Management By Walking Around (MBWA)

We all know that Management By Objectives (MBO) deals with an alphabet soup of techniques including KRAs, KPIs, BRMs, AQC, and so many more acronyms. Of course, MBO offers very objective ways to measure the performance of operations and improve them. However, there has been less emphasis on another tried and proven technique called Management By Walking Around (MBWA).

MBWA is a style of management that involves the leaders randomly wandering through the workplace, talk to the employees, watch out for safety, check the status of projects, examine equipment condition, and so on. During the course of the walk, the leader may stumble upon some issues, assemble a quick team to discuss the issues and resolve them (if they are simple enough) in a quick meeting. This technique was developed by the founders of my former employer Hewlett Packard – Bill Hewlett and David Packard. I heard that Bill and Dave (as they are popularly called in the HP circle) will wander around the HP’s Palo Alto operations and practice MBWA on a very consistent basis. 

My analytical and academic background is well suited to MBO, and I like examining issues through spreadsheet analysis, scenarios put forth in a nice PowerPoint, and if needed, using more analytical tools such as multifactor regressions, and statistical models. However, I enjoy MBWA and never miss out on an opportunity to walk around the plant, meet and greet colleagues, discuss the thing that will enhance safety, delight customers, and boost our productivity. In one of the recent such pursuits, I stumbled upon a few activities that do not add value to our customers and had a standup meeting with the cross-functional team of colleagues to eliminate those activities.

Contrary to the popular belief, MBO and MBWA are complementary to each other in my view and can be dovetailed to offer a very robust style of management. Enjoy walking around!