- Colin Powell

I discussed my feelings on this in a previous post, Bring Me Problems:

Related: Where to Start Improvement - Stop Demotivating Me! - How to Improve - Leadership quotes

“Having no problems is the biggest problem of all.” - Taiichi Ohno

The Curious Cat Management Improvement Carnival began in 2006 with the goal to provide links to interesting blog posts for those interesting in improving the practice of management.

• Jidoka is not just “built-in-quality” by Jason Yip - “Jidoka is not just about stopping and notifying of problems immediately. It also includes the concept of separating human and machine work. Effectively the idea of using machines to free humans.”
• How to Engage People in Kaizen by Jon Miller - “Frame all actions as experiments and not permanent or irreversible changes This allows people to think that they are not really changing something, only “trying it”. In fact if the method is demonstrably better, it may become the new way.”
• To Estimate or Not, That is the Question - “Create your estimates quickly and don’t get paralyzed by precision. Being quick may be the middle ground between estimating and not estimating.”
• Generation Y Deserves No Special Treatment by Chris Young - “Generation Y should not be treated any differently than any other generation. The very same employee performance standards applies to Generation Y as they apply to any other generation.”
• Rapid prototyping in NY’s Times Square by Karen Wilhelm - Experience and observation can determine optimum flow of people (and vehicles now diverted from their usual routes). Just like simulating flow in a full-size cell mockup can allow teams to adjust reality to assumptions. No long meetings, proposals, and computer models can substitute for a simple and quick prototype of a new system.”
• Stop Making Excuses by Nick McCormick - “Refuse to accept any reasons for why things that need to be done can’t be. It’s OK to identify the problems. The important thing is to develop solutions to those problems.”
• Cool Email Mistake Proofing - My main desktop computer runs Ubuntu Linux. The default email client is called Evolution. A recent upgrade introduced a very cool feature. When I hit ‘Send’ it looks for language in the email that might indicate I meant to include an attachment. If there is no attachment, it pops up [a] handy reminder
• Waste and SAP? by Kevin Meyer - “Moral of the story? Be careful of product demos.”

Curious Cat management web search.

Penske to Buy Saturn from GM

I thought Saturn was the worst management failure at GM, among many (NUMMI, and GM’s Failure to Manage Effectively, for example). They really did some great things early on with rethinking the system of manufacturing and selling cars. But GM failed to take care of the innovative division. I hoped that Saturn would gain a new, better, management that build Saturn toward the potential it has. Contracting out manufacturing however, is a horrible idea, I believe. Unfortunately I think this ends the hope for a great Saturn.

Saturn still have the potential to do ok, given how bad the dealership experience is for most other companies. The dealer experience, even for Toyota and Lexus is still not at all congruous with the customer focus principles of lean (for example, motivating sales people to make as bad a deal for customers as they can - paying them more the more they get for the dealership at the expense of the customer). And other car companies have quite a bit to learn from the sales practices of Saturn and Car Max.

Related: Big Failed Three, Meet the Successful Eight - Honda has Never had Layoffs and has been Profitable Every Year - People: Team Members or Costs - Invest in New Management Methods Not a Failing Company, 1986

The job market is not great, 9.4% unemployment in the USA, and not efficient either. At my full time job, we hired a ruby on rails developer (web programmer) this month, and are looking to hire another.

Job listings online filled with jargon

In the information technology field the standard practice is to include a large number of basically irrelevant skills as requirements. And then managers wonder why they don’t get decent applicants. You need to include the knowledge, skills and experience you really need and not all sorts of details that an employee can easily pick up, if needed, once they are on the job.

Related: Hiring: Silicon Valley Style - Interviewing and Hiring Programmers - IT Talent Shortage, or Management Failure? - Joy in Work: Software Development - Management Improvement Career Connections

• Don’t Shoot the Photographer by Mark Riffey examines how to turn a perceived threat to your business income into an opportunity by focusing on customer service.
• NPR Does a Great Job of Covering Toyota by Mark Graban - “How tough the assembly line is depends in part on its creator. Shigenobu Matsubara has helped design assembly lines from Japan to Georgetown, Ky., which has the biggest in the United States. He says he has always designed the lines with the workers’ welfare in mind.”
• Entrepreneurship Doesn’t Have To Be About The Next Big Thing - “Whatever you decide to do, there’s nothing to be ashamed of as long as you are actively going after your goals. Who cares if you are pursuing a not so glamorous business idea? Who cares if your friends are all trying to create hundred million dollar companies?”
• Lean Team Software Process by Corey Ladas - “The customer’s terms likely do not include any notion of defects-per-KLOC. The producer’s end is profit and reputation, which comes from managing cost and consistency. If TSP, or something related to it, helps us realize our ends, then (and only then) it is meaningful.”

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Image of Wall-e, from the Pixar film of the same name.

Pixar’s secrets on display in ‘Up’

Pixar has done a great job of creating the right climate for the business they are in. They make movies and have been very consistently successful. Many of those strategies are useful concepts for everyone. Create a climate that promotes pride in work. Create a climate where everyone sees how they contribute to the end product. Hire people you trust and let them do their jobs. Seek continual improvement. Respect people. Customer Focus. Innovation (for example: Pixar Is Inventing New Math).

