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I get a regular newsletter from Stanton Marris a consulting company. The one I got this morning has a brief guide to 'communicating high concern messages'. It serves as a useful reminder, making the point that

"When emotions are involved, too many managers handle the conversation badly, or avoid it altogether."

If only these tips had arrived yesterday before I got into a situation where I did not handle the conversation well. Someone asked me for feedback on a presentation she'd just given. It was one of those cases where I had a point of view, but didn't take enough care presenting it. In that situation the 'The six Cs of Communicating' would have helped.

The author rightly point out "there's a skill to how you use them, but if you follow them in order, you can be sure you have at least touched all the bases:"

Care – show empathy with the person/people receiving the message

Cut to the chase – say in a simple, clear sentence the news you have to communicate

Criteria – give the three main (evidence-based, not opinions) reasons why the decision has been made, or the criteria used to reach a decision

Concerns – acknowledge the concerns of the potential human or personal impact of your message

Confirm – repeat the headline message to re-state the facts, and add any helpful practical details such as next steps

Commitment – genuine personal commitment to provide support, keep people informed, and an organisational commitment to treat people fairly and well.

With a little thought I could have framed a more helpful feedback. And in hindsight I should have declined to give immediate feedback in order to give myself time to think about how to put the message across more effectively. An acronym that would have come in handy had I thought of it (and immediately acted on) is STOP.

This is useful to bring to mind before diving in: Stop, Think, Organize, Proceed. It only takes a minute. I could have stopped myself offering feedback, thought about how to provide it effectively, organized a response e.g. will think about it and come back and give feedback later, proceed with that statement.

Had I done that at the first 'c', care, then the rest of them would have followed smoothly – although one can never be sure. I read with fascination the Joe Barton story this morning. Barton retracts BP apology, regrets 'shakedown' comment. He could have done with the 6 C's, the STOP model and or the GROW model

The GROW model is useful for coaching/feedback conversations. This letters translate as What is the Goal (of the person), What is the Reality (he/she is facing)? What are the Options (available to try out/work with? What Will he/she do? There are many web explanations of it (google GROW Model) and they are all very similar. A straightforward one is on the Management at Work website.

Sadly, as a friend once pointed out to me 'should haves and would haves don't count'. It's what you do that counts. I've learned something for next time I'm asked to give feedback.

What Edward Tufte would make of the headline "Love It or Hate It, PowerPoint Shapes Strategy-Making, Says New Paper" I can't imagine.

Tufte is one of the people who makes a very good case for hating PowerPoint saying: Alas, slideware often reduces the analytical quality of presentations. In particular, the popular PowerPoint templates (ready-made designs) usually weaken verbal and spatial reasoning, and almost always corrupt statistical analysis. What is the problem with PowerPoint? And how can we improve our presentations?

He presents his arguments in an essay The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint: Pitching out the Corrupts Within. One of his examples in this is an analysis of the way NASA scientists used PowerPoint to make engineering presentations. In relation to this Tufte asks the question "Is this a product endorsement or a big mistake?" (Neatly suggesting the latter).

So now we have research from Sarah Kaplan, a Rotman professor of strategic management who studies strategy making in uncertain environments. She says "It's easy to say that PowerPoint is taking over and that's terrible … but what I observed is that the day-to-day use of PowerPoint is much more complex," in her view the technology creates a vehicle and 'discussion space' which can be used to shape idea generation and build corporate strategies"

A brief article about her work in Science Daily says that:

An eight-month examination of strategy making at a telecommunications company showed Prof. Kaplan that PowerPoint was more than just an omnipresent tool. It allowed for greater collaboration because more people had access to PowerPoint documents, it affected the parameters of the discussion (depending on what information was included, or excluded from the PowerPoint slides) and even shaped the influence individuals had in the strategy-building process (those with less facility using the technology lost status, those who possessed the "deck" of PowerPoint slides had greater power). By studying the daily use of PowerPoint in strategy making, it was possible to see how meanings were negotiated through PowerPoint use, as a means for both collaborative efforts to generate ideas and cartographic efforts to divide up territories and pursue individual or group interests.

