I was reading the other day about metabolic rates, rapid consumption of food, high pulse rates, and extremely energetic and agitated behaviors, and I quietly laughed to myself as understanding of our crazy, frenetic, speed possessed world came home to me.
I live in the Washington DC area – an area noted for the slow movement of automobiles on choked I-66 making it the nation’s second worst congested highway system after the great metropolis of Los Angeles.
I look around me as I drive on the Interstate coming into town, and I see interesting human behaviors. (In fact, when I used to take the bus to the Metro Station along the freeway, the view of human behavior from that high perch was even more revealing!)
In the stalled traffic, a woman is applying makeup. She purses her lips, applies the lipstick, and rapidly moves her lips together. Then she fishes out a pair of tweezers from her purse, and starts doing her eyebrows. After she is done, she puts on her foundation and in the meantime, the traffic moves forward.
A young twenty something has brought his cordless electric shaver with him and is busy moving it around his day old beard. He grimaces into the mirror attached to the sun visor of his car and starts pulling the skin to get a better shave. As he is done with the left half of his face, the traffic begins to move.
A middle aged man has spread the day’s Washington Post on his steering wheel and is busy reading the headlines. His eyes dart back and forth as he tries to absorb yesterday’s happenings in the two minutes before the traffic starts to move.
All around me, people are busy talking to unseen people on cell phones, the glow of the screens illuminating their faces. Everyone has someone that they should, must, talk to. There are people with cell phones coyly held to their ears, while others, with their elbows resting in the car window are busy barking authoritative messages in what we used to call “drive-by taskings” to seeming underlings waiting for word from their fearless leader.
We are all “busy”. We are engaged in motion. We are all performing activities that fill up our days. We are busy “hooking up”, “linking”, “networking”, and “connecting”. Our belief is that out of this frenetic activity comes personal success and that somehow, the need for speed is inevitable, necessary and good.
In the eighties, when FedExing stuff was the norm, corporate people blindly sent packages by Air Express regardless of whether the recipient was in town to receive and attend to them. In the nineties it was the Fax machine and electronic mail and FedEx. Today, it is all of the above and more – all conspiring to yank the recumbent employee from the task of pondering and into ill-thought, heedless action.
The Defense Department and the military have a word – “Ops Tempo” that describes organizational metabolic rate nicely. Ops Tempo is the rate at which operations can be conducted within the constraints of a military force structure’s ability to act, attack, defend, supply, and in general, conduct the activities of war. Ops tempo determines the metabolic rate at which a sustainable war can be fought.
Enterprises have sustainable ops tempos too – given the size of the resources, ability to deploy them, motivate them, and achieve successful activities with sustained positive results requires understanding the right ops tempo. Few enterprises or enterprise architects appear to recognize the importance of the ops tempo as a fundamental measure of the metabolic rate of an enterprise. As enterprises get larger and larger, unfortunately, the ops tempo has to scale up to counter the latency introduced by the need to traverse a long chain of command. And there is a limit to how much this can scale up because increasing metabolic rates, as we know from nature, increases the resources we consume and the stress we accumulate.
Nature has already dictated this. Small animals and birds have high metabolic rates, high pulse rates and frequent heartbeats. As animals get larger in size, their metabolic rates drop off – but their size gives them several natural advantages.
Large scale enterprises trying to be nimble like startups are like large animals trying to crank up the metabolic rate to match that of small animals – with an incipient risk of a heart failure and ultimate demise as they burn through their resources and increased stress that hardens their arteries. Right size the metabolic rate of your enterprise and you may have just found the secret sauce of sustained and harmonious survival.
I live in the Washington DC area – an area noted for the slow movement of automobiles on choked I-66 making it the nation’s second worst congested highway system after the great metropolis of Los Angeles.
I look around me as I drive on the Interstate coming into town, and I see interesting human behaviors. (In fact, when I used to take the bus to the Metro Station along the freeway, the view of human behavior from that high perch was even more revealing!)
In the stalled traffic, a woman is applying makeup. She purses her lips, applies the lipstick, and rapidly moves her lips together. Then she fishes out a pair of tweezers from her purse, and starts doing her eyebrows. After she is done, she puts on her foundation and in the meantime, the traffic moves forward.
A young twenty something has brought his cordless electric shaver with him and is busy moving it around his day old beard. He grimaces into the mirror attached to the sun visor of his car and starts pulling the skin to get a better shave. As he is done with the left half of his face, the traffic begins to move.
A middle aged man has spread the day’s Washington Post on his steering wheel and is busy reading the headlines. His eyes dart back and forth as he tries to absorb yesterday’s happenings in the two minutes before the traffic starts to move.
All around me, people are busy talking to unseen people on cell phones, the glow of the screens illuminating their faces. Everyone has someone that they should, must, talk to. There are people with cell phones coyly held to their ears, while others, with their elbows resting in the car window are busy barking authoritative messages in what we used to call “drive-by taskings” to seeming underlings waiting for word from their fearless leader.
We are all “busy”. We are engaged in motion. We are all performing activities that fill up our days. We are busy “hooking up”, “linking”, “networking”, and “connecting”. Our belief is that out of this frenetic activity comes personal success and that somehow, the need for speed is inevitable, necessary and good.
In the eighties, when FedExing stuff was the norm, corporate people blindly sent packages by Air Express regardless of whether the recipient was in town to receive and attend to them. In the nineties it was the Fax machine and electronic mail and FedEx. Today, it is all of the above and more – all conspiring to yank the recumbent employee from the task of pondering and into ill-thought, heedless action.
The Defense Department and the military have a word – “Ops Tempo” that describes organizational metabolic rate nicely. Ops Tempo is the rate at which operations can be conducted within the constraints of a military force structure’s ability to act, attack, defend, supply, and in general, conduct the activities of war. Ops tempo determines the metabolic rate at which a sustainable war can be fought.
Enterprises have sustainable ops tempos too – given the size of the resources, ability to deploy them, motivate them, and achieve successful activities with sustained positive results requires understanding the right ops tempo. Few enterprises or enterprise architects appear to recognize the importance of the ops tempo as a fundamental measure of the metabolic rate of an enterprise. As enterprises get larger and larger, unfortunately, the ops tempo has to scale up to counter the latency introduced by the need to traverse a long chain of command. And there is a limit to how much this can scale up because increasing metabolic rates, as we know from nature, increases the resources we consume and the stress we accumulate.
Nature has already dictated this. Small animals and birds have high metabolic rates, high pulse rates and frequent heartbeats. As animals get larger in size, their metabolic rates drop off – but their size gives them several natural advantages.
Large scale enterprises trying to be nimble like startups are like large animals trying to crank up the metabolic rate to match that of small animals – with an incipient risk of a heart failure and ultimate demise as they burn through their resources and increased stress that hardens their arteries. Right size the metabolic rate of your enterprise and you may have just found the secret sauce of sustained and harmonious survival.
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