The Ham in Your Operation

Why the most expensive habits in your business are the ones nobody questions.

There is an old story I have always liked. A young woman, newly married, is hosting her husband's family for Sunday dinner. She wants to make a good impression, and tradition in his family is a baked ham. As she is preparing it, her husband notices something and asks why she is not cutting the end off the ham. She looks at him a little puzzled. He shrugs and says, "That's the way my mom always did it."

She wants to do it right, so she obliges and cuts the end off.

Later during dinner, her mother in law compliments the ham. The new wife thanks her, then asks, "Can I ask you a question? Why do you cut the end off the ham?"

Her mother in law thinks about it for a second. "I don't know. That's just what my mom always did."

Grandma is at the table too, so the question gets passed to her. She shrugs. "I don't know. That's what my mom did."

Great Grandma is also there. The whole table turns. "Mom, why did you cut the end off the ham when you made Sunday dinner?"

Great Grandma looks up, leans in, and says, "I had to. We only had one pan, and it was the only way the ham would fit."

I think about that story a lot when I am working with leadership teams. Because every organization I have ever been part of has its own version of the ham. Some routine, some practice, some habit that made perfect sense at one point in time, and then quietly outlived the reason for it. The people doing the work are not lazy or careless. They are usually working hard. They are just operating inside a tradition that nobody has questioned in a long time, because nobody outside that team can even see it.

A version I lived through

A few years back, I was running a business through Covid. Like every business leader that year, I was looking for ways to preserve cash. We cut discretionary spending, tightened everything we could tighten, and I started looking at our accounts receivable to see if we could move money faster.

When I asked our team how long it took from the moment an invoice request came in to the moment the customer was actually invoiced, the answer was 17 days on average. That seemed like a lot. I asked the team if they could cut it in half, get it down to 8 days.

By the end of the first month, they had it down to 2 days.

Now, I would love to tell you we did something clever or expensive to make that happen. We did not. What I found out was this. The billing team had developed a routine, somewhere along the way, where all the invoicing for the month was done on the third Thursday. Three people would block out their day, sit down together, and crank through everything. It was efficient for them. It was comfortable. They had been doing it that way for years.

And nobody outside the billing team had any idea.

When I asked them to compress the cycle, they did not need new people. They did not need new software. They reorganized the work so one person took on invoicing as an ongoing task, two hours a day, three days a week. The total time spent invoicing across the team did not change. The rhythm changed. As a bonus, the person who took it on actually preferred that kind of work, so it landed with the right person.

Within six months, we stopped drawing on our line of credit. Six months after that, we were moving excess cash into investment accounts.

Why I keep thinking about this

The dollars mattered. But what stuck with me more was how completely invisible the third Thursday routine had been. It was not hidden on purpose. It was not anyone trying to game the system. It was just a habit that had calcified into a process, and once it became "the way we do invoicing," nobody questioned it. The team was comfortable. The work was getting done. From the outside, everything looked normal.

That is the part most leaders underestimate. Every department, every team, every function in your organization has its own version of this. Some practice that made sense at one moment in time, and then kept going long after the reason for it disappeared. A meeting that everyone attends because they always have. A report that gets generated because someone asked for it once in 2017. A process step that adds three days because that is where it sat when the system was first designed.

You cannot find these things from the corner office. You find them by asking specific, almost annoying questions about how the work actually happens. Walk me through it. Who does what. When. Why on Thursday. What would happen if we did it differently.

Most of the highest-leverage improvements I have seen a leader make did not require new investment, new tools, or new headcount. They came from finding the ham. From asking why we cut the end off, and being willing to sit with the answer when it turned out to be "I don't know, it's just how we've always done it."

That answer is not a failure of your team. It is an opportunity, sitting right in front of you, that nobody has thought to look at.

The job is to go looking.