By the way, Steve Jobs, Apple co-founder, paid $5 million for Pixar and sold his share for $3,700 million of Disney stock (he is the largest shareholder of Disney - approximately 7%). Pixar Movies include: Toy Story, Monsters Inc. and The Incredibles.

Related: Tilting at Ludicrous CEO Pay 2008 - Better and Different - Innovation Examples

Decades ago Dr. Deming emphasized the deadly disease of excessive health care costs in the USA. Since then, year after year, the situation has become worse (reaching $2.2 trillion in spending in 2007 - 16.2% of GDP). During that time senior executives has put forth very little serious effort (in comparison to the huge cost) to fix this problem. Finally, in the last few years, more and more senior executives are actively moving to address the ever worsening crisis (including, Howard Schultz, CEO at Starbucks).

They seem to be realizing that hoping the problem will just fix itself is not a great strategy. Finally senior executives are realizing they need to have the government address the systemic failures. Those executives need to keep up their efforts because those seeking to retain the system that doesn’t work, because they personally benefit from it, have been doing a great job of preventing progress for decades. Until a critical mass of senior executives demand change from Washington the chance of improving the relative performance of the USA health system in comparison to other countries is very bleak (we have just been getting more expensive and less effective [relative to other countries] over time).

CEOs Secretly Want Health-Care Reform

Related: Many Experts Say Health-Care System Inefficient, Wasteful - Articles on Improving the Healthcare system - Applying Disruptive Thinking to the Healthcare Crisis - Our Failed Health-care System
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In-N-Out Burger’s six secrets for out-and-out success

The fundamental idea of respecting people is something most executives seem to have no interest in. Treating employees as the critical partners in organizational success is just something that doesn’t leap out at you based on the actions of most managers, unfortunately. And that poor management damages the performance of the organization.

Read more about In-N-Out Burger management practices in Stacy Perman’s new book In-N-Out Burger: A Behind-the-Counter Look at the Fast-Food Chain That Breaks All the Rules.

Related: Respect for Workers at In-N-Out Burger (Nov 2006) - Building a Great Workforce - Another Year of CEO’s Taking Hugely Excessive Pay - Respect for People, Understanding Psychology - People are Our Most Important Asset

Secret of Googlenomics: Data-Fueled Recipe Brews Profitability

Google continues to make bold moves putting faith in their ability to find innovative solutions that others reject as impossible. It is a challenging but interesting path to success, for them, at least.

Related: Google Should Stay True to Their Management Practices - Google’s Answer to Filling Jobs Is an Algorithm - The Google Way: Give Engineers Room - Google Website Optimizer - Google: Experiment Quickly and Often - posts on innovation in management

Mike Wroblewski is hosting the Management Improvement Carnival #64 on the Got Boondoggle? blog, highlights include:

• Daily Scrum against the Board by Xavier Quesada Allue-”A good way to know if your team is using their taskboard to really manage their work is to look at their daily standup meeting.”
• Japanese CEOs and Leadership by Mark Graban-”When do you ever hear a Western CEO say ’sorry’ or ‘we were lacking’?”
• Total Company Involvement by Pete Abilla-”When the hearts and minds of everybody in the organization is moving toward the same end then you know the companies’ mission has became a living and breathing inspirational catalyst for good.”
• How Interruptions Drain Productivity by George Ambler-”Time is a leaders most valuable resource. The way a leader uses their time demonstrates to the people around them what’s really important.”

Overview of the management improvement carnival.

Each year Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger answer questions in front of crowds of tens of thousands of Berkshire Hathaway shareholders in Omaha, Nebraska. The question and answer sessions provide great wisdom on economics, investing and management. Here are some of the highlights I have found from the meeting (see more on the Curious Cat Investing and Economic Blog review of the answers)

Buffett, Munger praise Google’s moat

Google hopes the anti-trust regulators don’t see it the same way. And I believe Google sees their moat as easy to loose (and I think they are right). At the same time Buffett and Munger are right. The moat is huge but if Google looses focus they can drain the moat in no time.

Warren Buffett’s Q&A With Shareholders (Afternoon Session)

Related: Warren Buffett’s Letter to Shareholders 2009 - Management Advice from Warren Buffet - Warren Buffett Webcast on the Credit Crisis - Sleep Well Fund Investing Results

Revealed Preference: the preference consumers display by their action, in contrast to what they may say they prefer. While surveys may be useful people often say they will do one thing and actually when given the choice to do so, don’t.

Normally what matters is not what people say they want but what they actually will choose. For that reason revealed preference is a better measure than stated preference. Stated preference is often used as a proxy for actual preference (which may be fine) but it is important to understand that it is just a proxy for actual preference.

See more explanations from the Curious Cat Management Dictionary.

Related: Packaging Improvement - All Models Are Wrong But Some Are Useful - Dangers of Forgetting the Proxy Nature of Data - Confirmation Bias - Be Careful What You Measure