More Management Blog Posts From October 2005

Posted on November 30, 2008  Comments (0)

photo of yellow flower

So why did I have 2 posts with selections of October 2005 posts? Frankly I think I just made an error last month and missed the first half of October 2005, then I made a mistake and started at the beginning of October when starting this post instead of the beginning of November. But I think in this case two mistakes lead to a decent result. I certainly think October 2005 was packed with good posts, but you can judge for yourself. The photo is from my trip to Glacier National Park.

Family Business Gives $6.6 million in Bonuses to Workers

Posted on November 29, 2008  Comments (2)

The PEER Bearing Company (a manufacturer of bearings based in Illinois) was bought out by a Swedish company this year. The family that had owned the company gave surprise bonuses of $6.6 million to the 230 employees of the company (an average of over $28,000).

family thanks employees with surprise bonuses

Family members signed two thank-you cards to each employee, one in Spanish and one in English, expressing gratitude for “the loyalty and hard work of our employees over the years.” “They treated us like extended family,” said Maria Dima, who works at the company along with her husband, Valentin. “We won the lottery.”

On the day the checks were distributed, Valentin Dima watched as co-workers broke down in tears over their bonus checks. He drove home first, then opened his envelope: $33,000. His wife received a check for a smaller amount, and the two Romanian immigrants have since taken a Caribbean cruise to celebrate.
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The new owners intend to operate the company based 40 miles north of Chicago as a wholly owned subsidiary. Workers have been told that most will keep their jobs.

A small bit of good news for these troubling times. It is nice to see true respect for people being practiced. The family also created the Spungen Family Foundation, 2 years ago.

Related: Tilting at Ludicrous CEO Pay 2008 – Focus on Customers and Employees – People are Our Most Important Asset – Manufacturing Continuous to Increase in the USA

Thanksgiving: Micro-financing Entrepreneurs

Posted on November 28, 2008  Comments (2)

photo of Frew Wube in Ethiopia

This is a post from my Curious Cat Investing and Economics Blog. For me, giving back to others is part of my personal financial plan. As I have said most people that are actually able to read this are financially much better off than billions of other people today. At least they have the potential to be if they don’t chose to live beyond their means. Here are some of the ways I give back to others.

Kiva is a wonderful organization and particularly well suited to discuss because they do a great job of using the internet to make the experience rewarding for people looking to help – as I have mentioned before: Helping Capitalism. One of my goals for this blog is to increase the number of readers participating in Kiva – see current Curious Cat Kivans. I have also created a lending team on Kiva. Kiva added a feature that allows people to connect online. When you make a loan you may link you loan to a group.

I actually give more to Trickle Up (even though I write about Kiva much more). I have been giving to them for a long time. They appeal to my same desire to help people help themselves. I believe in the power of capitalism and people to provide long term increases in standards of living. I love the idea of providing support that grows over time. I like investing and reaping the rewards myself later (with investment I make for myself). But I also like to do that with my gifts. I would like to be able to provide opportunities to many people and have many of them take advantage of that to build a better life for themselves, their families and their children.

The photo shows Frew Wube, Haimanot and Melkan (brother and two sisters), an entrepreneur that received a grant from Trickle up. Trickle Up provides grants to entrepreneur, similar to micro loans, except the entrepreneur does not have to pay back the grant. They are able to use the full funds to invest in their business and use all the income they are able to generate to increase their standard of living and re-invest in the business.
Read more

Honda has Never had Layoffs and has been Profitable Every Year

Posted on November 25, 2008  Comments (6)

Engineers Rule, 2006

Longtime auto analyst John Casesa, who now runs a consulting company, says, “There’s not a company on earth that better understands the culture of engineering.” The strategy has worked thus far. Honda has never had an unprofitable year. It has never had to lay off employees.
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The lean and compact Fukui, like all of his predecessors, is an engineer who started in R&D and later ran the subsidiary. While other auto chief-executives-to-be were punching keyboards in an accounting office, Fukui ran the company’s motorcycle racing operations. He’s still racing. He hikes the stairs to his tenth-floor desk–tenth floor so he’s in the middle of things at Honda’s 16-story Tokyo headquarters and a desk because executives at Honda don’t have offices. Honda doesn’t disclose executive pay in detail, but the sum of salaries and bonuses that Fukui shares with 36 board members, $13 million, is just about enough for the boss at a big American company.

