create much added stock price value. The theoretical best practice in this arena is to have your company's stock sell at a premium to its current value based on historical and current performance because of anticipated successes you will have in the future. Also, the better your current performance, the higher the potential anticipation of future performance is likely to be. You can build a pyramid of wealth on other people's hopes, if you inspire them enough. Con men who offer investment pyramid schemes (like Ponzi) have known this for years. While Buffett is no con man, he knows how humans think. He has one of the best investing track records ever. The money he manages grows very rapidly. He goes his terrific track record one better: He lets the world know what he has bought, after he has bought it. Because his reputation is so stellar, others buy the same stocks, pushing the prices up higher than they would otherwise go. Because he is smart, they make him look even smarter. He also tells his story in his annual report. That creates a mystique about his work. One result the price of Berkshire Hathaway stock goes up faster than the value of the portfolio. Buffett approaches theoretical best practice in share gains. Encountered on an elevator at New York's Plaza Hotel, Buffett was as nice as his reputation. He provided directions to lost souls on the elevator as though he were a helpful hotel employee rather than one of the world's richest and smartest people. There was not a bodyguard or groupie in sight. Unless you knew it was he, you might have thought that you had just met the hotel manager. Now, that is a very satisfying theoretical best practice--lots of money, fame, and privacy as well. No Hits, No Runs, No Errors He throwed that out there like a strawberry at a battleship. --Red Jones, for years Cleveland Indians Commentator Baseball is a good metaphor in seeking an understanding of what a theoretical best practice is. In baseball the defending team has nine players on the field at all times. Many skills are involved: teamwork, throwing, running, catching. But the focus is on the pitcher, who can make or break a game. It is not unlike a self-directed work team with one person being critical to the team's efforts due to a special skill such as, say, statistics. So baseball pitchers can give us further insight into theoretical best practice. For a pitcher, theoretical best practice is winning every game he pitches. But there is another part to theoretical best practice here: For the team to win, the pitcher's team also has to have good hitters. The pitcher can't win the game if his team scores no runs. Also, the pitcher who performs at theoretical-best-practice levels is influenced by the fielding work of the team. If the other team makes fewer errors and scores lots of unearned runs, the pitcher also won't win. Thus, a high level of fielding competence is needed, too. Now to the pitching itself. We realize that the more stuff the pitcher has, the more likely it is that he will win. Ideally, he should have a fastball, a sinker, a slider, a curveball, and a knuckleball. The more pitches he has, the more chances he has to catch the hitter unprepared. Great pitchers have at least two great pitches. Sandy Koufax had both a great fastball and curveball. Most pitchers have a change-up. Koufax had a change-up, too. No great careers have resulted from a single pitch. So our theoretical-best-practice pitcher has to have several pitches and they have to be very well executed. His fastball has to be fast enough that the batter can't make very good contact with it. The curveball has to curve enough that the batter can't easily reach it. The knuckleball has to be so slow and has to drop so much that it eludes the best batters. To determine what theoretical best practice is as far as the various pitches are concerned, some work is required. Measurement of physical potential is used by engineers to help us determine what the theoretical best practice is in many cases. For pitching, we'd have to have a mechanical device with the ability to throw the fastball and the other pitches in various, precise ways. We'd have it throw the pitches in random order to all kinds of batters in the major leagues to find out how often the other side can hit our robot pitcher and how often. We would have to figure how many times to throw the fastball and the other pitches and in what ways. We'd have to note that the opposing batters will occasionally hit some home runs. Our team might now average hitting one home run and scoring three runs per ball game. To determine how good our offense has to be, we have to look at what our theoretical-best-practice pitcher can hope to accomplish. In our example, let's assume that the average runs per game by the opposing team is one. However, there will be a statistical variance. If the batters hit a home run every fifty-seven times at bat, the home runs will occasionally cluster. You could have three home runs in one nine-inning game. Usually there will only be one home run. In any case, the home team batters would always have to score a minimum of four runs to ensure that our pitcher always won. It would take a theoretical level of four runs or more per game for our team to win every game. Usually the opposing team will score one run and we will score four, assuming the same pitcher remains on the mound for nine innings. We would also have to factor into the analysis the effect on the game of some of our relief pitchers who don't pitch quite as well. We might need five or six top relief pitchers to win every game. Errors in fielding would also have to be considered. Locating the theoretical best practice is the key to setting