I’m sure many people have seen – or at least heard of – the 70/20/10 concept developed by Eric Schmidt (Google CEO). It essentially states:
- 70% of your time/resources are spent on core business activities
- 20% is spent on related activities
- 10% is spent on spent on unrelated activities.
This model is serves a couple purposes:
The first is structure. In structuring your resources in a consistent manner, you can presumably create a more predcitable organization with a “proper” resource allocation framework to fall into.
The second is seperation of tasks. The model explicetly states what percentage you spend on differing tasks. Example: You will not spend 25% on related activities, you’ll spend 20%. This will be more important in a bit…
The third, and arguably most important, is that 10%. Unrelated Activities is a bad term. The intention of this in Google was to encourage others to devote 10% of thier time to a prototype project; to invest time in thinking and innovating!
Sounds Great…But…
I’m behind this idea 100% (enough with the percentages!). I think its great way to promote an organizations innovative spirit (assuming it exists). This model should allow for people to “go off and have fun” on a side project which may eventually turn into a core business activity. That’s the up side!
The downside: For an active business or program, this is disruptive! It makes management stop and think about how they are allocating resources and – gasp – makes them make the hard decision to CHANGE!
Inaction
I presented this concept at a strategic planning committee with the intention to disrupt! One of our problems is that we spent too much effort on related activities (support) and not enough on core (software development). Whats more is that we do very little on unrelated (S&T) and this is an S&T program!
We spent hours talking about what our core business is, what related tasks are, and what that 10% is. We split-hairs on the wording of the model. We wordsmith’d answers to make them sound better…on and on we went…
In the end, everyone stopped talking about it and we moved on…
What happened?!
I found out the hard way how disruptive this model is to an organization. I blatantly revealed that our program, which should should be something like 50/20/30, was really more like 20/80/0! This required the answering of a lot of hard questions, and most importantly, the creation of sustaining policy!
Another point is: To what degree do we track this ratio? Is this a strict management task or just a guideline? How do we effectively track that in a large program? How long will it last?
Anyways, a week later, there is no follow up…there’s no policy created…and there’s no mention of what happened.
My Path Forward
There are two obvious options: 1) accept it and move on maintaining the status-quo or 2) try to affect change locally. I choose the latter. I am currently in no position to change the entire program, but I CAN change my own group. I’m going to attempt to prove what I have been preaching!
We’ll see what happens…