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See more photos from my visit to Parfrey’s Glen Natural Area in Wisconsin, about an hour outside of Madison. It really was amazingly beautiful - the pictures do not do it justice. The Parfrey’s Glen trail is under a mile but well worth visiting. If you want to hike more try the Ice Age National Scenic Trail or nearby Devil’s Lake State Park. The top photo is of me (John Hunter) at nearby Durwood’s Glen. The yellow flower is from Parfrey’s Glen.
Related: Coopers Rock State Forest, West Virginia - Metropolitan Museum of Art - South Carolina travel photos - The Importance of Management Improvement - Hoh Rain Forest and Ruby Beach - North Cascades National Park
An Essential Primer on Full and Fractional Factorial Test Design
Even if you are using full factorial to get the same amount of information as a fractional factorial test, it will take more time since you need more data to see statistically relevant differences between the many experiments. You might be wondering how fractional factorial can be accurate if interactions are possible?
Random interactions of high relevance are very rare, especially when looking for interactions of more than 2 factors. You really need to design tests where you look for meaningful interactions that are based on true business requirements rather than hoping for a random and low influence interaction between a red button, a hero shot and a headline.
I am a fan of design of experiments as long time readers know (see posts on design of experiments).
Some good resources for more on the topics discussed above: What Can You Find Out From 8 and 16 Experimental Runs? by George Box - Statistics for Experimenters - Design of Experiments in Advertising.
Related: Google Website Optimizer - factorial experiment articles - Using Design of Experiments - Marketers Are Embracing Statistical Design of Experiments
In Keeping Good Employees I talked about asking some simple questions. The biggest mistake I see managers make is to fail to deliver on what they say in such meetings.
There is the saying “It is better to be thought a fool than speak, and prove it.” Well it is better to be thought a pointy haired boss than to ask for feedback, then ignore it, and prove you are a PHB. This behavior is extremely common with a survey of employee satisfaction but can extend to any failure of management follow through. If you are not going to act on what good employees tell you - don’t ask.
If some of what they mention is something you disagree with, then explain that to them. Even bad decision making that is explained is better than no explanation and no action. If you end up explaining why no action can be taken on any suggestion then employees should rightfully (most likely) find you lacking. One aspect of the explanation is to educate them for future suggestions - there may well be factors they don’t think about that you must. But, even in such a case the best practice is normally to adjust the idea a bit to make it workable.
Related: Encourage Improvement Action by Everyone - Bring Me Problems and Solutions if You Have Them - Standardized Work Instructions - How to Improve - Write it Down - What Could be Improved?
Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) is a service providing web hosting. The cloud computing solution has been used by many organizations successfully. However the solution has experienced some problems including failing for much of the day on July 20th.
During our post-mortem analysis we’ve spent quite a bit of time evaluating what happened, how quickly we were able to respond and recover, and what we could do to prevent other unusual circumstances like this from having system-wide impacts. Here are the actions that we’re taking: (a) we’ve deployed several changes to Amazon S3 that significantly reduce the amount of time required to completely restore system-wide state and restart customer request processing; (b) we’ve deployed a change to how Amazon S3 gossips about failed servers that reduces the amount of gossip and helps prevent the behavior we experienced on Sunday; (c) we’ve added additional monitoring and alarming of gossip rates and failures; and, (d) we’re adding checksums to proactively detect corruption of system state messages so we can log any such messages and then reject them.
Finally, we want you to know that we are passionate about providing the best storage service at the best price so that you can spend more time thinking about your business rather than having to focus on building scalable, reliable infrastructure. Though we’re proud of our operational performance in operating Amazon S3 for almost 2.5 years, we know that any downtime is unacceptable and we won’t be satisfied until performance is statistically indistinguishable from perfect.
The failure was significant but in my view the advantages of Amazon S3 are still very significant. A huge advantage is how quickly you can scale if needed be. If your application is not hosted on Amazon S3 and it grows enormously you have to physically deal with buying servers, installing them, installing software… All this takes time. On Amazon S3 when you need the bandwidth you can get it, when you don’t need it you don’t have it sitting around unused. In that way it is very lean, it seems to me.
And while server infrastructure failures are bad, for most organizations the option is not Amazon S3 or some solution that is 100% reliable. Currently it is difficult to keep IT infrastructures online and operating and coping with shifting demand… For many situations Amazon S3 seems to be a great resource. They need to keep improving; and they seem to be doing so. Being open and honest about the challenges is a good sign. And improving the system, not blaming a person is another good sign.
