What's Driving Ujj? Effective Communication!

What's driving me today?

I'm obsessed about execution.

Ideas are a dime a dozen. But when you think about execution,that's an area that I like to focus on because I'm obsessed with the speed of outcomes, good or bad. Get them to happen fast. Iterate. There's a myKaarma Production System term, which Toyota also uses, called Kaizen: you continuously improve.

Now I'm talking about us internally.

When two people talk, that's the basic requirement to get any decision made. You're communicating you're exchanging information. And we're all familiar with the telephone game. When two people talk, the moment you add another couple of people into the chain, you're going to end up with distortion. Now when there's distortion, just like in the telephone game, you get outcomes that take longer.

Why do they take longer? Because you're going to do the wrong thing. Then you're going to discover that it wasn't the thing you wanted it to do and you ended up doing it anyway. So now you back up and do it again. For us, speed of outcomes and communicating and reducing the noise-to-signal ratio is super-critical.

So we came up with a mechanism in our company which is slightly different. What we do is we ask anybody who's trying to get anything important accomplished to format their emails or their chat messages in the following manner.

First, you write a Summary.

Then you write an Ask, and in the Ask, you put a deadline and include only the DRI’s name (DRI stands for Directly Responsible Individual) and you describe exactly what you want. Everybody else is cc’ed. So this way it makes it very clear as to who's responsible.

And then you have a Detail section where you can write the whole narrative, everything that you need.

Now, how does this work in real life?

If you trust the sender and he's somebody that reports to you or that's one of your colleagues, you're just going to read the Summary, you're going to read the Ask and you're going to make a decision. So, the speed of outcome just got compressed. You got a result faster. It's more accurate.

I'll tell you a little anecdote.

In our last company, we did the telephone game. This proves why communicating effectively, clearly and concisely works. I did the telephone game with my executives, and the statement I made to the first executive was “Dan Bonovitz runs production planning at American Honda, and Toyota makes Camrys in Kentucky.” By the time it came back after 12 or 13 execs, it started with “Infiniti moved their headquarters to Hong Kong.”

Now, how ludicrous is that? But that's what happens every time. So you've got to be accurate. You've got to be succinct, and you've got to make it easy for people to make decisions. And the key to it, the lubricant, is effective communication.