Chapter 11
Give Details Top Billing
There are two words that make [operations] work around here … quality and pride. If you design, build, operate, and maintain with quality, people will take pride in what they do.72
Dick Nunis (Retired Chairman, Walt Disney Attractions)
Business people of every stripe place a great deal of importance on seeing the “big picture” or coming up with the grand idea. But seldom understood is the fact that details give the big picture depth; they bring the grand idea clearly into focus and produce pride in workers’ skills. Paying attention to the little things is what turns the vision into a top-quality product or an outstanding service. As the great architect Mies van der Rohe once put it, “God is in the details.”73
No one had to tell Walt Disney the significance that seeming trifles can have when excellence is the goal. Perhaps because he possessed an artist’s eye, he recognized that attention to detail was the key to complete realization of his dreams. As a result, the company he founded has no equal when it comes to creating the thousands of intricate drawings needed to produce nonpareil animation, bring together the mind-boggling number of parts required to build a Disneyland or a Walt Disney World, or carefully attend to the numerous small details that make every guest’s experience a magical one.
Often overlooked in Disney’s awe-inspiring success is how the company as an organization has managed to give extravagant attention to detail without bankrupting itself. It has achieved a careful balance between the competing demands of the bottom line and the quest for perfection. The key to this balancing act is contained in the Disney philosophy that everyone—from the groundskeepers at the parks and the animators in the movie studio to the number crunchers in the accounting department—is responsible for doing whatever it takes to deliver the “good show.” Even Bob Iger has “trash collecting” in his job description when he’s visiting one of the theme parks! When all parties are convinced of the importance of their individual roles, nothing will be left to chance.
Most of the companies we work with are far removed from the Disney environment of entertainment, yet they too have recognized that obsessive attention to detail can pay huge dividends. Thus, they are calling on “casts” of employees to present their own version of the good show to an “audience” composed of suppliers and customers, and in doing so, these companies are consistently delivering quality products and services to their target markets.
A Relentless Search for Perfection
There is a photograph in the Disney archives of Walt and 10 of his animators standing around a studio table. In the middle of the table are five live penguins. The birds are all turned toward Walt Disney as if they know where their next meal is coming from. This arresting and charming image perfectly captures so much of the Disney ethos and magic—the element of surprise, the embrace of the animal kingdom, and always, the relentless search for perfection.
Disney, who was determined to exceed customers’ expectations, was dissatisfied with the movements of his animated movie animals. They were good, but they weren’t perfect. Up until that time, his animators had relied on photographic stills or movie clips to give them the models for their figures. It was clear to Walt that the animators could do better if they were able to copy the real thing—ergo, the penguins.
“How can we do better?” is the question Walt Disney asked at every turn. But then complacency is unnatural to the perfectionist. He strove continually to improve the quality of his products. “Whenever I ride an attraction,” he once said, “I’m thinking of what’s wrong with the thing and asking myself how it can be improved.”74
The story is told that after Disneyland was already up and running, the boss stopped in to take a ride on the Jungle Cruise attraction. He emerged furious. The ride was advertised as taking seven minutes, but he had timed it at only four-and-a-half minutes. The very idea that a guest might be short-changed was antithetical to the Disney culture and to Walt’s vision of quality; he ordered the ride lengthened immediately. Moreover, he made it clear that carelessness toward details would not be tolerated, for such an attitude might cause guests to start doubting Disney’s trustworthiness, the heart and soul of his management philosophy and personal credo.
Meticulous attention to detail is also characteristic of the Disney animated films. In Snow White, for example, viewers don’t see drops of water just dripping from a bar of soap, in itself an unusual level of detail in animated films. Instead, they see glistening bubbles that actually twinkle in the candlelight.
Creating such film magic required a staff of skilled animators, of course, and here, too, Walt refused to leave anything to chance. To make sure that he would always have a sufficient number of talented artists to meet his demanding standards, Walt began in-house training courses and eventually made a deal that brought teachers from an art school to work with his animators.
