Posted on January 26, 2012  Comments (0)

I am joining the ASQ Influential Voices project for 2012. The effort started last year when ASQ chose a few people to participate in a group effort to share their thoughts on various topics in quality improvement. I have been asked to join for 2012, along with a couple lean bloggers (Mark Graban and Tim McMahon) and others. Each month the ASQ executive director will post on a topic and I, and the other influential voices participants, will share out thoughts on that topic.

My history with ASQ extends back into my childhood. My father, William Hunter, was the founding chair of the ASQ Statistics division. They now administer the Hunter Award, which recognizes substantial contributions to statistical consulting, education for practitioners, and integration of statistics with other disciplines as well as demonstrated excellence in communication and implementing innovative applied statistical methods.

I joined with a group of people to lead the Public Sector Quality Improvement Network shortly after it was formed. The network aimed to help those in the public sector use quality management principles to improve performance. That group of people was one of the most impressive I have worked with; including Tom Mosgaller, Michael Williamson, Barry Crook, Nathan Strong and others. We decided to join with ASQ: that effort has become the ASQ Government Division. Another outgrowth of those efforts was my Public Sector Continuous Improvement Site, which I continue to run.

The Public Sector Network also connects back to my father; Tom Mosgaller and Michael Williamson worked on the quality efforts in the Madison, Wisconsin (at the City of Madison and the University of Wisconsin – Madison). Michael worked in for Joe Sensenbrenner, and then brought the new management ideas to his roles with university. My father approached the mayor, Joe Sensenbrenner, about applying management improvement ideas at the city. The mayor agreed and my father documented that effort in Dr. Deming’s classic, Out of the Crisis as the first government application of Deming’s management principles. See pages 245-247 of Out of the Crisis and also Joe Sensenbrenner’s classic article in the Harvard Business Review: Quality Comes to City Hall. Peter Scholtes was also part of that initial project at the First Street Garage in Madison, Wisconsin.

Terry Holmes (president of the local labor union), Joe Turner (division foreman) and Bill Hunter (consultant), working on the First Street Garage project. They went and presented to executives at Ford (where Dr. Deming was working) on the cooperation between union and management in the City of Madison project.

You can read a bit more about the work in Madison in George Box’s (an ASQ fellow) article – William Hunter: An Innovator and Catalyst for Quality Improvement. And also in: Doing More With Less in the Public Sector: A Progress Report from Madison, Wisconsin by William G. Hunter, Jan O’Neill, and Carol Wallen and Quality in the Community: One City’s Experience by George Box, Laurel Joiner, Sue Rohan and Joseph Sensenbrenner (1989). These documents are all made available by the Center for Quality and Productivity Improvement at the University of Wisconsin – Madison that was founded by George Box and my father.

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Posted on January 23, 2012  Comments (0)

In2In offers some great opportunities for those interested in management improvement. Their conference is excellent. They also offer various conference calls with speakers knowledgeable about Deming and Ackoff’s ideas. These normally take the form of conference call presentations (similar to a podcast) followed by some question and answers. The consistently get remarkable people like, Gerald Suarez, and earlier: Peter Scholtes and Brian Joiner.

Gerald Suarez is kicking off the new InThinking Network monthly webinar series. I worked for Gerald at the White House Military Office. He is one of the best presenters and most knowledgeable experts on Deming and Ackoff’s ideas working today.

Gerald Suarez will present on February 9th on the topic of “Better Thinking About Leadership.” This is a great opportunity and there is no cost to participate. If you participate from outside the USA you can connect via Skype (from the USA you will be given a toll-free number to connect with – or Skpye, if you wish). If you can’t join the call, audio downloads will be available at some later date. Register here. If you can’t make the live event, I strongly recommend listening to the audio download once it is made available.

The format of these sessions is a 90-minute session, each month – from February through November. They are held the second Thursday of the month, from 11:30 AM to 1 PM Pacific Time.

Future sessions that we have to look forward to include:

• Paul Hollingworth will present in March: An Introduction to Systems Thinking
• Graham Rawlinson, in May to explore “Thinking About Thinking”
• Gipsie Ranney, in September: “Cause(s) of Concern,” a session designed to present and advance the understanding of common causes and special causes of variation.

