A4 Paper Art

Posted on March 31, 2007  Comments (0)

Fun A4 Paper Art – unrelated to an A3 report. Another innovative use of paper: Teaching Engineers Experimental Design With a Paper Helicopter by George Box.

Goodbye Quarterly Targets?

Posted on March 31, 2007  Comments (2)

Goodbye Quarterly Targets?, Business Week:

For about a decade, companies have tried to goose their stocks-or manage the market’s expectations-by putting out quarterly earnings projections. Now the practice has come under fire as business leaders fret that the focus on short-term targets undermines long-term growth.

On March 14 the Commission on the Regulation of U.S. Capital Markets in the 21st Century, a project of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, urged executives to stop issuing their short-term goals. The practice is a “self-inflicted wound by American CEOs,” says commission member Robert Pozen, chairman of MFS Investment Management, a Boston fund manager.

Debate over this issue has simmered for years. Indeed, dozens of companies, including Coca-Cola and McDonald’s, have quit publicizing quarterly earnings targets. Now the issue has become urgent, the Chamber argues, as U.S. companies face growing long-term competition from overseas, where such projections are not widely made.

Learning that a fixation on short term profits is bad for the organization is a good step. Deming talked about this problem over twenty years ago in seven deadly diseases of western management one of which was: the emphasis on short term profits.

Related: Life Beyond the Short Term – Dell Falls Short – Constancy of Purpose

Data Visualization Example

Posted on March 28, 2007  Comments (3)

In Myths About the Developing World, Hans Rosling shows some great graphics to display data on health care outcomes. This is one of the talks from the great TED conference that we have mentioned before. They really have some great webcasts available on their site.

The presentation also gives a concrete example of faulty knowledge (people thinking things which are not so – related to theory of knowledge). He also makes good points on stratifying data at the 14 minute mark. See gapminder.org for good additional material.

Related: Great Charts – Open Access Education Materials

Metrics and Software Development

Posted on March 27, 2007  Comments (3)

Lean-based Metrics for Agile CM Environments by by Brad Appleton, Robert Cowham and Steve Berczuk:

Measure Up! Don’t use metrics to measure individuals in a way that compares their performance to others or isolates the value of their contributions from the rest of the team. The last of the seven principles of Lean software development tells us to “Optimize across the whole.” When measuring value or performance, it is often better to measure at the next level-up. Look at the big-picture because the integrated whole is greater than the sum of its decomposition into parts. Metrics on individuals and subparts often create suboptimization of the whole, unless the metric connects to the “big picture” in a way that emphasizes the success of the whole over any one part.

I agree measuring individuals is normally not an effective way improve. And “measuring up” can often be valuable. Often a fixation on small process measures can result in improvements that don’t actually improve the end result. But rather than the measure up view, I find looking at outcome measures (to measure overall effectiveness) and process measures (for viewing specific parts of the system “big picture”) the most useful strategy.

The reason for process measures is not to improve those results alone. But those process measures can be selected to measure key processes within the system. Say finding 3 process measures that if we can improve these then this important outcome measure will improve (using PDSA to make sure your prediction is accurate – don’t fall into the trap of focusing on improving that measure even after the data shows it does not result in the desired improvement to the overall results that was predicted).

Also, process measures are helpful in serving as indicators that something is going wrong (or potentially going better than normal). Process measures will change quickly (good ones can be close to real time) thus facilitate immediate remedies and immediate examination of what lead to the problem to aid in avoiding that condition in the future.
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Your Online Presence

Posted on March 26, 2007  Comments (4)

Web anonymity can sink your job search:

In today’s job market, turning up missing on the Web may not be a fatal flaw, and it’s probably better than having a search result in a photo of you in a hula skirt. But over time, the lack of a Web presence – particularly for IT professionals – may well turn from a neutral to a negative, says Tim Bray, director of Web technologies at Sun Microsystems Inc. “Particularly because we’re a core technology provider, if someone came looking for a senior-level job and had left no mark on the Internet, I’d see that as a big negative,” he says.

And it’s not just about technology, Bray says. “Most companies would rather have somebody who has demonstrated the propensity to contribute, and one [sign] of that is going out and getting involved, joining in the discussion.”

