Schafer: Good luck with management by Zooming around

There's a chance millennials haven't even heard about the management technique known as management-by-wandering-around, once so fashionable you really couldn't avoid hearing about it.

A few minutes on Google was all it took to see that MBWA, as it was called, seemed to surge in popularity after the 1982 publication of a best-selling management book called "In Search of Excellence."

Co-author and consultant Tom Peters later called the day he and his partner Bob Waterman first learned about MBWA, at the Hewlett-Packard Co. facility in Palo Alto, Calif., the "most significant" of his career. And for an idea Peters thought so powerful, it really wasn't all that complicated.

Managers should make a point of regularly walking among the engineers or assembly floor workers to find out firsthand what the problems were. Just wander around, introduce yourself, start a conversation and then listen.

Some problems might get solved on the spot. At a minimum, though, a little listening and observing meant they could come away with a far deeper understanding of what's going on than they ever could have gotten from any email or presentation.

MBWA has stuck around in some form of the American business conversation ever since.

Like everything else in business, though, to get good results you had to work at it. If the executive walked through the facility, listened attentively and then nothing ever changed for the workers there, that could be worse than never walking through at all.

One great benefit of working in an office or plant is all the unplanned conversations, learning something new while leaning on the counter that holds the coffee maker or catching the loading dock staff on a smoke break.

Yet until I saw a couple of news items this month, it never occurred to me that the people who now wanted to live in Arizona or Georgia and planned to phone it in forever could be people who held C-suite executive jobs.

Wandering around for them means going to the den for a video call, wandering out to the patio for the afternoon call and back to the dining room for the end-of-the-day wrap-up video meeting.

One news item came from the appointment at Deluxe Corp. of a new chief financial officer, Scott Bomar. He has plans to stay in the Atlanta area, given that he was recruited from a big company, Home Depot, that's based there.

The finance team will be in Minnesota. A company spokesman said via e-mail that there wasn't much more to talk about.

The other story was treated by the Minneapolis/St. Paul Business Journal as just more real estate news, as Winnebago Industries CEO Michael Happe bought a more than 8,000-square-foot Edina house from Norman Wright, the chief marketing and customer experience officer of the Optum unit of UnitedHealth Group.

Winnebago is formally based in Forest City, Iowa, but with an office in Eden Prairie it's picking nits to suggest that the Twin Cities is remote work for the CEO.

On the other hand, Wright previously told the Wall Street Journal in another real estate story that he and his wife had planned on retiring to Scottsdale, Ariz. They moved to Arizona when he could begin working remotely.

Optum still has its headquarters in Minnesota.

Part of the appeal for the idea of wandering around to Tom Peters was really as a metaphor, a sign that the leadership understood the importance of keeping really close to the business. These executives knew enough to see how it was going with the most important work, what the customer was really paying for.

Manufacturing executives needed to be inside a plant, not to blow through on a quick tour but to be there long enough for workers to volunteer some information that wouldn't reach the C-suite any other way.

Another part of the appeal of MBWA was that wandering really meant wandering, taking an unplanned and unstructured trip out of the executive suite and into the workplace. It was a manager showing up unannounced at a desk or workstation and introducing themselves.

One of the downsides of remote workers connecting on video screens is that everything is scheduled. The workday is about as spontaneous as a wedding ceremony.

Executive jobs have for a long time meant a lot of business travel, and those choosing to work remotely will still be profitable customers for the airlines. If the senior managers must fly in from out of town to do some work at their office, that presence is going to be known well in advance.

There'll be plenty of opportunity for the local manager to set up a carefully stage-managed visit if the executive wants to do a little walking around.

It's an old factory term but I first heard it in a banking office in St. Paul. It meant the early alert, a discrete phone call, when the boss you didn't see very often was about to show up.