Gerald is currently a professor on the faculty of the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith business school and works as a consultant and keynote speaker. Look for him to share his expertise in leadership, which includes 8 years of service in the White House under Presidents Clinton and Bush, as the Director of Presidential Quality — the first such post in the institution’s history.

Related: Transformation and Redesign at the White House Communications Agency – Managing Fear – The aim of leadership is not merely to find and record failures of men

Posted on January 22, 2012  Comments (1)

The Curious Cat management blog carnival is published 3 times a month with hand picked recent management blog posts. I also collect select management improvement articles and blog posts in the Curious Cat management article library. The annual management blog roundup event covered #151 – #154, so this is #155.

• We Don’t Know quote by David York, via Mike Wroblewski-
  We don’t know what the problems are…..that’s why we make them visible.
  We don’t know what the root causes of the problems are….that’s why we ask 5 Whys?
  We don’t know what the evidence is….that’s why we collect data.
  We don’t know what is actually happening….that’s why we observe.
  We don’t know what solutions will succeed….that’s why we experiment.
• Why do we pay sales commissions? by Dan Ostlund, Fog Creek Software – “For us, it’s been a great success, and at least from that perspective it might be time we punch the Theory X, commissions-based sales culture right in the nose. Real redemption might lie in removing the source of the derangement and treating sales people like we treat programmers and other workers that we implicitly trust.”


Axes in Nigeria by William Hunter

• The C-Suite Double Standard by Dan Markovitz – “I started noticing what I call the C-suite double standard: leaders and executives who are ferocious about improving manufacturing processes and eliminating waste, but who passively accept waste in their office operations and individual work.”
• Standard Work Is Like Food – Taste before Seasoning by Mark Hamel – “No doubt, we have heard the Taichii Ohno quote, “Where there is no standard, there can be no kaizen.” Standard work implies that there must be adherence. Without it, it’s more like a standard wish…as fickle as the wind. We can’t sustain improvements and we have little foundation for the next.”
• How to trick yourself into thinking you’re doing lean (and trick others at the same time) by Jamie Flinchbaugh – “Don’t believe you are doing lean just because you’re filling out a template or following an agenda. It’s the thinking that counts.”
• Defying Time: Dr. W. Edwards Deming by John Persico – “the more difficult part of our consulting at PMI was not in teaching statistics or process analysis but in helping to change management attitudes from the old thinking of meeting goals and quotas to the new thinking that went beyond goals and quotas to never ending improvement and innovation.”

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Posted on January 19, 2012  Comments (0)

Total health expenditures in the USA in 2010 reached $2.6 trillion, $8,402 per person or 17.9% percent of GDP. All these are all time highs. Every year, for decades, health care costs have taken a larger and larger portion of the economic value created in the USA.

In 2009 the USA Spent Record $2.5 Trillion, $8,086 per person 17.6% of GDP on Medical Care.

USA health care spending grew 3.9% in 2010 following an increase of 3.8% in 2009. While those are the two slowest rates of growth in the 51 year history of the National Health Expenditure Accounts, they still outpaced both inflation and GDP growth. So yet again the health system expenses are taking a bigger portion of overall spending. This has been going on so long that the USA spends double what many other rich countries do on healthcare with no better results.

As a result of failing to address this issue for decades the problem is huge and will likely take decades to bring back just to a level where the burden on those in the USA, due to their broken health care system, is equal to the burden of other rich countries. Over 2 decades ago the failure in the health care system reached epidemic proportions but little has been done to deal with the systemic failures. Dr. Deming pointed to excessive health care cost, back then, as one of 7 deadly diseases facing American business. The fact that every year costs have increased more than GDP growth and outcome measures are no better than other rich countries shows the performance has been very poor. The disease is doing even more harm today.

Some good things have been done over the years, most notably by Don Berwick while at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement. He was effectively thrown out of office by the politicians recently. The same politicians that have through decades of such foolish acts contributed more than any other group to the broken health care system that burdens the USA today. In the last 10 years a significant amount of good work has also been done in “lean healthcare”: applying lean thinking to healthcare. But it is similar to the quote that a “bad system will beat a good person.” With all the bad systemic issues the efforts, good as they are, in lean healthcare are mainly improving around the edges. Of course, “around the edges” of a $2.6 Trillion dollar system can still be extremely valuable and important.

