Growth companies usually face a significant problem: they need to scale operations while ensuring the output quality is not deteriorating. The standard way to do this is to have managers (or somebody else) control the output and make sure it is good enough. But this solution is suboptimal in so many ways: few people like to do this kind of work; few people like to be tediously controlled; and it is quite expensive.

A better way to do this is to design the tasks better in the first place and make sure everyone knows the overall vision and values as well as the intention of a given task. In his book, Start with why, Simon Sinek tells a great story about the two different ways of building a company:

There is a wonderful story of a group of American car executives who went to Japan to see a Japanese assembly line. At the end of the line, the doors were put on the hinges, the same as in America. But something was missing. In the United States, a line worker would take a rubber mallet and tap the edges of the door to ensure that it fit perfectly. In Japan, that job didn’t seem to exist. Confused, the American auto executives asked at what point they made sure the door fit perfectly. Their Japanese guide looked at them and smiled sheepishly. “We make sure it fits when we design it.” In the Japanese auto plant, they didn’t examine the problem and accumulate data to figure out the best solution—they engineered the outcome they wanted from the beginning. If they didn’t achieve their desired outcome, they understood it was because of a decision they made at the start of the process.

At the end of the day, the doors on the American-made and Japanese-made cars appeared to fit when each rolled off the assembly line. Except the Japanese didn’t need to employ someone to hammer doors, nor did they need to buy any mallets. More importantly, the Japanese doors are likely to last longer and maybe even be more structurally sound in an accident. All this for no other reason than they ensured the pieces fit from the start.

What the American automakers did with their rubber mallets is a metaphor for how so many people and organizations lead. When faced with a result that doesn’t go according to plan, a series of perfectly effective short-term tactics are used until the desired outcome is achieved. But how structurally sound are those solutions? So many organizations function in a world of tangible goals and the mallets to achieve them. The ones that achieve more, the ones that get more out of fewer people and fewer resources, the ones with an outsized amount of influence, however, build products and companies and even recruit people that all fit based on the original intention. Even though the outcome may look the same, great leaders understand the value in the things we cannot see.

Every instruction we give, every course of action we set, every result we desire, starts with the same thing: a decision. There are those who decide to manipulate the door to fit to achieve the desired result and there are those who start from somewhere very different. Though both courses of action may yield similar shortterm results, it is what we can’t see that makes long-term success more predictable for only one. The one that understood why the doors need to fit by design and not by default.

Scandinavian Airlines Services (SAS) had a pretty idea for serving great content to customers and potential customers: let their cabin crew and pilots share their best personal travel tips. To facilitate this information, they created iOS and Android apps.

So far so good. The idea of the app is good: SAS employees travel all the time and are in a good position to give insights in a competitive market. It also helps put a human face on the airline. And I might even meet one of their Chicago experts on my next trip to Chicago. Perfect!

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