The full research paper acknowledges Tufte's point about the potential for data mis-representation, saying

What emerges [from the research] is a multi-faceted view of PowerPoint. Its use enables actors to sort through and decipher complex and conflicting information. But, in doing so, these actors might simplify the data beyond usefulness or shape the information to suit a personal agenda. Some individuals' voices might be excluded while others might be amplified.

In some ways, this picture of PowerPoint lives up to the criticisms levied against it – the technology clearly enabled simplification, objectification and politicization. This may not be the whole picture, however. Those features are not necessarily "bad" in the sense that they were part of what made knowledge production possible in a highly uncertain context.

So users of PowerPoint should be aware of the pitfalls of over-simplification of the data but recognize that the discussion around the data can create shared understanding and meaning. (Obviously if the data is mis-leading the discussion will head off in the wrong direction as Tufte's analysis suggests).

A different analysis of PowerPoint compared the used of animated slides with non-animated slides on student learning.

Knowing that Microsoft PowerPoint has, over the last couple of decades, become the tool of choice for creating instructional slideshows Stephen Mahar of the University of North Carolina Wilmington and colleagues have explored the impact of custom animation in PowerPoint lectures and examined the idea that custom animation may, in fact, negatively impact student learning.

To test their hypothesis, the team recorded two versions of a PowerPoint lecture. The presentations differed only in the presence of animation to incrementally present information. They then showed students either the animated or non-animated lecture and then tested the students recall and comprehension of the lecture.

The team found a marked difference in average student performance, with those seeing the non-animated lecture performing much better in the tests than those who watched the animated lecture.

So it seems that users of PowerPoint should be judicious in their choices about the way they are designing their presentations. Like many other things it can be a force for good or ill.

My own peeve about PowerPoint is the single organization chart that it offers as a standard template. This is a classic hierarchy. I believe that if PowerPoint offered more options in organization chart structures there would be fewer hierarchically structured organizations.

I'm working with a client who currently has a hiring process that takes 198 days. Using a six sigma approach she has reduced it to 80 and is about to launch it on that basis. However, an internal client has come with the request for a 'bulk hiring' of 200 people to be done within 30 days. The question is, can the hiring process be accelerated to that level. What are the risks, and what would be compromised?

This is where people need to agree on the design criteria. Essentially design criteria

• Clarify what the new organization design must do well
• Identify 'problems' that must be solved in the new design
• Develop the 'benchmark profile' to guide the design and use in evaluating the design alternatives
• Take the emotion out of organization design and provides tangible data with which to assess options
• Provide focus for design or redesign that improves performance
• Lay the foundation for trade-off decisions – they articulate priorities that guide the design through conflicting needs.
• Keep members focused on the same outcomes of designing
• Enable differences to be surfaced and discussed
• Can be used to evaluate different design solutions

The organization design criteria are developed from the assessment of things that will have to change to implement the new strategy, purpose, vision, and achieve the new performance requirements, together with an analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of organization

They comprise 5 or 6 statements of what the design should accomplish in terms of observable/measurable operating features/outcomes. e.g.

• Move decision making out to those interfacing with customers
• Enable effective information exchange between ABC and 123
• Maintain strategic global/regional presence with capacity to capture greater global market share and future business growth

The criteria are not:

A description of how to organize, such as "Centralize Support Services" or "Create an architecture group".
A directive goal statement, such as "Implement BPO."

In his book, Change by Design, Tim Brown talks about innovation in relation to design constraints, and boundaries – essentially synonymous with innovative organization designs and design criteria. With this in mind organization designers would do well to follow Brown's guidance

"A second way to think about the overlapping spaces of innovation is in terms of boundaries. To an artist in pursuit of beauty or a scientist in search of truth, the bounds of a project may appear as unwelcome constraints. But the mark of a designer, as the legendary Charles Eames said often, is a willing embrace of constraints."