Related: USA Heath Care System Needs Reform – USA Spends Record $2.3 trillion ($7,681 Per Person) on Health Care in 2008 – Systemic Health Care Failure: Small Business Coverage – Measuring the Health of Nations – How to improve the health care system performance – Management Improvement in Healthcare – USA Spent $2.2 Trillion, 16.2% of GDP, on Health Care in 2007

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Posted on January 16, 2012  Comments (0)

The following are my comments, which were sparked by question “Trust, but verify. Is this a good example of Profound Knowledge in action?” on the Linked In Deming Institute group.

Trust but verify makes sense to me. I think of verify as process measures to verify the process is producing as it should. By verifying you know when the process is failing and when to look for special causes (when using control chart thinking with an understanding of variation). There are many ways to verify that would be bad. But the idea of trust (respect for people) is not just a feel-good, “be nice to everyone and good things happen”, in Deming’s System of Profound Knowledge.

I see the PDSA improvement cycle as another example of a trust-but-verify idea. You trust the people at the gemba to do the improvement. They predict what will happen. But they verify what does actually happen before they run off standardizing and implementing. I think many of us have seen what happens when the idea of letting those who do the work, improve the process, is adopted without a sensible support system (PDSA, training, systems thinking…). It may actually be better than what was in place, but it isn’t consistent with Deming’s management system to just trust the people without providing methods to improve (and education to help people be most effective). Systems must be in place to provide the best opportunity to succeed. Trusting the people that do the work, is part of it.

I understand there are ways to verify that would be destructive. But I do believe you need process measures to verify systems are working. Just trusting people to do the right thing isn’t wise.

A checklist is another way of “not-trusting.” I think checklists are great. It isn’t that I don’t trust people to try and do the right thing. I just don’t trust people alone, when systems can be designed with verification that improves performance. I hear people complaign that checklists “don’t respect my expertise” or have the attitude that they are “insulting to me as a professional” – you should just trust me.

Sorry, driving out fear (and building trust – one of Deming’s 14 points) is not about catering to every person’s desire. For Deming’s System of Profound Knowledge: respect for people is part of a system that requires understand variation and systems thinking and an understanding of psychology and theory of knowledge. Checklists (and other forms of verification) are not an indication of a lack of trust. They are a a form of process measure (in a way) that has been proven to improve results.

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Posted on January 11, 2012  Comments (0)

The 2011 Management Blog Roundup has been completed. I hope you enjoyed it and learned from the great posts highlighted by all the participants in this effort. The final group of posts to be added are:

• Mark Hamel at Gemba Tales added his 2nd and 3rd reviews of: A Lean Journey and Steven Spear.
• Hank Anderson, at Stats Made Easy, offered up some great posts by Jurgen Appelo at the oddly named NOOP.NL, but nevertheless excellent, blog on managing software development. Jurgen Appelo has had 2 guest posts on this blog (Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog, of course), the last one was: The Achilles’ Heel of Agile.
• Tim McMahon, posted his 3rd and 4th reviews on A Lean Journey, reviewing: Lean Leadership and Lean Pathways.
• And I posted my 3rd review in this roundup here (on the Curious Cat Management Blog) looking at the previously mentioned Stats Made Easy.

I offer my thanks to all the bloggers who took the time to participate.

I hope you found many concepts and ideas to adopt at your organization in 2012. And lets hope that those companies we have to deal with in 2012 are adopting these ideas so we can have much more rewarding and enjoyable experiences as customers.

Related: More 2011 Management Blog Roundup Posts Added – Newly Added 2011 Management Blog Roundup Posts – 2010 Annual Management Blog Review

Posted on January 8, 2012  Comments (0)

The 4th Annual Management blog roundup is coming to a close soon. This is my 3rd and final review post looking back at 2001, the previous two posts looked at: Gemba Panta Rei and the Lean Six Sigma Blog.

I have special affinity for the use of statistics to understand and improve. I imaging it is both genetic and psychological. My father was a statistician and I have found memories of applying statistical thinking to understand a result or system. I also am comfortable with numbers, and like most people enjoy working with things I have an affinity for.

