For “business processes and procedures” amazon(dot)com returned 1,800 titles. “business process management” yielded 26,000 books.
And “business processes” led to over 490,000 book titles.
Four hundred and ninety thousand. That’s a lot of books. Does this mean that Americans consider internal processes critical to the success of companies?
There is a popular American phrase which states “there is more than one way to skin a cat.” This phrase is used to express that there are multiple processes which produce the same result, and that as long as the result is achieved, the approach taken does not matter how.
It was first used in 1840 by American humorist Seba Smith in The Money Diggers, in which Smith wrote: “There are more ways than one to skin a cat, so are there more ways than one of digging for money.”
This phrase was (and still is) so popular that it inspired many variations. In 1855, Charles Kingsley’s Westward Ho! used the phrase “There are more ways of killing a cat than choking it with cream.” Many other popular variations include killing cats (and sometimes dogs) by hanging, choking with butter, and choking with pudding.
The phrase has also appeared in many American books, including Mark Twain’s 1889 book A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, in which the author wrote “she was wise, subtle, and knew more than one way to skin a cat.”
In one episode of the American television show Community, when eight people have to divide into partners, they first divide without considering any variables or long-term consequences. Shortly afterwards, however, they are so annoyed with their imperfectly chosen lab partners, that they decide to find a way to be in their optimum pairings.
This leads to them spending all night, and most of the following day, trying to decide what those optimum pairings are. They try several different systems to find new partners, including dividing by hair-color/gender/race, old/young, highest/lowest GPAs, and finally by rating each other then pairing the most popular with the least popular, etc.
After a failed attempt to implement the rating system, the 8 people succumb to fighting, angry at each other for the rankings they received. Finally, more than 12 hours after beginning the optimization process, the characters realize that their class is about to start, but none of them have done their work.
They go to class, and the teacher is so angry with them for not doing their work, and not even knowing who their partners are, that he forces 7 out of the 8 “partners” to all share one set of lab equipment, while the rest of the class no longer has to share.
In 2008, United Airlines baggage handlers damaged Dave Carroll’s guitar. After the airline refused to pay to fix the damage to his instrument, he and his band wrote a song called “United Breaks Guitars” and put it on YouTube.
Within two days it had more than 24,000 views (and more than 14 million views by 2015), and it was estimated that the bad press cost United Airlines around $180 million the following year (2009).
This incident also inspired Carroll to co-found Gripevine – a company that helps customers use social media to expose their complaints and convince companies to give better service.
Perhaps because of the high cost of tuition at American universities, Americans typically view students as customers and schools as businesses. As such, teachers will attempt to cater to the needs of their students – if a certain process doesn’t interest the customers (students), the teacher will change it in order to keep the customers attentive.
During their classes, if American teachers notice that students aren’t paying attention, they will often include several amusing anecdotes that they tell throughout the class to keep their students’ focus.
For example, during a physics class, it would not be uncommon for an American professor to stop the lecture to talk to students about how Herman Weyl (one of the early proponents of group theory) had an affair with Erwin Schrodinger’s (the physicist who’s best known not only for his quantum mechanics equation but also for his potentially dead cat) wife, or how Murray Gell-Mann (who won the 1969 Nobel Prize in physics) was so narcissistic that he once warned his cab driver not to cash his check, because he believed that his signature was worth more than his cab fare had been.
American teachers will also include anecdotal stories from their own lives if these stories have any relevance to the subject matter.
Americans become very uneasy whenever they see their German colleagues address processes with their characteristic intensity. German process discipline is almost synonymous with rigidity.
Another, more careful, look reveals, however, a contradiction. On the one side, German processes are generic, theoretical, complex and seemingly not fully focused on the goal. On the other, Americans have the sense that Germans expect processes to be followed by the letter. They ask themselves how they are supposed to follow a process which is hardly described?
German procedures are also generic and not spelled out. The Germans take this as a signal to decide independently, to make their own judgement, in a given situation. Instead of requesting input or permission from their manager, they either decide themselves or discuss with an experienced colleague how to handle a given procedure within the context of its process.
To the Americans this represents a severe breakdown in process discipline. They have little understanding, thus tolerance, for processes or procedures which allow for so much independent action when that action can lead to mistakes, errors, problems, to an domino effect.
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is well-known for its excessive use of checklists. Over the history of this organization, checklists could be found placed all over its spacecraft, and covered everything from launch operations to spacewalk procedures and even to unlikely sudden multiple system failures. In fact, astronauts used so many checklists that Apollo 11 astronaut Michael Collins called his crew’s mission checklists the “fourth crew member.”