In fact, no corner of the organization escaped Walt’s obsession with perfection. Thoroughly convinced that no detail was too small to be ignored in order to provide his guests with an exceptional experience, the boss made his touch apparent everywhere. He determined that garbage cans should be spaced exactly 25 feet apart all around Disneyland. He ordered that the highest-quality paint be used on rides and buildings, going so far as to specify that real gold or silver be used for any gilding or silvering. He even hired someone whose job it was to patrol Disneyland twice a month to make certain that all the colors in the park were in harmony!
The master entertainer instinctively knew that the whole package—colors, sounds, smells—had an impact on how guests received the show.
If this holistic, integrated approach to entertainment seems excessive, one need only think of a promising restaurant experience that went awry because of one disagreeable factor. Perhaps the food was first-class, the service pleasant, and the decor attractive, but the background music assailed a diner’s ears and made it impossible to enjoy the meal. One jarring element can undermine a host of favorable impressions in a restaurant or anywhere else, and Walt Disney wasn’t about to risk such a misstep.
That’s why street cleaners at Walt Disney World are given extra training at Disney University to ensure that they respond in a positive and helpful fashion to questions from departing guests. It might seem strange to train street cleaners in customer service, but the company learned a few years back that these employees receive the greatest number of unstructured questions from park guests. An exhausted couple with three hungry children in tow might ask where they can get a quick, inexpensive dinner, for instance. To make sure that a guest’s last impression after a wonderful day in the park isn’t ruined by a don’t-ask-me-it’s-not-my-job attitude, The Walt Disney Company decrees an extra three days of interpersonal skills training for the clean-up crew. They take a proactive approach to head off potentially damaging situations. The Disney organization realizes that the entire “whole show” is critical; the way the street cleaner treats the guest is as important or even more important than the way the guest is treated on the Tower of Terror.
Maintaining a Delicate Balance
When it came to pursuing the often elusive ideal of perfection, Walt Disney spared no expense. The previously mentioned reworking of the Jiminy Cricket character in Pinocchio, after the costly animation process was already well underway, is but one example. When it was discovered that a merry-go-round at Walt Disney World was installed two inches off center, the company insisted that it be moved. “Who would notice?” you might wonder. The Disney folks not only noticed, but they reasoned that if the carousel were not set right, thousands of guests would take home vacation pictures that provided an imperfect memory of their visit to the park
You may think that this was much ado about nothing. However, the Eastman Kodak Company once estimated that 4 percent of all amateur photographs taken in the United States were taken at the Disney theme parks, and many of those taken at Walt Disney World were from an angle that captures the carousel in the background. For example, guests often are photographed as they stand in Cinderella’s Castle with Fantasyland as the backdrop. Looking through the doors of the castle, the carousel is perfectly framed at the center of the opening. Since an off-center merry-go-round would make those pictures look strange, Disney naturally decided that the imperfect carousel had to be moved, despite the hefty expense involved.
But we must make clear that “sparing no expense” has never meant profligate spending. Walt Disney was always well aware of the bottom line, and he expected that the money spent would be returned in customer satisfaction and employee loyalty. The way Walt saw it, meticulous attention to detail provided a level of quality that cast members could take pride in, and he knew that when workers are proud of their product, it is reflected in the kind of service they give to customers.
But when it came to spending on items unrelated to providing the good show, the boss was actually known as something of a penny-pincher. He never built a splendidly pompous, ego-enhancing headquarters building, nor did he ever spend a nickel on advertising his theme park. Disney reasoned that his television shows provided advertising aplenty, so why waste money paying for it? In today’s environment, The Walt Disney Company has a large advertising budget, but still does not waste money on backstage areas.
Walt also kept a sharp eye on financial arrangements and partnerships, not hesitating to protect his own interests. Although a licensing deal in the early 1930s brought in $300,000 the first year—with Walt’s share providing half of the company’s annual profits that year—he quickly discovered a major drawback. The deal called for his percentage of the profits to increase as more items were sold, but since novelty items sold fast and then faded from the market, the licensee would make a lot more money than Disney would. Walt canceled the arrangement and set up an in-house marketing division.