"Without constraints design cannot happen, and the best design – a precision medical device or emergency shelter for disaster victims – is often carried out within quite severe constraints. For less extreme cases we need only look at Target's success in bringing design within the reach of a broader population for significantly less cost than had previously been achieved. It is actually much more difficult for an accomplished designer such as Michael Graves to create a collection of low-cost kitchen implements or Isaac Mizrahi a line of ready-to-wear clothing than it is to design a teakettle that will sell in a museum store for hundreds of dollars or a dress that will sell in a boutique for thousands."

"The willing and even enthusiastic acceptance of competing constraints is the foundation of design thinking. The first stage of the design process is often about discovering which constraints are important and establishing a framework for evaluating them."

"Constraints can be visualized in terms of three overlapping criteria for successful ideas: feasibility (what is functionally possible within the foreseeable future); viability (what is likely to become part of a sustainable business model); and desirability (what makes sense to people and for people)."

"A competent designer will resolve each of these three constraints, but a design thinker will bring them into a harmonious balance…. (This is not to say) that all constraints are created equal; a given project may be driven disproportionately by technology, budget, or a volatile mix of human factors. Different types of organizations may push one or another of them to the fore. Nor is it a simple linear process. Design teams will cycle back throughout the life of a project, but the emphasis on fundamental human needs — as distinct from fleeting or artificially manipulated desires — is what drives design thinking to depart from the status quo."

"Designers, then, have learned to excel at resolving one or another or even all three of these constraints. Design thinkers, by contrast, are learning to navigate between and among them in creative ways. They do so because they have shifted their thinking from problem to project."

Thinking in this way may well result in a 30 day hiring process that is better than the 80 day one, and far exceeds the 198 day one in terms successful outcomes.

There's a long and interesting article in this month's print copy of The Atlantic, called 'The End of Men'.

The summary reads as follows:

"Earlier this year, women became the majority of the workforce for the first time in U.S. history. Most managers are now women too. And for every two men who get a college degree this year, three women will do the same. For years, women's progress has been cast as a struggle for equality. But what if equality isn't the end point? What if modern, postindustrial society is simply better suited to women? A report on the unprecedented role reversal now under way- and its vast cultural consequences."

Why do I say it is interesting? It seemed to me to suggest that organizations would operate differently with women in charge, and from this I took (a perhaps unintended) point that organizations would have different designs from the command and control, mechanistic designs rooted in Taylorism. In fact the author, Hanna Rosin, says that

The old model of command and control, with one leader holding all the decision-making power, is considered hidebound. The new model is sometimes called "post-heroic," or "transformational" in the words of the historian and leadership expert James MacGregor Burns. The aim is to behave like a good coach, and channel your charisma to motivate others to be hardworking and creative. The model is not explicitly defined as feminist, but it echoes literature about male-female differences. A program at Columbia Business School, for example, teaches sensitive leadership and social intelligence, including better reading of facial expressions and body language. "We never explicitly say, 'Develop your feminine side,' but it's clear that's what we're advocating," says Jamie Ladge.

A 2007 study by Cristian L. Deszõ and David Gaddis Ross, "'Girl Power': Female participation in top management and firm performance," attempted to quantify the effect of this more-feminine management style.

According to McKinsey Quarterly, in their article A business case for women, September 2008,

"Using data on 1,500 US companies from 1992 to 2006, Cristian L. Deszõ and David Gaddis Ross demonstrate the "strong positive association between Tobin's Q,8 return on assets, and return on equity on the one hand and the [female top-management] participation rate on the other." The authors add that they found "at least indicative evidence that greater female representation in senior-management positions leads to-and is not merely a result of-better firm quality and performance."

I don't know if anyone has done a study on whether women led organisations have different designs compared with men led organizations, or if the design of the organization has any bearing on the way women are able to perform in it. If not, these would be good topics for a PhD.

When Disney acquired Pixar, in January 2006, Robert Iger, CEO of Disney, agreed to an explicit list of guidelines for protecting Pixar's creative culture. For instance, Pixar employees were able to keep their relatively plentiful health benefits and were not forced to sign employment contracts. He even stipulated that the sign on Pixar's front gate would remain unchanged.

