Cypress Semiconductor: no-excuses management

T.J. Rodgers, founder and CEO of Cypress Semiconductor, established a highly structured management system to make sure the organization was operating efficiently and effectively. All 1,400 employees commit to accomplish particular goals by particular due dates and enter these commitments into a central database organized by project and task. In Monday project meetings employees set short term goals and prioritize them. These goals take between one and six weeks, and different employees have different numbers of goals. In any week around 6,000 of those goals come due. On Tuesday morning all managers receive a listing of their subordinates' new and pending goals. These reports are used on Tuesday afternoon to work out overloads and conflicts and to organize the work. A revised schedule is fed into the computer.

This system is designed to maximize accountability and minimize surprises. Rodgers believes this is competitively significant in the fast moving, highly uncertain semiconductor marketplace. He sees the computerized management information system as just an electronic version of what he had done previously using a blackboard to keep track of projects. The computer record for each goal includes a description of the task, a priority code, the date the commitment was made, the due date, the employee's manager and the vice president the manager works for. With just a few keystrokes Rodgers can use the system to find out not only about projects, but about whether managers and vice presidents are keeping their organizations on track. The detailed information Rodgers can call upon whenever anything goes wrong helps in making sure people do not try to hide the truth about difficulties they are having.

Questions:

1. Use the WCA framework to organize your understanding of this case and to identify important topics that are not mentioned.

2. Explain why you think this system is or is not excessively intrusive on employees. If it is exceedingly intrusive, explain the system you would replace it with. If it is not exceedingly intrusive, explain why few companies use this type of system.

Source: Rodgers, T.J., "No Excuses Management." Harvard Business Review, Jul-Aug, 1990, pp. 84-98.

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