Killing The Stupid Rules At Your Work

July 23, 2012

Interview with Lisa Bodell, author of the book Kill the Company: End the Status Quo, Start an Innovation Revolution

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Mike Carruthers:
In every organization there are rules, policies and procedures and the more meetings you have the more rules, policies and procedures you create.

Lisa Bodell:
And I think what we have to do is rather than creating more things and coming up with more ideas we have to start by simplifying and creating less.
 

Lisa Bodell, author of the book Kill the Company... 

And what I advocate is actually getting rid of things these processes, these reports etcetera that are actually holding us back from innovating because we just no longer have the space to do it. We’ve got to create the space and create the time by getting rid of things.

Most rules, policies and procedures are created to deal with an issue but they’re created in a vacuum.

You know when something in a vacuum doesn’t seem so bad but when you add it to your collective to do list it becomes overwhelming. You know sure doing a monthly operating report might only take a couple hours but when everything takes a couple hours there’s no more time left.

So before new policies are created Lisa recommends that managers and employees sit down and start to eliminate things first.

What we did actually is we came up with a tool called kill a stupid rule. So we tell them if you could get rid of any rule that’s holding you back form either being more effective in your job or innovating what would it be and why? And I’ll tell you they don’t just come up with 1 rule on average the people in our classes come up with between 10 and 15 in just 10 minutes. So rather than starting with what are we going to build on for next year why don’t you start on what we should get rid of first.