As I was signing the credit card slip last week, I mentioned to the dentist that he was missing out on a sure source of revenue to the tune of about 18%.

“How? That would double my profit margin.”

“Above the signature, add a line for a tip.”

Ah, the simple solutions are often the best.  We had a polite, if maybe just a little strained, chuckle.

Tipping has always struck me as a bad way to run a business because it doesn’t reinforce the virtues that Boyd associated with superior performance in organizations. As you might recall from Certain to Win, for example, these included his EBFAS climate and his “Theme for Vitality and Growth,” IOHAI.  In particular, it doesn’t seem to do much to promote teamwork, such as wait staff pitching in to help out when one waiter became overloaded, or taking the initiative to solve non-wait-related problems in the restaurant (like tidying up common areas or making suggestions for improvement — kaizen).

Plus, it reinforces a caste system, with some staff on straight hourly wage, some on salary, and one particular group on sub-minimum wage plus tips. Not good for Einheit.

But then, the restaurant business isn’t one I know much about; I don’t have any Fingerspitzengefühl for it.

Turns out, though, that I may be right. Check out restaurateur Jay Porter’s article, “After I banned tipping at my restaurant, the service got better and we made more money.”

Note the conclusion, which might come straight out of Boyd:

By removing tipping from the Linkery, we aligned ourselves with every other business model in America. Servers and management could work together toward one goal: giving all of our guests the best possible experience. When we did it well, we all made more money. As you can imagine, it was easy for us to find people who wanted to work in this environment, with clear goals and rewards for succeeding as a team.

One you have everybody together as a team, you can start investing in people and really get the benefit from Boyd’s climate. You may even be able to evolve an implementation of the principles that underlie maneuver warfare and the Toyota Production System/lean production. History suggests that if you do, you’ll wipe the table with the competition (a little pun, sorry).

First off, I’m  not a Microsoft basher: We have a Windows 7 PC (Dell) that we use for accounting and database work. It was inexpensive and works great more than three years after we bought it.

And I looked at the Surface before buying a Kindle Fire HD 7. Nice little machine, but much too expensive for what I use a tablet for. I didn’t buy an iPad mini, either, for much the same reason. At this point, I should confess that my wife and I own three Macs, an iPad, and two iPhones, and if I can nurse my nearly 5 year old MacBook, which I’m using to write this, until the fall or early 2014, I’ll most likely buy a MacBook Pro.

With that off my chest, there were a couple of great articles this week on the Fall of the House of Microsoft. Continue reading →

Not long ago, I received an offer to become a “temporary, part-time” faculty member at a local institution. The letter went straight to the shredder, but the thing I remember most was the section that emphasized what I was not entitled to:

• Health care
• Any other benefits
• Physical space at the university
• Tenure or progress towards tenure in any form
• Membership in any faculty organization
• Right to call myself “adjunct”

Other than that, welcome to the team. Continue reading →

Steve Jobs, that is. Unfortunately, if you take this path, you may not get a job with Bill Gates or other corporate overlord, and you probably won’t get promoted, but you just might do something wonderful.

Liberal Arts and Humanities Education: Who Is Right—Bill Gates, or the Late Steve Jobs? by Vivek Wadhwa, Fellow, Arthur & Toni Rembe Rock Center for Corporate Governance at Stanford University

When students asked me what subjects they should major in to become a tech entrepreneur, I would say engineering, mathematics, and science. I used to believe that education in these fields was a prerequisite for innovation, and that engineers made the best entrepreneurs.

That was several years ago. Read more …

I’ve uploaded a chart I did for zenpundit several years ago showing some of the sources Boyd drew on for the Discourse.  Those of you who have been to the Boyd Collection at Quantico know that he didn’t just dabble in these areas, he devoured them, developing a deep understanding of subjects from military science to quantum mechanics to Taoism. Available on the Articles page.  I’m working on an update, maybe later this month.

At our little PR firm, J. Addams & Partners, we never hired anyone with a PR degree. As the founder, Jeannine Addams often said, if you’re bright and energetic, we can always teach you PR, but we can’t give you a 4-year degree in how to create, write, or think.

He didn’t actually say that (Boyd did, on Organic Design, 16), but Delta CEO Richard Anderson expressed the sentiment well in a recent interview with the Associated Press. For example:

AP: As you fly around, where do you sit?
ANDERSON: I was in row 28 coming up here. I wear my badge. And I fly in coach.

I really like this, especially because it’s exactly what I recommended that Delta execs should do back when I wrote Certain to Win:

If you’re a high roller with some airline, call your 1-800 telephone number to make a reservation. Try your web site. Stand in line to check in. Check a suitcase. Fly coach. Try to change a reservation. What do you think? Excited by your own stuff? Any sign of magical pizzazz there? Any reason anybody with a choice would do it again? And while you’re back there in coach, talk to people. (p. 157)

I don’t know if he does all of these things, and I also have no idea whether other high Delta execs follow suit (a little pun, sorry). But it’s a very good sign that Delta is getting a lot right.

I’ve also berated loyalty checks — where you only use your company’s products — remember how Detroit auto factories (when there were auto factories in Detroit) used to put signs in their parking lots telling people with imported cars to go park somewhere else?

So I was delighted to read this:

ANDERSON: I’ve done long-haul to Asia. You know what I like to try to do? I like to try to fly on the competition when I go long-haul. I take my little black book and just make notes and observe what’s going on and how the airports are operating, and how your competitors are operating.

Hell yes!  But again, my question would be whether such behavior is part of the Delta culture now; do all Delta personnel fly the competition on a regular basis, and do they report on what they found? Is there an institutional process to use these reports? Put another way, does this information become part of Delta’s common implicit orientation?

Anyway, kudos to Delta. As a Million Miler living in the South, I’ve flown them, and will be flying them, a lot.