Virtue:
Orderliness
Other names:
"Regulatedness"; "Methodicalness"
Definition:
"what is becoming to the business in hand, and to one's surroundings" (II-II q168 a1)
Advice:
"... focus on minutes, not hours. Most people default to hour and half-hour blocks on their calendar; highly successful people know that there are 1,440 minutes in every day and that there is nothing more valuable than time" (Bradberry, #1)
"focus on only one thing. Ultra-productive people know what their most important task is and work on it for one to two hours each morning, without interruptions" (Bradberry, #2)
"Throw away your to-do list; instead, schedule everything on your calendar" (Bradberry, #3)
"""touch things only once. How many times have you opened a piece of regular mail--a bill perhaps--and then put it down, only to deal with it again later? How often do you read an email and then close it and leave it in your inbox to deal with later? Highly successful people try to ""touch it once."" If it will take less than five or 10 minutes--whatever it is--they deal with it right then and there. It reduces stress, since it won't be in the back of their minds, and it is more efficient, since they won't have to reread or reevaluate the item in the future"" (Bradberry #12)
"practice a consistent morning routine. Kruse's single greatest surprise while interviewing more than 200 highly successful people was how many of them wanted to share their morning ritual with him. While he heard about a wide variety of habits, most nurtured their bodies in the morning with water, a healthy breakfast, and light exercise, and they nurtured their minds with meditation or prayer, inspirational reading, or journaling" (Bradberry #13)
Empirical Research:
Case examples:
Gifts of the Holy Spirit
Further reading:
Vices opposed:
Case Study (Revised)
ReplyDeleteIn Good to Great, Jim Collins discusses the habits of orderliness.
"Do you have a 'to do' list?
"Do you also have a 'stop doing' list?
"Most of us lead busy but undisciplined lives. We have ever-expanding 'to do' lists, trying to build momentum by doing, doing, doing—and doing more. And it rarely works. Those who built the good-to-great companies, however, made as much use of 'stop doing' lists as 'to do' lists. They displayed a remarkable discipline to unplug all sorts of extraneous junk.
"When Darwin Smith became CEO of Kimberly-Clark, he made great use of 'stop doing' lists. He saw that playing the annual forecast game with Wall Street focused people too much on the short term, so he just stopped doing it. 'On balance, I see no net advantage to our stockholders when we annually forecast future earnings' said Smith. 'We will not do it.' He saw 'title creep' as a sign of class-consciousness and bureaucratic layering, so he simply unplugged titles. No one at the company would have a title, unless it was for a position where the outside world demanded a title. He saw increasing layers as the natural result of empire building. So he simply unplugged a huge stack of layers with a simple elegant mechanism: If you couldn’t justify to your peers the need for at least fifteen people reporting to you to fulfill your responsibilities, then you would have zero people reporting to you. (Keep in mind that he did this in the 1970s, long before it became fashionable.) To reinforce the idea that Kimberly-Clark should begin thinking of itself as a consumer company, not a paper company, he unplugged Kimberly from all paper industry trade associations.” (Collins, Good to Great, p.139)
Case Study
ReplyDeleteIn Good to Great, Jim Collins explains how Abbott Laboratories developed the habit of orderliness.
"Many of the Abbott disciplines trace back to 1968, when it hired a remarkable financial officer named Bernard H. Semler. Semler did not see his job as a traditional financial controller or accountant. Rather, he set out to invent mechanisms that would drive cultural change. He created a whole new framework of accounting that he called Responsibility Accounting, wherein every item of cost, income, and investment would be clearly identified with a single individual responsible for that item. The idea, radical for the 1960s, was to create a system wherein every Abbott manager in every type of job was responsible for his or her return on investment, with the same rigor that an investor holds an entrepreneur responsible. There would be no hiding behind traditional accounting allocations, no slopping funds about to cover up ineffective management, no opportunities for finger-pointing.
"But the beauty of the Abbott system lay not just in its rigor, but in how it used rigor and discipline to enable creativity and entrepreneurship. “Abbott developed a very disciplined organization, but not in a linear way of thinking,” said George Rathmann. '[It] was exemplary at having both financial discipline and the divergent thinking of creative work. We used financial discipline as a way to provide resources for the really creative work.' Abbott reduced its administrative costs as a percentage of sales to the lowest in the industry (by a significant margin) and at the same time became a new product innovation machine like 3M, deriving up to 65 percent of revenues from new products introduced in the previous four years.
"This creative duality ran through every aspect of Abbott during the transition era, woven into the very fabric of the corporate culture. On the one hand, Abbott recruited entrepreneurial leaders and gave them freedom to determine the best path to achieving their objectives. On the other hand, individuals had to commit fully to the Abbott system and were held rigorously accountable for their objectives. They had freedom, but freedom within a framework. Abbott instilled the entrepreneur’s zeal for opportunistic flexibility. ('We recognized that planning is priceless, but plans are useless, said one Abbott executive.) But Abbott also had the discipline to say no to opportunities that [didn’t fit its mission]. While encouraging wide-ranging innovation within its divisions, Abbott simultaneously maintained fanatical adherence to its [mission] of contributing to cost-effective health care." (Collins, Good to Great, pp. 122-23)
In his book, More Than a Hobby, David Green explains how he pursues orderliness not just as a matter of personal practice, but in the way products are physically presented and arranged at Hobby Lobby. "At Hobby Lobby we’re determined to keep a store that isn’t junky—despite the nature of our merchandise. Crafts and home accents come in thousands of different shapes and sizes, which makes our job challenging. If we were in the clothing business, most items—whether men’s, women’s, or children’s—would either display vertically on a hanger or stack nicely on a table. If we were car dealers, almost all vehicles would occupy roughly the same-size rectangles on the lot. We, on the other hand, are trying to keep an area that displays polyurethane grape clusters and dollhouse miniatures and ceramic birdbaths and model trains from looking like a junkyard." For David Green, orderliness is a basic principle of customer service on a personal as well as material level. "I insist that Hobby Lobby should be well organized—not just because it’s my nature, but because customers appreciate it. They like being able to find what they’re seeking with a minimum of looking around." (David Green, More Than a Hobby, ch. 3)
ReplyDeleteAdvice
ReplyDelete“Make it a rule to require, and submit, regular periodic progress reports, as well as final reports on completed projects. However tedious such chores may seem, your business simply isn’t fully organized and controlled until you have established this practice, as regards reports to your superiors as well as from your subordinates…It is further true that, generally speaking, a project is not really finished until it is properly summarized, recorded, and filed in such a manner that the information can readily be located and used by all interested parties.” (King, The Unwritten Laws of Business, 55)