Mark Anderson

Mark Anderson’s Stats Made Easy blog brings statistical thinking to managers. And this is not an easy thing to do, as one of his posts shows, we have an ability to ignore data we don’t want to know. Wrong more often than right but never in doubt: “Kahneman examined the illusion of skill in a group of investment advisors who competed for annual performance bonuses. He found zero correlation on year-to-year rankings, thus the firm was simply rewarding luck. What I find most interesting is his observation that even when confronted with irrefutable evidence of misplaced confidence in one’s own ability to prognosticate, most people just carry on with the same level of self-assurance.”

That actually practice of experimentation (PDSA…) needs improvement. Too often the iteration component is entirely missing (only one experiment is done). That is likely partially a result another big problem: the experiments are not nearly short enough. Mark offered very wise advice on the Strategy of experimentation: Break it into a series of smaller stages. “The rule-of-thumb I worked from as a process development engineer is not to put more than 25% of your budget into the first experiment, thus allowing the chance to adapt as you work through the project (or abandon it altogether).” And note that, abandon it altogether option. Don’t just proceed with a plan if what you learn makes that option unwise: too often we act based on expectations rather than evidence.

In Why coaches regress to be mean, Mark explained the problem with reacting to common cause variation and “learning” that it helped to do so. “A case in point is the flight instructor who lavishes praise on a training-pilot who makes a lucky landing. Naturally the next result is not so good. Later the pilot bounces in very badly — again purely by chance (a gust of wind). The instructor roars disapproval. That seems to do the trick — the next landing is much smoother.” When you ascribe special causation to common cause variation you often confirm your own biases.

Mark’s blog doesn’t mention six sigma by name in his 2011 posts but the statistical thinking expressed throughout the year make this a must for those working in six sigma programs.

Related: 2009 Curious Cat Management Blog Carnival – 2010 Management Blog Review: Software, Manufacturing and Leadership

Posted on January 3, 2012  Comments (2)

As we start 2012, the 4th Annual Management Blog Roundup continues. Once again some of the most popular management bloggers are taking a look back at the last year in the management blogging world. The following reviews have been added since my last update:

• Jamie Flinchbaugh, on his blog of the same name, took a look at 3 blogs, including this one, Curious Cat Management Improvement, as well as: Old Lean Dude and Brad Power’s posts at the Harvard Business Review
• Mark Anderson, at Stats Made Easy, added another post looking at: Unfolding Leadership.
• Karen Wilhelm, of Lean Reflections, took a look back at the posts on: The Mistake Bank, Lean Thinker and Business 901.
• Ron Pereira, of the LSS Academy provided links to interesting posts from the last year on some more excellent blogs: Dan Pink, Evolving Excellence and Got Boondoggle.
• Mark Hamel, at Gemba Tales, took on the task of the quite prolific Mark Graban’s Lean Blog. Mark Graban is also selling an ebook of his best 2011 blog posts.
• And I reviewed two great management blogs, right here on this blog (the Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog, of course): Gemba Panta Rei and Lean Six Sigma Academy.

These posts provide many great ideas for you to apply in the new year. The 2011 management blog roundup has more great posts coming up in the next week. The home page for this collaborative effort of many management bloggers provides links to all the posts in the 2011 Management Blog Roundup.

Related: 2010 Management Blog Roundup – 2011 Management Blog Roundup Begins – Curious Cat Management Blog Directory

Posted on December 29, 2011  Comments (1)

For my contribution to the 4th annual management blog roundup I am taking a look at 3 management blogs. In this post I look back at the year that was at the Lean Six Sigma blog.

We are lucky to have so many great management blogs to read all year. They provide inspiration and great advice to managers. Though, one of my frustrations is how few good six sigma resources there are online. In this area we are unlucky. The disparity between the amazingly high number of very high quality lean blogs and agile software development blogs compared to almost nothing of similar quality for six sigma content is dramatic (and unfortunate).

Ron Pereira

Ron Pereira is the managing partner of Lean Six Sigma Academy and the Gemba Academy which provide high quality online lean manufacturing training. One of the ways Ron stands out are his posts that make continuous improvement a family affair (which I appreciate given that I grew up in such an environment).