Two years after the acquisition some analysts were surprised that it was working successfully:

How Disney and Pixar are making the integration work holds lessons for other executives faced with the delicate task of uniting two cultures. Tactics that have served the companies well include the obvious, like communicating changes to employees effectively. Other decisions, including drawing up an explicit map of what elements of Pixar would not change, have been more unusual.

Many organizations want to either keep the creative culture that they have or create one if they don't have one as creativity is seen as an organizational asset. But are there downsides? A summary of some recently published research suggests there are:

The demands associated with creative work activities pose key challenges for workers, according to new research out of the University of Toronto that describes the stress associated with some aspects of work and its impact on the boundaries between work and family life.

The authors describe three core sets of findings:

• People who score higher on the creative work index are more likely to experience excessive job pressures, feel overwhelmed by their workloads, and more frequently receive work-related contact (emails, texts, calls) outside of normal work hours;
• In turn, people who experience these job-related pressures engage in more frequent "work-family multitasking" — that is, they try to juggle job- and home-related tasks at the same time while they are at home.
• Taken together, these job demands and work-family multitasking result in more conflict between work and family roles – a central cause of problems for functioning in the family/household domain.

According to Schieman (the lead researcher), "these stressful elements of creative work detract from what most people generally see as the positive sides of creative job conditions. And, these processes reveal the unexpected ways that the work life can cause stress in our lives -stress that is typically associated with higher status job conditions and can sometimes blur the boundaries between work and non-work life."

Other researchers' findings, however, find that creative activity helps people stay healthy,

… "said lead author John Mirowsky, a sociology professor with the Population Research Center at The University of Texas at Austin. "Creative activity is non-routine, enjoyable and provides opportunity for learning and for solving problems. People who do that kind of work, whether paid or not, feel healthier and have fewer physical problems."

So maybe creativity is emotionally stressful but physically beneficial? It's difficult to tell. Thinking about this I turned to Gerd Gigerenzer's book Reckoning with Risk. He discusses three situations which research reports like the above throw up: the illusion of certainty, risk communication, and drawing conclusions from numbers.

Since I don't know enough about the specifics of the two pieces of research it's tempting to take the summaries at face value – but would it be 'a good thing' to, say, design creative work environments which aimed to maintain stress within tolerable levels (whatever these might be) and maximize physical health. Reading Gigerenzer's books suggests that healthy skepticism and a clear understanding of the limitations and generalizability of research are useful tools to have to hand when doing organization design work.

This week's Economist has two articles in it that caught my eye. The first is about NGOs and their relationships with corporate for-profits. Called Reaching for a Longer Spoon it outlines the closer relationships that activist non-profit groups are developing with for profit companies. The Nature Conservancy, for example, has received large sums of money from BP, while Conservation International has been paid, again by BP for advising on its oil extraction method. Environmental Defense Fund another non-profit collaborates with "such frequent targets of activists' ire as Wal-Mart, a giant retailer with no time for unions, and Kohlberg Kravis Roberts (KKR), a private-equity firm often depicted as a financial predator."

The second article is a review of two books about business in China that discuss 'state capitalism' whichc is basically a business model that the reviewer says embraces capitalism in so far as it can be used as an instrument of state power. China is the classic example of state owned companies selling goods on the global market.

From Latin America to the Middle East authoritarian governments are imitating China's model of "state capitalism". They are not only using state companies to shore up their power at home, they are directing those companies to reap the fruits of global capitalism. State-controlled manufacturers sell goods on the global market and buy up natural resources. Sovereign-wealth funds invest the profits from all of this activity in global markets.

The rise of this new hybrid has led to a dramatic change in the balance of power between the state and the market. State oil companies control three-quarters of the world's crude oil reserves. Three of the four largest banks by market capitalisation are state-controlled. The biggest mobile- phone operator, China Mobile, is also a state company.