I think that is exactly right. For certain jobs the need for an online presence is not as critical, however, knowledge workers can really help out their prospects with a good online presence. Creating such a presence can be a big job or it can be a fairly simple site with a few articles with your ideas on topics that interest you. Creating your own blog can also be an effective strategy. Guest blog posts on another blog can also be useful. Having one home page that can serve as the long term address is a very good idea (and getting a web site with your name is a good idea, if possible, even if you don’t use it right away, for example: johnhunter.com). Then you can link to various efforts (guest posts on blogs, articles at various sites, podcast…).

Related: Blogging is Good for You – Your Online Identity – Curious Cat Career Connections – Curious Cat Management Improvement Articles

GM Lacrosse: China and the USA

Posted on March 25, 2007  Comments (0)

Made in China, an article exploring the new GM LaCrosse:

The redesign was pitch perfect, so well targeted that the Chinese LaCrosse is on track to sell nearly 110,000 units in its second year in production. (In the United States, the LaCrosse isn’t expected to approach the 100,000-unit mark, ever.) Now, with that success still fresh, Qiu and the China design team face a critical test. They will design the next Buick LaCrosse, due out at the end of the decade, for the entire world.

I wonder how much value there is to designing cars to be world cars? Occasionally that might make sense and standardizing parts and even design processes… makes sense to me (as much as practical). The key it seems to me is “so well targeted” and local manufacturing.

Their plan, unprecedented within GM, was to pit teams of designers from around the world against each other.

I don’t like that idea. As much as possible they should cooperate with each other.

Using Google to Eliminate Some IT Costs

Posted on March 24, 2007  Comments (0)

Computer Science 101: A Case Study In Google Applications:

Sannier plans to shut down the university’s own e-mail servers later this spring. When that happens, thousands more will move over. The portal provides access to other functions of Google Apps, including calendar (which users can now share online, something they couldn’t do before), instant messaging, and search. Within the next two months, Sannier expects to offer personalized home pages and Google’s Docs & Spreadsheets applications combo.

The cost to ASU: zero. The university had been spending a half-million dollars a year on servers and storage for its open source e-mail system, including administrative support costs. More important is the faster pace of innovation. “Now we’re on Google’s development curve, not ours,” Sannier says.

Google’s efforts with Google Apps have fairly quietly become quite significant. I find gmail excellent (and Google talk and Google calendar are good but hopefully will be improved significantly). I must say I find Open Office very good and so don’t quite see the value in Google docs but maybe I am missing something (for those few documents that benefit from collaboration Google’s model sounds interesting – though a wiki seem like the best option in that case). Seems very possible Google Apps are an example of Clayton Christensen’s concept of disruptive innovation.

Exposing CEO Pay Excesses

Posted on March 23, 2007  Comments (4)

The politics of pay from The Economist:

Although barely one-tenth of the 2,000 biggest American companies have yet reported under the new rules, the tally of negative headlines is already mounting. “There are already plenty of examples of firms reporting chief-executive pay packages of millions of dollars more than expected,” says Paul Hodgson of the Corporate Library, a research firm. He reckons that the firms that have already reported are a representative sample likely to provide a good indication of the overall trend.

Thankfully, more of the ludicrous pay packages details are being made public and shame will force some changes (those approving these pay packages have to justify such reckless spending). Of course, some feel no shame no matter how egregious the situation. As I mentioned earlier, I would add excessive executive pay to Deming’s seven deadly diseases of western management. We need to drastically role back the luducrous pay packages.

Related: More on Obscene CEO Pay – Excessive Executive Pay – Toyota’s CEO pay under $1 million – Warren Buffett on Excessive CEO Pay – Compensation at Whole Foods – Bloated CEO salaries, subsidized by taxpayers, undermine American values – CEO Compensation: A Problem That Just Gets Worse

Making Suits in the USA

Posted on March 21, 2007  Comments (0)

Trying On Toyota’s Methods (site broke link so I removed it):

Keeping Abboud’s suit manufacturing in the United States has advantages, such as reduced shipping time, he said. He also believes overseas workers can’t beat the quality and price of the suits Abboud produces in New Bedford, which sell in Nordstrom Inc. and Bloomingdale’s for $700 to $1,000.

