A New Take on How We Will Do Things

This is Steven Petrick Posting.

SVC spent the last two and a half days (including today for the half) at "Business Boot Camp". He notes that most of what they were trying to teach he had already learned either in the oil business, or in the "school of hard knocks" since he sailed forth to create his own company.

Still, he has been inspired by the experience and had vowed to change the way Amarillo Design Bureau, inc, operates in an effort to make the company more efficient.

We all wear a lot of hats (very few of us to do all the jobs), and have tendencies to focus on one particular job (hat) to the detriment of the others to some extent. We have been managing to get most things done, but not everything. Things fall through the cracks, mostly the things none of us really wants to do. That does need to change, all jobs need to be done, but we are probably going to continue to suffer from too much work for too few people.

At the end of the day, there is always more work to be done. Perhaps if we can save a few wasted moments here and there we can some of that completed also.

So, we are going to hold more meetings for the specific purpose of seeing what we have done and what needs to be done, and confirm that no one is "waiting for someone else to do something". (Even as small as we are, we have this problem, someone needs something from someone else, but the someone else is working on something they need to finish right now and cannot stop to do the thing the other person wants, so someone winds up doing nothing for a while if he or she cannot find some other task.)

My biggest fear is the "disruption" this may cause. I am often leaving my desk as it is to check orders or trim books or other things. Every time it happens my train of thought is interrupted and when I get back, I have to figure out where I was in what I was working on, losing even more time. Being interrupted when I was not currently trying to be creative is not a problem, but it really does hurt when I am trying to keep a stream of thought going. I never seem (in my opinion) to be able to find the same stream when I get interrupted. Whether by a phone call (I answer the phone most of the time) or having to go check what some else was doing.