Commanders intent and repeatability

I just finished reading a book called Repeatability written by Chris Zook and James Allen and turns out that repeatability is something that needs to be in the DNA of the organization as opposed to just blindly documenting day to day activities in the business. Also, repeatability is about having an organization on the front line which knows how to clone the management thinking and map that to their individual tasks.

What is not repeatability:

• It is not the performance of a repetitive task like a robot. We are talking about the essence of a business requiring constant judgment, but needing some consistency in order to drive learning[Repeat things]
• It is not mechanical replication everywhere of a business concept[Repeat things globally across geographies]
• It is not an endless to-do list handed down to every frontline employee. This form of repeatability suppresses feedback and is demotivating and soulless.[dumb workforce]
• It is not the repeatability of nonstrategic functions. Every company has critical functions in finance, tax, real estate - essential enablers.

Commander's intent is an intent describing military focused operations and it is a publicly stated description of the end-state as it relates to forces (entities, people) and terrain, the purpose of the operation, and key tasks to accomplish.

This is a snippet that I am plagiarising from the book:

How can it be that hard to align the front line around the core ideas of the business? the same as the management team? Here are some key obstacles that seem to get in the way of shortening the effective distance between management and the front line that is serving the customer:

• "The customer is a number, not a person." Insulated by phone menu options and distant call centers, senior management can easily spend less and less time interacting with customers, and especially ultimate end users.
• "The thin blue line of customer care." When customer care and after-service is viewed as an expense to be managed down you have a problem.
• "Sales are the other guys." Some businesses have cultures that devaluate the sales and service roles, as opposed to exalting it as the eyes and ears on the ground, as the intelligence function about customer needs and competitive offerings.
• "Tyranny of functions." In some companies, internal functions become service centres for other internal customers, creating an entire internal ecosystem with a life of its own independent of the customer and the value that these functions actually create that the customer would pay for. If you are having too many internal meetings, and if this accounts for more than 10 percent of your time, then you might have this problem
• "Myth of stakeholder priorities." When customers become one of a long list of stakeholders in the queue of competing company priorities, customers can become undervalued, and the gap between senior management's mentality and the market reality at the front line increases.
• "Layered organizational complexity." Organizations add complexity when they grow, especially in absence of repeatable formula. Addressing complexity with complexity has effect over time of disconnecting top management from the front line and turning major decisions into a fuzz ball of committees where no one really knows who decides. This is how complexity kills speed, responsiveness and ultimately growth.