Posted on July 28, 2009  Comments (1)

This lean thinking webcast from India actually does a pretty decent job of providing an overview (for a business TV channel) even if they get some things a bit confused. The discuss TQM in India preceding lean which is an accurate view in my opinion – quality management shared many lean principles. They even talk of lean at Ford doing lean first. But they get the decades for that a bit off. They seem to mash together the “quality is job one” refocus on quality lead by Dr. Deming in the 1980′s with Henry Ford in the early 1900′s.

The webcast includes Jim Womack discussing lean thinking. He mentions the misunderstanding of lean as primarily cost cutting.

Related: Curious Cat Lean Management Resources – 2008 Deming Prize: Tata Steel – Lean management in India – TVS Group Director on India, Manufacturing and the Economy

Posted on July 26, 2009  Comments (8)

Speech by Akio Toyoda

Once again Toyota shows they are the type of management I want to invest in. In my last post I discussed another: Jeff Bezos at Amazon. Google management is another management system I am glad to invest in. Toyota, Amazon and Google are 3 of my 12 stocks for 10 year portfolio.

Toyota continues to show they are an exceptional company that doesn’t waver due to short term pressures. They know the management system they have in place is excellent. They always try to improve. And they react to evidence that shows they have room to improve. They then access the situation and move forward.

via: Toyoda on Toyota: A New Regime, A New Future

Related: New Toyota CEO’s Views (2005) – Interview with Toyota President (2006) – Deming Companies – “2007 has been a difficult year for Toyota” – No Excessive Senior Executive Pay at Toyota – Webcast on the Toyota Development Process

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Posted on July 23, 2009  Comments (6)

Amazon is acquiring the unique company – Zappos: we have written about Zappos previously: Paying New Employees to Quit. Jeff Bezos uses the webcast above to talk to the employees of Zappos. Excellent job. The letter from Tony Hsieh, the Zappo’s CEO, to employees is fantastic. This is a CEO that respects employees. These are leaders I would follow and invest in (and in fact I am glad I do own Amazon stock).

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Posted on July 22, 2009  Comments (0)

In yet another voice against the looting mentality of the current crop of executives Chris Bones, dean of Henley Business School writes a A crisis of confidence?

It really is a shame that the executives leading so many companies are so moral, ethically and managerially bankrupt. We need to stop allowing such people to become executives in organizations. With such fundamental problems in their basic understanding of human systems the correct solution is to stop allowing such flawed people to have power not to try and convince such flawed people to behave responsibly.

That executives believe they should act as royalty taking what they wish from the value produced by others is so fundamental a failure that I do not believe reform is the best solution. They should just be removed. If you are lucky some competitor will hire them and you can gain not only from their removal but from the damage they cause your competitor.

Related: Warren Buffett on Excessive CEO Pay – Honda Executives not Overpaid – Unconscionable Executive Pay – Tilting at Ludicrous CEO Pay 2008 – Looting: Bankruptcy for Profit – More on Obscene CEO Pay

Posted on July 20, 2009  Comments (0)

Shaun Sayers is hosting the Management Improvement Carnival #70 on the Capable People blog, highlights include:

• 8 ways to get total involvement by Jon Miller: “How do we get total involvement from our people in the good things?”
• Total company involvement by Peter Abilla: “Most vision or mission statements are hollow, uninspirational artifacts. Sloganeering, as it were: they sound good, but fail to mobilize a team”
• The limits of customer involvement by Shaun Sayers: “I’m noticing a growing tendency for an over-use of certain platitudes, such as ‘customer involvement’ and ‘leadership’ without much of an attempt to add substance, or give any clues as to what that may add up to in terms of planning, implementation or measurement”

Please submit suggestions for post to include in future editions of the management improvement carnival. The Curious Cat Management Blog Directory provides links to many management blogs.

Posted on July 16, 2009  Comments (0)

Nice webcast by Martin Fowler, Three Years of Real-World Ruby. This talk is probably only of interest to those of you in software development, but for them I think it is an excellent presentation.

At work we have been use Ruby for the last 3 years and have found it to be a powerful language that helps make writing software applications fun. And that is important. By providing a powerful language and a rails framework that takes away much of the drudgery of writing code you can create an environment where develops are happy and productive. We are hiring, by the way.

The talk provides a good background on their experience using ruby to manage projects; and how they manage ruby application development projects.

Related: Combinatorial Testing for Software – Checklists in Software Development – Future Directions for Agile Management

Posted on July 13, 2009  Comments (0)

The Curious Cat Management Improvement Carnival provide links to recent blog posts for those interesting in improving management of organizations.

