“I don’t mind going back to daylight savings time. With inflation, the hour will be the only

thing I’ve saved all year.” (1)

Who invented Daylight Savings Time (DST)? In 1784, Benjamin Franklin was documented as the first person to propose the idea of DST. Franklin estimated 64 million pounds of candle wax could be saved by moving the clock forward one-hour in April and back in October. Springing-forward replaced expensive, man-made energy with early morning sunlight during spring and summer months. “This prudent plan was certainly in keeping with the man who, in Poor Richard’s Almanac, had written “Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.” (2)

Ben Franklin found value in moving the clock forward. I’ve personally found great value in turning back the clock each October. It’s a time I use to fall-back on proven principles or practices that I may have forgotten or overlooked. Often those principles provide me and our organization a way to spring forward with improved results. Here are some fall-back positions you may want to consider this year:

Fall-Back Positions

• Be a contrarian, not a conformist.Step back and ask yourself two questions: “Am I or my company doing what everyone else does?” and “Are we successful?” Successful people, investors and organizations are typically contrarians. In the stock market, the key principle of success is well known… “buy low and sell high”… yet most investors follow the crowd, buying or selling when they see others doing so. Billionaire Warren Buffet buys when most investors are afraid and sells when most are optimistic. What should you or your company do that most others do not? If someone says, “We don’t need Activity Based Costing. No one in our industry uses it.”, a light bulb of opportunity should turn on. Anyone can be a contrarian: All you have to do is make a habit of taking a contrary position or attitude. In other words, step out from the crowd.
• Be a parent and leader, not a friend. Today’s culture promotes the idea that moms and dads should be friends to their children. Someone wisely reminded me years ago that my daughter will have hundreds of friends but only two parents. Being a parent is not as much “fun” as being a friend, but it’s a fall-back position that leads to your child’s long-term success. The same principle applies to manager-employee relationships. Employees need a leader more than another friend. A leader that casts an exciting vision, guides execution of a plan, measures performance and applies appropriate consequences.
• Be a process manager, not a person evaluator. Many organizations have annual performance reviews of people, yet few evaluate their processes. A process is a series of activities that cross functional boundaries, i.e., Procurement Process, Order Fulfillment Process, New Product Process, Budget Process, etc. The father of Total Quality Management, Dr. W. Edwards Deming said, “If you can’t describe what you are doing as a process, you don’t know what you’re doing.” When you learn to look past people to the process in which they perform, you’ll never see waiting in line at a restaurant, hospital ER, or traffic light in the same way. Improving a process improves the result of the people involved. Improving people while ignoring the process would be like staffing airport security with Harvard MBA’s … little if anything would improve. Have you mapped and measured your organization’s processes? If not, ICMS’ new software tool, CostMapper™, is a simple, practical method to define, measure and evaluate your processes. For a free demonstration of CostMapper™, visit ICMS.netor send a request to tompryor@icms.net . Focus on the work, secondarily the worker.

On September 3, 1999, Palestinian bomb makers connected a timer to thirty pounds of explosives, setting it to go off September 5th at 6:30 P.M. On September 5th, terrorists Ibrahim Salah and Krayem Nazal took delivery of the bomb package, got in a Fiat and drove to Jerusalem to place it on the 6:30 P.M. bus. Salah looked at his watch. It read 5:25 P.M. Thinking they had an hour to kill, they parked and sat in the car to wait for the bus. Five minutes later their car exploded. It seems that both the bomb makers and terrorists had forgotten that Israel falls-back from daylight savings time earlier than the rest of the world.

Remembering to turn back time… both physically and mentally… can have far-reaching implications. If Benjamin Franklin could have envisioned the effects produced by his idea of shifting human activity to make the best use of daylight — the problems, the benefits, the intriguing curiosities — he surely would have been even more astonished than he was that morning in 1784 when he was awakened by the sunlight streaming through his window. Use Daylight Savings Time to shift some of your activities. Like Ben, you too may find yourself pleasantly surprised by the savings.

(1) Victor Borge
(2) Seize the Daylight, David Prerau, Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2005