I have habit of sending long emails from my iPhone. There is a joke that goes, “I didn’t have time to write a short message.” I have started placing in BOLD, the main points. My justification for the barrage is that I want people to be able to plumb the depths of my thinking as far as they want to go. I find it builds trust. It also introduces fatigue. Sorry to those who have received these huge blocks.
Mikel suggested we create “Whitepapers by Daryl.” While he is partially teasing me about all the “sent from my iPhone” tomes, the reality is the emails-turned-whitepaper have created a deep pool of practical logic. And, we don’t have to make them public.
In the last 60 days we have produced 23 of these narrow margin, one to two page overviews and a growing “Definitions Table” to reference them. We have also begun a General Manager FAQ wiki that hyperlinks into deeper pools.
Adding to these reference documents are swimlane diagrams and written procedures for individual roles. We even have a few General Managers doing likewise, using our system architecture of a bunch of living and breathing digital hyperlinked documents. I find more information better, personally. And, in a complex, adaptive environment there is zero way I can “control” everything we do. Our companies are living and breathing teams of people. They make tons of decisions on a whole host of things that I am clueless on. However, I do know some things about business and people management that might help… if they want.
Do you have definitions and moderate length explanations about why you do some weird thing a certain unusual way?