Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog: Deming, lean thinking, innovation, customer focus, continual improvement, six sigma.
December 29, 2006

The IT Iceberg Secret

The Iceberg Secret, Revealed by Joel Spolsky

It’s pretty clear that programmers think in one language, and MBAs think in another. I’ve been thinking about the problem of communication in software management for a while, because it’s pretty clear to me that the power and rewards accrue to those rare individuals who know how to translate between Programmerese and MBAese.
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Customers Don’t Know What They Want. Stop Expecting Customers to Know What They Want. It’s just never going to happen. Get over it.

When developing software applications in house, developers should work in cooperation with those who will use it. Working from requirements is not a very effective way to proceed. It is similar to the old idea of suppliers working to specifications. Dr. Deming taught long ago that companies needed to work with suppliers and customers to improve the overall system. Well managed companies have learned this and practice it.

You know how an iceberg is 90% underwater? Well, most software is like that too — there’s a pretty user interface that takes about 10% of the work, and then 90% of the programming work is under the covers

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December 28, 2006

Change Your Name

Best Buy Asks Man To Change Name:

Turns out if your last name is less than three letters, the online sign-up isn’t an option for you.

Companies often put up barriers for no reason, then leave customer service agents to try and explain. And then this happens:

When he called Best Buy one customer service agent even suggested he change his name

Now that is great :-)

Charles Yu: “I said well, I think that is a little ridiculous - I don’t want to change my last name just to sign up for this.”

When 7 On Your Side contacted Best Buy, the company apologized for the problem saying… “We were aware that our online system for creating Reward Zone accounts does not recognize a name with less than three letters and the decision has already been made to correct it.” The company went on to say they have no definite timeline for the fix…

My advice. Don’t create stupid restrictions (in IT systems or otherwise). What do you care how long people’s names are? There are many people with 2 character names.

Also, have customer service personnel who are trying to improve the system, not trying to get the customer off the phone to meet some arbitrary numerical target. Most often the representatives seem most concerned with getting you off the phone. An effective system to discover what needs to be improved is not something that management has bothered to design into the system. Big mistake.
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Customer Un-focus

Counties caught in conundrum: getting Amish to take food stamps by John Horton

Accepting public assistance is verboten within the Amish culture. It simply is not done. But Taylor is under orders to at least try to get them enrolled. The Ohio Department of Job & Family Services has asked Geauga and Holmes counties, which feature the state’s largest Amish populations, to lift dismal food-stamp participation rates.

Taylor and his Holmes counterpart, Dan Jackson, called the mandate a waste of tax dollars, time and resources. In their eyes, the directive is government bureaucracy that ignores the obvious in setting an unrealistic goal.
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Taylor and Jackson said they’ve both asked the state to readjust participation goals for their counties. Carroll said the request is under consideration. This is the first year for the performance standard.

Data, such as participation rates can be used as in-process measures to help you locate areas to look at for improvement. When you discover a good reason for the numbers then look to other in-process measures. Don’t make the mistake of managing to the measure. The measure should help you manage. Improving the number is not the goal. Improving the situation that the number is a proxy for is the goal.

Related: Another Quota Failure Example - Forget Targets - Welfare waste

via: Amish Refusal to Accept Food Stamps Makes Welfare Workers Look Bad

December 27, 2006

Poor Service - Industry Standard?

More Trouble Canceling HP Orders by Bob Sutton:

I wrote a post a couple months ago about how difficult it was to cancel an order I had JUST made for an HP computer, and how when I complained on the phone to the HP salesperson, his justification was that it was “industry standard,” which really pushed my buttons — as the logic is “I am going to treat my customers badly just because everyone does.”

How true. One good example, one bad example from: Ritz Carlton and Home Depot. I find it very frustrating how poor the service is most everywhere these days. Have you shopped in a Trader Joe’s? The contrast is amazing. I am used to most employees, on the phone, or in person, seeing the customer as a bother. I have been in Trader Joe’s maybe 10 times and the staff always seems happy to have customers. Which seems like a good indication that management is doing a number of things right. That with almost everyplace else that I interact the service is the opposite, does not speak well for management.

Related: Companies in Need of Customer Focus - Customer Service is Important - What Could we do Better? - No Customer Focus - Starbucks: Respect for Workers - Great old lean thinking at HP: Eliminating Complexity from Work: Improving Productivity by Enhancing Quality by Tim Fuller, 1986 - More recent HP

December 26, 2006

Create Your Own Book

I received a custom made photo book from my brother. It is amazing. It is a hardcover book, full of photos. The quality is amazing. The book is printed by blurb. Looking on their web site the pricing is surprisingly cheap: 150 page full color hardcover book - $39.95 (for 1 copy! - 10% discount at 25 copies…), as little as $18.95 for a full color softcover book up to 40 pages. The site says books are normally printed in under a week.