• Starving the Golden Goose by Michael Neiss – “Where they [the Human Resource Department] should be obsessed with growing talent, they have become partners in reducing investments in that talent….starving the golden goose into a slow death… Fear doesn’t increase engagement, it increases caution.”
• One Point Lesson: Kamishibai by Jon Miller – “The kamishibai board is particularly useful when there is a will and desire for managers to practice genchi genbutsu (go see what’s really happening) but they are unsure how to structure day or even what to do when they are on the shop floor.”
• Stop Fighting Fires by Tim McMahon – “For the first question, you might use the “5 Whys” method of continuing to ask why until you reach something that really is a “root cause” rather than being a symptom/result of a more fundamental problem.”
• Systems and Individuals by John Dowd – “The point is that fixing the system requires action on the system, not the individual parts.”
• Medical Errors in Hospitals Still Occur at Alarming Rate by Mark Graban – “Seems like this, and many other medical mistakes, are cultural and social problems more than they are technical problems.”
• Does Kanban Respect People, Self Organisation and Continuous Improvement by Karl Scotland – “A Kanban System is more than just a basic tool to be used to manage the work. It is a way of working which frees people to think for themselves in the pursuit of achieving success through improved productivity and quality.”

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Posted on July 11, 2009  Comments (28)

photo of (from right to left) Peter Scholtes, John Hunter and George Box in Madison, Wisconsin at the 2008 Deming Conference

Peter Scholtes died peacefully this morning in Madison, Wisconsin. His family was with him.

My father wrote about the First Street Garage project in W. Edwards Deming’s Out of the Crisis (pages 245-247). Peter (who was working for the City of Madison at the time) and he became good friends working on that project together. Peter went to work for Joiner Associates afterwards and was a primary author of the Team Handbook. And Peter spent many years working with Dr. W. Edwards Deming and moving forward Dr. Deming’s ideas.

I would meet with Peter when consulted in Washington DC (which he did a good deal) and when I would visit Madison. He was extremely funny, compassionate, competent and effective. It was always a joy and educational to spend time with him. His Leader’s Handbook is the first management book I recommend to anyone. Peter enriched my life and the lives of many of others. And he will continue to do so through his works and those who were influenced by him.

Peter was a great friend and a wonderful person to talk with. I valued our shared interest in improving people’s lives by improving the practice of management. Peter was a priest before moving into management improvement. He retained his focus on helping people lead rewarding lives as a consultant. And we shared the desire to make the huge amount of time people spend working a much more rewarding experience. Making progress in that vein requires not just a wish to do so but the ability to learn and effectively apply ideas to affect real improvement. He was exceptionally gifted at this difficult task and was aided here, as with most things he did, by his considerable empathy and respect for others. His books provide evidence of this gift and effort. And those who were lucky enough to hear him speak enjoyed his ability to use humor to great affect in the effort.

In one of his last speeches, for example, when he speaking at the Deming conference (where the photo was taken) he used the action of kissing to underscore a point he was making about systems thinking and he described the challenges of gathering accurate data by recounting a radio interview he had heard about a research scientist who, in order to accurately assess the hibernation activities of bears, had to discretely sneak up on them during hibernation and well… take their temperatures in a non-genteel way.

I am very lucky to have developed friendship’s with several of my father’s friends. The photo shows me with two during my last visit to Madison: Peter and George Box.

It was a happy surprise when I found out Peter Scholtes wrote They Will Know We are Christians by our Love (link to a nice mp3 recording of the song). I think it is a wonderful song. Here are the words to that song (and a webcast is below):

We are one in the spirit we are one in the Lord
We are one in the spirit we are one in the Lord
And we pray that all unity will one day be restored

And they’ll Know we are Christians by our love, by our love
Yes they’ll know we are Christians by our love.

We will walk with each other we will walk hand in hand
We will walk with each other we will walk hand in hand
And together we’ll spread the news that God is in our land.

We will work with each other we will work side by side
We will work with each other we will work side by side
And we’ll guard each man’s dignity and save each man’s pride

All praise to the father from whom all things come
And all praise to Christ Jesus his only son
And all praise to the spirit who makes us one.

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Posted on July 9, 2009  Comments (1)

John Hunter’s IT Crowd badge (Reynholm Industries)

The IT Crowd is a great BBC show on an IT support office in a large organization. The IT staff are knowledgeable and tired of dealing with foolish users of IT. And you wouldn’t want to watch for any customer support tips (though companies like United Airlines might do just that). Anyone involved in IT know Internet Explorer 6 is not an acceptable tool in this day and age. But some IT departments don’t let that stop them from forcing it on their users. Orange UK exiles Firefox from call centres

Great management. Provide only an outdated and poor tool. Then threaten to fine employees that try to get a tool to allow themselves to do their job. Yes, it makes sense to setup rules for managing IT resources in a company but it is not acceptable to provide extremely outdated tools and then instead of fixing the problem when employees can’t stand your lousy service any longer you threaten to fine them. Wonderful. I guess you could call it the punishment-by-threat-demotivation-drive-in-fear management (for those that think Alfie Kohn’s Punished by Rewards model is too light on the punishment part of management).