What's interesting about both these articles is that they point to business models and organization designs that should be inclusive of partners, stakeholders and others in their overall design – and this is not the way organization design is traditionally approach – based, as it is in the notion of a single organization operating as a unitary system. I wonder, for example, how flexible and adaptive Galbraith's Star model would be dealing with these, or whether the McKinsey's 7S model would stand up to notions of organizations being both more than and less than an entity in its own right.

The Economist points out, in relation that "Collaboration between business and NGOs, if well designed, can certainly yield significant mutual benefit, "but does not explore the intricacies of 'well designed'. It takes a less bullish view on state capitalism saying that "that there is a lot of evidence to suggest that state companies are less productive and innovative than their private-sector competitors. Much of the dynamism of the Chinese economy comes from private companies rather than bloated state firms." Nevertheless it may also be true that a well designed 'state capitalist' organization will be very successful. It could be that state run companies are ripe for organization design skills improvement and my recent trip to Shanghai certain demonstrated that there certainly is the interest in it.

I got totally bogged down today in a piece I'm writing about managing change. Briefly I've been asked if I could consider approaches to change and provide some frameworks and activities to help people get started and/or improve their managing change skills.

It's one of those topics that seems utterly clear to begin with and gets progressively more murky the deeper down you dive into it. I began with trawling through all the articles I have collected on it, before going to my bookshelf and finding the several books I have on it. Then I went to find a definition. There are thirteen of them on the site I went to. I was pleased to see I could also find them in other languages including Dutch, Korean, Portuguese, and Russian should I want to. I resisted the temptation of this displacement activity and focused on the task in hand.

Having surrounded myself with this unstructured information I then went to the on-line university library that I have access to and looked for academic articles on the topic. That was also a recipe for procrastination as it suddenly seemed tremendously urgent to read an article on Values in Nordic Newspaper Editor Decision Making (in the Journal of Media Business Studies), and Precision ag technology offers opportunities for peanut farmers to improve efficiency. (in Western Farm Press) clearly I'd run out of self-control in allowing myself this diversion – there was small comfort in the fact that both mentioned change management.

At least I knew that I had an exhaustible supply of self-control. I read this useful fact in a Fast Company article earlier this week. The article Why change is so hard: self control is exhaustible opens with the statement.

You hear a lot about change: People won't change because they're too lazy. Well, I'm here to stick up for the lazy people. In fact, I want to argue that what looks like laziness is actually exhaustion. The proof comes from a psychology study that is absolutely fascinating.

The article goes on to discuss the study ending with the remark that:

Change wears people out-even well-intentioned people will simply run out of fuel.

This is not really the road I want to go down as I provide guidance for people who are tasked with managing change. They don't want to know that they will run out of self-control and become exhausted. They want to know exactly the opposite – that with good guidance and the right tools they will have a well controlled change management process which is energizing both for them and the people they are supporting through the change process.

So back to the toolkit – looking at my array of books I thought it might be helpful to compile an Amazon wish list of books on managing change. So I did that, which took a fair bit of time, but at least I can point people to it in the tool kit. I did wonder if there was a facility to convert the wish list into a correctly formatted (APA 6th edition) bibliography as a word document but haven't explored that yet. The list is available by typing in my name on the Amazon wish list search and looking for the list on change management.

Now the task is to read through the information and structure it into the guidance and toolkit. However, that's for tomorrow. This evening a friend is singing in the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra production of Brahms German Requiem and I'm going to that. I'm hopeful that listening to it will allow replenishment of my self control, together with the emergence of the outline of the document to write. (Tomorrow, I will also ask my webmaster to put a direct link from this website to my Amazon wish lists).

I see in this morning's Financial Times the headline 'Cultural failings leave BP engulfed'. Instantly I'm attracted to it to see if it would have been a useful case study to put in my new book. (It's too late now as yesterday it went to print. It's the Economist Guide to Organisation Culture and is coming out in mid-July). The piece opens with:

"In the storm of public and political fury that has hit BP in the US since the Deepwater Horizon disaster on April 20, the company's shortage of native knowledge of America and how it responds to crisis has been painfully exposed."