I checked and Honda was also profitable in 2007 and 2008 fiscal year (ending in September) and no I see no evidence of any layoffs this year (when I look online).

Related: Honda Engineering – Back to School for Honda Workers, 1993 – The Google Way: Give Engineers Room – Google’s Ten Golden Rules – Toyota as Homebuilder – Curious Cat Science and Engineering Blog – Toyota’s CEO pay under $1 million

Of all the bizarre subsidiaries that big companies can find themselves with, Harmony Agricultural Products, founded and owned by Honda Motor, is one of the strangest. This small company near Marysville, Ohio produces soybeans for tofu. Soybeans? Honda couldn’t brook the sight of the shipping containers that brought parts from Japan to its nearby auto factories returning empty. So Harmony now ships 33,000 pounds of soybeans to Japan. An inveterate tinkerer, Honda also set up a center nearby to develop better soybean varieties and improve agricultural processes.

Eric Schmidt on Management at Google

Posted on November 24, 2008  Comments (5)
Eric Schmidt speaks at the Management Lab Summit on May 29, 2008 in Half Moon Bay, California. Conversation with Professor Gary Hamel.

  • “The culture can be thought of as a ship and iterate culture with transparency for what people are doing. And that model scales pretty well.”
  • “I have two jobs, two roles. The first is to make sure every issue that is important is really debated to find, not the common outcome, but the best decision… second thing is to put pressure to make it happen quick.”
  • “it [managing better] starts with listening, it has to do with curiosity“
  • “everything has to be based on some fact”
  • “It’s only about the people.” [respect for people is critical, Google really acts as though the people are their most important asset - John].
  • “What is the number 1 goal of the company? It is end user happiness with search. What is the number 2 goal? It’s end user happiness with advertising. What is the number 3 goal? The construction of the Google network of partners to effectuate the first two. What is the number 4 goal? To grow and scale the business… You will eventually get extraordinary returns for your shareholders and maximize advertiser happiness if all those things happen… There are a lot of business executives that get confused on what the goal is and they think that shareholder value is the goal. Shareholder value is a consequence of the goal.”

Related: Eric Schmidt Podcast on Google Innovation and Entrepreneurship – Interview with Google CEO Eric Schmidt – Innovation at Google – Google: Experiment Quickly and Often – Marissa Mayer Webcast on Google Innovation – Google Management by Gary Hamel – Larry Page and Sergey Brin Interview Webcast

Invest in New Management Methods Not a Failing Company, 1986

Posted on November 22, 2008  Comments (0)

Invest in New Management Methods Not a Failing Company by William Hunter, 1986

I predict American Motors will stop making cars in Wisconsin in the near future, whether or not the state’s money is used for a temporary propping-up operation.

These competitors are beginning to understand how essential it is to take a long-term view of their businesses. Toyota, for example, took its top 40 managers on a two-day retreat to ponder what their corporation will look like in the 21st century. They are studying totally new methods of management [20 years later large portions of these "new" methods are still ignored by many - John]. These methods take continuous quality improvement as a central, guiding principle.
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Investing in American Motors now, in any form, is a mistake. If Wisconsin is to become a trend-setter in economic development, we need some long-term thinking in forming wise, creative policies.
It is difficult, I know, for legislators and other elected officials to take a long-term view when the tangible reward is re-election and elections come around quite frequently.
Our founding fathers are remembered for their long-term vision. We need to change the way our democracy works so that long-term visions is an integral part of all important discussions on economic development on the local, state and national level.

Don’t reward shortsightedness by James Cook

In 1985 I assumed the role of plant manager of one of the world’s foremost automotive tool manufacturers in a small northern Iowa town. It was then that I was introduced to W. Edwards Deming. At the time, the company had a greater market share than any of its individual domestic or foreign competitors, but ominous and encroaching signs from abroad began to threaten its pre-eminence in the automotive aftermarket. So steps had to be taken to arrest this incursion that could mean the end of its reign.

