At Manager Tools, we review the business weekly in an operational review. It’s really easy to see how the changes we make in suppliers or ways of booking flights or methods of working make a difference. We review our finances weekly and so we immediately see a difference. The people we work with are all on the call, so we hear how our changes affect them.

When I’ve worked in multi-national companies, it’s much more difficult to know how the work you do makes a difference. I can’t tell you that a quarterly earnings report has ever been changed by a saving I made. I might have saved our team a few hours a month with a new method of working, but it was probably a drop in the ocean compared with all the hours worked each week by the whole company.

There was an article in Bloomberg Businessweek which made me think about this. Campbell (the soup company), needs to make $80 million in annual savings every year – not to make MORE money, but to KEEP UP WITH INFLATION. That’s an astounding number, just to keep up. How do they do it? “Every day, before their shifts begin workers … huddle with managers to find ways to save the company money.” Later the article says “A 1 percent gain in plant efficiency in North America adds $3M to operating profits”. They only need 27 1% ideas to make their $80 million.

Which just goes to show a) it doesn’t matter how insignificant the efficiency seems, it’s worth doing; and b) Confucius was right when he said the longest journey begins with the smallest step. Whatever you do today, it matters.

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/10_49/b4206015275454.htm