OK so I do cover the difficulties companies have in moving into new (for them) countries. The concepts of cultural fluency at an individual and organizational level are discussed. There are lots of examples of companies pulling out of countries that they didn't understand the culture of: Walmart leaving Germany is one, IKEA leaving Japan is another (although IKEA is now having a second go at Japan hopefully having learned some lessons).

Cultural fluency, by the way, means familiarity with cultures: their natures, how they work, and ways they intertwine with our relationships in times of conflict and harmony. It means awareness of several dimensions of culture, including communication, ways of naming, framing, and taming conflict, approaches to meaning making, identities and roles, diversity .

I also discuss how companies respond to crises. There are some who do it well (Gap and its handling of sweat shops) and others (Shell over estimating its oil reserves) do it very badly. The 2008 financial crises showed in glorious detail the various ways of handling crises. It's hard to say whether the companies who manage crises well outweigh the companies who handle it badly. The latter get a lot more publicity. There's not a great deal of on-going news in a crises well-handled although it makes good case studies for MBA students – but have they learned from these when they get into high positions in organisations?
The article goes on to remark that:

"Yet in spite of the country's importance, BP is short of Americans in senior roles. Tony Hayward, the chief executive who has become the lightning rod for American anger, is British, as are the heads of its two main operating businesses and Andrew Gowers, head of media, a former editor of the Financial Times."

This is an interesting point that western companies entering China and other emerging markets are grappling with. I was speaking the other day with a VP for Talent Management for a large western manufacturing company with an expanding presence in China. She herself is Chinese but has lived in America for 20 years. Now going back to China with a specific brief to develop local leadership she is alarmed by the youth of the local senior executives, the scarcity of them, and their lack of experience. She feels she has very little time to get a robust local leadership strategy successfully up and running, and without local leadership she feels her company is in a very risky position.

Thus it may be that we see many more mishandled crises and large scale damage as companies wrestle with the supply/demand difficulties of getting local, good leadership in place.

Another point to note in the article is the legacy aspect. In this case it is the name

'Even Thad Allen, the US Coast Guard admiral who is the public face of the effort to fight the spill and talks about his good working relationship with BP, refers to the company as "British Petroleum", which has not been its name since 1998.'

I do look at the power of history and legacy in shaping a company's culture and the perception of it. It is very strong – not just internally but also externally. I remember working for British Airways 15 years after the merger between BOAC and BEA that formed BA. People still dismissed what another person said on the grounds that 'they don't know anything. They're from BEA'. (or BOAC depending on who was talking).

So I'll be watching the BP crisis unfold in terms of the cultural implications. I may not be able to offer much scientific or engineering expertise in how to stop the spill but I could give some useful suggestions on how to build a healthier culture.

On Friday I went to see the movie Office Space. Either it didn't come out in the UK or I missed it but here in the US it seems as if every office worker has seen either it or the Milton animated shorts on which it is based, a zillion times.

The film follows Peter Gibbons (Ron Livingston), a software engineer cubicle dweller at Initech. He has a frustrating commute, normally tiresome coworkers, an inane boss and a girlfriend that he's pretty sure is cheating on him. The bright spots in his life are his two friends at work, his neighbor, and the waitress at the local café.

This is yet another in the genre of Up in the Air, State of Play, and Outsourced all of which I've seen in the last year and all of which look at the idiocies and difficulties of organizational life. I guess that a film showing people enjoying their work, with good bosses, in pleasant environments wouldn't be a crowd drawer. But the fact that these films and related TV programs (Back to the Floor, Undercover Boss) and Dilbert (and Alex in the UK) cartoons are so popular is that office or work life really is as depicted for many people. Who hasn't been involved in a conversation like this one at some point?