Related: Bezos on the Internet Boom - Amazon’s Amazing Achievement - Bezos on Lean Thinking - CERN Pressure Test Failure - 12 Stocks for 10 Years Update (June 2008), Amazon is up 116% in the portfolio since 2005, just behind Google and ahead of Petro China
Understanding Why Good Workers Quit
“Ask them directly: What can we do to keep you?,” urges Kaye. And don’t be shy or dishonest. If the employee asks for things you cannot deliver, be direct in acknowledging it but also indicate what you can do. Know, too, that just by talking to employees in this way you are scoring points because it’s something that just does not happen in most companies.
More concretely, Karen Fink, vice president of human resources for Edmunds.com, said that the glue her company uses to keep top IT workers is as simple as interesting work. “Technical workers tend to remain with an organization where they have the opportunity to contribute to interesting projects that stretch their skill sets and where they have the opportunity to be educated on the latest technologies.”
Good advice. I like direct, simple, questions. What can we do to keep you? What do you enjoy about your job? What do you dislike? What can I do to increase your joy in work? What one thing would you most like to see changed? What do you want to see continue? Would you like help in some aspect of your career development? What can I do better? Am I providing too much oversight, not enough?
Give honest straight forward answers to questions. If someone wants to move ahead and needs to work harder to advance their career tell them that. If they need to be more cooperative, develop certain skills… tell them. The idea is not just to make the person happy in that meeting. If they need to work on certain things to get where they want then help them do that. Give your best advice and say what they can do to improve.
Related: People are Our Most Important Asset - What 1 Thing Can We Improve? - IT Talent Shortage, or Management Failure? - Silicon Valley Style Hiring - How to Improve - Respect for People, Understanding Psychology - The Joy of Work
HP shatters excessive packaging world record
Sadly not. What the überbox did contain was 16 smaller boxes “which in turn [each] contained (wrapped in foam so they wouldn’t get broken) exactly two sheets of A4 paper”
It is hard to imagine what management system creates such solutions. But it is not hard to image Dilbert’s pointy haired boss fitting right in there.
Related: Is Poor Service the Industry Standard (HP)? - Muda/waste - Customers Get Dissed and Tell - Companies in Need of Customer Focus
Paul Graham has some excellent ideas. I have written about some of them previously: Innovation Strategy, What Business Can Learn from Open Source and Google and Paul Graham’s Latest Essay. Y Combinator, which he founded, provides seed funding. Here are some ideas they would like to fund:
Related: Our Policy is to Stick Our Heads in the Sand - Find Joy and Success in Business - Innovative Thinking from Clayton Christensen
Pay for performance is a bad investment by Pete Waters
As Deming said (page 102 of Out of the Crisis): “The idea of a merit rating is alluring. The sound of the words captivates the imagination: pay for what you get; get what you pay for; motivate people to do their best, for their own good. The effect is exactly the opposite of what the words promise.” Understanding enough about managing organizations to know why it doesn’t work is not easy - which I think is a big reason why people go for the nice sounding, but flawed idea, I think. Read our posts on performance appraisals and the works we reference to learn.
Manufacturing has new look in R.I.
The closing of an old-fashioned assembly-line, low-wage factory always makes headlines, contributing to the image of the industry as one with a bleak future, Taito noted, while advanced manufacturers who steadily grow and add three or four jobs a year win no notice. “But that’s real growth, sustained growth,” she said of the latter.
Grove said RIMES has promoted the advantages of the lean initiative to Rhode Island manufacturers for about 10 years. “When you adopt lean manufacturing, it becomes the process of the whole shop and, by necessity, employees have to be more of a team than in the past,” he said. On-the-job training is routine at Pilgrim, according to Grove.
Still, the industry’s transition has not been painless. The number of manufacturing jobs in the state has declined steadily. In 2002, there were 64,796 people employed in manufacturing in Rhode Island and, 30 years ago in 1978, there were 134,654, according to figures from the R.I. Department of Labor and Training.
Yet another illustration of what I have been saying for years. USA manufacturing continues to grow and USA manufacturing jobs continue to shrink (as do worldwide manufacturing jobs). And as I have been saying for years, China manufacturing output continues to grow very quickly and China manufacturing jobs continue to shrink (China lost 7 times as many manufacturing jobs as the USA from 1995-2002).
Related: Manufacturing and the Economy (2005 post) - Creating Jobs - Top 10 Manufacturing Countries 2006 - America’s Manufacturing Future - Wisconsin Manufacturing - Manufacturing Employee Shortage in Utah
Amazing Stat: California Uses More Gas than China:
That’s according to the California Energy Commission’s State Alternative Fuels Plan, which was posted online last Christmas Eve (pdf). The whole report makes for some fascinating reading because it’s a blueprint for a low-carbon and renewable transportation fuel future. The dominant takeaway: it ain’t going to be easy.
