While I was studying this summer at Stanford, Professor of Marketing Baba Shiv quoted Warren Buffet to the class — “Busy is the new stupid” — when we were discussing finding time for certain important activities. I spent some time reflecting on what this quote meant and how to reconcile it with my core belief that working hard breeds success. Can both concepts hold true?
I decided the answer was “Yes!” We can work hard to not be busy by investing in our future. Contrast that with not being busy now (not working hard) due to laziness or procrastination, which often leads to being even busier in the future!
More recently, I was reminded of Parkinson’s law, which stems from an essay published in 1955 by the naval historian C. Northcote Parkinson in The Economist :[1] "Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion." There must be some truth to this observation, and that truth lies in human nature. Otherwise why do so many tasks become completed only at the deadline?
Necessity is the mother of invention
When our survival depends on figuring out a better way to solve a problem, it’s amazing what we can do. This is where Parkinson's law intersects with the concept of innovation. When a team or business simply doesn’t have enough people or time to do everything — and survival seemingly needs it — our subconscious helps us solve these challenges by surfacing ideas for our conscious minds to consider, experiment with and implement.
As workers and leaders, if we’re creative and introspective, we’re constantly faced with this question: “Do we invent or automate to make our tasks easier in the future, or do we just do these tasks?”
To effectively answer this question, we must figure out a few things:
- How many times will we do this task? To figure this out, it’s helpful to ask:
a. How often do I need to do this?
b. How long will I do this until it ends or substantially changes in scope to make the investment in automation or simplification obsolete? - How long does it take to do it the way I’m manually doing it now?
- How much work will it take to automate or simplify the process?
- How long will it take to automate the process?
- How do I run the process and build the tools to make this task more efficient in parallel with doing the work?
Let’s consider a simple example:
Imagine you have to fill a bucket of water every day. It takes one hour to walk to the well, fill the bucket and walk home. You will have to do this every day for one year. The amount of work you put into this task is shown in the graph below:
Now imagine a scenario where you can work an additional two hours per day for the first month to lay a pipe to bring water from the well to your house to fill the bucket. Once the pipe is laid, it only takes you 10 minutes a day to fill the bucket.
If we put both scenarios in one graph, we see that investing in the automation (pipe) paid off. You began to save time cumulatively between months three and four whereas, prior to that, you had to work harder to get to a more productive state. If this task persists for at least that long, you had a positive return on your investment (ROI) in automating the task (installing the pipe). And cumulatively, at the end of the year, you were over three times more productive despite being one-third as productive in the first month while you were both manually fetching water and laying the pipe.
This concept probably seems obvious to many with an operations background, but if we bring the psychology of Parkinson’s law back into the picture, we realize that idle resources create a disincentive to invest in such automation. If there’s nothing to do in a day but fetch water, why invest in automating the process? There’s plenty of free time, and getting the water is possibly one of the more interesting parts of the day!
Clearly, this example is an oversimplification, but the metaphor holds when considering the time allotted for a job. If we allot more time than needed, we will not feel the necessity to automate tasks for productivity. No pain or urgency for our survival causes our instincts to kick in and spur us into innovative action.
However, in our example, we didn’t address the fifth question a leader must ask: “How do I run the process and build the tools to make this task more efficient in parallel with doing the work?” This is one of the hardest parts of driving efficiency and productivity in an organization. We frequently need to put in more energy, more work and more investment for some amount of time before we see the longer-term payoff. This is where experts in process design, information technology, tools and now artificial intelligence come into play.
It's generally best for the people performing a task to be heavily involved in designing the method to automate or reduce the time necessary to perform it. It can also be extremely useful for organizations to involve experts who can help design and document an optimally efficient process and then define it for others with the necessary skill sets, often in IT, to implement.
That said, process owners rarely spend a majority or even a large amount of their time devising, documenting and implementing processes for increasing productivity. I recommend that one person on the team become an internal process consultant or leader for other team members who define and implement processes less often. Sometimes, outside consultants or contractors can provide the extra temporary bandwidth to streamline a process in the long term.
First things first
Prioritization is critical in a resource-limited environment, but if resources aren’t lacking, making difficult prioritization decisions simply won’t happen. In a ZBB or zero-based-budgeting exercise, leaders are often given a fixed budget and asked to prioritize projects to fit within that budget. Sometimes (or usually), projects that have a positive ROI fall beneath the line where projects get funding. This funding could be for people, money or other critical limiting resources.
Consider the following simple example for a $30 budget
In the limited-resource case where only projects above the ZBB line can be executed, the ROI is 2.4 times. But in an environment where all projects are funded, then the ROI would be only 2.2 times. Parkinson’s law postulates that, if we had more people, we would have just filled the time, possibly by doing project delta but maybe by spending more time on the other projects and diminishing the ROI.
Now you might argue that the net ROI would be greater if we did project delta — even though it’s a less productive project or activity, it still has a positive ROI — and you would be right. But consider a scenario where one of the projects didn’t work as planned. You’ve invested in three teams now, you have only two teams’ worth of work, and team project gamma is now sitting idle.
In the limited-resource case, you already have a productive project to work on to maximize ROI under the scenario. The future holds many twists and turns, so sometimes, it’s good to have things to work on that haven’t been considered. Parkinson’s law offers some hidden insight here as well.
Conclusion
My friend said, “You can work smart, you can work long, and you can work hard.” I believe that "Busy is the new stupid" really means working smart, so you don’t permanently have to work long and hard. Parkinson’s law can be a compelling argument that resource-limited situations can lead to more positive outcomes by creating an environment where companies must out-innovate to survive.
Here are the key takeaways:
- Resource limitation drives innovation: Resource-limited environments often need innovation for survival, leading to more productive outcomes. Micron production capability is approximately 13% of the world’s NAND output — big enough to give us scale but not so big that we can invest in everything. We’ve focused our attention on a few key differentiators: being the core technology node leader, leading in QLC technology, building the best vertically integrated data center SSD and UFS products, and leading in power, performance and quality.
- Adversity builds resilience: Overcoming adversity can have benefits, such as increased resilience, renewed appreciation for life and improved processes. In the past, Micron has faced setbacks in our data center SSD portfolio. Our first vertically integrated platform took longer than expected to get to market and qualify with our customers. We learned from this experience and focused on building world-class development execution and product validation capabilities to ensure the integrity of our roadmap.
- Risk of unlimited resources: Organizations with nearly unlimited resources may lack the motivation to invest in processes and tools that drive efficiency, risking becoming uncompetitive. History is littered with companies that sat at the peak of their markets only to be disrupted by smaller competitors. At Micron, one of our values is tenacity, and it’s so valuable because it makes us a bit scrappy. We push a little harder every day to maximize our efforts.
- Necessity of prioritization: Prioritization is critical in a resource-limited environment, ensuring that the most impactful projects are executed. Over the past few years, Micron has focused on delivering products that lead the industry in power, performance, cost and quality. The result has been that Micron has deprioritized investments in areas like a KV or Ethernet interface SSD or a specialized data center SLC die. These decisions have proven to be the right call, as they have enabled the world's best engineers to tackle the most pressing problems.
Our success and portfolio reflect our commitment to focusing our efforts and delivering products that solve real customer problems, executing to our commitments, and leading in core differentiable technology vectors. Just wait until you see what we do next!