In Let’s Dance he looks at understanding psychology as it relates to working with groups/teams (in this case his daughters soccer team): “my coaching style and my assistant coach’s style had become a bit too intense and, as a result, the girls were playing tight and scared to make mistakes… We kept this ‘dancing’ theme alive for the rest of the season. During warm-ups before games I, and the girls, would dance like fools. The other teams watched us like we were nuts… but we didn’t care. We kept right on laughing and dancing.” Take a look at this post, it really packs in a ton of great thoughts for managers.

Another way Ron stands out is with his webcasts on discussion lean terms (the gemba glossary). In this webcast he looks at the topic of standardized work processes.

One of the great things about blogs is the focus on what people really deal with day in and day out. It is nice to read about a great management system in a book like the Leader’s Handbook by Peter Scholtes. But what do you do when you are in a much more common situation, where others don’t share your desire to reshape the management system into something new and better? Ron took a look at this in his post: 3 Things You Can Do When Your Manager Doesn’t Support Continuous Improvement: “The best way to combat this is to demonstrate the value without them asking you to. In other words, make something better and let them know about it. And when I say make it better I mean it. Do something to positively impact the business.”

Another wonderful family related post by Ron this year was Training Wheels – “Like most young people my boy was itching to take the training wheels off his bicycle… The best part of all is he’s learning to solve his own problems. He’s not waiting for people to hand him things on a platter… How many times do we continuous improvement practitioners moan and groan about the lack of management support when, in actuality, even though they may not care they won’t stop you from making things better?”

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Posted on December 24, 2011  Comments (0)

For my contribution to the 4th annual management blog roundup I will take a look at 3 management blogs. In this post I look back at the year that was at the Gemba Panta Rei blog.

We are lucky to have so many great management blogs to read all year that provide inspiration and great advice. This year 12 management bloggers contributed to highlight nearly 40 blogs, be sure to check out all the posts.

Jon Miller

Jon Miller is the of the Executive Director of Kaizen Institute Consulting Group and author of the excellent Gemba Panta Rei blog. With so many good management blogs it is hard to read all the good posts, but this is one blog that is at the top of my to do list.

Jon provides extremely thought provoking posts that challenge managers to think. Over the years I have been thinking about why so many organizations fail to get most of the benefits provided by lean thinking and I have become more convinced in recent years a significant problem is the oversimplification and desires for solutions that don’t require thought. If you are not willing to spend time thinking about the profound implications of lean thinking the benefits you can achieve are several limited. Jon’s blog will help you by providing a reminder. But you then have to think yourself about how the ideas he raises relate to your situation. A few posts from last year in this vein:

• The New Math of Daily Kaizen – “When kaizen is done in ways that it involves everybody and everywhere, but not on a daily basis, the gains from each additional person or area is additive. However, when even one person in one area is able to do kaizen every day, a curious thing happens. The impact is not additive. It is geometric, transformational.” [Lean is geometric, transformational, when done right. Reading Jon's blog and adopting fundamental changes in how you think and work is how you can find yourself on this path instead of one where you have incremental success but not much more. - John]
• Lean Maturity and the Four Stages of Competence – “The lean journey is a long and arduous one. It spans one’s full lifetime… There is a larger contest that is being played out every day: the battle of backsliding versus continuous improvement.”
• The Importance of Thinking About the Box – “The fruit I buy travels in boxes of metal, wood, cardboard and finally reaches me in a plastic container. Nature only makes containers that are edible, biodegradable or both. That is a thinking box worth stepping back into.”
• Why Don’t We See More QC Circles? – “Even today the span of control of a typical leader is far too large and ineffective, driven by direct-to-indirect labor ratios and financial models that are divorced from the reality that people who function in small teams can solve and prevent problems in ways that lower cost. [I recently posted some comments on QC circles - John]
• Kitchen Jidoka: Low Cost Automation Example – “separate human work and machine work so that humans can do less non value added and more value added work within a given period of time… Second, autonomation is used to prevent processes from making error after error by building in en error prevention or detect-and-stop functions.