Abboud says its sales are about $400 million a year. The company is doing fine, but management says the U.S. factory has to improve constantly to justify the higher salaries its workers make, compared with foreign rivals. The average wage in the factory is $12 an hour, plus union benefits. That’s three or four times what workers in Mexico make, Sapienza said.
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“It’s one thing to do it in 2007,” he said. “Are we going to be able to do it in 2010? In 2012? … In the final analysis, if Toyota can make a car in 13 hours, there’s no reason we shouldn’t be able to make a suit in a much reduced period of time.”

Related: Made in the USA – Joseph Abboud: Lean Manufacturer – More on Joseph Abboud

Eric Schmidt Podcast – Google Innovation and Entrepreneurship

Posted on March 20, 2007  Comments (1)

iinnovate podcast interview with Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google.

“Normal sales quotas” – oops maybe Google can learn from others in this area. I found it interesting that Eric Schmidt teaches at Standford even while being the CEO of Google, because as he says he learns from students questions. The podcast series, done by 2 Stanford students, has quite an impressive list of, I guess, visiting speakers at Stanford: Andy Grove, Alex Counts, David Kelley…

via: Eric Schmidt Interviewed On Entrepreneurship, Management and More

Related: Innovation at Google – Google Shifts Focus – Chaos Management (by design) at Google

Errors in Thinking

Posted on March 19, 2007  Comments (0)

photo of Jerome Groopman

The Doctor’s In, But Is He Listening?, text and podcast from NPR:

Jerome Groopman (photo) is a doctor who discovered that he needed a doctor. When his hand was hurt, he went to six prominent surgeons and got four different opinions about what was wrong. Groopman was advised to have unnecessary surgery and got a seemingly made-up diagnosis for a nonexistent condition. Groopman, who holds a chair in medicine at Harvard Medical School, eventually found a doctor who helped…

“Usually doctors are right, but conservatively about 15 percent of all people are misdiagnosed. Some experts think it’s as high as 20 to 25 percent,” Groopman tells Steve Inskeep. “And in half of those cases, there is serious injury or even death to the patient.”
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Errors in thinking: We use shortcuts. Most doctors, within the first 18 seconds of seeing a patient, will interrupt him telling his story and also generate an idea in his mind [of] what’s wrong. And too often, we make what’s called an anchoring mistake – we fix on that snap judgment.

An understanding of theory of knowledge is helpful to counteract errors in thinking. How we think is not perfect, and an understanding the weaknesses and faulty conclusions we are susceptible to making is helpful. That can help avoid jumping to conclusions that are faulty and to design systems that counteract such behavior.

Related: Epidemic of Diagnoses – Write it Down – The Illusion of Understanding – Illusions – Optical and Other – health care improvement posts

Read an exceprt from the book: How Doctors Think by Jerome Groopman .

Experiment and Learn

Posted on March 18, 2007  Comments (0)

Experimenting with milkshakes?

I have been on a mission to convince firms to do simple experiments that will give them feedback regarding the decisions that they make. Just as with people (as Anders Ericsson studies), firms cannot learn with feedback. It turns out, however, that it is not easy for people in companies to see the wisdom in experiments.

Experiments are useful and underused. PDSA and design of experiments are two concepts that aid in experimenting successfully.

Related: Google: Experiment Quickly and Often – Why Use Designed Factorial Experiments? – Using Design of Experiments – theory of knowledge

Deming Institute Seminar

Posted on March 16, 2007  Comments (0)

The Deming Institute is sponsoring, How to Create Unethical, Ineffective Organizations That Go Out of Business, 23-25 April, 2007 in Lansing, Michigan. I will be co-presenting the seminar. Let me know if you sign up.

Twenty-seven faulty management and corporate governance practices create most of the problems in any organization. These practices will be identified, and better practices recommended. It will be shown that as better practices are introduced, quality of products and services increases, costs decline, and you create a globally competitive advantage for your organization.

Learn how governance practice leads to the heaviest losses, how inconsistencies between policy and strategy create sub-optimal outcomes, how mismanagement of people leads to unethical and ineffective behavior, and how to overcome these problems. Study the theory and practice of management. Not quality management, not good management, not excellent management, not knowledge management, not risk management, not process management, not performance management, not supply or asset management, not technology management, not time management, not emergency management, just plain management.