Today, Disney executives ask cast members to balance what they call “quality cast experience,” “quality guest experience,” and “quality business practice.” The product should deliver value in all three areas: pleasing cast members, customers, and corporate bean counters and balancing them as needed. The company firmly believes, as Walt did, that obsessive attention to detail in all respects is the key to delivering a sterling experience that will keep guests coming back while holding costs to a level that still maintains profit margins.
In our experience, successful companies like Disney balance business and creative needs by insisting on strict adherence to a set of core values, emphasizing the importance of details in exceeding customer expectations, and encouraging innovation and risk taking within a specified set of boundaries. Disney makes no bones about its belief that creativity works best within a specified framework. In a 1996 interview with Fortune magazine, Peter Schneider, president of the film division, called deadlines “a key ingredient to creativity.”75 They force people to focus on the project at hand, to produce something—good, bad, or indifferent—that will at least serve to spark the next idea, he said. And, of course, deadlines also keep costs from spiraling out of control.
Many of the companies we advise have devised winning strategies that similarly balance top-of-the-line quality with innovation and bottom-line performance.
John Dunn’s hotel properties consistently rank at the top in opinion polls because of his insistence on quality and attention to detail. Employees end up caring for the properties as much as they care for their own homes, picking up trash dropped on the floor, straightening a lampshade as they pass by, and tidying newspapers left scattered about the lobby. Everyone from the desk clerk to the banquet manager is trained to react rather than overlook.
One of Dunn’s managers insists that every item on the breakfast bar—coffee, juice, rolls, butter—be placed in exactly the same place every day. Now you might ask what difference it makes if the coffee pot is on the left or the right. But the manager recognizes that repeat guests, and particularly the targeted business traveler, will appreciate not having to hunt for the decaffeinated coffee or figure out which is the apple juice and which is the orange.
At BellSouth, attention to details means that when an installation and maintenance crew is at a particular location, members know they should make the appropriate preventive repairs that will head off future problems and save another time-consuming, money-devouring visit at a later date. Just as with the Dunn hotel employees, being proactive is an important ingredient in balancing quality and costs.
Measuring for Success
Paying attention to detail also means measuring results. This concept seems almost too rudimentary to mention, but experience has taught us that many organizations make little or no effort to assess results, either in terms of operating objectives or in terms of performance standards and customer satisfaction.
In our Dream Retreats, for example, we frequently ask participants, “How many of you feel that you would be more successful if you made fewer mistakes and produced your product more quickly?” Everyone always raises a hand. But seldom does even one hand stay in the air when we follow up with, “How many of you are making quality and time measurements for your key business processes?”
YMCA Camp Kern took the question to heart. YMCA Camp Kern is located between Dayton and Cincinnati, Ohio. This 420-acre facility located along the Little Miami River outside of historic Lebanon, Ohio, was founded in 1910. Camp Kern offers year-round programs serving as host to over 30,000 guests a year. Programs include: Summer Camp, Ranch Camp (Equestrian), Outdoor Education (“Hands-on Learning for Every Season”), Conferences & Retreats, Leadership Adventure Programs, and a variety of family programs. Camp Kern is a $2.5 million branch operation of the Greater Dayton YMCA.
In 2002, YMCA Camp Kern had a summer camp retention rate of 29 percent, meaning that out of 10 children attending Camp Kern for the first time in 2001, only 3 campers returned in the summer of 2002. The national average rate of summer camper retention (campers who return after their first year experience) is approximately 50 percent. Additionally, Camp Kern had a retention rate of 34 percent in conferencing; and staff retention was at an all time low for seasonal Summer Camp and Outdoor Education staff; and a whopping 40 percent turnover for full-time staff.
That same year, Jeff Merhige arrived as the new executive director, determined to change the culture and philosophy of YMCA Camp Kern. “The Disney Way model seemed to be a perfect fit for what we needed to accomplish,” noted Jeff. Jeff and his staff team at Camp Kern would strive to become the best in reputation, program delivery and development, relationship building, facility, and work culture.