It was then, as I began my tenure at the company, that we began with Deming’s concept of Statistical Process Control, later changed to Quality Control, and the practice of Toyota’s kanban cell manufacturing techniques that would enhance the already high-quality standards that had defined the company for decades.
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If we had listened, if we had followed him, if we had incorporated his thinking not only in the automobile industry but in government, in the ubiquitous economy collapsing around us and in our private lives, we would now be far better for it.

Related: At Ford, Quality Was Our Motto in the 1980s – Ford’s Wrong Turn – Could Toyota Fix GM (2005) – Ford and Managing the Supplier Relationship – No Excessive Senior Executive Pay at Toyota – Creating Jobs

What’s the Value of a Big Bonus?

Posted on November 21, 2008  Comments (0)

What’s the Value of a Big Bonus? by Dan Ariely

To look at this question, three colleagues and I conducted an experiment. We presented 87 participants with an array of tasks that demanded attention, memory, concentration and creativity. We asked them, for instance, to fit pieces of metal puzzle into a plastic frame, to play a memory game that required them to reproduce a string of numbers and to throw tennis balls at a target. We promised them payment if they performed the tasks exceptionally well. About a third of the subjects were told they’d be given a small bonus, another third were promised a medium-level bonus, and the last third could earn a high bonus.
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So it turns out that social pressure has the same effect that money has. It motivates people, especially when the tasks at hand require only effort and no skill. But it can provide stress, too, and at some point that stress overwhelms the motivating influence.

When I recently presented these results to a group of banking executives, they assured me that their own work and that of their employees would not follow this pattern. (I pointed out that with the right research budget, and their participation, we could examine this assertion. They weren’t that interested.)

This is an interesting look at an effect of bonuses. We all know monetary bonuses can influence behavior. The problem is the type of behaviors that result. Huge bonuses, for example, create huge incentives to risk the future of the company for the chance at a huge bonus for the executive. Extrinsic motivation leads to many problems.

Problems with bonuses: Losses Covered Up to Protect Bonuses – “Pay for Performance” is a Bad Idea – Problems with Bonuses – Book: Punished By Rewards: The Trouble With Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A’s, Praise, and Other Bribes by Alfie Kohn – posts on executive pay

The Manager FAQ

Posted on November 20, 2008  Comments (3)

This is a great set of answers for programmers on the behavior of managers, that can also be of interest to some non-programmers.

The Manager FAQ by Peter Seebach

The following list is an attempt to cover some of the issues that will invariably come up when hackers without previous experience of the business community first start working in it. Other workers may also find it informative.
DISCLAIMER: The author is a hacker. Bias is inevitable.

Questions and Answers:

Section 1: Basic understanding.

1.1: Why doesn’t my manager just do some actual work?
Management is a kind of work. Just as programs need architecture and design, functional groups of people can need organizing principles. Having a person picked to handle this work can reduce the amount of time spent trying to decide how to make decisions, and can free other people up to do the work they’re best at.
1.2: Is it useful for me to have a manager?
It depends on the kind of job you’re doing. A manager can dramatically improve your performance, both as an individual and as a member of a team, or a manager can get in the way and keep you from working.

Work environments where managers are particularly useful are:

  • Large environments, especially with high turnover.
  • Jobs where a significant amount of incoming information must be factored into planning.
  • Jobs which are prone to substantial obstructions coming between workers and their work.

Read more

CMMI and Agile Development

Posted on November 19, 2008  Comments (1)

CMMI or Agile: Why Not Embrace Both! is a new report that is worth reading.

All too often, CMMI has been applied rather than implemented. The standards-centric application of CMMI has contributed to some spectacular failures and losses of time and money. The key difference between applying and implementing CMMI is that applying usually appears as a superimposition (or overlay) of model practices onto existing activities with an expectation of producing the example work products found in the model, rather than seeking the natural products of the organization’s processes. This misplaced focus is often the by-product of an overly strong focus
on achieving a particular appraisal rating.

