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McQuarrie: Solving Your DAM Problems with New Book
March 4, 2013 | Dan Beaulieu, D.B. Management GroupEstimated reading time: 13 minutes
Dan Beaulieu recently had the opportunity to sit down with Gray McQuarrie, president of Grayrock & Associates, and chat about his new book, You Have a Dam Problem How to Identify the Behaviors Sabotaging Your Company.
Dan Beaulieu: Gray, thanks for being with me today, it’s good to see you again. I just finished reading your book and writing a review.
Gray McQuarrie: I hope you gave it a good review.
Beaulieu: Well, let me put it this way I’m calling it a recommendation not a review so what does that tell you? No honestly I enjoyed the book tremendously. As I say in my recommendation this is one of the few business books that get to the heart of the matter which is almost always a people thing. I think you have that dead on. But for those who have not read the book tell us a little bit about it. Explain your premise.
McQuarrie: How much time to you have? Ok…the premise simply stated is you can have great brand recognition, great products, great financial systems and all of that, but if you don’t have your people right, your company will never realize it’s full potential. Not only that it will take a lot of energy and management focus on the day to day and the crisis that happen to keep it going. People have learned to put up with this marginal level of performance. What I suggest in this book as well as my first book is you don’t have to put up with this anymore. If you address people’s bad behaviors that they bring with them to work you can get a whole lot more done, where your company grows, and have fun doing it.
Beaulieu: Interesting. So no matter what systems you have in place, no matter how well your company is set up if the right people have Dam thinking it’s just t going to work?
McQuarrie: Right. Dam thinking would be expending energy at work to show you are better than me. Some might call this politics and you can’t get rid of it at work. And I would call it bad behavior and you should have a standard that this type of behavior (which for most of us is learned by the way) is unacceptable at work. This behavior is just one of the five DAMs, which is called the ego DAM and this stops the flow of productivity. And if you agree with this premise, that two people trying to “one up” the other aren’t going to work productively together, or two departments see the other as the enemy, well this has a huge negative impact on a company’s top and bottom line. And yes you are right. No matter what type of initiative you might have going on like Lean or Six Sigma, you aren’t going to have a sustainable result that justifies the cost and expense or deliveries a desirable ROI. Getting back to your question about the premises for the book well one is your people’s behaviors are a “leading” indicator to the future performance of your company. It is so important that I don’t understand why Wall Street doesn’t exploit this truth and is worked into the PEG.
Beaulieu: So Gray, Where did you get the idea for the book? And why did you write it?
McQuarrie: Hey…you asked me two questions. I am awake you know. Why did I write it? There are many reasons why, but let me share with you a recurring experience. Many times in conducting a Kiazen event in the early days, the people I was working with wanted to do it themselves. I would always say I was there to help, coach, mentor, and provide anything they needed. Since these people were typically very smart technically, they felt that they could do what I did better. They would do two things. First, they would condense the time of the Kiazen by about 85% or more. Second, they would completely remove all of the collaborative elements and tell everyone what they wanted them to do. As you might imagine this met with disaster! I struggled to understand what this insanity was all about. I realized there are two ways of thinking at work. One is DAM thinking where again, we try to prove we don’t need help, we are competing against our colleges and even our boss, and we want to be worshiped and adored, and so on. The counter to this DAM view is FLOW thinking where we achieve greatness collectively with collaboration. The group not the individual shares the riches from the success. Where we are open to learn from each other so we don’t go on repeating the same mistakes over and over again.
The great problem is we are trained and rewarded with DAM thinking and it’s behaviors. And we see collaborative efforts manifested by people working socially, FLOW thinking, as inefficient and weak. And the opposite is true. I believe (hey I have and ego too that needs to be fed) that nobody has written about this as directly as I have in my two books. The reason why I wrote the second book is I needed it to be more direct to the reader to show them they are a big part of the problem. In fact we all are part of the problem, but it is pointless to feel guilty, blame ourselves, or each other. Just, let’s grow, be better people, and make our companies a whole lot stronger!
Where did I get the idea for the book? It was important for me to find a reason that was different, like people’s bad behaviors, and then develop a metaphor or construct that people would understand and do something with to help fix bad behaviors. Being an engineer I thought about what is it like when people’s behaviors block the work that needs to get done. So I focused on this blocking idea and started toying with this idea of a DAM. Then I thought about what a DAM does, which is to stop flow. It is an attempt to control a very powerful emergent entity, such as a river, which acts up in an unpredictable fashion, where floods are one example of an undesirable outcome. We love certainty. The price when you remove the DAM and get FlOW is uncertainty or what I like to call emergence. The DAM itself creates three outcomes: 1) pressure, 2) stagnation, 3) pollution. By contrast, a FLOW has three outcomes: 1) velocity, 2) quality, and 3) emergence. You want FLOW, but we have been taught DAM is better. This is such a powerful metaphor that it is very easy for me and my associates to evaluate assess a company on what is wrong and what they can do blazingly fast.
Beaulieu: This all sounds like you are talking about a company culture right? I mean is this really possible to change?
McQuarrie: Dan you are right. The collective behavior in a company is the culture. And your right that this can be impossible to do if you don’t know how to do it. This book is a big part of telling you how you can do it. What is important and why. And even how you can measure it. Almost everyone is suffering from this malaise at work. Just having a positive discussion about people’s behaviors using the DAM thinking construct described in this book, with it’s tests and sometimes humorous explanation of results, goes a long way to building trust amongst people, amongst departments, and amongst managers and employees. When we are self aware, and we allow others in to help us be better people to help them be better people to with our behaviors, it is amazing how quickly a company culture can change. And there are so many things you can do as a leader to bring people together that are discussed in this book and you can find in other places once you know what to look for.