A Camp Kern Staff Guidebook was developed and new staff training was designed for all employees, educating them on the new operating philosophy of “Guests and Kids First,” as well as its program goals, mission statement, and staff expectations, which included a staff commitment to excellence contract. Staff evaluations were also created to assess responses to questions such as: (1) What can we do to help you be excellent? (2) What would you change to help us all be excellent? (3) What do you think should be kept the same or modified to be excellent?
By the end of 2005, the all-inclusive sharing of dreams and goals among Camp Kern staff resulted in a dramatic improvement in staff energy and motivation. Camp Kern’s retention rate of summer campers had jumped to 71 percent in 2005. And conferencing today celebrates a 92 percent retention rate.
In the past three years, Camp Kern has received donations and gifts totaling over $2 million, renovated five buildings, and built four new buildings—including a 300-person Assembly Hall and Conference Center.
Staff retention: There has been no senior staff turnover in the past two years (9 positions), seasonal staff retention has grown to 65 percent for summer staff and seasonal outdoor ed staff, and full-time staff retention has grown to 85 percent.
The process of Dream, Believe, Dare, Do created a map that made it easy for me and my team to chart a route and make it to our destination of business success, unity, and fun for all of us, and most importantly, our guests and children.
JEFF MERHIGE, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR YMCA CAMP KERN
We can’t emphasize strongly enough the importance of implementing some system for gauging quality level, process time, customer satisfaction, and product cost, as well as negative elements such as errors of judgment and process mistakes. All too often, companies give little thought to measuring processes in their entirety, even though doing so need not be a complicated task. But without measurements, an organization cannot possibly know which processes are working efficiently and effectively, what products and services are meeting quality standards, and whether or not customer requirements are being satisfied.
Identifying processes and mapping the functions involved are keys to increasing efficiency. In many organizations, however, processes seem to be hit-or-miss affairs, the result of haphazard growth. When a team takes the time to map the details of a process, the results are usually an eye-opener. “Why would anyone design a process like that?” baffled executives ask. No one did design it, of course, and that’s just the problem. The process simply mushroomed in all directions as well-meaning managers added a step here and required a memo there. Before long, what once was a relatively smooth-functioning process has turned into a Hydra-headed monster.
Dr. William Cross, the vice president with whom we worked at Mead Johnson who was first mentioned in Chapter 4, found this out when teams in his department decided to take a look at certain key business processes. They uncovered many redundant and non-value-added elements that had been built into the system over the course of several years. Dr. Cross was astounded to discover that mapping a single work process related to releasing a new product produced a “flow chart that when it was all put together end to end, was about seven feet high and about two and a half feet wide, and was in very small print. So it was extremely complex.”77
By mapping out the details of the complex process, however, the team was able to determine which steps could safely be discontinued. The new streamlined process reduced the usual cycle time for a product release by about two weeks.
Something similar occurred when Bill Capodagli was working with the South African utilities company mentioned in Chapter 9. After every step in the procurement process had been documented, more than 100 square feet of a wall in the project-planning center were covered with index cards. Needless to say, the process was hopelessly complex and very often redundant so that capital materials procurement was taking as much as a year and a half, with seven or eight months of that eaten up by the internal bureaucracy.
Astonished company executives could only wonder how it had happened that pieces of paper were going back and forth for months on end, and for absolutely no reason at all. Once the process was streamlined, the savings in time and money was considerable.
When we work with a team on a strategic initiative, a willingness to become immersed in details is a must. At Mead Johnson, for example, the exhaustive process began with the creation of a complaint analysis team to determine the path traveled by product complaints, either from an individual or from another company. It took us three to four months to complete the flow chart documenting each step involved. The team interviewed every department along the route, and when the flow chart was done, each department was asked to check it for accuracy.
Simultaneously, the team followed one sample complaint through the entire handling process and clocked the amount of time each step took. Multiplying the time factor by the department’s charge-out rate allowed the team to assess costs. The team discovered that a single complaint traveling through the analysis system took an average of 30 days and cost the company up to $910 from beginning to end. Having established its data, the team was then able to draw up a new flow chart for an ideal system.