In contrast, implementing CMMI is using the model in the same way that engineers and architects use models: as a learning tool, a communication tool, and a means of organizing thoughts. The more implementation-oriented an organization is, the more improvement-centric it is; thus, the focus is on maturing and growing process capabilities rather than ratings.
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CMMI and Agile can complement each other by creating synergies that benefit the organization using them. Agile methods provide software development how-to’s that are missing from CMMI best practices that work well—especially with small, co-located project teams. CMMI provides the systems engineering practices that help enable an Agile approach on large projects. CMMI also provides the process management and support practices that help deploy, sustain, and continuously improve the deployment of an Agile approach in any organization.

Related: Stretching Agile to fit CMMI Level 3 – Microsoft CMMI – Agile Management

Ford’s Camaçari Plant in Brazil

Posted on November 18, 2008  Comments (3)

photo of Fords' Camacari plant in Brazil

Brazil’s Camaçari plant is model for the future

This state-of-the-art manufacturing complex in the northeastern Brazilian state of Bahia is not only the centerpiece of Ford’s Brazilian turnaround plan, it is also one of the most advanced automobile plants in the world. It is more automated than many of Ford’s U.S. factories, and leaner and more flexible than any other Ford facility. It can produce five different vehicle platforms at the same time and on the same line.
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At Camaçari, more than two dozen suppliers operate right inside the Ford complex, in many cases producing components alongside Ford’s main production line. Having those supplier operations on-site allows Ford to take the concept of just-in-time manufacturing to a whole new level. Inventories are kept to a bare minimum, or dispensed with entirely. Components such as dashboard assemblies flow directly into the main Ford assembly line at the precise point and time they are needed.
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Unlike many U.S. auto plants, where workers’ responsibilities are strictly limited to specific job classifications, workers like Silva dos Santos are encouraged to learn as many different skills as possible.

Here is an interesting video on the plant. It is sad how poor management at GM, Ford and Chrysler has created such a bad situation for those working at those companies, their suppliers, the communities that support their production… GM and Ford had the advice they needed to succeed from Deming in the 1980′s but they chose to focus on the short term, large executive payments, accounting gimmicks instead of continual improvement…

They each have improved over the years, but the standard is not just improving but doing so effectively and enough and they failed at that. The UAW shares some responsibility for failing to successfully lead their workers to a promising future but management is much more responsible for the failure in my opinion (the video and article try to say Ford wants to be innovative in the USA but the UAW won’t let them). It is management’s jobs to focus the organization on cooperation and success for all stakeholders. When management is more concerned with getting themselves huge payoffs (from the pockets of the other stakeholders) and then try to blame one of those other stakeholders for fighting management is disingenuous. Executive’s contempt for other stakeholders leads to the other stakeholders feeling that they should be just as greedy as management.

Related: Ford’s Wrong Turn – Ford and Managing the Supplier Relationship – Global Manufacturing Data 2007 – Toyota’s New Texas Plant – Womack Podcast on GM – VW Phaeton Manufacturing plant
Read more

Management Improvement Carnival #47

Posted on November 17, 2008  Comments (0)

Read the previous management carnivals. Also see the management Reddit for popular new blog posts to include in future carnivals.

  • The Decline and Fall of Agile by James Shore – “Without XP’s agile engineering practices, code quality and productivity asymptotically decreases over time. With them, productivity starts lower, but then it asymptotically increases.”
  • How Do You Measure Success? by Ron Pereira – “First of all, I believe many companies get caught measuring the wrong things… my favorite productivity metric is sales per employee. Of course some will think I’m advocating cutting heads in order to drive this metric up. I’m not.”
  • No Excuses by John Shook – “A culture of management seeking where to place the blame — the five whos — will absolutely prevent the flourishing of a culture that fosters ubiquitous use of the five whys”
  • Resource Planning by Jurgen Appelo – “Considering that task-switching is bad, the resource planner must seek to minimize the number of different activities per week, per person… Software developers themselves are allowed to reserve a number of academy days. These are days for self-development and training.”
  • The Deming Chain Reaction by John Dowd – “According to Deming, quality is not a state to be achieved in manufacturing, but is, rather, an ongoing company-wide effort at continual improvement.”

    • Read more

Lean and Kanban for Software Developers

Posted on November 15, 2008  Comments (0)

Lean and Kanban for Software Developers by Clinton Keith

Time-boxing allows us to employ a very powerful aspect of Kanban. The cards in each column represent capacity for each stage of the value stream. As we see above, each stage can only handle one zone at a time. That is the capacity of each stage, if we have one person working at each stage.

