Posted on September 29, 2008  Comments (6)

The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete by Chris Anderson

see update, below. Norvig was misquoted, he agrees with Box’s maxim

I must say I am not at all convinced that a new method without theory ready to supplant the existing scientific method. Now I can’t find peter Norvig’s exact words online (come on Google – organize all the world’s information for me please). If he said that using massive stores of data to make discoveries in new ways radically changing how we can learn and create useful systems, that I believe. I do enjoy the idea of trying radical new ways of viewing what is possible.

Practice Makes Perfect: How Billions of Examples Lead to Better Models (summary of his talk on the conference web site):

Related: Will the Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete? – Pragmatism and Management Knowledge – Data Based Decision Making at Google – Seeing Patterns Where None Exists – Manage what you can’t measure – Data Based Blathering – Understanding Data – Webcast on Google Innovation
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Posted on September 27, 2008  Comments (5)

Companies seem to think technology is an excuse to provide bad service. Or maybe they don’t need any excuse at all to do so, based on how often they provide bad service. My latest experience with lame pointy haired boss technology came while looking to watch a football game online. Years ago you could listen to any Wisconsin Badger game over the internet – very simple, no special software (just the simple free Real Audio plugin). In subsequent years (just to play a simple audio stream that had worked in previous years they kept requiring upgrades and their ever more complex required software would fail very often). Then the option of listen to online radio broadcasts disappeared altogether (for schools that chose to prevent this anyway).

Now sites that provide video seem incapable of making it a simple process. They chose not to use standard open software solutions. Instead they require you follow their desires to use this or that and then the whole operation fails quite often. Google, no surprise, is an exception (yes it worked prior to Google, they were just smart enough to buy it and not break it). YouTube just works. Can others copy this, idea? Some can, but many phbs decide that really everyone that uses their web sites should be happy to try and download special software and make configuration changes… to get their site working on their personal computers.

The idea that playing video online is solved problem and just making it more and more complex is not a good idea for users no matter if they want to add some bullet points to their boss on why they should get a larger raise this year because they got the engineers to add on some additional new feature that no-one actually wants. Granted This solved problem is a bit lame now, so I am all for improving it. But this should be a process that goes for simpler solutions, not more complex ones. And certainly any timed to the operating system of the end user is too idiotic to consider.
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Posted on September 25, 2008  Comments (0)

Here are some posts from the blog 3 years ago, this month. I took the photo on my visit to North Cascades National Park.

• Measurement and Data Collection – I have found it helpful to ask: what will you do if the data we collect is 30? What will you do if it is 3?… I find, that asking that question often helps reach a better understanding of what data is actually needed, so you then collect better data.
• Operational Definitions and Data Collection – When collecting and reporting data it is important to include the operational definitions associated with that data.
• Fixing Healthcare from the Inside – don’t just copy idea, rapid experiments and pilot on a small scale (PDSA). You can’t just copy what works in one place (this is one of the risks of benchmarking, if done improperly – as is often the case).
• How Toyota Turns Workers Into Problem Solvers – Benefits can be gained by adopting some concepts in a piecemeal manner. However, many benefits accrue only when the positive interactions between Toyota Production System (TPS – Lean) concepts occur

I have added a page to my personal web site with links to my pages on social web sites: LinkedIn, Reddit, Kiva…).

Posted on September 24, 2008  Comments (0)

Guest post from John McConnell, Wysowl Pty Ltd

Dr. Deming opened his first Australian seminar in 1986 with the question, “What are we here to do”? After some discussion he answered his own question with, “To learn”, and “To have a good time”.

He repeated this opening at subsequent seminars.

The Fifteenth Point
Mr. Murray Mansfield of Melbourne has what I believe to be the only completely up to date version of Dr. Deming’s famous Obligations for Top Management. After a long discussion with Murray during his last Australian seminar, Dr. Deming agreed that there ought to be a fifteenth point. He took Murray’s notes turned to the page containing the fourteen points and at the foot of the page wrote:

15.     Have a good time!

Related: I Don’t Know – Find Joy and Success in Business – posts on respect for people – Destroyed by Best Efforts – Lets Play Work – Seven (plus 2) Deadly Diseases of Western Management

Posted on September 23, 2008  Comments (1)

Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne’s Enterprise Thinking Network Ongoing Discussion series this month features conference calls with Peter Scholtes (Thursday, September 25th, Noon to 2pm Pacific Time – USA) and Brian Joiner (Friday the 26th, Noon to 2pm Pacific Time – USA). See more details and register online.

