Hire the Lazy Person

Hire the lazy person! is not something you hear very often. If you read the job vacancies column, companies are looking for energy, dynamism, aggression and commitment. So, why would you look to hire the lazy person?

Now, I suppose some clarification is necessary. If someone is pure idle, and just cannot be bothered to show up on time, or to produce anything, then you should not be interested in them, but lazy – that’s different, especially if it is tied in with innovation.

The lazy, but innovative, person will usually look at how something is being done, or even why something is being done at all, and will seek to find a more efficient way of doing it. If you can find a lazy person with a touch of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, so much the better, because they will always be looking for the smarter way to achieve their tasks.

Why is this important in the Value Stream world? Well, mostly because that’s how you would like all of your staff to work.

To give a specific example, let’s look at the IT world and the ongoing shift to DevOps. This is a fundamental move to a new way of delivering value in the IT world, and let’s face it, the case can be made that every business is an IT business.

The base proposition of DevOps is that we are looking to deliver Value to Customers faster. This is done through adapting some fundamental principals in the way we work. These are Culture, Automation, Lean, Measurement and Sharing or CALMS. So what do we mean by these?

Culture – we need to shift to a mindset of Continuous Improvement, Continuous Learning and Continuous Delivery.

Automation – If we are doing the same task more than three times per day, and it takes more than 90 seconds to do, it’s a candidate for Automation.

Lean – Are we adding value at every stage? Are we re-working? Are we passing defects downstream for someone else to fix?

Measurement – Do we know exactly what we are doing, how long it takes, and where the Constraints are?

Sharing – Are we sharing knowledge, so mistakes are not being repeated?

Where does the lazy person fit in all this?

Well, they usually want to continuously improve what they do and how they do it, so that they are not wasting valuable energy. If they can get a machine to do the work, why should they need to spend time and energy doing it? If they are re-working someone else’s output, that’s a real waste. They can usually tell, to the minute, how much time they are wasting and they are quite happy for everyone else to learn how to be lazy, so they are happy to share.

So, if you want your business to be as efficient as it can be, if you want to deliver faster, if you want your Customers to be delighted at the Value they get from you, think about hiring the right lazy person!