Another theme on the Gemba Panta Rei blog is ambiguous visual controls. Effective visual management tools greatly enhance safety, productivity and usability. But using a concept is not the same thing as successfully using it, as the periodic posts on failed attempts Jon posts illustrates very well. Ambiguous Visual Controls: Airport Hotel Edition, too much information, in the park, lost in the supermarket…

Take a look at the other 2011 Management Blog Roundup posts.
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Posted on December 20, 2011  Comments (0)

The 4th Annual Management Blog Roundup is making good progress. It is wonderful how many great blogs there are to chose from. Even with us covering 40 management blogs there are many more great management blogs we didn’t include. The following reviews have been added since our initial post:

A Factory of One by Daniel Markovitz

• Matt Wrye, at Beyond Lean, posted the last of his reviews covering Lean Reflections (which will be hosting their own reviews later).
• Dan Markovitz, at TimeBack Management, posted on Daily Kaizen, Peter Drucker’s Management Philosophy and Shmula. Dan’s first book was also just released: A Factory of One.
• Mark Anderson, at Stats Made Easy, posted their first review, this year, covering: Edge Perspectives.
• Joseph Dager, at Business901, posted reviews of: The 99 Percent Solution (Behance) and Customer Insider blogs. The 99% solution preceeds the excitement around the 1% and 99% movement this year – Dan Markovitz actually reviewed that blog in 2010.
• Tanmay Vora, at QAspire, reviewed Seth Godin’s Blog.
• Kevin Meyer at Evolving Excellence selected some great posts in the last year from Jamie Flinchbaugh, Matthew May, My Flexible Pencil and TimeBack Management.

These posts provide many excellent management ideas and the annual review has many more great posts coming up. The home page for this collaborative effort of many management bloggers provides links to all the posts in the 2011 Management Blog Roundup.

Related: 2010 Management Blog Roundup – Curious Cat Economics, Investing and Personal Finance Carnival

Posted on December 15, 2011  Comments (2)

One thing that frustrates me is how managers fail to adopt proven strategies for decades. One very obvious example is using queuing theory to setup lines.

Yes it may be even better to adopt strategies to eliminate as much waiting in line as possible, but if there is still waiting in line occurring and you are not having one queue served by multiple representatives shame on you and your company.

Related: Customer Focus and Internet Travel Search – YouTube Uses Multivariate Experiment To Improve Sign-ups 15% – Making Life Difficult for Customers

Posted on December 13, 2011  Comments (1)

I ran across this message and liked it (by wuqi256):

I know I often don’t bother voicing my concerns when I have given up all hope the organization has any interest in customer service. Sadly this is a fairly common situation.

It isn’t easy to do, organizations that are customer focused need but taking advantage of those customers helping you by expressing the frustration (that many of your customers experience, but don’t express). To do so organizations need to develop a culture where everyone is encouraged to improve your processes. The tricky part is not claiming that is what you want, but actually creating and maintaining the systems that bring that about.

Related: The Problem is Likely Not the Person Pointing Out The Problem – Customer Service is Important – Customers Get Dissed and Tell

Posted on December 12, 2011  Comments (1)

The Curious Cat Management blog carnival highlights recent management blog posts 3 times each month. This is the 4th year that the normal rhythm is being broken to review the past year in management blogging. From now until January 12th some excellent management blogs will be hosting reviews of what has transpired on great management blogs over the last year.

You can find links to all the reviews, as they are posted, on the home page for Management Blogs: 2011 in Review. As managers looking to improve the performance of our organizations, we really are lucky to have so many excellent management blogs to learn from. It is difficult to stay on top of all the wonderful options: hopefully these posts will provide some good resources to follow in the year, and years, ahead.

Matt Wrye, at Beyond Lean, has started things off with posts looking at: Squawk Point and All Things Workplace.

Again this year we have many management bloggers joining the annual roundup. Over the next 3 weeks posts will be seen on some great blog, including: Jamie Flinchbaugh, Lean Six Sigma Academy Blog, Business 901 and many more.

Related: 2010 management blog review – 2009 management blog roundup – Curious Cat Management Blog Directory

Posted on December 8, 2011  Comments (3)

The excesses to which CEO’s and their board buddies go to in taking from corporate treasuries what they don’t deserve continues to amaze me. The level to which the bad behavior is accepted is apparent in the lack of progress at dealing with those that are taking what they have no moral right to. As shouldn’t have to be explained (but maybe does) leadership isn’t about avoiding being indicted. The levels to which these people take from the organization they are suppose to be leading is a very sad commentary on our leaders. They act as though the corporation exists to enrich them, and their friends, personally: and all the other stakeholders are just leeches on the system.