Peter’s books (The Team Handbook and The Leader’s Handbook) are thought pieces for Thursday’s conversation with Peter. As a place to begin the conversation with Peter, we might consider the possibility that teamwork and leadership are perhaps even more in our awareness today than when Peter wrote these books. And if you’d like to explore more of Peter’s thinking and writing, see also a variety of articles and letters by and about Peter at his website.

Brian has offered us several Thought Pieces related to his current work. According to Brian, “The thing I am most excited about now is the Transition Towns movement which started in the UK a few years ago. It’s what I will be focusing on once the First Unitarian Society green building is effectively launched.” In addition, the following site gives a brief intro to the Transition Town approach, with much more detail on the Transition approach available in their Primer. Says Brian, “I hope this will be enough to start conversations.”

Both Brian and Peter are from Madison, Wisconsin (where I grew up) and both worked with my father: Bill Hunter. Brian Joiner also wrote Fourth Generation Management and co-authored the Team Handbook with Peter.

Related: Curious Cat Essential Management Books – Brain Joiner on Dr. Deming – Total Quality Leadership vs. Management by Control by Brian L. Joiner and Peter R. Scholtes

Posted on September 22, 2008  Comments (0)

The Ergonomics of Innovation by Hayagreeva Rao and Robert Sutton

Related: Saving Lives: US Health Care Improvement – 5 Million Lives Campaign – PBS Documentary: Improving Hospitals – Hospital Reform – IHI on CBS – Articles on Improving Health Care Performance – Drug Prices in the USA – posts on innovation

Posted on September 20, 2008  Comments (0)

More people learning about manufacturing truths lean thinkers have known for a long time. Made (again) in America

Learn more about lean manufacturing.

Related: Lean Manufacturing Saving Jobs Again – Made in the USA (2006) – Workplace Management by Taiichi Ohno – New Look American Manufacturing – Wisconsin Manufacturing

Posted on September 18, 2008  Comments (0)

Kenji Hiranabe talks about Toyota’s development process (webcast). Kenji shares a presentation he attended earlier this year by Nobuaki Katayama, a former Chief Engineer at Toyota, and the lessons he learned from him.

The webcast takes awhile to get going. If you are impatient you might want to start at the 6 minute mark. Some thoughts from the talk:

• Voice of the Customer is diffuse. A strong concept (for a project – new car for example) is very important to focus thought, listening to voice of the customer is important but must use strong concept to avoid losing focus (due to diffuse customer feedback).
• Honest face to face communication is important. Bad news first – present bad news first [don't try to hide bad news - my thoughts in brackets, John Hunter].
• Everyone must think about cost reduction, many efforts add up to big impact [the importance of reducing waste everywhere].
• benchmark, not to copy others, but to learn from what others do well.

The webcast includes a nice (though short) discussion of agile management in software development and lean manufacturing (the different situation of manufacturing versus software development). Kenji Hiranabe has also translated several agile and lean books into Japanese including Implementing Lean Software Development.

Related: Kenji Hiranabe’s blog – Marissa Mayer Webcast on Google Innovation – Articles and webcasts by Mary Poppendieck – Future Directions for Agile Management – Interview with Toyota President

Posted on September 16, 2008  Comments (0)

Dr. Deming encouraged the use of the Plan-Do-Study-Act cycle to improve. Agile Management encourages a similar mindset – to test out ideas in practice and adapt quickly. A key to both strategies is to quickly iterate over possible solutions. Tesco provides an example of this strategy:

At the time Tesco paused the expansion I mentioned it seemed to me they should have allowed more time for PDSA.

To me, it is enormously important to design management systems that support and encourage continual improvement. That is much more important than superior results today. Results today are also, important, but a choice between an inflexible system that produce good results today and a flexible system with results not quite as good is not a close choice. Good management improvement requires continual improvement and therefore systems must be designed to support and encourage continual improvement.

Related: Experiment Quickly and Often – I own Tesco stock – management improvement tips – Tesco: Lean Provision

Posted on September 15, 2008  Comments (0)

Read the previous management carnivals. I posted on a new tool for finding management resources online, I will monitor the management Reddit for popular new blog posts to include in future carnivals.