I have not tried it but it appears printing your own great looking book is about as easy as creating a blog. I knew it was getting easier to print books, but still I find this very cool. Blurb can import photos from Flickr and Picasa.

Holding Improvement Gains

The Hard Part: Holding Improvement Gains by Ron Snee

The long term goal should be to combine all improvement initiatives into an overall improvement system and create the management framework to sustain that system. Thus, improvement will become a routine managerial process, just like any other.
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One of the strongest spurs to maintaining momentum and sustaining the gains of an improvement initiative comes from the effect achieving significant, measurable benefits has on the culture. People like to succeed. When they see tangible results, they are eager to repeat the process. That is the simple, but powerful, principle of the kind of culture change that sustains improvement over the long term: Culture change doesn’t produce benefits; benefits produce culture change.

Related: Going lean Brings Long-term Payoffs - Change is not Improvement - Constancy of Purpose - Leading Six Sigma

December 21, 2006

Management Blog Tag

John and Bill Hunter

I have been tagged by Mark Graban of the lean blog: “Tag” - 5 Things You Don’t Know About Me.

      • I spent a year in Singapore and another in Nigeria while I was growing up.
      • Dad, Bill Hunter, was a professor (related to the item above), who co-authored Statistics for Experimenters and applied Deming’s ideas in the Public Sector for the first time. Out of the Crisis pages 245-247 include a write up on that effort with the First Street Garage. Peter Scholtes, at the time worked for the City of Madison, and played a big part in the effort. He went on to write the Team Handbook and The Leader’s Handbook.
      • I was on the Wisconsin Badger Basketball camp championship teams in 7th and 8th grade. The second year we played the championship game on the regular Badger Basketball home court. The Badger’s are a bit better now then they were then.
      • I have flown on “Air Force One.” Not technically, since it the president was not aboard, but while working for the White House Military Office I flew on the plane on a couple test flights. It is officially “Air Force One” only when the President is flying.
      • I spent many Thanksgivings beating John Dower, my father (and other of the family members of both) at Oh Hell. Some might claim I remember more victories today than took place at the time.

John Hunter. The small person is me, the bigger one is Dad.

I tag: Kathleen Fasanella, Mike Wroblewski, Peter Abilla, Karen Wilhelm and John Dowd.

More on Madison’s Quality efforts: Doing More With Less in the Public Sector: A Progress Report from Madison, Wisconsin - Quality in the Community: One City’s Experience

December 20, 2006

Interview with Toyota President

Very interesting interview with Katsuaki Watanabe - Toyota President seeks growth without major quality problems:

For the North American-exclusive models, we would like to localize as much as possible the r&d activities, like factory, production engineering and production preparation. We need to improve the engineering capabilities in those functions so that we will be able to localize more of those activities. So in that sense, they have to increase and enhance the operations at TMMA. We are likely to increase the size of TMMA.

However, it’s not just because we have more plants. Instead, the driver for this enhancement is that we want to localize r&d, production engineering and production preparation functions. Our desire is to do all the designing and production preparation for upper-body parts for North American-exclusive models, like Tundra, in America.

The whole interview just has a different feel to me that most CEO interviews. The focus seems to be on how to manage the organization better. The financial details will flow from managing most effectively. But it is hard for me to tell whether it is just my good feelings toward Toyota coloring my opinion of the interview.
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Why Extrinsic Motivation Fails

Why Motivation by Pizza Doesn’t Work

This completely changes the role of the manager as motivator. Rather than being the source of motivation (kind of a ludicrous idea in itself), the manager must help employees to find their own intrinsic motivation.

Lean thinkers understand this idea as respect for people. Dr. Deming talked about joy in work. Douglas McGregor talked about theory x and theory y thinking. All of these perspectives incorporate an understanding of workplace systems and human psychology. Extrinsic motivation is easy but not effective. It is really just abdicating management and using extrinsic motivation in place of management. The alternative requires managers to actually manage. This is challenging but the correct choice to make.

Stop Demotivating Employees

So rather than trying to bribe people to want things using pizzas and promotions, managers should help their people to discover meaning and develop skills at work. What some managers don’t realize is that people want to do good work. Create a happy, positive work environment and people are naturally motivated. Even better: They motivate themselves and each other.

As I have stated before: Alfie Kohn has some great books and articles on the problems with extrinsic motivation, and related ideas - I know it is hard for many people to believe (the link provides some online articles that can help as well as some books).

