August 1999
Mr. Fixit
By Douglas A. Samuelson
"Good game, Andy," the OR/MS analyst said as the weekly Wednesday lunchtime basketball game in his company's gym concluded. "We just couldn't stop those drives of yours."
"Yeah, you too, Joe," his colleague and basketball nemesis agreed. "I guess I've still got a little speed, after all."
"Maybe I've lost a step or two," Joe conceded ruefully. "But you sure keep going after the weak spot, don't you?"
"That's what my high school coach always told us," Andy replied. "If you have something that works, keep doing it until they find a way to stop you."
"Say," Joe exclaimed, as he had suddenly realized something. "Some of my colleagues in my department must never have learned that."
"What do you mean?" Andy asked.
"We have a big client whose problems really don't change much," Joe explained. "We can keep them happy just by making small changes and updates to a model we've had working well for years. You'd think this would be great for us: We keep getting paid and the client stays happy, and we don't have to do much to keep it all happening."
"Sounds good to me," Andy nodded.
"But not to our project leader," Joe said. "He's always trying to demonstrate how much better we can do it if we get creative. The client usually doesn't like the changes, the answers take longer to come in, we all end up scrambling to fix program bugs and resolve data problems. Why can't we just leave well enough alone?"
"It's not just your group," Andy noted with a rueful chuckle. "I guess a lot of us analyst types somehow feel we have to keep creating to justify our jobs. Even if that's not what the client wants, we keep trying to fix what isn't broken. We're never content to let something good keep working as it was. That makes us better scientists and engineers, but it also helps to explain why the dumb MBAs keep eating our lunch. They know when to leave well enough alone!"
They shared a laugh. "You're right, now that I think about it," Joe pointed out. "I'm in a couple of local professional societies whose leadership all too often thinks the same way. We would have some really successful programs, with lots of people there and a nice profit for the association. The next year, the new leaders decided they'd make it even better. They were so busy making the programs 'even better' they ran late getting the program put together and the publicity out — even though we'd already learned, from previous years, that getting good, detailed publicity out on time was critical! So the paid attendance would drop by about half, compared to the year before, and the society would barely break even."
"Mmmm, too bad," Andy sympathized.
"But even worse," Joe continued, "then the next set of officers and the new committees would decide that last year's lower attendance means it's time to try something different! They'd start talking about a whole different format, different time of year, different topics. In some cases, they'd even try to recruit a whole bunch of new volunteers before talking to the people who had been carrying the load — so those people got annoyed, and the new people ended up without the benefit of working with people who had done it before.
"Once in a while someone who had run one of these successful programs several years before would ask, 'Why do you want to bet the association's money and momentum on something nobody knows about, with no data on what the potential customers want? Why not go back to what worked so well two years ago?' And usually the new leaders would say, 'Oh, we just thought it was time to try something new.' They wouldn't budge. Sometimes it would work out O.K. anyway, but more often they were headed for a disaster!"
"It sounds that way to me," Andy agreed. "Another case of not knowing when to leave well enough alone. Like the old New England saying, 'If it ain't broke, don't fix it!'" They shared another laugh.
"You know," Andy added after a short pause, "this fits with something else I heard recently. One of our top sales guys was talking about taking technical people along on sales calls. He said the No. 1 thing techies do wrong is that they keep talking after the sale is made, trying to 'correct' some little piece of information that doesn't matter, or trying to teach the customer more about the subject when the customer is ready to sign the papers and move on to something else. Trying to fix things even if they're not broken, right?
"He told me a story about a sales call a couple of friends of his made a few years ago in Hollywood. They were with Dick Clark — yes, that Dick Clark, he's a very successful producer now in addition to the music and awards shows he hosts — trying to sell a TV show to a studio head. The studio head very quickly said, 'Sounds good, I'll take it.' One of these guys started to ask a question, and Dick Clark immediately stood up, thanked the studio head, and hustled those guys out of the room with a glare that warned them to be quiet.
"One of them started to ask his question again as soon as they were out the door, and Dick Clark again motioned him to be quiet. When they were outside the building, he turned to them and pronounced sternly, 'Guys, when you strike oil, stop drilling!'"
Douglas A. Samuelson is the president of Infologix and Division E director of INFORMS.
OR/MS Today copyright © 1999 by the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences. All rights reserved.
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