Time to Smile is both a moment and a way of getting there. The moment: a customer gets what they wanted, and feels it. The way: earning it, every time, without needing heroes.

The moment is easy for the customer to feel. And when the work takes many hands, crossing group after group on its way to done, it is nearly impossible for us to see.

Each group can confirm its own piece: the agreement signed, the work shipped, the payment cleared, the case closed. We can even ask, and hear all is well. No one inside can confirm the smile.

Real work is full of complications: the wrong order, the stale answer, the request no one planned for. Some stay inside one group, where they’re fixed in plain sight. The ones that cost us bounce between groups, and the space between groups belongs to no one.

Somebody has to close that gap, chasing the solution, redoing what arrived wrong, walking the work from one group to the next. It’s nobody’s job title. It’s whoever knows, whoever notices, whoever cares.

That’s the second job: the unpaid work of getting the first job done. And when nobody inside picks it up, the second job lands on the customer, retelling their story to groups, chasing their own request, checking whether anything ever came of it.

All the while, every group’s numbers are green. The chasing, the redoing, the carrying leave no trace: no ticket, no field, no line in any process doc. So an AI learning our operation from what we wrote down can’t see it.

Three things push the smile further away: customers working too hard to get what they wanted. Our people working too hard to deliver it. And solving, again, what someone here already solved.

The way there begins with three questions, meant to become how the company works. Every group asks them, of every process we run and every change we make.

How do we cut the customer’s effort?

How do we cut the effort of every group this work passes through?

And what did we learn that the next person, or the system, can use?

To the customer, it was always one request. We each saw our piece of it. Ask and answer the questions together, and every group sees the whole, the same smile. See it through together, and the moment gets closer on its own.

A company that works this way earns the smile a little sooner each time: what any group learns, every group uses.

A company that doesn’t work this way keeps needing heroes. Eventually it runs out of them.

Phil Verghis · August 2026

First published November 2017. This definition supersedes it.