One more choice statistic: gasoline usage in California has increased 50 percent, that’s 10 6.7 billion gallons, since 1988.
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But China’s oil thirst is growing — to almost 20 billion gallons in 2007 — and perhaps as early as this year, China’s 1.3 billion people will overtake California’s 37 million people in total gasoline and diesel usage.
Interesting data. The Curious Cat Economics Blog recently posted on the top oil consuming countries.
Related: Car Powered Using Compressed Air - Failure to Increase Gas Tax - Curious Cat Science and Engineering Blog - Energy posts
An outcome measure is used to measure the success of a system. For example, the outcome measure could be the percentage of people who do not get polio (the result). An output measure, for example, would be the number of people vaccinated with the polio vaccine (the output). Often we measure inputs (amount of money spent) or outputs (number of people vaccinated). They are usually easy to measure but obviously less valuable proxies for what the objective of the system (reducing the incidence of polio).
You should have all these types of measures but outcome measures are most likely to be missing so special care should be taken to make sure you are using them. It is important to define good outcome measures to use in determining the success of systems, and in determining the whether improvement projects actually result in improved outcomes.
In-process measures can be valuable in providing actionable information sooner than the outcome measure would allow action. In the polio example, an in process measure example could be % of vaccination by the time a babies is 18 months old. And looking across a country say it might well make sense to stratify the data to see if certain areas were doing poorly on this measure. If so that might be where to focus improvement. You don’t need to wait until people not vaccinated start contracting polio (which will likely be delayed for years after the system starts to have processes fail, in this example) to then notice the problem and then react.
Waiting for the outcome measure to point to a problem in this case (and in many cases) is far too late for process improvement. So process measures are needed to aid in managing the system and reacting to process results, before those processes create poor results (and can be seen as poor outcome measures). More on outcome measures.
Related: Operational Definition - tampering - management improvement web search - Measuring and Managing Performance in Organizations - Data is a Proxy - posts on managing using data
A couple more: Managing Fear - Bezos on Lean Thinking - Could Toyota Fix GM - Saving Lives: US Health Care Improvement
The Drucker difference and Toyota’s success by Ira A. Jackson, dean of the Peter F. Drucker Graduate School of Management, the business school of the Claremont Colleges.
Develop routines to resolve contradictions. As the authors note, “Unless companies teach employees how to deal with problems rigorously and systematically, they won’t be able to harness the power of contradictions.” Toyota has a number of tools including the well-known ask-why-five-times practice and the Plan-Do-Check-Act model.
Encourage employees to voice their opinions even if they are contrary. The people in top management must be open to hearing critical comments from employees and listening to opposing views if they want to engender new ideas and new ways of doing things.
Related: Drucker Opinion Essays from the WSJ - Deming and Toyota - Management Pioneer Peter Drucker - The Contradictions That Drive Toyota’s Success - Extreme Toyota: Radical Contradictions That Drive Success at the World’s Best Manufacturer
Meetings are perennial problems. People sit through meetings and then complain about how big a waste of time it was. Here are a couple very simple tips to try and actually improve (instead of just agreeing that meetings are wasteful, but doing nothing to improve).
I would strongly suggest if someone thinks they need to answer emails… instead of pay attention to the meeting they should not be in the meeting. Some people love to multi-task and act like they are too important to focus on something. I don’t find that true, instead they are just people that like to seem busy but not actually accomplish tasks. If your staff are doing this stop them. If you are subjected to working with such people, try to exclude them from the meeting and deal with people that actually care to focus and get things done.
Critical people on the other hand I find valuable (while others don’t want to deal with them). Encourage people to be open if meetings are not an effective use of their time. Talk to them about how to improve the meeting process. I take as true the idea that meetings are a problem and so those willing to state this and help make them better should be valued.
The Team Handbook also has good information on running effective meetings.
Related: Most Meetings are Muda - Programmers see meetings as wastes of time - Arbitrary Rules Don’t Work - Be Careful What You Measure
It is obvious a few companies don’t have any ability to, provide even just reasonably bad service (for them the goal of decent service is so far away as to not be reasonable). How often do Verizon (based on their lousy track record I won’t get FIOS), Comcast, Time Warner, AT&T, United… get blasted for horrible custom service? So often it is not news. Still, the stories of their failures are written about over and over as they make so many people so mad some can’t help posting yet another story about the failures to value customers. Seth Godin is one recent example - Learning from frustration:
Related: Dell, Reddit and Customer Focus - More Bad Customer Service Examples 
- Customer Hostility from Discover Card - Is Bad Service the Industry Standard? - Ritz Carlton and Home Depot - Better and Different
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