I was reminded about this story because of something that happened recently. I had posted that my book “Stories At Work”, had hit number three and a friend of mine, a well-wisher said you shouldn’t be chasing numbers. I disagreed because I said you know it’s no good playing cricket if you didn’t have a scoreboard. You just mustn’t allow the scoreboard to determine how you play and this reminded me of the following story. This story is from the 1880s. It is about a gentleman called Charles Schwab an industrialist who had set up this company called Bethlehem Steel, the second biggest steel mill in those times. In one of his units he was having a low production issue. He had sent one of his better managers there but a few months later nothing had changed. So, Charles visited the unit and asked the manager what he had been doing. The manager said, “Well, Charles I’ve tried everything! I have tried to shout at them, I tried to motivate them, I even tried to threaten them to be sacked! Nothing worked.” Charles asked how many units did the morning shift deliver. The manager said “Six”. Charles took a piece of chalk and on the ground he wrote the number six very boldly and put a box around it and left In the evening when the evening shift staff came in, they asked the manager what the number 6 was, and he said, “Sir Charles was here and he has put down the number of units that the morning shift had delivered”. This guy said “Oh did they deliver six? We will do better.” By the next morning the number was wiped out and it said seven. When the morning shift came back they saw that the number that they had written had been wiped out and it was now reading seven. They said “Oh is that it so?” They brainstormed and now they pushed it up to ten and so on and so forth till they became one of the largest or the fastest producing units among all of Bethlehem Steel! What Charles had inadvertently done is create one of the cheapest leader boards in corporate history. What leader boards do is give the sign for you to measure yourself as to see how you’re doing, let others know how you are doing and promotes competition. There’s another thing that can happen around leader boards, you can have conversation and that can generate more stories. “Oh they did seven? How did they manage to do seven? Is there something we can learn from that?” “They did only four? What went wrong?” and from these little stories around leader boards you can even get more lessons. What a motivating story! Business Points ( Tags) #leaderboards #charlesschwab #increasedproductivity #healthycompetition #Gamification
