The
New Meaning of Slacker--And Why You Should Be One
Never mind those work-averse goofballs of the past. The gnarly
interruptions in global supply chains recently have demonstrated the dangers of
just in time everything.
Any number of words in the English language have been redefined
over the years and they've come to mean entirely different things. Some have
come to be complimentary ("sick" or "ill"), some are
disparaging (I dare not give a "ditzy" example), and others are now
hateful and politically incorrect if misapplied, used in jest in the wrong
company, or used by the "wrong" people.
Apparently, for example, you can be called a "thug" by
our President if you attack the Capitol, but not by a sportscaster if
you flagrantly attack another player on the basketball court and break his
nose. It's a very slippery slope these days and a page right out of Alice
in Wonderland where Humpty Dumpty tells Alice: "When I
use a word, it means just what I choose it
to mean -- neither more nor less."
Nonetheless, I propose that we start today to rehabilitate the
word "slacker" and cut the poor noun some slack. I'm not really sure
when calling someone a "slacker" became a term of derision. In the
beginning, it was far more hilarious than hateful. Richard Linklater's 1990
film Slackers brought the definitive persona to the big
screen. Kevin Smith's Clerks and Mallrats in
the mid-90s added to the oeuvre. These were all basically amusing portraits of
a bunch of young comedic doofuses living an alternative (and modestly
attractive) lifestyle.
Their attitudes, approaches, and antics weren't necessarily
admirable, but they didn't mean any evil by it. No harm, no foul. However, over
some relatively short period of time, "slacker" morphed into a
moniker that meant lazy, drug-addled, pierced, tattooed; slackers came to
represent a lifestyle that threatened to corrupt our kids with their
work-averse ethic, weed and wild ideas. They could live in Seattle or Portland,
but not on our streets or in our suburbs.
But, as we hopefully near the end of our national nightmare, one
thing that the pandemic taught us for sure is that - in our businesses - having
a little slack is a pretty good thing. That doesn't mean bailing on the whole
work hard thing. It just means having a little space and breathing room, a
margin of error for hiccups and mistakes, and a back-up plan for when things go
sideways, or worse. Running everything up to (and sometimes beyond) the
bleeding edge - managing your inventory and supplies on a "just in
time" basis and not accepting pieces and parts a moment too soon - turns
out to a very risky proposition when your supply chain chokes, your customers
swarm, demand spikes, and your shelves are suddenly empty.
The economic pain from this global lack of foresight and
preparation won't end when the pandemic does. Try to get a critical electronic
part for your Lexus and the dealer will wish you well, give you a loaner, and
pray that the parts eventually return to inventory this summer. Last week, the
Jeep plant in Belvidere, Illinois, which employs 3,600 people, shut down along
with four other impacted factories because of a shortage of semiconductor chips.
Lots less steel these days, it's all about smarts.
So, my new definition of a slacker is someone who is smart and
understands that the new 3 R's of business are reserves, redundancy and
resilience. A slacker builds and manages his or her business in a
way that incorporates these necessities and creates the "slack"
necessary to survive whatever the world may throw his or her way. Here are
three rules for becoming the perfect slacker:
(1) Adequate reserves are a critical component of
your business model.
It's clear that virtually no business had the necessary cash on
hand or other reserves (including lines of credit and other liquid assets) to
survive a once-in-a generation economic disruption like last year's, but the
experience highlighted for all of us the extent to which far too many firms
were underfunded, over-extended, over-expanding and otherwise skating far too
close to the edge of financial ruin long before the virus hit. As Warren
Buffett says:
"Only when the tide goes out do you discover
who's been swimming naked."
(2) Redundancy is costly and unnecessarily
duplicative -- until your base systems fail.
During the pandemic, almost every business in the U.S. and the
government itself was at the mercy of outsourced and distant supply chains as
well as victimized by a classic strategy that attempted to minimize the
theoretical cost of holding excess inventory on site. We ignored the less
likely but, in the event, far more costly prospect of completely interrupting
production and manufacturing due to the unavailability of critical parts and
components. Backups, onsite storage, alternative supply channels that aren't
single-threaded, and business interruption insurance are all expensive
undertakings. But modestly reduced margins are a reasonably fair tradeoff when
the possible alternative is shutting down your operations entirely for lengthy
periods of time.
(3) Resilience means building businesses that can
quickly measure, and then bend and adapt to, unforeseen stresses and
circumstances without breaking.
For all the fashionable talk about agility and flexibility, the
pandemic demonstrated just how brittle and hidebound so many businesses are and
how painfully long it took them to react, adapt to, and respond to the new
business conditions and constantly changing operating requirements that the
rapidly spreading virus triggered. The tragically pathetic response by the
Trump Administration (accompanied by the criminal and ongoing denial of
the virus's severity) made things even worse.
Very few businesses have constructed circuit breakers, gutters,
or other safeguards that effectively put a floor and some fail-safe curbs
against the freefall debacles that we witnessed during the pandemic. Too many
firms found that the metrics and measurements they had traditionally used in
their accounting and management systems to respond to changes in their markets
and circumstances were too slow and too narrow to capture the scale and speed
of the shifts. It's too often the case that you only learn where the limits are
once you've gone past them. Early warning systems, rapid response plans, and
far faster decisions would have saved lots of lives and livelihoods last
year.
Finally, once things are rebuilt and again operating smoothly,
implementing regular stress testing and failure drills are equally important
and rarely done steps that will help protect your business. It's much like the
need to periodically replace the batteries in your flashlight and smoke
detectors.
These are another set of preventative costs that are easy to put
off or avoid. It's just human nature - we're so happy to be back in business
that we don't even want to think about any of the ugly alternatives. That's how
they eventually come to bite you in the ass.
A word to the wise: it's only when they go wrong that
machines remind you how powerful they are. Once you're up and running again,
don't slack off.