Related: Motivation - Dangers of Extrinsic Motivation - Eliminate Slogans

December 19, 2006

How to Prevent Innovation

Top ten tips for preventing innovation give some great ideas many companies are already doing but you may find some your company hasn’t mastered :-) For example:

Make performance reviews easy. Create some easy-to-measure metrics (like # of sick-days taken, # of powerpoint slides created, # of meetings attended), and use those for performance reviews. People always gravitate toward the metric. We can run the reviews with a minimum of effort, giving us more time to tell them how to do their jobs. Just an hour a year. Some managers can give feedback in 15 minutes.

The performance appraisal systems used now, are a great way to stifle innovation. If you actually want to look at encouraging innovation, see some of our posts on innovation.

Related: Better and Different - Performance Appraisal Problems - Quality and Innovation - Dr. Deming on Performance Appraisal

December 18, 2006

Mason Neck State Park Photos
Belmont Bay, Mason Neck State Park, Virginia

Photos of Mason Neck State Park, Virginia
National park photos: Grand Canyon, Great Falls, Rocky Mountain, Grand Teton…
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December 16, 2006

Starbucks: Respect for Workers and Health Care

Starbucks Corp. CEO Howard Schultz interview on Marketplace

I grew up in Brooklyn, New York. I guess it’s been well documented, many times, in federally subsidized housing known as the projects. My dad never made more than $20,000 a year and I saw first-hand what it was like to kind of live on the other side of the tracks
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the company is deeply-rooted in a sensibility and trying to build the company with a conscience primarily, I think, defined by the fact that we did something in 1989 and 1990 that had never been done before, which was creating a program in which we had comprehensive health insurance for all employees including part-timers and created a mechanism for equity in the form of stock options

What about those that believe you should cut spending on employees, since health care, for example, is so expensive?

We’ve created more productive people and created an environment where Starbucks in many places domestically and around the world is the employer of choice and we are able to attract and retain fantastic people because of the culture of the company, which is defined by these benefits. So my argument is simple, it’s which investment do you want to make? An investment in your people or do you want to make an investment in the hidden costs of turnover and retraining your people?

So many companies talk about how people are the companies most important asset, so few act that way.
(more…)

December 14, 2006

Workplace Management by Taiichi Ohno

Workplace Management by Taiichi Ohno, translated by Jon Miller.

This classic work by the founding father of the Toyota Production System returns to print in a new translation. Ohno delivers timeless lessons on how to effectively manage the gemba – actual place or work. He relates stories from across his nearly 40 years of struggle to establish the Toyota Production System as both a mindset and supporting behaviors of constant improvement. In the book’s 37 chapters, Ohno covers a broad range of topics and lays out the fundamental philosophy of kaizen (continuous improvement) that has made Toyota the most successful automobile manufacturer today.

Jon Miller posted excellent items to his blog on each chapter. You may pre-order the book now for delivery in March, 2007.

Related: Gemba Keiei by Taiichi Ohno - Kaizen the Toyota Way - Origins of the Toyota Production System - Lean terms defined: Kaizen - Curious Cat Management Improvement Books

December 12, 2006

How to Improve

My management philosophy is guided by the idea of seeking methods that will be most effective.* There are many ways to improve. Good management systems are about seeking systemic adoption of the most effective solutions. What this amounts to is learning about the ideas of Deming, Ackoff, Ohno, Chirstensen, Scholtes, Womack… and then adopting those ideas. In doing so learning about management tools and concepts as they are applied to your work.

Here is a simple example. (more…)

December 11, 2006

10 Stocks for 10 Years Update

In April of 2005 I wrote: 10 stocks for 10 years. At that time I also created a fund through Marketocracy. Thus far the portfolio is up 15.8% annually (versus 15.3% for the S&P 500) - see more below…

I have made minor changes to the fund during the year (less than 4% turnover). As I mentioned in June I would buy Tesco, but Marketocracy does not support it. Google is still doing quite well, up 122% since inception. The second largest gain is for Petro China, up 106% and Toyota is up 67%. Dell is the worst performer down 25% followed by Yahoo down 16%. I am comfortable with the original 10 stocks and don’t have any significant changes I would make to the portfolio now. For the small change I would make now see more…
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December 10, 2006

Weblog Awards: Best Business Blog Finalist

award button

The Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog is a 2006 Weblog Awards finalist in the Best Business Blog category. 10 blogs from each category are selected as finalists. Voting opened last week and continues through December 15th.