Time-boxing is the first step in beginning to find a balanced flow for our value stream as visualized on our Heijunka board. However, one problem exists. Each stage of effort in the stream will require a different length time-box. This can cause gaps and pileups.

For example, if our level designer can lay out a level in a week, but the high res artist requires two weeks, then a lot of work can pileup for the high res artist. Conversely, if the concept artist requires two weeks to complete the concept art for each zone, the level designer might be waiting for work with nothing to do. We have to find ways to balance this workflow smoothly so that everyone has work to do every day. One way of doing this is to balance the effort on each stage to achieve the same flow through the system.

Related: Lean, Toyota and Deming for Software Development – Kanban In Software Engineering – A Programmers Take on Agile Software Development – Agile Software Development – Six Sigma in Software Development – Curious Cat Management Improvement library

6 Leadership Competencies

Posted on November 13, 2008  Comments (5)

photo of George Box, John Hunter and Peter Scholtes

At the recent Annual W. Edwards Deming Institute Annual conference (this year held in Madison, Wisconsin) Peter Scholtes gave an excellent speech on the 6 Leadership Competencies from his book: The Leader’s Handbook. Those competencies are:

  • The ability to think in terms of systems, and knowing how to lead systems.
  • The ability to understand the variability of work in planning an problem solving
  • Understanding how we learn, develop and improve. Leading true learning and improvement.
  • Understanding people and why they behave as they do.
  • Understanding the interdependence and interaction between systems, variation, learning and human behavior. Knowing how each affects the other.
  • Giving visions, meaning, direction and focus to the organization.

As those familiar with Dr. Deming will immediately note those are very closely tied to Deming’s 4 areas of management. I am a friend (and manage Peter’s website so I am biased) but as I have said before anyone interested in management should read his book (the competencies are discussed in chapter 2).

The photo shows George Box, John Hunter and Peter Scholtes (from right to left) at the MAQIN reception the night before the conference. Two previous mayors of Madison introduced Peter’s talk: Paul Soglin and Joe Sensenbrenner.

Related: ASQ Deming Medal to Peter Scholtes – Using Books to Ignite Improvement – Management Improvement Leaders – Performance Without Appraisal

ASQ William Hunter Award 2008: Ronald Does

Posted on November 12, 2008  Comments (0)

The recipient of the 2008 William G. Hunter Award is Ronald Does. The Statistics Division of the American Society for Quality (ASQ) uses the attributes that characterize Bill Hunter’s (my father – John Hunter) career – consultant, educator for practitioners, communicator, and integrator of statistical thinking into other disciplines to decide the recipient. In his acceptance speech Ronald Does said:

The first advice I received from my new colleagues was to read the book by Box, Hunter and Hunter. The reason was clear. Because I was not familiar with industrial statistics I had to learn this from the authors who were really practicing statisticians. It took them years to write this landmark book.
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For the past 15 years I have been the managing director of the Institute for Business and Industrial Statistics. This is a consultancy firm owned by the University of Amsterdam. The interaction between scientific research and the application of quality technology via our consultancy work is the core operating principle of the institute. This is reflected in the type of people that work for the institute, all of whom are young professionals having strong ambitions in both the academic world and in business and industry.
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The kickoff conference attracted approximately 80 statisticians and statistical practitioners from all over Europe. ENBIS was officially founded in June 2001 as “an autonomous Society having as its objective the development and improvement of statistical methods, and their application, throughout Europe, all this in the widest sense of the words” Since the first meeting membership has grown to about 1300 from nearly all European countries.

Related: 2007 William G. Hunter Award – The Importance of Management Improvement – Resources on using statistical thinking to improve management

Tilting at Ludicrous CEO Pay 2008

Posted on November 10, 2008  Comments (5)

I continue to tilt at the robber barron CEO pay packages (2007 post on CEO pay abuses).