Related: Curious Cat Management Improvement Calendar – Deming Seminar and Conference – Deming Institute Conference

Best Buy Rethinks the Time Clock

Posted on March 15, 2007  Comments (0)

Best Buy Rethinks the Time Clock:

With a classic flextime structure, workers arrange their schedules with their boss in advance. But under a program called Rowe, for “results-only work environment,” the boss has no say in scheduling and can judge employees only on tasks successfully completed – even if none were done in the office. The five-year-old plan now covers 60 percent of the employees at Best Buy’s corporate headquarters near Minneapolis.

And by all accounts, it’s working. Employee productivity has increased an average of 35 percent in departments covered by the program. Rowe “has forced managers and employees to be really clear about what needs to be accomplished,” says spokes-woman Dawn Bryant.
In defense of bosses from hell

Flush with the success of Rowe in its white-collar world, Best Buy is about to start testing the program in select retail stores. The company won’t release any details on this pilot project, and skeptics abound. “It’s pretty tough to ‘phone it in’ or work on your own independent schedule in retail,” says Susan Seitel, president of Minnesota-based Work Life & Human Capital Solutions.

Quite a contrast to: Wal-Mart Scheduling and Respect for People – One More Reason Not to Shop at Wal-Mart. I can see some challenges trying to make this work, in fact it seems like the wrong way to do it to me but I support trying creative ideas even when I am skeptical (just pilot it on a small scale and assess the results). Why can’t you trust your managers to be sensible when they approve a schedule?

Management Improvement Carnival #7

Posted on March 14, 2007  Comments (0)

  • How are stories of successful companies leading us astray? by Karen Wilhelm – “correlation does not equal causation, a inspecting a “sample” consisting only of good parts will not yield good information about a process, and anecdotal evidence is interesting but not acceptable as proof of a hypothesis.”
  • SBTI Response to WSJ Article by Joe Ficalora and Joe Costello – “By and large the executives who have left GE and AlliedSignal (now Honeywell) and other Six-Sigma companies who became top executives have uniformly started Six-Sigma and Lean programs at their new companies, and nearly all successfully deployed it.”
  • Mark Graban interviews Jim Womack: Machine Revisited (podcast): “The job of ‘Machine’ was to describe a complete business system… ‘the biggest disappointment… was to have people tell me it was a great book about factories.’”
  • Why few organizations adopt systems thinking by Russell L. Ackoff – “To understand why organizations do not use mistakes as opportunities for learning, other than a disposition inherited from educational institutions, we must recognize that there are two types of mistake: errors of commission and errors of omission.”
  • Kano Model by Robert Thompson – “Attractive quality attributes can be described as surprise and delight attributes; they provide satisfaction when achieved fully, but do not cause dissatisfaction when not fulfilled.” – Curious Cat on the Kano Model

    • Read more

Simple Solutions That Work

Posted on March 13, 2007  Comments (0)

Nurse, the maggots

Maggots clean wounds 18 times faster than normal treatments, can conquer MRSA and would save the NHS millions.
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Recent studies have indicated that maggot therapy can cut treatment duration from 89 days to just five, and slash the cost from £2,200 to £300 per patient. Moon describes the grubs as “a highly cost-effective, highly efficient but forgotten and undervalued method of treatment”, and Caroline Flint, the Public Health Minister, says that using fly larvae (maggots) is “increasingly common” and “an illuminating idea”

In trials in Wales and Manchester, says Moon, patients not only recovered faster but noticed less smell and felt less pain from their rotting flesh when maggots were allowed to eat it. “Maggots are highly precise,” she says. “Unlike surgeons, they remove only the rotting tissue. Surgeons have to cut out healthy tissue to clear the wound, thereby creating a larger wound and more bleeding.”

I can believe we would avoid such a simple solution even it is more effective (the health care system seems perfectly capable of avoiding simple effective solutions to me). I hope we pursue scientific study of the most effective solutions – even if they don’t fit with the current way of thinking. It seems to me the health care system needs to find creative and cost effective solutions.