CEO’s deserve to be paid well. As they were in 1970. As their abuses (with the support of subservient boards) became greater and greater the outrage increased. Peter Drucker moved from defending highly paid CEOs (say 20 or even 30 times the median employee pay) to expressing dismay at the massively excessive pay packages in the 1990s (which were much lower than that taken by the current crop of self important leeches).

Taking such excessive amounts from the corporate treasury is innately dis-respectful to all other employees (though usually they through large amounts of cash at those they have to see often which bring them into the camp of those taking instead of the masses being taken from). Whatever nice words they use to try and give an illusion that they respect those they work with (or their stockholders, suppliers, customers, communities…) doesn’t change their disrespectful actions.

Executive pay from Fortune, annual earnings from Google Finance, employee totals from Yahoo Finance. * Quest was merged into CenturyTel and I can’t find Quest employee data.

This problem is far worse in the USA than anywhere else. Some CEO’s have become jealous and urged that they be allowed to take more so they can not feel so sad about how much less they make. And so companies from other countries are moving in the wrong direction. The USA continues to move so quickly away from any sense of propriety however that they seem to be gaining on the rest of the world for how badly we can do in this area. There are of course, companies in the USA that don’t believe in letting the CEO treat themselves to whatever they want. Costco is a great example of this. That CEO respects his fellow employees and customers. We need more outrage at those CEOs that refuse to lead and instead just seek to take whatever loot they can before they leave.

Related: Another Year of CEO’s Taking Hugely Excessive Pay (2007) – CEO’s Castles and Company Performance – Honda’s top 36 employees received $13 million total (2006)

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Posted on December 5, 2011  Comments (0)

I posted an interesting document to the Curious Cat Management Library: it includes Dr. Deming’s comments as part of a discussion organized by the Government Accounting Office in 1980 on Quality in Japan and the United States.

The document provides some interesting thoughts from Dr. Deming and others; Dr. Deming’s statements start on page 52 of the document. For those really interested in management improvement ideas it is a great read. I imagine most managers wouldn’t enjoy it though (it isn’t giving direct advice for today, but I found it very interesting).

Some selected quotes from the document follow. On his work with Japan in 1950:

One of the common themes at that time was Deming’s methods worked because Japanese people and culture were different. That wasn’t why the ideas worked, but it was an idea many people that wanted to keep doing things the old way liked to believe.

At the time the way QC circles worked in Japan was basically employee led kaizen. So companies that tried to copy Japan told workers: now go make things better like the workers we saw in Japan were doing. Well with management not changing (and understanding Deming’s ideas, lean thinking, variation, systems thinking…) and staff not given training to understand how to improve processes it didn’t work very well. We (those reading this blog) may all now understand the advantages one piece flow. I can’t imagine too many people would jump to that idea sitting in their QC circle without having been told about one piece flow (I know I wouldn’t have), and all the supporting knowledge needed to make that concept work.

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Posted on December 1, 2011  Comments (0)

Mark Graban is hosting Management Improvement Blog Carnival #150 on the Lean Blog, highlights include:

• Watching Waste in the ER! – As part of his relatively new blog, Anthony Scott (Frontline Lean) writes about his experiences with waste in an emergency department. The waste isn’t surprising to those who have been a patient or those who have worked in the E.D. Scott is a supervisor in a lean manufacturing setting and he applies lean thinking to this unfamiliar environment.
• Case Study: The Nordstrom Innovation Lab – Eric Ries (Startup Lessons Learned), author of the excellent book The Lean Startup, has a post with video featuring the use of “Lean Startup” methods and mindsets within a Fortune 500 company. Eric writes, “It’s one thing to talk about “rapid experimentation” and “validated learning” as abstract concepts. It’s quite another to see them in action, in a real-world setting.”
• Top 3 Things I’ve Learned After 18 Months in Healthcare – My friend and DFW-area neighbor Mike Lombard (Hospital Kaizen) reflects on his first 18 months after transitioning from manufacturing into healthcare. In addition to his main points, Mike ends the post with an invitation for others to Move to Healthcare, writing, “Like I said earlier, I’ve learned a lot (a lot more than is shown here) and I continue to learn everyday. If you’re an engineer, project manager, quality professional, operations manager, or any other type of business professional, you can make the move to healthcare. Just be ready to focus on people, deal with complexity, and be proud of your work. Most of all, be ready to continuously learn and improve.”

