Provide employee “artists” with experiences such as apprenticeship with a master, stories of outstanding customer service, and extended time with a customer. In a surgery center, repetitive work that can be standardized (such as high-volume hernia repair or Lasik corrective eye surgery) is managed separately from more complex inpatient surgery that requires individual judgment.
Manage artistic and scientific processes separately.
#STEINWAY SAMPLE MANAGER PROFESSIONAL#
So continually expose artists to customer feedback.Īt Steinway, piano voicers (who adjust completed pianos to perfect each instrument’s feel and sound) interact directly with professional pianists. Artistic processes must rely on external measures of success. Hall and Johnson recommend these steps for managing your processes once you’ve determined which ones should be artistic: Develop an infrastructure to support art Ritz-Carlton recaptured its reputation for unrivaled service when it empowered employees to improvise their responses to individual guests’ needs. If your process is artistic, train employees in the judgment required to respond creatively to variable conditions.
Inputs to the process are variable (for example, no two pieces of wood used to make a Steinway piano soundboard are alike).To decide if a process should be more artistic than scientific, look for these conditions: Many processes work best when treated like artistic work, rather than rigidly controlled. Ironically, process standardization can undermine the very performance it’s meant to optimize. They need not be at odds but must be carefully harmonized. Managers must ask: What new technologies can make a science of art? Do my customers value variation? How do the costs and opportunities of art and science stack up?Īrt and science both have important roles to play in business processes. Periodically reevaluate the division between art and science. Firms also must institute ways to mitigate failures, which are inevitable with variation.ģ. Scientific processes can provide a stable platform for artists to work upon, but art and science should never be intertwined. Artists require proper training and metrics that help them maximize value for customers (such as continual customer feedback). Develop an infrastructure to support art. Once employees were allowed to improvise, customer satisfaction improved.Ģ. Not only does the wood used in soundboards differ, but professional musicians appreciate the instruments’ unique “personalities.” Ritz-Carlton adopted an artistic approach to service after discovering that tightly defined procedures weren’t meeting the needs of its diverse customer base. Steinway & Sons, for instance, uses artistic processes to make concert pianos. If those two conditions aren’t present, mass processes (which eliminate variation) or mass customization (which controls it) will be required. Companies need art in variable environments (if, say, raw materials aren’t uniform) and when customers value distinctive output. Identify what should and shouldn’t be art. Tuck professors Hall and Johnson advise companies to rescue artistic processes from the tide of standardization with a three-step approach.ġ. Imposing rigid rules on them squashes innovation, reduces accountability, and harms performance. Many processes-such as leadership training or auditing-are more art than science. Managers have gone overboard with process standardization.
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