the right objectives for your organization. Done properly, you will greatly expand your employees' and colleagues' sense of what can be accomplished, while you instill confidence that the large gains are reasonably likely to occur. This will, in turn, help motivate everyone in your organization to enthusiastically pursue these new "stretchier" goals. Your organization's performance will soar as a result, creating the exponential success of a great 2,000 percent solution. Getting From Point A to Point B Theoretical best practice helps on a personal level, too. An avid Boston Celtics fan was planning his route to the Celtics stadium. He began by asking everyone he knew how long it took them to get to the games and what route they took. Not one had a good route or a time-saving set of directions. Due to widespread construction in Boston, traffic was atrocious. Finally, the fan realized that he should test every possibility, a kind of theoretical-best-practice approach. He scouted all of the routes that led directly to the Fleet Center where the Celtics games are played. He did a similar study of all the routes that led to the Fleet Center access routes. He then calculated the time it took to do all of the different combinations of routes. He settled on one that was quite illogical as the crow flies. But the series of route changes when used together took a third less time than any alternative because the normal approach was to try to reduce distance, not elapsed time. Mastering the Masters Tiger, Tiger, burning bright In the forests of the night, What immortal hand or eye Could frame thy fearful symmetry? --William Blake, The Tiger One of the best ways to understand how effective an individual or organization can be is to use the example of a phenomenal athlete who amazes people with his success. Ask those who competed in the 1997 Masters Tournament in Augusta, Georgia. They will tell you this much: Tiger did not land in the woods (Exhibit 13-1). Learn from Tiger's awesome work in that classic, which he won with the lowest score in Masters' history and at the youngest age ever. The twenty-one-year-old actually exceeded what everyone believed to be the theoretical best practice in one area. During an entire week at the Augusta National Course, one of the hardest in the world for putting, he made every single putt of ten feet or less. Experts on the topic would have told you this accomplishment was impossible. Top pros usually make half their putts from six feet. Dave Pelz, an engineer, did some widely publicized mechanical tests and discovered that if you place a golf ball on the green and perfectly line up and roll the ball from twelve feet out, it will drop into the cup only half the time. So much for precision. Yet it happened. If you study his following year's performance in the Masters, the full scale of this accomplishment becomes clearer: Tiger might also have won in 1998 had he putted as well as he did in 1997. Tiger Woods's sport is dominated by men taught by professionals. Initially, Tiger did not learn from a pro. Taught by his father, a nonpro, this wunderkind doesn't take a full backswing from the ball as other top golfers do. He has perfected an unorthodox drive in which he hunkers down with a short, wicked swing and generally hits the ball farther and more accurately than anyone else who hits it a long way. Tiger Woods can hit the ball longer distances than the powerful John Daly. The conventional wisdom holds that if you try to hit the ball as hard as Tiger Woods hits the ball, you lose accuracy, as Daly often did. But at the Masters in 1997, Tiger Woods basically landed his hard hit drives on the fairways every time. So much for a sport dominated by trained professionals with lesser skills than Tiger's. Obviously, Tiger Woods played terrific golf in winning the 1997 Masters. Best practice here is to note the actual best score ever posted at Augusta under the same playing conditions. Tiger Woods went way beyond, breaking the existing record. Theoretical best practice goes beyond what Tiger Woods was able to accomplish, too. Theoretical best practice will tell us what would happen if every shot were as perfect, which duffer and champion alike know is simply not possible. One way to approach theoretical best practice is to figure out what is the most the human body can do--how hard a human can swing the club and hit the ball, and how accurately that human can hit the ball toward the target. Tiger's best swing will show high accuracy. It's possible for him to hit well repeatedly, just as a top concert pianist can play a piece of difficult classical music repeatedly without error. But golf is not a precision instrument. Some golf factors are uncontrollable. Theoretical Best Practice: Every Golfer's Dream Theoretical best practice in golf calls for hitting the ball well enough to birdie each par-three hole. (A birdie is one under par.) This accomplishment calls for hitting each tee shot so perfectly that the ball lands close enough to the hole--say no more than three feet from the pin--so that every putt is likely to drop. Golf courses typically have four par-three holes. So our analysis calls for three-foot putts every time and three scores of two and one score of three (theoretically missing one three-foot putt and one birdie as well). Due to roll, you will likely miss a three-foot putt one time in four. The course will also have four par-fives, and we know from the performance of people who do long-drive competitions that it is possible for people to hit the ball with some accuracy for distances of 300 yards. What those facts mean in theoretical best practice is that after the second shot, the ball should be on the green