Simply put, elegance is getting something done as concisely as possible. The preceding sentence is not elegant or concise. But this key is (pictured from behind, so you can’t 3D print a replica):
When I need my front door to open, this key gets it done. And it sits on a lightweight keyring until needed, easily hooked to a bag or pocketed. This key has a nearly ideal job-doing metabolism – taking up almost no energy while not in use, using minimal energy to get its job done. If I didn’t have to put it in my pocket and remember it and could instead use my eyeball or fingerprint to open my door, the seamlessness of the job would be higher, but the mechanisms to maintain access to may apartment would likely require more maintenance (eye/finger print storage, electricity, motor for unlocking). A door with a keyhole and a key are so exceptionally well-adapted to each other and their security and access jobs that smart lock providers will struggle for decades to bring this ludditish hipster along.
This metabolic analysis can be applied beyond products to organizations. Organizations have many well-adapted roles with optimized metabolic clarity. Accounting, for example, typically understands its lane well and drives within it. Sometimes cost structure (and tax) strategies drive business model and marketing decisions, in which case accounting heads ought to be part of the exploration and decision jobs. But there are several wholly owned jobs of the accounting department (taxes & audits) that may require gathering some information from other groups, but are otherwise metabolized entirely within the accounting organ. Legal departments have a few similar jobs (regulatory affairs, litigation) that can often be entirely digested from within, resulting in a high job doing metabolic rate (JDMR). But a perennial frustration of in-house lawyers is the too little consultation too late phenomena (ask your favorite general counsel about it). The job that many corporate lawyers believe they must do is protect the company generally. However, many of the other members of senior teams do not acknowledge the breadth or scope of this job and resent the interference and concomitant sludging up of their JDMRs (particularly marketing – but marketing has a chronically shitty JDMR for reasons to be discussed).
The idea in managing a business well is to create high JDMRs for all the critical jobs to be done across the organization by: eliminating any jobs that do not need to be done and ensuring that all jobs are metabolized inside of a single “organ”. The first step is well-documented in the home tidying literature. Does the job spark joy for one of more of your stakeholders? Yes, paying your taxes lights a fire for at least a few people at the Internal Revenue Service. If not, stop doing it. This does not necessarily mean firing the people that are doing this job today. When you examine all the jobs that could be done, you will find that many of the jobs in your organization are not being metabolized sufficiently and you must staff the appropriate, clearly responsible organ with more people. You may also find jobs that need to be done that are not being done at all. Human interactions with human customers is often a chronically too-tiny organ, in addition to being scattered across disjointed, poorly connected organs. “Strategy” is more like a virus than an organ, though it can be a benevolent virus (more like healthy red blood cells) if it is addressed from a JDMR design perspective.
So why are people doing work in marketing, strategy, risk management, and of course legal almost always frustrated? Each usually suffers from absurdly low JDMR across many of their perceived and actual jobs. Why? Marketing is an exceedingly confusing exemplar. What is marketing’s job? To sell more stuff? That sounds like sales. What about to be the face of the company? That sounds like the CEO’s job. To represent the products and connect product design to the voice of the customer? Don’t tell the product managers, user experience designers, or engineers. “Marketing” is something companies all know they do, but the job-based organs that are associated with getting people to pay attention and eventually pay companies money are not very well understood. This is because even the divisions within a marketing function are not very clear. What is a “brand” team supposed to be doing? “Managing the brand” doesn’t sound like a real job that requires a dedicated organ, but building logos, naming and re-naming the company, and selecting fonts do sound like valid (if temporary) jobs. When these types of transient jobs need to be done, it is often JDMR-maximizing to have a few of the people in your organization that are most impacted by these jobs set aside time to work together on logo-development as a discrete project. Here we have a key distinction between the body/organ analogy and groups of people: the cells that make up an organ cannot be reorganized easily, while individuals and teams of job-doers can change their orientations as quickly as they can learn to do a new job (this is why many organizations may become obsolete as individuals come to be able to do every minimum job of an organization by themselves using software and networks and a single job in a JDMR-max way; but you’re probably a leader or member of an organization, so I won’t go further into this future beyond to recommend that you think about your post-organization approach to finding jobs to be done).
The flexibility of job-doers even within organizations must be relied upon more heavily in organizational job-design. Strategy is a great example. What jobs does “strategy” do? To get this out of the way, making board decks is not a full time job, and not even more than a 30-minute project if you’ve designed your information processing and sharing jobs well. Helping the leaders of your business decide what to do is also not a real job. Deciding what to do is the job, and it’s one that can include consultation, but done at its JDMR-max when decisions are regularly made and tested by the leaders and teams (the organ) who owns the outcomes of the decision. For example, using a new process to manufacture products is not a decision that should be made or evaluated by a strategy team. The manufacturing process organ must own this decision and its implementation. If the decision requires the consideration of re-shaping of the entire manufacturing organization (for example, moving from a custom, job shop approach to mass customization) the team working on this question might need to step outside of their manufacturing organ roles and into temporary roles as strategists and designers. Such a reframing can and must be done with team members from the existing operation; they know the strengths and weaknesses of the current approach, and if they enter a well-designed, temporary strategy & design organ, the best possible answer will likely emerge.
Organ re-design must be regular and expected, in order to maximize JDMR. Depending on the pace of change in a given business, it may be necessary to change the nature of the organs in the organization every 90 days, every year, or every three years. Whatever the pace (determined by the industry’s rate of change and the organization’s maturity) organizations must provide their members with a clear timeline and expectations for how often and in what ways the organs will be re-shuffled. Some organizations may need to completely re-imagine their members and jobs, while others may need to make less radical changes if things are going well. Low maturity and high maturity organizations must change more regularly, while middle maturity businesses can change less often while they reap what they sowed in their initial growth or from their post-maturity re-constitution.
The critical point is not that re-orgs are the key to success or that investing in things that seem to be adding value is the way to go. The principle is:
- Do jobs stakeholders value
- Create “organs” that own a whole job
The first point speaks for itself. Call Marie Kondo. Spread your jobs out on your office floor. Hold each of them and imagine if it sparks joy for a stakeholder. Then ask the stakeholder if they value the job.
The second point is the part that will take the most re-orienting from everyone schooled in the teacher-student / pseudo-feudal / industrial-Taylorist / comparative advantage / parent-child traditions. So pretty much everyone. Jobs don’t require power. They require a request, skill & expertise, and action on the request. Therefore, organizations do not have be static, permanent, lumbering structures that are just waiting in fear for the next wave of job-doers that might replace them. Organizations can re-organize, more like octopuses or starfish than human bodies, able to re-constitute themselves based on the environment, the members, and the jobs that need doing. To make this re-organizing a continuous practice, think about Job Doing Metabolic Rate maximization as a critical job to be done and consider the advantage people have over organs stuck inside a human body, in terms of flexibility and learning.
Roman Ryan 