For the first few missions of a particular program (Apollo, Gemini, etc.) the astronauts have always been far less familiar with the checklists and standard procedures than the astronauts for later missions. This is because it was more likely that something unexpected would happen during the earlier missions, and the astronauts might need to “think on their feet” in order to stay alive.
In fact, it was somewhat common for the astronauts to modify their checklists “on the fly,” although they only did so reluctantly. Collins spoke about this reluctance during his post-flight briefing, saying “I don’t enjoy making changes to procedures. It seems like the crew only does that when they feel there’s some good need for it.”
Examples of NASA Checklist deviations:
Gemini 3 – the first manned Gemini mission, which had the primary goal of testing the new Gemini spacecraft. The astronauts deviated from the post landing checklist to accommodate for extra smoke from the thrusters.
Gemini 4 – the second manned Gemini mission, which included the first spacewalk by astronaut Edward H. White. Following White’s spacewalk the hatch initially failed to open, and the astronaut inside the capsule had to deviate from standard procedure in order help White to return to the spacecraft.
Mercury 9 – the last manned Mercury mission, in which the astronaut Gordon Cooper would remain in space for one full day. Electrical problems led to the failure of several systems, and as a result, Cooper prepared a revised checklist to finish his mission.
For Americans, checklists are guidelines more than fixed rules, and often are not taken very seriously. For example, NASA checklists are also places of amusement – for the Apollo 12 mission, the backup crew managed to sneak playboy pictures into the checklists which were attached to the wrists of the moonwalkers’ space suits.
Power: Ability to act or produce an effect; legal or official authority, capacity, or right; possession of control, authority, or influence over others; a controlling group; physical might; mental or moral efficacy; political control or influence; the number of times as indicated by an exponent that a number occurs as a factor in a product; a source or means of supplying energy; the time rate at which work is done or energy emitted or transferred. From Anglo-French poer, pouer, from poer to be able, from Vulgar Latin *potēre, alteration of Latin posse potent.
Influence: An ethereal (other worldly) fluid held to flow from the stars and to affect the actions of humans; an emanation of spiritual or moral force; the act or power of producing an effect without apparent exertion of force or direct exercise of command; corrupt interference with authority for personal gain; the power or capacity of causing an effect in indirect or intangible ways. Latin influere to flow in.
Importance of sales/marketing: Americans place very high value on market- and customer-orientation. And orientation means listening to, understanding and interpreting, the needs of the customer. Meeting customer needs is the path to success.
Which means understanding and interpreting is the basis for making and delivering products and services. Understanding and interpreting requires proximity to and dialogue with customers. These are the primary functions of sales (account management) and marketing.
In its purest form, sales/marketing listens, interprets, then passes back into the organization to those responsible for the product/service portfolio. Who, in turn, pass back to colleagues in product development. Who, in turn, pass back to research and development.
From this perspective, everything flows from sales/marketing back into the organization. This puts sales/marketing in the lead.
Customer reviews can make or break a company in the USA. Especially now that the internet gives customers a way to instantly compliment or complain about service (and to make sure that their opinion is available for anyone to see) one good or bad review can drastically change the number of customers a company has.
In 2012, after Brandon Cook from New Hampshire posted a Facebook story about a Panera manager named Sue making a special order of clam chowder for his grandmother (and giving her a free box of cookies as well), the store became much more popular. Several people who would not otherwise have eaten at this restaurant went there, and commented about it online. Some of the Facebook comments that people made were:
Cyrus Twirpwhirler My family is eating at Panera tonight because of this story. Way to go Sue and Panera!
Snow Casey That is so cool, I’m a customer already, but I like them even more now.
Daniel Julian that is so cool!!! Have to visit Panera soon.
Murray Gell-Mann, a theoretical particle physicist who won the 1969 Nobel Prize in physics, used the specific measurements of multiple particles with varying masses to induce the existence of quarks, half of the known elementary particles – the foundation of all matter, and what he called the eightfold way, a generalization of particle symmetries, which was able to predict the masses of yet undiscovered particles.
Linus Pauling, a chemist who is the only person to win two unshared Nobel Prizes, for chemistry in 1954 and peace in 1962, charted particular chemical bond angles and distances at Caltech following his fellowship. He then used these specific charts to formulate generalizations about atomic arrangements in crystals.