2007 pay
rank		 Company CEO Pay 5 Year Pay CEO % of 2007 Earnings
1 Apple Steve Jobs $646,600,000 $650,170,000
18.5%
2 Occidental Petroleum Ray Irani $321,640,000 $509,530,000
5.9%
3 IAC Barry Diller $295,140,000 $512,270,000
Company Lost Money
4 Fidelity National Financial William Folley $179,560,000 NA
138.4%
5 Yahoo! Terry Semel $174,200,000 $432,490,000
26.4%
7 Countrywide Financial Angelo Mozilo $141,980,000 $295,730,000
Company Lost Money
13 XTO Energy Bob Simpson $72,270,000 $215,280,000
4.2%

Data via: Forbes CEO Compensation (Total compensation for each chief executive includes the following: salary and bonuses; other compensation, such as vested restricted stock grants, LTIP payouts and perks; and stock gains, the value realized by exercising stock options.) and Google Finance (using 2007 earnings – Countrywide from SEC). I realize this chart could be improved by spending more time (the effect of stock options exercised in one year distorts things a bit but the excess are so massively huge that the clarity of the data does not need to be very precise).
Read more

Easiest Countries for Doing Business 2008

Posted on November 8, 2008  Comments (0)

Singapore is again ranked first for Ease of Doing Business by the World Bank. For some reason they call the report issued in any given year as the report for the next year (which makes no sense to me). The data shown below is for the year they released the report.

Country 2008 2007 2006 2005
Singapore 1 1 1 2
New Zealand 2 2 2 1
United States 3 3 3 3
Hong Kong 4 4 5 6
Denmark 5 5 7 7
United Kingdom 6 6 6 5
other countries of interest
Canada 8 7 4 4
Japan 12 12 11 12
Germany 25 20 21 21

The rankings include ranking of various aspects of running a business. Some rankings for 2008: Dealing with Construction Permits (Singapore and New Zealand 2nd, USA 26th, China 176th), Employing Workers (Singapore and the USA 1st, Germany 142nd), protecting investors (New Zealand 1st, Singapore 2nd, Hong Kong 3rd, Malaysia 4th, USA 5th), enforcing contracts (Singapore 1st, Hong Kong 2nd, USA 6th, China 18th), getting credit (Malaysia 1st; UK and Hong Kong 2nd; Singapore, New Zealand and USA 5th), paying taxes (Hong Kong 3rd, USA 46th, Japan 112th, China 132nd).

These rankings are not the final word on exactly where each country truly ranks but they do provide a interesting view. With this type of data there is plenty of room for judgment and issues with the data. Several of my posts, from my other blogs, that I recommend on this topic: The Future is Engineering, Science and Engineering in Global Economics and Intellectual Property Rights and Innovation.

Related: Easiest Countries from Which to Operate Businesses 2007 – Countries Which are Easiest for Doing Business 2006 – New Look American Manufacturing – Top Manufacturing Countries (2007) – Oil Consumption by Country – International Health Care System Performance – Economics, America and China

Righter Incentivization

Posted on November 5, 2008  Comments (2)

So incentive schemes to get people “motivated” seem to backfire often. Why can’t we figure out how to incentivize the behavior we desire and have it not backfire on us? What is the righter way to dangle incentives in front of our employees to get them to do what we want? Well aiming at that is a bad strategy. Using extrinsic motivation less badly is possible but the correct answer is just don’t do it.

The problems of individual incentives seem to far outweigh any potential benefit. Dr. Deming was against this strategy decades ago, and I agree. Peter Scholtes and Alfie Kohn (among others) do a good job of explaining why it is a bad idea. Douglas McGregor‘s Human Side of Enterprise is a good place to start. Managers need to eliminate de-motivators of employees not try to find better carrot dangling schemes to somehow make the carrot dangling incentive produce the desired behavior.

I have written about this area previously: Problems with Bonuses, The Defect Black Market, Why Extrinsic Motivation Fails and Losses Covered Up to Protect Bonuses.

Bob Sutton has a good blog and wrote an interesting post recently: Washington Mutual and Perverse Incentives

the problem with using money as a motivator is that it is very difficult to get the incentive system designed so it motivates the right kind of behavior and discourages the wrong kind
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their reward system — and misguided culture to supported it — helped bring down this once great bank [WaMU]
…
My question: Problems like this crop up over and over again. What can we do to stop them? Should we stop using individual incentives? I think that is too extreme, but how do we design individual incentive systems that avert a narrow and misguided focus?

