10 lessons fron the Honeywell Operating System

This week's Economist has a valuable article of the way Honeywell is run. Here I draw out ten points that make sense to me.

1. Time management, lots of short (15 minute) meetings where people stand up. no long boring meetings.

2. Tools and tricks to create an urgent environment (like special coloured clocks on the wall, labels where people should stand on the floor creating social pressure on late comers.

3. Daily meetings for suggestions of realistic process improvements,

4. lots of measurable results (4 times faster to do make x, higher profits, revenues, cash generation, 2 ideas per employ per month)

5. successful implementation of management theory (theory without good implementation is so much BS)

6. 12 “behaviours” including customer focus, self-awareness and championing change as opposed to values which are hard to measure.

7 Employees were indoctrinated in a forthright retraining exercise, known as One Honeywell (“One Hon”).

8. "better to do it right than quickly" as in Tim Harford's Unilever example in his wonderful TED Global talk: Trial and Error God Complex
- initial template following visit to Toyota,
- pilot in 10 factories. worked in half.
- tweaked and tested in 5 more factories
- deployed broadly.

9 Decentralization. "hardest ... was to get workers—... to adjust to a more decentralised power structure. “You have to get to the point where people say, ‘this is how I do my job now’,”

10. cost cutting can go to far as in Allied Signal. spending money can be good if it is to raise productivity and make money

Key facts about Honeywell here US$36.5bn revenue $3.5bn Ebitda