Transcript

Finishing #1163 · From Chad

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Finish when the job is done, not the clock is out.
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There's a story behind that. This is your daily message from
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Chad. Where 1163 to upgrade your
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mental game today by telling yourself a better story.
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Because the most important story you hear is the story you tell
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yourself. This message is dedicated to
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heroic superstar Christine O'Connell.
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Here's the upgrade. You think the fix for bad
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quality is watching the hours more closely, but upgraded
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thinking knows the hour is the wrong thing to pay for in the
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1st place. Here's the story.
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Paul Van Doren was a high school dropout who started as a 16 year
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old service boy and spent 20 years learning every inch of the
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shoe trade before he ever owned anything.
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By the time he started Vans, there was almost nobody alive
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who knew more about making a canvas shoe.
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He had a problem. Every operator knows and his
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bones. When he pushed his factory for
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production numbers, quality fell.
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When he pushed for quality, production fell.
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A seesaw shove one side down and the other pops right back up.
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The experts answer was to send in Harvard trained efficiency
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men to stand behind the workers with stopwatches.
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Paul threw them out. He he found it demeaning and
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worse, he found it wrong. They were tuning one worker
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while ignoring the whole system, and the deepest flaw was the pay
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itself. He was paying by the hour, which
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doesn't address quantity or quality.
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Hourly pay rewards a person for taking an hour to do whatever
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they're doing. So Paul stopped paying for time
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and he started paying for the outcome.
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He told his people, hit your eight hour quota at top quality
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and if you finish in six hours, go home.
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And the seesaw stopped because now the same reward pulled speed
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and quality at once. It worked so well, some crews
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went to four day work weeks. The exact same move saved
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Federal Express. I told that story in message
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number 725. Their night shift paid by the
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hour had every reason to drag until someone paid them per
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shift and let them leave when the planes were loaded.
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Two men, 2 industries. One lesson.
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You get the behavior you incentivize for, not the one you
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instruct. Now put it on yourself because
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you run a factory too. It's your day, and most of us
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pay ourselves by the hour. We feel good because we're busy,
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because we sat there a long time, because we ended up tired.
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But the hour is not the shoe. The hour is not the loaded play
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plane. You can log 10 hours and finish
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nothing. The better story to tell
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yourself is reward the outcome, not the hour.
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Van Doren's real credo was that Vans was a people company that
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made shoes. He said.
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The distinction sounded like nothing, but it was everything.
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Start there, then quit paying yourself for time in the chair.
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Name the quota the real finish, and when you hit it, go home.
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Reward the shoe, not the stopwatch.
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Tell me a story of paying for the outcome instead of the clock
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to From chadsmith@gmail.com. Send someone a text and ask them
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what could you finish faster if the hours stopped counting?
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You can get a free copy of my book, The Most Powerful Story in
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the World by going to from chad.gumroad.com.
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The transcript of this message and hundreds of others are
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always available at www.fromchad.com.