I would say don’t try to create righter individual incentives. While it is possible to make it less bad, spend your time on more productive management activities. That is my answer.

Related: Reward and Incentive Programs are Ineffective — Even Harmful by Peter Scholtes – Theory X (motivation by carrot and stick) – We eliminated commissions, incentives… – Individual Bonuses Are Bad Management – Another Quota Failure Example – Righter Performance Appraisal

Management Improvement Carnival #46

Posted on November 4, 2008  Comments (0)

Ron Pereira is hosting the Management Improvement Carnival #46 on the Lean Six Sigma Academy blog, highlights include:

And here is a great post from his blog last week: Millions of Dollars Saved in 60 Minutes

Best Places to Work for Six Sigma Professionals

Posted on November 3, 2008  Comments (0)

iSixSigma has created a list of the Best Places to Work for Six Sigma Professionals. To be eligible to participate, companies must have been actively engaged in using Six Sigma for at least two years and must employ a minimum of 30 full-time Six Sigma practitioners in either Black Belt, Master Black Belt or Deployment Leader roles.

Sixteen companies met all the entry requirements and completed a two-part online survey. The senior Six Sigma leader submitted answers to an employer survey, and the full-time Six Sigma personnel at each company submitted answers to an employee survey.

Companies were ranked 1 through 10 by totaling the scores from the two surveys. The greatest weight was given to the employee survey, which asked questions in five main categories: job satisfaction, culture, compensation/rewards and recognition, training and career development, and net promoter score (NPS). Of these categories, the most weight was given to job satisfaction, as that is what employees said was the most important factor to them when it comes to a working environment. The companies, in alphabetical order:

  • Chevron
  • EMC
  • Masco Builder Cabinet Group
  • McKesson
  • NewPage
  • Rio Tinto Alcan
  • Textron
  • Volt Information Sciences
  • Vought Aircraft Industries
  • Xerox

The rankings will be revealed later. The details are from from convincing to me that these are indeed the top 10 organization for six sigma professionals. However, it does seem a good list for someone looking for a new job working with six sigma to consult.

Related: Deming and Six Sigma – Six Sigma Success – Agility vs. Six Sigma – posts on management careers – Seduce Them With Six Sigma Success

Lame Move by Google

Posted on November 2, 2008  Comments (0)

Google does great things and makes good decisions most often. However a recent move on their part has ended very lamely. As part of what their 10th anniversary celebration they provided a search of the 2001 index (the oldest index they could find to search now). This was extremely cool.

Now if you go to find it so you can try it out you will be disappointed. Search for it on Google you will find a link to Google Search 2001 which gives you a page that says: “The page – www.google.com/search2001.html – does not exist.” Is it amazingly lame that Google took the search down, has it has the first result on searches, and has no explanation on that page of what it was about.

It would be cool for them to leave it up (it was interesting). And I would think they could make a great deal of money showing ads (I can’t remember if they did show ads). But not leaving a page at that address (which was linked to over 95,000 times) explaining what the page did and that it is now offline is very lame. Breaking 95,000 links is bad enough for some pointy haired boss that believes the internet is made up of tubes but for a well run internet company to do that is pitiful.

This move shows Google in a similar light as Gap when managers shut down the Gap’s web site for days (in 2005). Google failed when exiting the video business (DRM issues), then realized their mistake and recovered. The fix for this would take all of 1 hour. Someone just has to put up a page discussing what the page was for and that the search has been discontinued.

But really they should explore if it is better to just make it live – maybe it doesn’t but I would certainly want to look into that option. If not, I would put up some interesting results from the experiment (though if the choice is just a 1 hour solution or nothing then just put up a page in 1 hour) and link to commentary about the search and interesting things people found. This would be an interesting task for an intern, or someone else, and could provide an interesting and popular page. but most importantly at least not breaking 95,000 links (plus all those who go to the page from search results pages) is the minimum Google should do.

Related: web pages should live forever – Search Share Data Checking the ACSI – Ways for Google to Improve Read more

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