• Where Does Bad Corporate Culture Come From, and Can It Be Corrected? by Tim Prosser – “while it is natural for bad organizational culture to develop, this tendency can be countered and a more positive and productive organizational culture can be produced, though it requires savvy and introspective management.”
• Toyota’s Commitment to People by Mark Graban – “I’m sure keeping the workers on and training them (with real work, not just letting them sit in the cafeteria) is all about the long-term good of the company.”
• Consulting is easy by Pascal Van Cauwenberghe – “Real Lean is making use of the collective wisdom of everybody in the organisation.”
• Prioritizing and Planning for Market Risk by David Anderson – “Matts-Maassen tells us to push back decisions as far as possible and to gather information, create options and understand when they expire. This helps us to optimize decision making and minimum the risk of a decision being a bad one.”
• An IT Guy Gets Lean by Kevin Meyer – “This isn’t to mean that all software is a problem, and we definitely believe that software tools, appropriately deployed, can create value. But more often than not they mask waste and reduce the ability to change by enforcing rigid processes”
• 5 Things I am Still Learning about Lean Manufacturing by Jon Miller – “maybe I am only just learning that if you properly take care of the people issues first, the factory will fix itself.”
• Congratulations. You’ve mapped out the future state. Now what? by Dan Markovitz – “Establishing standard work, understanding limits and leveling the workload so as not to overload people, allowing them to actually create the future state they’ve mapped out — this is a humane, rational, and far better way to work.”
• The problem with single points of failure – “Companies can’t rely on people like me, or Dr. Hammer, to be their single point of failure. A great process or great ideas must be capable of going on without you.” – I wrote on a similar topic for the Curious Cat Management blog in May: Well Managed Companies
• Lean Tutorial: Production Capacity Template by Ron Pereira – webcast walks through using a spreadsheet (template included in the post) to manage the production line.
• Future Directions for Agile Management by John Hunter – “Deliver working systems quickly (with limited features, add features based on user needs)… Build systems that cope well with uncertainty and allow for constant continuous improvement of processes”

Posted on September 14, 2008  Comments (0)

I am happy to say our blog has been included in the Top 100 Blogs for Development Managers. The list of blogs is quite impressive, including blogs referenced here previously: Joel on Software (ranked 1st), Coding Horror (2nd), Seth Godin’s Blog (3rd), Paul Graham’s essays (4), Signal vs. Noise (40), Agile Management Blog (43) and Lean Software Engineering (68). The Curious Cat Blog is ranked 41st.

You can read our software development category to get our posts specifically related to that topic. Some specific software development related posts that might give you a flavor for the blog: Software Supporting Processes Not the Other Way Around – Future Directions for Agile Management – Metrics and Software Development – The Defect Black Market. And hopefully many of our other posts will also help software development managers.

These, and similar, rankings don’t mean much, other than according to the criteria used this is now they ranked. Still it is nice to see the Curious Cat Management Improvement blog was nominated and according to the criteria used did so well.

Related: #2 Engineering Blog – Performance without Appraisal – Search Share Data, Checking the ACSI – Best Research University Rankings (2008)

Posted on September 11, 2008  Comments (0)

Photo of the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington DC by John Hunter. The museum is the newest addition to the collection of Smithsonian museums on the Mall. The second photo is of a Mayan calendar. Photos can be used with attribution.

Related: Botanical Garden, Washington DC – Mount Saint Helens National Volcanic Monument – The Cloisters Museum, Manhattan

Posted on September 10, 2008  Comments (0)

The bad idea behind our failed health-care system by Malcolm Gladwell

This is another article with an interesting take on the problems with the broken health care system in the USA. I don’t totally agree with the conclusion. I think the failure of the system and refusal to make substantial change have multiple causes including: smart lobbyists paying politicians lots of money to support their interest in keeping the current system, people being fearful about change, false perceptions about the system performance (thankfully an understanding of the poor performance is becoming more widespread recently), that the system works least poorly for the wealthy who have more influence than those without insurance, that the benefits of spending huge amounts today are going to specific companies and people and thus are available for buying political support (not just paying politicians but also funding marketing campaigns, experts to provide journalists the position of those in favor of the existing system…) while the benefits of changing are much more distributed. Luckily companies are increasingly – decades after Deming noted this health care costs are a huge problem for companies in the USA – focusing on the need for improving what is often one of the largest expenses for companies. The issue many fail to understand is how much the excessive costs of health care in the USA harm the ability of companies in the USA to compete – many even fail to appreciate the human cost of tens of millions of people without health insurance.

Related: Drug Prices in the USA – Measuring the Health of Nations – Overview of 5 Nations Health Care Systems – Fixing Health Care – Improving the Health Care System

Posted on September 7, 2008  Comments (0)

‘New’ management truths sometimes started as heresies by Cecil Johnson

I agree with this idea except the implication that these ideas are accepted now. To the extent they are excepted it is only a surface understanding of a couple of tools and concepts. The true power of the new ideas are still adopted in a very small number of organizations. Thankfully small initial steps are being made but there is much more to be done, before we can think of these ideas as accepted.

