Scott Porad

There’s an expression I’ve heard that says there are two types of work: working in your business and working on your business.  What’s the difference?

Working in your business is doing the work of making the business go.  For example, if you have a widget factory, you’re working in your business when you’re making widgets.

Working on your business is doing the work of improving the business.  For example, if you have a widget factory, you’re working on your business when you streamline your processes to produce more widgets at a lower cost.

There’s a Japanese work kaizen which literally means “improvement” but has come to reflect a philosophy of continuous and regular working on the business.

Last week, the CheezTech team made an effort at kaizen—we took an hour out of our busy schedules to talk about how we could improve our development processes and productivity.  The results, both practical and emotional, were remarkable.

At the end of our hour we walked away with three concrete changes to our processes.  And, we committed to meet again in a month to see how we’ve done, and look for other improvements.  The entire team felt great!

Today, several members of our team attended a conference and participated in an experiential session that used game-like activities to teach about teamwork and productivity.  In one of the activities, the group was divided in two teams and each team was asked to move as many baseballs as possible from here-to-there following certain rules.

We did it once, and our efficiency was measured.  Then, we were given exactly two minutes to discuss as a team how we could improve our process before we had to do it again.  Just two minutes of working on our business resulted in an almost 100% improvement in efficiency!

Not only did we learn the importance of taking a time-out to discuss improvements as a team, perhaps the most important lesson had to do with the difficulty of implementing changes “to the process” while “in process”.

During the first attempt, two of the 14 members of the team discovered an opportunity to streamline, but were unable to effectively communicate it to the rest of the team.  Since the whole team was busy working in the business, it unable to divert attention and communicate in order to make improvements on-the-fly.

The lesson here is clear: there is genuine value in taking small amounts of time to step outside of working in the business and gather as a team and discuss how improvements can be made to the business.  Taking this time to step aside is critical because it’s difficult to apply changes in-process.

I’m excited for this new aspect of our teamwork at Cheezburger.  By itself, introducing our monthly meeting is an excellent improvement.  I’ll report back you next month to tell you how it goes.

P.S. For those of you familiar with Agile and Scrum development methodologies, this type of kaizen practice is built into the methodology by way of the “sprint retrospective meeting”.