and three feet from the pin again. Theoretically, you would sink three of the four putts. So you would score three eagles (which is two under par) and another birdie. The rest of the eighteen holes (ten of them) are par fours. Theoretically, you have to assume that your accuracy at 300 yards will now give you three-foot accuracy from the pin on the second shot. You'll land close to the green or on it with the first shot so that a chip, a putt, or a pitch will get you near the pin. This means that after the second shot you'll be three feet away from the cup. Assume you make 70 percent of these short putts so that seven out of ten holes will be birdies. You'll also have three pars. For each eighteen-hole round, your score will be seventeen under par. Tiger was eighteen under par in total for the four rounds in the Masters. Theoretical best practice would be four times seventeen or sixty-eight under par. Basically, theoretical best practice works backwards: We start with what is perfection given the natural limits of human beings. We then begin to consider what we have to do to reach perfection. Tiger Woods averaged 323 yards off the tee at the Masters and would have had to learn to hit more accurately to achieve theoretical best practice. He did get a lot of birdies. What made him succeed was that he played the par-fives exceedingly well. He played par golf on the par-three holes. He had bigger gaps from theoretical best practice on the par-fours than on anything else. Using this comparison, he could analyze the gaps in his game on each hole and focus on his bigger gaps on par-fours. This discussion is only to show you about theoretical best practice. We do not intend to knock a man who is arguably as fine a player to ever swing a golf club. Tiger is young. He will no doubt continue to improve, perhaps dramatically so. Neither he nor anyone else short of a robot can reach theoretical best practice for an entire round of golf. He has, however, come closer than anyone else. Way to go, Tiger! The Unsound Sound Barrier In a Smithsonian Air and Space Museum audiotape, famed test pilot Chuck Yeager recalls the missions of test pilots who tried and failed to exceed the speed of sound. The planes would shake so much that they would tear apart. There were lots of crashes, and lives were lost. Theoretical best practice for an airplane was, therefore, believed to be flying at or just below the speed of sound back in the 1940s. But then the planes were redesigned. Yeager, who was lucky enough not to attack the sound barrier with the poorly designed planes, says the advanced plane he flew was buffeted a lot. But as soon as he passed through the speed of sound, the air became smooth. Those who have flown on the Concorde do so with the knowledge that this once-hazardous crossing of the sound barrier is quite safe. There is a Mach meter in the front of the cabin. Passengers who know about the sound barrier tense up as the Concorde approaches Mach 1 (the speed of sound). But nothing happens. Pioneers had set a theoretical-best-practice limit that was too low. Had Chuck Yeager and his unlucky peers observed the Mach 1 barrier, there would have been no space program. Theoretical Best Practice in Historical Perspective Modern people see themselves at the end of a continuous evolution of talent and knowledge. We do, in fact, stand on the shoulders of those who went before us. Perhaps we should examine history more carefully. Sports history suggests that the pursuit of theoretical best practice in sports has been limited due to a lack of historical perspective. For decades, runners thought it was not humanly possible to run a four-minute mile. Finally, in 1954, Roger Bannister ran the mile in under four minutes, specifically in three minutes, fifty-nine and four-tenths seconds. The record fell again quickly after that. Now no miler worth his salt is content to do less. Runners are still shaving seconds. Long jumpers are setting new records almost every year. Or so it would seem. But archeologists have gone back to study the beginning of sport in ancient Greece. In the excavations, they have found the long-jump pit the Greeks used 2,000 years ago. The long-jump pit suggests that athletes may have jumped twice as far as long jumpers today. However, the archeologists also dug up pieces of pottery that depict athletes doing long jumps with weights in their hands. They would swing their weighted arms forward at takeoff and then let go of the weight, so went much farther. Is that an illegal assist? Perhaps. In 1937 Cornelius Warmerdam won fame in breaking the impenetrable fourteen-foot barrier in pole vaulting and eventually jumped fourteen feet, seven and five-eighths inches, with a stiff pole. Today the record is over nineteen feet. But the pole is flexible, not stiff. Rapid improvement is often called a mutation. There are cases in which a superior athlete like Tiger Woods does the impossible and thus overwhelms the competition, causing them to stop pursuing the best practice. In the face of rapid progress, people will assume that no further work needs to be done. But theoretical best practice should raise the hurdle constantly to an ever higher level. Artificially low targets are and have been the bogeyman of progress. Until we know what can be achieved, we will not attempt that which is possible. Quotes / Reviews || Excerpt || About Us || Speaking for You || Services || Buy the Book || Master Process || Stall Reports || Newsletter || Job Search || E-Mail a Friend || Contact Us || Mitchell On Tour || 2000 Percent Puns || Home Copyright 1999, 2000 Mitchell and Company Mitchell and Company Developed and maintained by Interactive Media Advertising Group, Inc.