Low Hanging Fruit

I grew up around orchards. In fact, one town I lived in was known as the “Fruit Basket of America” and was surrounded by miles and miles of fruit trees. It wasn’t until much later in life that I went apple picking. We were living in Calcium, New York and my wife announced we were going to Mexico to pick apples. I was a tad confused but figured I’d heard her wrong and she must have said something that made sense. No, that’s what she said. I wasn’t sure about driving all the way down to Mexico just to pick apples so I queried her further on the subject. She was adamant about picking apples and had made arrangements for our neighbor, a large family, to join us for apple picking in Mexico. I was interested to see her logistical plan for getting all these people, they had six kids and we had three, to Mexico and back...she’d plans to drive there, we would each take our own car. Fortunately, I discovered, she had found an apple orchard in Mexico, New York...just down the road maybe an hour. That was my geography lesson for the day. There was so much fruit, ripe apples, on the trees you could fill your bushel basket in minutes. It was a day trip with a picnic lunch so we weren’t in a hurry. The trick was to find the type of apples you like and pick some of each. During this and subsequent outings of this sort, I noticed the fruit near the tree tops looked bigger and juicier (don’t ask how, they just did). I also watched people trying to snag those luscious-looking morsels. The effort put into procuring a ladder, getting the ladder situated, climbing up, and picking those two or three apples seemed a bit much. Especially since I had nearly filled my basket while I watched the endeavor. Those apples they snagged on the top branches looked delicious, and they seemed proud to have procured them, but my family needed more than two or three to do all the things we planned to do with apples. My point, low hanging fruit is easy picking and can provide an abundant payoff.

Every assignment or new job, where I was in a position of authority, I told myself I would start off slow. “Don’t shake things up too much,” I would tell myself. Give yourself and your team time to get situated and familiar with one another. I learned over the years that just wasn’t me. Status quo always included too much ripe, low-hanging fruit for me to resist the temptation to just start picking. Whether it was outright regulatory violations, outlandish scheduling practices, or just a physical environment that would make a hoarder salivate. Things had to change. Not those grandiose items that are boasted about in company newsletters or award events, but just day-to-day crap that HAD to be fixed. Hence, I earned the nickname AssHole everywhere I went. Fortunately, most of the workers, at least the ones I retained, had a different opinion of me by the time I left but it was always an uphill battle, at least in the beginning.

Having said that, about waiting until I got situated, I have to say I had learned long ago, before reaching a rank or position of influence, that a lot of bad practices within an organization are only noticeable to the newcomer. This meant they would be overlooked if too much time lapsed so they needed to be corrected pronto. I also learned that many, which appeared to be bad at first, were perfectly sane once I had time to figure out why they were done the way they were done. So what I’m suggesting is the trick to picking low hanging fruit is knowing which are ripe and ready for picking and which should be left alone, or given time to ripen, if you will.

The idea of picking low hanging fruit is meant to convey minor adjustments in the operations. Rather than instituting a total course change or making major organizational structure changes, you tweak the current system and/or steady the ship to tack a straighter course. You can plot a better, possibly whole new, course over time as you get a better feel for the operation but, in the meantime, you can correct many of the problem areas. These corrections will make a future course change (if needed) easier because you won’t be bogged down in bad habits and inefficient practices.  

I also found that many “managers” can’t manage to get to work on time much less any tougher tasks. This leaves a wealth of ripe fruit on the lower branches for the next one in that position. So much so that working long hours and pushing my team hard still left enough on the tree to have some fruit rot (a metaphor for getting burned by not fixing a predecessor’s deficiencies soon enough). What I’m saying is, you have plenty that’s easy picking for a long time before you’ll need to be ready to attack that gorgeous fruit high up on the tree (that new and better course), so relax and just keep picking.

