United States – Page 45 – understand-culture

Scope Creep

Scope creep is when a task or project grows beyond its original intent, requiring more people, time and money than originally planned. It is typically a result of poor task definition, change control or internal communication. A precisely defined decision limits scope creep.

Scope: The extent of the area or subject matter that something deals with or to which it is relevant; the opportunity or possibility to do or deal with something.

Creep: To move slowly and carefully, especially in order to avoid being heard or noticed; moving very slowly at a steady pace; occur or develop gradually and almost imperceptibly; increase slowly but steadily in number or amount. Old English crēopan, meaning to “move with the body close to the ground”. Of Germanic origin; related to Dutch kruipen.

According to Economic Recovery Measures, Financial Rescues Have Only Temporary Impact by Kathy Ruffing and James R. Horney from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the Bush-era tax cuts and its extension during the Obama presidency, in addition to the deficit-financed wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, account for “almost half of the $18 trillion in debt that, under current policies, the nation will owe by 2019.” Deficit-creep.

A subtle difference

Normierung – norm-ing – is defining a unified measurement (dimensions, proportions) for products and processes. Norms are not only practical, they save money. Up to 17 billion Euros per year, according to the German Institut of Norms (DIN).

DIN is well known to all Germans, even if they don’t think about it. DIN-norms were introduced to them as early as grammar school when they began to work with stardardized pape sizes such as the A4.

But what exactly is a norm?

The German Chamber of Commerce writes (loosely translated): “A norm is a rule (regulation, code of practice). It is legally accepted. It was established via a standarized process. It solves a problem, addresses a situation, addresses factual circumstances.”

Manufacturers can invoke or refer to a norm in order to save time and money. However, noone is obligated to follow a norm. They are often, nonetheless, written into production contracts, thus defining measurements and processes.

In that sense production proceeds deductively, base on theory or the norm. Industry norms are more firm, more binding, than industry standards, which are not generally accepted, which can be defined by manufacturer to manufacturer.

Interestingly, the English language does not distinguish between a norm and a standard. Perhaps this gives us deeper insight into German thinking.

Public Apologies

In America, celebrities are often considered suppliers, and their fans customers. Anytime celebrities make mistakes or behave in ways which don’t meet their fans’ expectations, they are expected to immediately issue formal apologies. Some of the more recent examples include:

Lance Armstrong – issued a public apology after admitting to using drugs to win the Tour de France seven times. Justin Bieber – issued a public apology after a video surfaced, in which the pop star told a racist joke. Reese Witherspoon – issued a public apology after being arrested for disorderly conduct.

On the same page

The first step an American supplier will take is to gain a deep understanding of the customer‘s needs. Because these aren’t always so concrete, they must also try to identify the perceived needs. The relationship with the customer should be highly collaborative on all levels, from the beginning to the end.

The American supplier, vendor, consultant, constantly strives to make sure that they are “on the same page” with the client. In fact, they work literally side-by-side with the client, going to the client’s place of work and completely adjusting their schedule. They maintain continuous dialogue throughout the process so that they always understand the client’s needs and desires, especially as they change.

This includes knowledge-transfer agreements, which detail when the customer will be able to do something on his own, without supplier assistance, so that he begins to take over the process.

Results: Because the customer exerts such a certain level of control over the external expert (the how as well as the what), the expert is held accountable exclusively for the work dictated (ordered) by the customer. How the results might affect related areas within the client company remains the responsibility of the customer. Responsibility cannot exceed scope of work.

Information: For this collaborative effort to function effectively a high level of communication between customer and supplier is necessary. Information flow is guaranteed via short-term feedback between the customer and the supplier during the entire business relationship. This allow customers to modify their requests depending on changing situations.

Powell Doctrine

The Powell Doctrine, named after General Colin Powell, stresses exhausting all political, economic, and diplomatic means, before a nation should resort to military force.

Powell has since expanded the doctrine, stating that when a nation is engaged in war, every resource and tool should be used to achieve decisive force against the enemy, minimizing American casualties and ending the conflict quickly by forcing the enemy to capitulate.

Deploy. To extend a military unit especially in width; to place in battle formation or appropriate positions; to spread out, utilize, or arrange for a deliberate purpose. From French déployer, literally, to unfold.

Atlas of Emotions

In the U.S. the field of psychology has grown in popularity. In the 2006-2007 school year, social science was tied with history as having the second largest number of awarded Bachelor’s degrees.

In fact, there are so many people majoring in psychology in the U.S. that psychology majors have the highest unemployment rates of all recent college graduates, with 19.5% of clinical psychology majors and more than 10% of educational and industrial/organizational psychology majors unable to find work.

A lot of this popularity is due to the work of people like Paul Ekman, an American psychologist, who has created an Atlas of Emotions, which identifies over ten thousand different facial expressions. He has also written fifteen books about body language including Telling Lies and Emotions Revealed.

Due to his high (albeit imperfect) success-rate with using small details in a person’s facial expressions to induce larger truths about that person, Ekman has served as an advisor to several police departments and anti-terrorism groups, including the Transportation Security Administration (TSA). Thanks to his work, Ekman has gained a reputation as the best human lie detector in the world.

Additionally, Ekman’s work was recently used as the basis for the television crime drama Lie to Me, a show in which several psychologists and facial expression experts use their knowledge of body language to assist in investigations. This show ran from 2009 to 2011, and won two People’s Choice Awards in 2011.

cheese

Who Moved My Cheese? by Spencer Johnson. This business fable is about adapting quickly to change. The characters who succeed are those who make fast decisions and act, rather than waiting for perfect information or circumstances. The story is widely used in American business to encourage employees to embrace quick, adaptive decision-making.

Nature of the Problem

H.R. McMaster, February 2017 until April 2018 National Security Advisor under President Donald Trump, describes how critical it was at the beginning of his tenure to get clarity on scope. Listen to minutes 3:00 to 4:15 about “the nature of the problem”, and about “framing out the problem”:

McMaster earned an M.A. and a Ph.D. in History, both from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He turned his dissertation on the strategy of the U.S. in the Vietnam War into his book entitled Dereliction of Duty.

rigged with a bomb

Speed (1994). When a city bus is rigged with a bomb that will explode if the speed drops below 50 mph, police officer Jack Traven must make quick, high-stakes decisions to keep everyone safe. The plot is driven by the need for constant, rapid action, with little time for perfect planning.

Fail Fast, Fail Often

“Fail Fast, Fail Often, Fail Everywhere”. By John Donohue. The New Yorker. May 31, 2015.

“Discussions about failure may come more easily in America in part because our businesspeople are so good at it. The failure rate for startups, using a yardstick in which investors lose everything (i.e., all of the company’s assets are liquidated), is between thirty and forty per cent, according to Shikhar Ghosh, a senior lecturer at Harvard Business School.

The rate is seventy to eighty per cent if failure is defined as not meeting the projected return on investment, and ninety to ninety-five per cent if it is measured by failing to beat a declared projection.

Despite these statistics, Americans remain remarkably optimistic about the process—last year, venture-capital companies staked forty-eight billion dollars in pursuit of big returns. And the fact that these investments are concentrated in a relatively small number of companies has not seemed to inspire much fear in prospective entrepreneurs.

According to a study done by the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor, a project run by Babson College and the London Business School, in 2014 among respondents between the ages of eighteen and sixty-four who were not already running their own businesses, just thirty per cent reported that fear of failure would stop them from starting one.

And more than half of those Americans surveyed believed that there are good opportunities to strike out on one’s own.