Dom Portwood: Hi, Peter. What's happening? We need to talk about your TPS reports.
Peter Gibbons: Yeah. The coversheet. I know, I know. Uh, Bill talked to me about it.
Dom Portwood: Yeah. Did you get that memo?
Peter Gibbons: Yeah. I got the memo. And I understand the policy. And the problem is just that I forgot the one time. And I've already taken care of it so it's not even really a problem anymore.
Dom Portwood: Ah! Yeah. It's just we're putting new coversheets on all the TPS reports before they go out now. So if you could go ahead and try to remember to do that from now on, that'd be great. All right!
And who doesn't understand, if not speak, business language of the type Lucy Kellaway talks about:

For nearly a decade I wrote a fictional column in the Financial Times about a senior manager who spoke almost entirely in business cliches. Martin Lukes talked the talk. Or rather, he added value by reaching out and sharing his blue sky thinking. At the end of the day he stepped up to the plate and delivered world class jargon that really pushed the envelope. After eight years of being him I came to accept the nouns pretending to be verbs. To task and to impact. Even the new verb to architect I almost took in my stride. I didn't even really mind the impenetrable sentences full of leveraging value and paradigm shifts. But what still rankled after so long were the little things: that he said myself instead of me and that he would never talk about a problem, when he could dialogue around an issue instead.

But these characterizations are rooted in caricature and stereotype. Many people actually do enjoy their work, in a social atmosphere where they feel they are contributing, and they also recognize many aspects of the send-ups of office life that they see in films, cartoons, and articles. This is one of the values of the send-ups – people can laugh and also be aware that a culture based in fear, duplicity, lack of control, and powerlessness is not fun. By humorously highlighting the negatives it makes it more possible to design in the positives.

Recently I've spent a lot of time 'standing behind the yellow line' in immigration queues waiting to have my passport stamped to be let into a country. I've also stood waiting behind people to check out at the supermarket, get money from an ATM, board buses, and buy movie tickets.

I looked at the queues to get into the World Expo country pavilions and decided that it wasn't worth my time for the pay-off. Instead I enjoyed my Expo experience of walking through the landscaped gardens there, watching the people, and seeing the pavilions from the outside.

Now I've just read an article on 'balking behavior'. Business management professor Pen-Yuan Liao of the National United University in Miaoli, Taiwan makes the point that:

No one enjoys queuing, so even small reductions in waiting time will result in better quality of service and lead to enhancing customer loyalty and so increased sales

He goes on to report that:

"The profit loss from business resulting from inefficient queuing systems is quite difficult to estimate, but there is a creative and effective way to formulate the costs of waiting and so improve customer satisfaction and sales."

The article reports that:

Liao has devised a scientific formula he refers to as the "balking index," which is referred to by the Greek letter theta. Ironically, this symbol is used elsewhere in science as shorthand for temperature, a parameter that often rises among people standing in ineffective queues. Liao has encapsulated theta as relating the expected queue length and the mean arrival rate in a given time period. Multiplying the balking index, the queue length, and the mean arrival rate gives you the number of frustrated customers who will leave their position in the queue in that time period.

Estimating balking loss enables a store manager or other person in charge of staffing levels to determine the optimal number of servers by minimizing total cost, including service cost and balking loss," says Liao. He has successfully tested the formula in advising a fast food manager on how many staff to have serving at any given time depending on the balking index.

By using this formula, approach, restaurants and other services that have queues can cut costs and improve customer loyalty," he says, "Customers benefit from much reduced queuing times."

The source article goes into a lot more detail which I found intriguing. For example,

Although the importance of waiting time as a form of price has been recognized, it is difficult to account for this effect in making managerial decisions. Ittig (1994) mentioned two difficulties for estimating the opportunity cost of the waiting time. The one is that the waiting time may vary with each different customer, while the price is fixed. The other is that the monetary value of per unit of the waiting time during a shopping trip may vary widely from one customer to another, and may have difficulty to estimate. Therefore, it is more practical to consider using the concept of the waiting time as a form of the price to estimate the lost profit from lost business.

It led me to think back over the various queues I'd recently stood in and wonder about my own balking time calculus. Beyond that, the article provides good information for people working on the staffing aspects of organization design, and market research departments could do useful work on customers balking and work with managers to come up designs that mitigate the risks of balking.