With that in mind, I’ll return to the orchard setting. Think of the typical outing to the local U-Pick apple orchard. The results can be amazing and be felt for the better part of a year. On the other hand, the outing can be frustrating, physically exhausting, and leave you with little to show for the effort. It all depends on your approach to apple picking. On each tree you’ll see low hanging fruit as well as bright and beautiful fruit way up high on the top branches. You can ignore the plentiful, “average looking” fruit within reach and deploy your team on a mission to reach the top branches. After much time, effort, and risk you’ll leave the orchard at the end of the day with bragging rights on a few show pieces. Or…

You can pick that low hanging fruit all day and leave with enough fruit so that every team member can feast on it for a good long while. The company may not recognize you with an award, your resume may not reflect a grandiose accomplishment, and your team may not even recognize your selfless act.  You will, however, accomplish much needed corrections to the overall efficiency of your organization.

At first your people may take offense because your challenging their comfort zone. “We’ve always done it this way!” is the typical battle cry of those that call you AssHole behind your back (another story for another day). Most, eventually, figure out you’re moving them forward and they’re learning new and proper procedures...knowledge they can use to grow and advance with. Their duty schedule smooths out giving them “real” time off and their work environment becomes clean and organized. Resources to help them do their job better appear almost overnight and customers stop harassing them; actually start treating them like professionals. All possible from a little effort to pick that plentiful low hanging fruit.

One simple example, that comes up almost everywhere I’ve worked, is vendor selection. Most companies have a policy in place but departments routinely ignore it and use a favored vendor instead. In the case of office supplies, I have managed to improve the efficiency of obtaining supplies and cut spending significantly (without any reduction in supplies) just by enforcing the company’s vendor selection policy. The toughest part is typically the whining and crying by the soon-to-be previous sales rep. The staff, however, quickly figure out they were now getting superior products and service at cheaper prices while spending less time on ordering. This stretches their budgets and allows them more time to focus on other aspects of their job.

The next common example is scheduling and I’ll steal an example from my father’s playbook. He was the Police Chief of a relatively small town, in the San Joaquin Valley. Not nearly as small as the small New Hampshire town I live in with a population of 800, but small in a California sort of way. One of the first things he noticed was an issue with the schedule. His fix, which I’ll give you in a minute, didn’t increase or decrease payroll (with a very minor exception). In other words, no change in the number of patrolmen nor a change in the number of hours they worked. The exception was some minor changes in shift differential pay. What he did was not some new or innovative approach but an application of experience in police work as it applied to scheduling.

The original schedule was marked by three standard shifts with set number of patrolmen on each shift. Police work is similar to retail in that there are busy times and quiet times and not all are in 8 hour increments. Since shift change brought the entire force into the police station at the same time, it left the public unprotected 3 times a day, everyday, for the length of shift change. So he staggered the shifts. Not every patrol car would shift change at the exact same time. On top of the need for constant coverage by patrols you also have the busy times that need greater coverage. For this he did two things. First, he overlapped some of the shifts so he had near double coverage during the busiest times and significantly less during the quiet times. Second, he thinned out the quiet shifts even further and used those patrolmen to beef up the busier shifts. Good things happened as a result: response times improved, crime rate dropped, and their visibility to the public increased. The entire police department’s image improved in the eyes of the public. Easy, peasey.

Yes, there was blow back. Almost always will be but if you’re doing the right thing (mission first) for the right reason (Integrity first) just grow your skin thick enough to weather the storm.

In my dad’s case, all that well deserved good press for the entire police department got smeared and lost in the personal attacks on the police chief that were splashed all over the local newspaper’s op/ed pages. The two big gripes from the Labor Union weren’t centered on public safety as you might guess. One gripe was the loss of shift differential pay by a couple of patrolmen when they got moved to another shift. The other, if I remember correctly, was the actual shift assignments. Certain officers didn’t like being moved to a busier shift. The team members who are all about self-interest usually show their hand in these cases. It makes the decision of who to keep (mission oriented team players) and who to get rid of that much easier.

These are just two examples of low hanging fruit, vendor selection and scheduling, that I’ve encountered time and again. You can save a lot of money to use elsewhere, improve working conditions and morale, and increase efficiency by leaps and bounds...just by picking that low hanging fruit.