Find your boiled egg…

Andy Grove is thought of by many as one of the most successful executives in the history of Silicon Valley. His book, ‘High Output Management’, is essential reading for managers and operators at all levels. While the book includes many key lessons, one of the more memorable is when Grove uses a diner processing a breakfast order of boiled eggs, toast, and coffee as a framework for understanding what great operations look like.

While you may not think making breakfast has anything in common with building software, providing a service, or producing a widget, Grove argues most commercial processes, whether it be pancakes or iPhones, only require a few key things: delivering products in response to customer requests at a scheduled delivery time, at an acceptable quality level, and at the lowest possible cost.

While processing a breakfast order may seem simple, there are still things that can go wrong. Managers and cooks deal with multiple pieces of equipment, different time frames, and path dependencies. With all of this variation, it becomes increasingly important to dial in on the critical aspects of the meal and optimize from there. Grove calls this process identifying the limiting step, as he writes:

The first thing we must do is to pin down the step in the flow that will determine the overall shape of our operation, which we’ll call the limiting step. The issue here is simple: which of the breakfast components takes the longest to prepare? Because the coffee is already steaming in the kitchen and the toast takes only about a minute, the answer is obviously the egg, so we should plan the entire job around the time needed to boil it. Not only does that component take the longest to prepare, the egg is, also for most customers, the most important feature of the breakfast.

It is a simple but powerful idea.

As knowledge workers, we are constantly dealing with more.

More inbound requests, more tasks, more processes, more meetings, more email… more, more, more! With this constant stream of inbound noise, it is easy to lose sight of the critical drivers of our success.

We lose site of the limiting step.

In the late 1800s, a little-known Italian Economist showed that approximately 80% of the land in Italy was owned by 20% of the population. This concept, now known as the Pareto Principle, captures the essence of the limiting step neatly.

Pareto highlighted a truth that most of us know intuitively. There are usually only a handful of things that we do in a day, week, month, or year that truly drive the outcomes we desire.

For serving a great breakfast, it is boiling the perfect egg.

As you start executing against key priorities in 2021, keep this in mind. Most of what you do will not matter. This means it is critical to find the 20% and do it well.

In other words, make sure you are serving a great boiled egg

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