Tipping Point Leadership
Effecting Change with Limited Resources
“Dave! Do Something! ”, a front page headline in New York post screamed to the then Mayor of New York. In the early 1990’s New York city was veering toward anarchy. Murders were at an all time high. Muggings, mafia hits, vigilantes and armed robberies filled the daily headlines. New Yorkers were under siege. With miserable pay, dangerous working conditions, long hours and little hope of advancement in tenure promotion system, morale among the NYPDs thirty six thousand officers was at rock bottom Many social scientists had concluded that New York was impervious to police intervention. This is when Bill Bratton was appointed police commissioner of New York City in February 1994. In less than two years and with a frozen budget ,Bratton turned New York into the largest safest city in the United States. Felony crime fell 39%, murders 50% and theft 35%. Public confidence in NYPD leaped from 37% to 73%.
The question I want to address today is : how do you get an organization to execute a strategic change and achieve performance gains when the resources at hand are limited . The concept I want to introduce you to is called “Tipping Point Leadership”. Whereas , conventional wisdom suggests that increments in performance can only be achieved by proportional investments in time and resources. So that bigger the challenge, greater the resources and time needed. We don’t have the resources! We need more resources ! are very commonly voiced arguments while effecting change in organizations. Tipping Point Leaders, in contrast, in addition to securing more resources, also focusing multiplying the value of resources that they already have.
Tipping point leadership builds on a rarely exploited corporate reality that in every organization there are people, acts and activities that exercise a disproportionate influence on performance. It is identifying and leveraging these factors of disproportionate influence to tip over the organizational hurdles. When it comes to scarce resources, there are three factors of disproportionate influence that executives can leverage to dramatically free resources on the one hand , and multiply the value of resources on the other. These are hotspots, cold spots and horse trading. Hot spots are activities that have low resource input but high potential performance gains. Cold spots are activities that consume lots of resources but have low performance impact. Horse trading involves trading your departments excess resources in one area for another units excess resources to fill remaining resource gaps.
Bratton identified the New York subway system as a major hotspot. If only the subway system, that had earned the reputation of an “Electric Sewer” could be made safe, the impact on the perception of the city being safe or unsafe could be drastic. Whereas his predecessors had argued that to make the subway system safe, they had to have a police officer ride every line and guard every entrance and exit. This had never been possible given the budget and resources. Bratton’s analysis revealed that although the subway was a maze of lines and entrances, the vast majority of crimes occurred only at a few stations and a few lines. With a complete refocus of cop element on these few hotspots , crime on the subway lines came tumbling down.
Bratton found that one of the biggest cold spots was processing criminals in court. On average, it would take an officer sixteen hours to take someone downtown to process even the pettiest of crimes. Bratton brought in the “bust buses” roving old buses retrofitted with miniature police stations, that were parked outside subway stations. Now, the police officer only needed to escort the criminal to the street level instead of dragging him across town to the court house. This cut the processing time from sixteen hours to just one, freeing up more officers to be reallocated to the subway hotspots.
Bratton also found that the transit unit, which was starved for office space , had been running a fleet of unused cars in excess of its needs. The New York division of Parole, on the other hand, had excess office space in the prime downtown building, but needed more cars. The obvious trade, when proposed was gratefully accepted by both departments and had drastic impact on performance.
The point here is , that the value of resources that you already have can be increased by freeing up resources from your cold spots and redirecting them towards the hotspots. What actions consume your greatest resources but have little performance impact? Conversely, what activities have the greatest performance impact but are resource starved? When questions are framed in this way, organizations can rapidly gain insight into how tip the hurdle of limited resources.
