Who would insist, as part of their contract to perform on stage, that a bowl of M&Ms should be provided for them backstage with all the brown sweets picked out?

I just read the surprising answer in Atul Gawande’s The Checklist Manifesto. It is the Californian heavy metal rock band Van Halen.

If the bowl wasn’t there, or it contained any brown M&Ms, the contract stipulated that the band could pull out of the gig, with the venue still liable for the full fee.

Singer David Lee Roth explained that this wasn’t a joke. It wasn’t a bit of celebrity powerplay.

The reasoning behind it was this. Van Halen had an enormously complex touring production. They had nine eighteen-wheeler trucks full of gear, where the standard was three. Setting it up was a serious business, involving a lot of people and a lot of attention to detail. If the venue organisers weren’t up to it, the repercussions could be expensive and dangerous.

Hence the M&Ms rider. It was a shrewd way of testing the venue’s commitment to detail. It alerted the band to the likelihood of  problems ahead. Roth says if he found any brown M&Ms backstage he knew the venue hadn’t read the contract. There would almost certainly be important technical errors elsewhere.

Sweetly done.

Me, me, me, me….. Improving productivity can be a tad self-centred. It’s about focusing on oneself.

This misses a vital dimension. We mostly work in teams. We make demands on others. Yet we don’t think as deeply about that as we ought. We rarely give much brain space to the way we waste the time of other people.

This is hardly logical, since we know too well how much of our time other people waste.

Peter Drucker had a characteristically simple approach. To find out how and when you waste the time of others, you just ask them. Then you can eliminate it.

Effective people have learned to ask systematically and without coyness, “What do I do that wastes your time without contributing to your effectiveness?” To ask such a question, and ask it without being afraid of the truth, is a mark of the effective executive.

Peter Drucker, The Essential Drucker, 2007, p177.