Which of Dr. Deming’s seven deadly diseases of western management have been effectively addressed in several decades? My opinion? Zero. Granted 2 are probably closer to economic failures (political issues that management could have spent time trying to fix but not really in the control of a single company): excessive medical costs and excessive legal damage awards.

Excessive legal damage awards was the one disease most business school graduates would have agreed was a disease decades ago, and they still do. They have spent a great deal of effort to reform the legal system, but have not been effective. Many now agree the health care system is broken. But I would say less than 50% understand this, even decades later, even after the situation has deteriorated much further. And certainly little effective effort at improving the health care system has been made. At least in the last 5 years some real efforts are being made by senior executives as some companies.

And I strongly believe Dr. Deming would see the current unjustified taking of companies resources by CEOs for their own use, in ludicrous pay packages, as a new disease. If these “new” (the system of management ideas are at least 30 years old, as a system, and it has been 60 years since Dr. Deming present them in Japan after World War II) management ideas were common, such horrible behavior as we continue to see would not be tolerated.

Related: Deming Companies – Toyota Execution Not Close to Being Copied – Management Advice Failures – Purpose of an Organization – New Rules for Management? No!

Posted on September 4, 2008  Comments (1)

Reddit is a web site that ranks web pages by user votes. If you login and vote yourself they will develop a pattern of what you like and can show you a list of the pages you are likely to enjoy. I believe this is done by matching your likes and dislikes with others. When showing you a list of recommended links it gives some importance to up votes by anyone and more priority to up votes by those that have shown a tendency to like what you do.

I have recently setup a management sub-reddit (a distinct topic-focused-area on the management improvement topics covered in this blog). If you sign up you can not only vote on the links displayed but add new links (that then will be voted on by others). I think Reddit does a very good job of using social aspects of the internet to provide recommendations that are worthwhile (I have used the site for years). The success of this management subreddit depends on reaching a critical mass of users. So I encourage you to give it a try and vote on links you enjoy and add new articles, web sites, blog posts… The benefit of this subreddit will grow as we grow the number of participants.

I have also recently added a page to johnhunter.com with links to my online presence on various sites (such as: StumbleUpon, Kiva, LinkedIn…).

Related: Dell, Reddit and Customer Focus – Curious Cat Management Improvement Search – Curious Cat Management Improvement Library

Posted on September 3, 2008  Comments (0)

Learning from a summer intern program:

Excellent post and the advice echoes his advice on hiring: the End of the Job Interview. We have an internship directory, that helps people find opportunities (and those with internships to offer a way to market it) which includes a list of virtual internships.

Related: Seth Godin on Marketing and the Internet – Internships Increasing – Curious Cat Management SubReddit

Posted on September 2, 2008  Comments (1)

Malcolm Gladwell presented at the New Yorker conference on the Challenge of Hiring in the Modern World. As usually, he provides some great thoughts. I wrote on Hiring the Right Workers

Malcolm Gladwell doesn’t use the same language but I think he says many of the same ideas: “Insisting on managing by the numbers even when the most important figures are unknown and maybe unknowable.” etc. This idea he frames as a mismatch problem.

Related: Hiring: Silicon Valley Style – People are Our Most Important Asset – Malcolm Gladwell Synchronicity – Hiring, Does College Matter? – Interviewing and Hiring Programmers – Gladwell (and Drucker) on Pensions

Posted on September 1, 2008  Comments (0)

Shaun Sayers is hosting the Management Improvement Carnival #42 on the Capable blog, highlights include:

• How to change the way we think about customer service (by Maria Palma) “it is not that people don’t care about relationships and don’t consider Service Excellence their job … it is simply that they do not appreciate the significance that their interactions may have on the person or client they are serving”
• 3 Steps to Statistical Thinking (by Rob Thompson) – “HG Wells: When you can measure what you are speaking about and express it in numbers, you know something about it. When you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind”
• If Peter Piper Picked a Peck of Prioritized Projects… (by Sue Kozlowski) even if significant costs can be saved – even if reliability can be improved – even if staffing efficiencies can be realized – if the project or deployment champion isn’t engaged, you may end up with a beautiful project that won’t be sustained
• Is long term goal driven planning a waste of time? (by Shaun Sayers) like the idea of an after-life, it’s nice to think that we can develop and execute long-term plans, because the alternative may be an uncomfortable thought
• Operational excellence is not a substitute for effective leadership or a good strategy (by Peter Abilla) Deploying a Lean or Six Sigma culture within your firm … is not a panacea; by itself, a culture of Operational Excellence will find itself lacking in a hyper-competitive world

Please submit your favorite management posts to the carnival. Read the previous management carnivals.