I know we are all busy but, Mark, has done a great job highlighting some excellent posts. Take a look at the full carnival post and each of the posts. It is very nice to see how many great posts we are able to find for every carnival. A decade ago finding this kind of content was nearly impossible.

Related: Management Improvement Carnival #50 – Management Improvement Carnival #100

Posted on November 21, 2011  Comments (1)

Jon Miller hosts Management Improvement Carnival #149 looking at blog posts examining motivation, highlights include:

• a wonderful cat photo
• Kevin Meyer found some bright spots on his trip to India and documented them in several fun articles in Evolving Excellence. My favorite was leadership lessons from Ganesha, a set of mindsets and behaviors that are both motivating personally and constructive in motivating others.
• On productivity and motivation, one article began by explaining how researchers found that doing or saying something nice, even if this was a very small gesture, has proven to improve the job performance of people including doctors. The premise is that positivity promotes performance.
• Addressing the question of “Where do I start?” in learning lean thinking and putting it into practice, Mark Rosenthal suggests adopting the find the bright spots advice from the book Switch. Finding brights spots is always good advice. While companies fail at thing for a wide variety of local and specialized reasons, success tends to cluster around a handful of factors; motivated people; removing waste, variation and burden; a long-term view. We need to drill a level deeper in each one of these.

I agree that motivation is a very important topic. I think trying to improve management without a good understanding of how people are really motivated is very difficult and weaknesses in this area end up frustrating many improvement efforts.

Related: Incentivizing Behavior Doesn’t Improve Results – Motivate or Eliminate De-Motivation – You’ve Got to Find What You Love

Posted on November 16, 2011  Comments (1)

Even if ideas are good and have significant importance (high value to customers, reduce waste dramatically, improve safety…) implementing the ideas can be difficult. Getting people to make an effort to improve a situation by simply laying out the dry facts is not very effective. You need to engage in the management system to make your ideas something other people care about and want to do (you need to consider the psychology of getting things done in human systems).

Often a good way to do this is not to just think what is best for the performance of the system, but figure out what people want fixed/improved… and then figure out what I think could help. Then pick among various options to improve based upon the advantages to the performance of the organization, desires of decision makers and the ability of an improvement effort to build the capacity of the organization for customer focused continuous improvement.

Few places I have worked just want to adopt Deming’s ideas (which is my belief for what is the best way to improve performance). But they have things they care about – reducing the times people get mad at them, increasing cash flow… I find it much easier to help them with their desires and slowly get them to appreciate the benefit of Deming’s management ideas, lean thinking and quality tools. Though even this way it isn’t easy.

Even if the organization I am working with doesn’t think based on Deming’s ideas, I do. So I believe any effort to improve the management system must consider all 4 areas of Deming’s management system. In the beginning of an improvement effort psychology is very important for the change agent to consider and deal with. With an understanding of psychology and an understanding of the organization you can build appropriate strategies to improve and build the capacity of the organization to improve over the long term.

I also think about the long term as I am thinking of how to help. It is important to not just solve the current dilemma but to improve the organizational capacity to improve in the future. And for me that means increasing people’s understanding of the ideas I explore in the Curious Cat Management Improvement blog.

Related: Building the Adoption of Management Improvement Ideas in Your Organization – Stop Demotivating Employees – How to Improve

Posted on November 11, 2011  Comments (0)

Jamie Flinchbaugh hosts Management Improvement Carnival #148, highlights include:

• Since I’m just back from the 1st Lean for HR Summit, I thought I would also showcase an HR-oriented blog. This one from Emily Douglas challenges HR to step up to the plate in The HR Puzzle.
• Old Lean Dude, aka Bruce Hamilton, aka “Toast Guy”, writes in Illogical Progression on how hoshin gets used as an organization progresses on their lean journey.
• Michael Baudin writes about the use of sports metaphors in Black belts, scrums, and other metaphors. His opening sentence says it all: “To be useful, a metaphor must help understanding.” Too often, metaphors are cute but not useful.
• Matt Wrye, a lean practioner blogging at Beyond Lean, writes Hired for one. Promoted for another. It’s a reflection on the balance between technical and relationship skills.

Make sure you check out the full carnival for many more great management posts.

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