Related: USA Health Care System Costs Reach 16% of GDP – Lean UK Hospitals – Management Improvement in Healthcare – Maggot Therapy Project – Maggots make medical comeback

NCAA Basketball Challenge 2007

Posted on March 12, 2007  Comments (0)

Once again I have created a group on the ESPN NCAA Basketball Tournament Challenge for curiouscat basketball fans. To participate, go to the curiouscat ESPN group and make your picks.

Go Badgers and Go Davidson,

Jeffrey Pfeffer on Evidence-Based Practices

Posted on March 11, 2007  Comments (0)

Jeffrey Pfeffer Testifies to Congress About Evidence-Based Practices:

In this short statement, I want to make five points as succinctly as possible, providing references for background and documentation for my arguments. First, organizations in both the public and private sector ought to base policies not on casual benchmarking, on ideology or belief, on what they have done in the past or what they are comfortable with doing, but instead should implement evidence-based management. Second, the mere prevalence or persistence of some management practice is not evidence that it works — there are numerous examples of widely diffused and quite persistent management practices, strongly advocated by practicing executives and consultants, where the systematic empirical evidence for their ineffectiveness is just overwhelming. Third, the idea that individual pay for performance will enhance organizational operations rests on a set of assumptions. Once those assumptions are spelled out and confronted with the evidence, it is clear that many — maybe all — do not hold in most organizations. Fourth, the evidence for the effectiveness of individual pay for performance is mixed, at best — not because pay systems don’t motivate behavior, but more frequently, because such systems effectively motivate the wrong behavior. And finally, the best way to encourage performance is to build a high performance culture. We know the components of such a system, and we ought to pay attention to this research and implement its findings.

Great stuff. Read the entire document. via: Bob Sutton’s Work Matters

Related: Evidence-based Management – Illusions – Optical and Other

Books: The Knowing-Doing Gap by Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert Sutton – Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths And Total Nonsense: Profiting From Evidence-Based Management by Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert Sutton

Investors Business Daily on Deming

Posted on March 10, 2007  Comments (1)

He Pointed Firms To Quality by Kirk Shinkle:

Management responsibility took on an almost moral role for Deming. Failure in business and the resulting unemployment could be blamed almost entirely on leadership. Leaders, he believed, should commit to their employees, not hop around from job to job. He would likely have eschewed today’s renewed climate of zealous private equity buyouts and an increasing trend toward mobile management.

In the introduction to his 1983 book “Out of the Crisis,” Deming called hostile takeovers and leveraged buyouts “a cancer in the American system.” “Fear of takeover, along with emphasis on the quarterly dividend, defeats constancy of purpose,” he wrote. He also derided a focus on short-term profits that comes with traditional benchmarks used by many corporations.
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“Back in 1980 when he talked about working with your suppliers, people would just back up against the wall. That was heresy,” Orsini said. “Now we’re teaching courses in supply chain management, and most people have no idea the roots of it are in Deming’s thinking.” Deming opposed protectionist laws and policies, calling trade between nations “an essential component of peace and prosperity.” Deming’s influence on managing people’s skill was built on a solid foundation of quantifiable fact.

Related: Deming on Management – The purpose of an organization – distorting the system – Management: Geeks and Deming – Curious Cat Deming Connections – Red Bead Experiment – Curious Cat Investment Blog – Willam O’Neil (Investor’s Business Daily founder) – not exactly a Deming based investing approach

Kanban In Software Engineering

Posted on March 9, 2007  Comments (0)

Kanban in Action:

The kanban system allows us to deliver on my 3 elements of my recipe for success: reduce work-in-progress (in fact it limits it completely); balance capacity against demand (as new CRs [change requests] can only be introduced when a kanban card frees up after a release); and prioritize. We hold a business prioritization meeting once per week with vice presidents from around the company. They get to pick new CRs from the backlog to allocate against free kanban cards. This forces them to think about the one, two, or three most important things for them to get done now. It forces prioritization.

Another interesting application of management improvement concepts in software development by David Anderson.

Related: Management Science for Software Engineering – Microsoft CMMI – Innovation in Software Development Process – Lean and Theory of Constraints – Kanban definition

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