Herb Brooks is a great example. He had to take hockey players from the University of Minnesota and from Boston University. Two groups that hated each other. What has been suggested in the movie “Miracle” and from others that have written books about this, is Herb quickly made himself to be the “common enemy” of the team which brought the team together extremely rapidly. This idea is so powerful, yet so poorly understood and used, it’s worth sharing a quote by Condoleezza Rice: “We need a common enemy to unite us.”
Beaulieu: When did you start and when did you finish? How long did it take you?
McQuarrie: Wow, it was a lot of work and much more than I wanted to do when I first took this project on. Initially I thought this would take 6 months and to be honest with you I had a draft done in that time. But what I found were the ideas were so powerful and transformational for me that it raised a lot of questions. So I spent the better part of the year doing more research and making more observations that I think made for a much better book. Bottom line, it took about two years, where 75% of it was very intense work and burning the midnight oil.
Beaulieu: What is your writing process? How do you write?
McQuarrie: Talking with other authors it became clear to me everyone uses a different process. The process I do is think of a situation or problem. Let it stew in my mind as I sleep, as I work on other things, as I ride my bike and so on. When I feel inspired I make sure there are no interruptions and I just start writing my ideas down and see where they might lead. After awhile I might start to think of titles of the chapters and how they connect. And I will write as much as I can until I am spent, not carrying to edit or think in detail what all of it means and reads. I will then walk away from it until I am inspired to start editing. And it is this editing and reediting for me that is the hard work of putting together a good book. It can go on forever and at some point you just have to declare it DONE.
Beaulieu: There are a lot of personal stories in this book and I comment in my review that this takes a lot of courage because you do not always portray yourself in a very flattering light, what about that?
McQuarrie: I hadn’t seen a business book that was personal and I felt this could be a great contribution to the world and a value to people. Think about it. What is more personal to people then their work other than their family? And how often do our feelings and emotions, our joys and frustrations, get wrapped up into our work. For many of us our work defines who we are. So why are so many business books so dry and antiseptic where the most important part of who we are and what we do has been stripped out as if our humanity isn’t important? And besides, life is stranger than fiction and infinitely more entertaining. So yes it may have taken courage to do, but for me it just seemed to be something that was long overdue in a business book. And when we can all admit we are all far from perfection and we all do stupid things from time to time, well this provides a medicinal quality to our leadership, management, and work and allows us to appreciate others the way that we should. A company with good people like this in it with good leadership that understands people, can become a great company.
Beaulieu: Tell me a little bit about your career, we get the idea from reading the book that you have worked for a number of companies summarize that for us will you?
McQuarrie: My career has spanned from process engineering, to technical service, to research and development, to operations management, to consulting. I have worked with such companies as Monsanto, AlliedSignal, Photocircuits, Shipley, and so on. For reasons out of my control I was always thrown into problems I knew next to nothing about and had very little relevant experience. I quickly found asking for help, getting at the true facts of a situation, was key to my survival and later to my success. One of the patterns I adopted in my way of helping other companies is when they tell me, “I know what the problem is and it is X and I know it isn’t Z,” I usually find it is in fact “Z” and not “X.” For a chronic problem where people can’t figure out the solution, I found being the outsider it was easy for me to think about trying the opposite of what was being done, and more often than not this pathway lead to rapid improvement. This way of thinking is valuable for almost any functional department and in fact can be part of a company’s strategic initiative to improvement: challenging the status quo for example.
Beaulieu: Your father and some of his co-workers has played a tremendous role in your life and you talked about them in your book, expand on that a little bit for us.
McQuarrie: Well my father wanted to be an author of fiction even though he was a highly trained thoracic surgeon. So he loved the English language and writing and wanted me to have an appreciation of this as well. He really regarded his writing and his ability to communicate as his most important learned skill. My dad was trained at a time where surgery was going through a period of rapid development and innovation. I got to know the great surgeons that had developed open heart surgery and later developed heart transplantation and how creative and multi faceted these people were. They could talk about anything and loved the joy of learning from anyone about anything. And it was an honor as a kid how they would invite me into their conversations as I would listen with great interest and with very wide open eyes. It left a huge impression on me.
Beaulieu: So Gray, What are you up to today? Bring us up to date about Grayrock and what that’s all about?
McQuarrie: Well my consulting company Grayrock has honed it’s purpose for our clients. For example, since we believe “behaviors lead results” we have honed highly effective tools to measure these behaviors and predict a company’s results. And from this we can formulate strategies on how to make a company more efficient and effective by creating a more productive work environment. But, what we have found, if you are only good at this people or soft side, and haven’t had any experience with running and working in business, you can’t get much traction to improve things. Hence, we have developed new competencies, such as discrete even modeling which I write about in my column, “Solving DAM Problems” that are much are extremely effective. Using tools like this and others we can also help direct a company technically. Finally how we blend both of these things together, the behaviors with the technical, is within the context of a project using Agile project management or SCRUM. The net result is very powerful business transformations that happen extremely quickly and are fun to do! And the new state is sustainable, as are the results, and much easier to manage.
Beaulieu: I sure appreciate the time you’ve spent with us today, but before you go the name of the book again and also how people can get it?
McQuarrie: You will be able to get the book in paperback on Amazon and you currently can get an e-book at my web site at: http://businessagilitysolutions.com/shop/you-have-a-dam-problem-ebook-buy/
Beaulieu: And where do people go to find out more about and your company?
McQuarrie: That would be at: http://businessagilitysolutions.com/
Beaulieu: Well Gray, great book I hope you sell a million copies. Nice talking to you today.
McQuarrie: It was my pleasure as always Dan. I really hope people like this book and it helps them!