Related: Stop Demotivating Me! – Software Supporting Processes Not the Other Way Around – Lean IT Systems – Not ERP – The Defect Black Market (another theory X IT management example) – Change Your Name
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Posted on July 7, 2009  Comments (2)

Unfortunately companies like United have created cultures where people take pride in doing their job poorly. And the continued long term customer hostility companies take shows no sign of letting up. My suggestion is to take Southwest or Jet Blue (or Singapore Airlines or Cathay Pacific).

Unfortunately sometimes you need to travel somewhere that no airline that cares about customer service flies. Then just hope somehow the broken system you must trust to get you someplace somehow doesn’t fail you too badly. Or you can follow the increasingly common trend and publicize the horrible service you were subjected to, in your blog or perhaps your own webcast.

Related: Airline Quality – CEO Flight Attendant – Japan Airlines CEO on CEO Pay – Respect for Employees at Southwest Airlines – Incredibly Bad Customer Service from Discover Card

Posted on July 6, 2009  Comments (2)

The Trouble with Performance Reviews by Jeffrey Pfeffer

Another good article pointing out the harm of annual performance reviews. As I have said many times managers need to do better. See chapter 9 of the Leader’s Handbook and previous posts: Don’t Use Performance Appraisals – – Deming and Performance Appraisal – Find the Root Cause Instead of the Person to Blame – Performance Without Appraisal

Posted on July 3, 2009  Comments (0)

Obviously many businesses are now dependent on computer Network Operations Centers (NOC). Some of these data centers can cause millions of dollars in lost sales each minute if they fail. So sound engineering, including off-site redundancy is critical. Authorize.net is a recent example of such a failure, Authorize.net Goes Down, E-Commerce Vendors Left Hanging

From what I can piece together it seems within about 5 hours services were back up, at least partially. NOC failures are not uncommon (either due to fire, power failure [including backup systems], government raids, software glitches [not exactly the same as a NOC failure but some can have the affect of essentially knocking off a NOC from providing the specific service desired]). Evaluating these risks must be part of management systems with significant NOC dependencies.

Authorize.net set up a Twitter account and within hours has 2,500 followers. I am not a huge fan of Twitter, it is nice but seems pretty limited to me. But this is an example of using it effectively. You can follow me on Twitter @curiouscat_com.

Related: Information Technology and Business Process Support – Amazon S3 Failure Analysis – Information Technology and Management – IT Operations as a Competitive Advantage – Undersea Cables Cut Again, Reducing India’s Capacity by 65%

Posted on July 1, 2009  Comments (0)

The Curious Cat Management Improvement Carnival began in 2006 with the goal to provide links to interesting blog posts for those interesting in improving the practice of management.

• Reward: Creativity’s Forbidden Fruit by Matt May – “Kaizen does not attempt to light a fire under people. It lights the fire within them.”
• Elegance and Encapsulation by Pete Abilla – “Encapsulation is an elegant and simple principle to ease the burden on your customer by subtracting or covering the unnecessary and adding the meaningful.”
• Deming’s Theory of Knowledge by Marc Hersch – “Systems thinking comes down to developing methods and instincts for hearing the voice of the process, or if you will, the voice of the system. This is the opposite of the reduction that has become the common sense of by-the-numbers and just-the-facts thinking in Western enterprise.”
• Virginia Mason’s CEO on Health Reform by Mark Graban – “The path to better quality and safety is the same as the path to reduced cost… Our system is so full of waste (non-value-added activities), need to systematically reduce and eliminate that waste”
• Does good experimental design require changing only one factor at a time (OFAT)? by Mark J. Anderson – “Multifactor testing is far more effective for statistical power, screening efficiency and detection of interactions. Industrial experimenters are well-advised to forget their indoctrination in OFAT and make use of multifactorial designs.”
• Getting More People Involved in Improvement by Lee Fried – “make sure that all leaders are getting out of the conference room and into the gemba to make sure that the appropriate checking and coaching activities are taking place.”
• How clean is clean enough? by Ron Pereira – “In other words, the true purpose of this step is to clean to inspect.”
• Seeking: Checklist for a Sense of Urgency by Jon Miller – “This is a delicate balance. We need to think long-term, but act each day with urgency.”
• Toyota Develops Thought-controlled Wheelchair by John Hunter – “the more important story is why Toyota and Honda will be dominant companies 20 years from now. And that story is based on their superior management and focus on long term success instead of short term quarterly results.”