For those visiting from the award site you may want to take a look at our popular posts including: Stop Demotivating Employees - New Rules for Management? No! - Toyota IT Overview - Eliminate Slogans - Quality and Innovation - Manufacturing Jobs data USA and China
And some others: Distort the System - Improving the 401(k) System - Righter Performance Appraisal - More on Obscene CEO Pay - Housing and the Economy - Usability Failures

December 7, 2006

Management Improvement Carnival #1

There have been a number of great post recently about management improvement:

  • Amazon’s Long Public Haul by Kevin Meyer - “Amazon has now been around a while and has a loyal following. Their culture is apparently deep, at least for the most part. But that does not guarantee long-term success.”
  • Jeff Bezos Risky Bet Isn’t New by Peter Abilla - “Guess what everybody — Bezos’ Risky Bet isn’t new. Amazon has been doing that for years, but they’re just now opening services up to the masses.”
  • How to Put Kaizen into Your Culture by Jon Miller - “The reason we can make our living is because we serve our customers… Improvement is everyone’s job… The current condition is unacceptable, no matter how good we are.”
  • Choices = Headaches by Joel Spolsky - “Inevitably, you are going to think of a long list of intelligent, defensible reasons why each of these options is absolutely, positively essential. Don’t bother. I know.”
  • Two podcast interviews by Mark Graban: Jim Womack on lean in China (podcast) and Norman Bodek on Educating Leadership
  • Using Quality Tools to Identify Root Cause by Jay Marino - “One of the steps of the PDSA cycle is “identifying root cause” and includes several quality tools to help identify the “culprits” in a system including: Cause and Effect Diagram; Relations Diagram; and the 5 Whys.”

    • (more…)

December 6, 2006

Ritz Carlton and Home Depot

Don MacAskill writes of his great service from Ritz-Carlton and horrible service from Home Depot. Neither result is surprising, see related posts below. On the Ritz:

The next day, Ritz employees were still greeting us in the halls by our name and wishing us “Happy Anniversary”. The bottom line: We felt special. We felt pampered. We felt like the Ladies and Gentlemen of the Ritz-Carlton knew us personally and really cared about making sure we were happy. They’ve earned a customer for life.

Ritz-Carlton’s motto is “We are ladies and gentlemen serving ladies and gentlemen.” And they actually turn those words into reality. They are not platitudes with no action. The system is guided toward achieving that vision.


Worst. Service. Ever: Home Depot & HOMExperts (which includes videos of NBC investigation of customer service problems):

As the CEO of a company that strives to provide top-notch customer service, this has been incredible to watch. At no time during the process, other than the design and purchasing phase, have we felt taken care of, or even like our satisfaction was even a consideration. I wish I could say that the experience has been highly educational, like my visit to the Ritz-Carlton, but I have to imagine that any human being would realize that this is ludicrously bad customer service. The two companies involved, The Home Depot and their contractors, HOMExperts, must have some serious problems internally.

Related: Customer Focus at the Ritz - Effective Leadership Strategies are Driven by Total Quality Management (TQM) Principles - 1999 Ritz Baldrige Application Summary - Not Lean Retailing - More on Obscene CEO Pay

December 5, 2006

Womack on Lean in China

From the Lean blog another valuable podcast: Lean in China with Jim Womack. He is not impressed with the state of lean in China yet. Lean Enterprise China has been established to aid the adoption of the best management practices in China.

Read articles by Jim Womack

Related: China’s Lean Journey - Manufacturing Jobs Data: USA and China - Toyota in China: Full Speed Ahead - Global Manufacturing Data by Country

December 4, 2006

Toyota Production System for Sales…

Corporate profile: the Toyota Production System by Sarah Perrin:

Within Toyota itself, non-production personnel support the TPS approach. “We very much value the Toyota way,” says David Betteley, managing director of Toyota Financial Services (UK) and vice president operations for Europe and Africa. “The key values of the Toyota way are teamwork, respect, challenge, kaizen and genchi genbutsu.

“You produce a new product and it can be replicated by a competitor almost immediately, so you have to be always innovating. We are very dealer focused. We have to provide not only a competitive service pricewise to dealers, but also be competitive in terms of the length of time it takes to deal with things. We have to be moving and changing all the time and never sit still.”

Applying the TPS to non-production areas of the business isn’t easy, of course. “It’s a challenge converting these best practices in Toyota that have been developed for production and moving them down into sales and marketing, which is what we do,” says Betteley.

It is nice to see this article in Accountancy Age. One more nudge toward lean accounting.

Related TPS non-manufacturing posts: Toyota IT Overview - Lean Retailing - Marketing in a Lean Company - More on Non-Auto Toyota - Japan Airlines using Toyota Production System Principles - Keeping score with lean accounting

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  • A Sedaris: I agree with Sherry T below that it is all about training and maintaining communication. By and large,...
  • Lauren: Just a philosophical view on this if you like, as the last sentence really struck a chord with me. “One...
  • Zack Katz: Having a wiki open to your business is a great idea. One of the obstacles to team building / team training...
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