One change drastically reduced the number of complaints that were still being stored after the process was completed. Before the analysis, all complaints were being held for four months, even though most of them were never looked at again. The team logically determined that only those complaints that posed a potential legal threat—packaging that had allegedly been tampered with—or those that involved a federal, state, or local government agency needed to be retained. This one simple change of process saved the company considerable time.
Not all of the team’s proposals and recommendations could be instituted immediately because some depended on decisions in other divisions. But initial forecasts pointed to eventual savings of $123 per complaint. Dr. Cross said, “The teams have saved in dollars thus far tens of thousands which have already [produced] a payback.”
The message for management, then, is to look at your business in a holistic manner the way Disney looks at its show. Carefully examine all the details that affect the way your product or service is provided to customers. In other words, go the extra mile, or as the folks at Disney might say, “Bump the lamp.”
This cryptic phrase originated when the movie Roger Rabbit was being made, and it relates to a scene in which someone bumps into a lamp, causing the shadow it casts to wobble. Initially, there were no shadows in the scene, which the animators immediately spotted as being unrealistic, so they went back and did the hundreds of drawings needed to bring perfection to these few seconds of the film.
“Bump the lamp” has become shorthand at Disney for doing things the right way, down to the tiniest detail. The Walt Disney Company has raised the bar of performance—to “bump the lamp,” despite their well-publicized management blunders of the past decade. In the next chapter, we explain how CEO Bob Iger is re-creating the “magic” throughout The Walt Disney Company.
Questions to Ask
Do your cross-functional teams map all the critical details of processes in order to determine which steps can be safely eliminated?
Do your employees and teams make quality and time measurements of their critical processes?
Do your employees routinely ask, “How can we do this better?”
Do you include meticulous attention to detail as part of your organization’s values?
Do you reward people in your organization for detecting inconsistencies or defects in the products you produce?
Actions to Take
Appoint a “details squad” to get fanatical about the details that make a difference to your customers.
Continuously evaluate the effectiveness of your processes.
Make attention to detail a part of organizational values.
Evaluate how “little things” can make a difference in the way you serve customers or turn out products.
Don’t assume you can wow a customer with the big picture at the expense of details.
Team rewards are an essential component of all good teamwork. As we mentioned earlier, we had spontaneous celebrations and we had official parties. Along the way, Jerry McColgin often took members out for a game of golf after the completion of an especially grueling project. But the big award was, of course, the year-end bonus, and herein lay a problem—how to calculate a fair bonus for an international team whose members were usually paid under a variety of bonus structures. With the help of the company COO, Jerry finally worked out a solution for the first year’s bonus. But when the final bonus was to be paid, there was such a generally critical and unpleasant attitude among other members of management in the company that Jerry felt he should offer to forgo his own bonus, not only to preserve others’ rewards but to maintain team morale and focus. In the end, it all worked out, and Jerry received his bonus too, but we have always felt that Jerry’s offer was proof of his commitment to the team.
“One of the things we encouraged from the beginning,” Jerry recounts, “was to celebrate failure. I’ll never forget the first time someone said that his subteam had failed in a design task. My response was to say, ‘It’s great to discover this now and not once we’re in production.’” This was part of Jerry’s way of building trust so that people were as open with their failures as with their successes.
For Jerry, looking back after the team’s work was finished, this project was the best job experience he had ever had. “I looked out on the horizon and asked, ‘How can I top this?’” What Jerry learned, though, is that there is no recipe. There are no hard-and-fast rules for a successful team project. Each team is different in its makeup, in its goals, and in its leader. If you change all the ingredients, you can’t use the same recipe. Putting people first is essential. The deliverables will follow if the team is cohesive and dedicated to the goals. In the case of the Global No-Frost team, it was 10 months before a pervasive sense of unity took hold, so patience is required. The team, with its diverse staff, its time pressures, and financial limits, ended its project with a memorable triumph.
“We came in ahead of schedule, under budget on investment, and with a lower product cost than promised,” Jerry recounts with justifiable pride. The achievements of the team were, indeed, astounding.
Our Featured Organization:
The Cheesecake Factory
GOOD BUSINESS IS SHOW BUSINESS
The Dalai Lama once said that simplicity is the key to happiness in the modern world. He apparently has never met David Overton, CEO of The Cheesecake Factory. David has made a career out of creating a “show business” restaurant concept where managing complexity is the name of the game. When the doors open at 11 a.m., the curtain is up, so to speak. Every detail—the lighting, the music, the temperature, the cast in perfectly-pressed uniforms—is shining.
If you were going to start a restaurant and sat down with a blank piece of paper, you probably wouldn’t dream of the details that David dreamed. The idea of offering over 200 made-to-order menu items and over 50 varieties of cheesecakes and other sumptuous desserts would leave most entrepreneurs cold. Not to mention that every single Cheesecake Factory restaurant is custom-designed under David’s supervision. We asked David how he decided to create such a complex menu. “I didn’t know any better. You see, I never worked in the restaurant business before we opened,” replied David. “Today, it is a competitive advantage.”78 There is no cookie-cutter approach in use, at least not when it comes to executing the concept of outstanding quality with a high degree of customization. “We are masterful at taking something that couldn’t be done and doing it well,” says Peter D’Amelio, president of restaurant operations. “We bring in weird ingredients for three items. Nobody else does this.”79
The classic restaurant chain model is grounded in simplicity of concept and simplicity of execution. The Cheesecake Factory thrives on complexity. Every Cheesecake Factory employee understands the all-consuming and intense environment in which they make their living, and most are energized by it. They are required to work harder than the average restaurant worker, but the rewards are also greater. Most tell us that they stay because of the high quality of food, the atmosphere, and the people on their teams. “Cast members” know their lines; they are players in an orchestrated show that is staged up tempo every hour of the workday.
“Our store openings are unbelievably organized,” David told us, “people are impressed by this and they naturally team.” A difficult challenge for him, however, is deprogramming employees who have worked at other restaurant chains. Most are accustomed to having five tables in their stations, but The Cheesecake Factory believes that four tables translates to the guests receiving better service. “It costs money and takes time,” says David, “but the guests are happier and it’s proven that servers make more money if they please the guest.” It’s a form of “cheesecaking,” the verb, always making things best for the guest.
Food is one of David Overton’s greatest passions. And, strange as it may seem, he has what his staff terms, “a perfect palate.” He apparently has the ability to detect ingredients in nearly every dish he tastes. He periodically stages what are known as “food tours,” which are not to be confused with boondoggles. No, in fact there are lessons to be learned on each one. Once on the food tour with his management team in Providence, Rhode Island, David ordered a white pizza that the team quickly devoured. Several months later when he was back at the Calabasas Hills corporate office, he asked Peter D’Amelio to taste a piece of pizza and then asked him, “Where did you have this before?” After a moment, Peter remembered the trip they had taken and the pizza they had loved so much. David had duplicated the pizza from memory!
Food tours are as carefully planned as the restaurants themselves. There are perfect itineraries, each and every time. They’ll go from place to place ordering lunch at 11, 1, and 3, and then dinner at 5, 7, and 9. David insists that everyone order an appetizer, salad, entrée, and dessert at each seating. He takes them to trendy places to see what is coming into the market and to more traditional, established places as well. He never goes anywhere to steal an item. It’s about judging it, changing it, perfecting it. “David, from the very beginning, is the one person who understands what people will respond to in a positive manner,” remarks Robert Okura, vice president of R&D. “We use anything and everything as inspiration. It’s a multifaceted process and it takes a long time.”80
Every item on a Cheesecake Factory menu is a slight variation on a traditional dish. David believes that if the items are harder, people won’t be as likely to duplicate them. “Our struggle for all these years has been to manage to the success of the concept, and not bring the concept down to our level of management.”
Food, Service, Décor, and Location—these pillars of the restaurant business all have to be top-notch to achieve Cheesecake Factory results. “I’m continuing to take pride in building an excellent company, bringing people up to run it, and sharing the great success of The Cheesecake Factory with all those who have worked very hard to help build it,” David says with quiet conviction.