Posted on August 30, 2009  Comments (2)

Freedom to surf: workers more productive if allowed to use the internet for leisure

I wouldn’t take 1 study of 300 workers as the final word on the topic but I believe as a general principle it is a good idea to allow recreational internet use when appropriate, as I wrote in 2006. Such access does create the possibility for abuse but managing that risk is better than policies that are far too restrictive.

Related: Hire People You Can Trust to Do Their Job – Respect for People – Understanding Psychology – Management By IT Crowd Bosses
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Posted on August 26, 2009  Comments (4)

The W. Edwards Deming Institute has posted Dr. Deming’s 1984 video on the 5 deadly diseases of western management.

• Lack of constancy of purpose
• Emphasis on short term profits – “creative” accounting, focus on quarterly profits
• Annual Performance Appraisals – management by objective, management by fear
• Mobility of management – [see Toyota for a great example of a company that operates on different principles - where the leadership has been with Toyota for decades]
• Running a company on visible figures alone – many important factors are “unknown and unknowable.”

Dr. Deming added 2 diseases to reach his famous 7 deadly diseases: excessive medical care costs and excessive legal damage awards swelled by lawyers working on contingency fees.

Personally I believe all 7 of those diseases are still prevalent and causing damage. I do think some progress has been made on longer term thinking but far too many organizations still are extremely short term focused. And I would add two new deadly diseases of management: excessive executive compensation and an outdated intellectual property system.

Related: Deming Companies – Purpose of an Organization – Continual Improvement – Creating Jobs – New Management Truths Sometimes Started as Heresies

Posted on August 20, 2009  Comments (0)

Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog Carnival

• The Maddening Effectiveness of Root-Cause Analysis – “And I wonder: how often this is a subtle blockage to individuals and teams doing good root cause analysis? How often am I fearful of Really Knowing just what is at the root of some undesirable outcome?”
• Lean and Basketball – “in a strong Lean business, it is essential to have a well-trained and motivated staff to execute all of the good tools and methodologies that have been introduced to them.”
• Phronetic Leadership — Father of Scrum explores a new type of Leadership by Kenji Hiranabe – “Phronesis is a concept that synthesizes ‘knowing why’ as in scientific theory, with ‘knowing how’ as in practical skill, and “knowing what” as a goal to be realized. Unlike episteme, it emphasizes practices in particular contexts. However, phronesis is not just knowledge within a certain, particular context per se. Since it is knowledge to serve the “common good”, it implies an affinity with universal principles.”
• What Happened to the Deming Philosophy? by Rip Stauffer – “I have had Quality executives from major corporations tell me that “Deming was just a philosophy,” implying that it was pie-in-the-sky, without any practical use for business. It’s hard to get these people to listen to you after you explain how ignorant a statement that is…”
• One reason why so many lean initiatives fail by Dan Markovitz – “But it’s worth thinking about whether top management is doing what they need to do to make it work. As Jamie Flinchbaugh says, when clients tell him that management is 100% behind them: ‘Behind is still behind. Leadership is about being out in front.’”

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Posted on August 19, 2009  Comments (4)

The system is responsible for 90, 92, 94, 97% of problems – W. Edwards Deming. Fix the system, don’t blame the people. When you seek system fixes you approach situations differently than if you search for people to blame.

By the way, I am often asked about the data supporting Deming’s contention that the system was responsible for 97% of the problems. This statement was not based on a set of data but on Dr. Deming’s decades of experience. And he increased the percentage over time – as he learned more.

Roads that are designed to kill

Is a situation killing 40,000 people in the USA a year a health care issue? It sure seems to me it would be. It probably isn’t a disease management issue though (some might try to say bad roads are a disease but I wouldn’t say that). I think this is one, of many examples, that shows that we have a disease and injury management system not a health care system (in addition to illustrating systems thinking, effective root cause analysis, PDSA, innovation, respect for people…).

Related: Find the Root Cause Instead of the Person to Blame – Traffic Congestion and a Non-Solution – Checklists Save Lives – Saving Lives: US Health Care Improvement – The Economic Benefits of Walkable Communities – SWAT Raid Signs of Systemic Failures – System Improvement to Respond to the Dynamics of Crowd Disasters – The Leading Causes of Death

Posted on August 17, 2009  Comments (2)

Google does a great job of using statistical and engineering principles to improve. It is amazing how slow we are to adopt new ideas but because we are it provides big advantages to companies like Google that use concepts like design of experiments, experimenting quickly and often… while others don’t. Look Inside a 1,024 Recipe Multivariate Experiment

via: @hexawise – My brother has created a software application to provide much better test coverage with far fewer tests using the same factorial designed experiments ideas my father worked with decades ago (and yet still far to few people use).

Related: Combinatorial Testing for Software – Statistics for Experimenters – Google’s Website Optimizer allows for multivariate testing of your website. – Using Design of Experiments

Posted on August 15, 2009  Comments (2)

One of the reasons my organizations switched to Ruby on Rails for software development was the great integration with automated testing. We always wanted to have good test coverage on our software applications (which are web applications – some used only inside our organization) but didn’t actually find the time to do so. Since we adopted Ruby we have been doing much better in this regard. It isn’t just the switch to Ruby, of course, but the switch to Ruby coincided with the beginning of many improvements to our software development practices that have continually improved over the last couple of years.

Here is a post on How to build quality software by an agile, Ruby, lean software developer

via: @benjaminm

Related: Combinatorial Testing for Software – Checklists in Software Development – Software Supporting Processes Not the Other Way Around – Software Development and Business Process Support – Top Blogs for Software Development – Hexawise: more coverage, fewer tests (my brother’s company)

Posted on August 11, 2009  Comments (3)

Making things visible is a key to effective management. And data in computers can be easy to ignore. Don’t forget to make data visible. Paul Levy, CEO of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston recently hosted Hideshi Yokoi, president of the Toyota Production System Support Center and wrote this blog post:

The mission of the Toyota Production System Support Center to share Toyota Production System know-how with North American organizations that have a true desire to learn and adopt TPS.

Related: The Importance of Making Problems Visible – Great Visual Instruction Example – Health Care the Toyota Way

Posted on August 10, 2009  Comments (1)

Jon Miller is hosting the Management Improvement Carnival #72 on the Gemba Panta Rei blog, highlights include:

• Three Key Principles when Leading without Authority – One piece of advice passed down by Toyota managers is to “lead as if you had no power” George Ambler writes about the three key principles of leading without authority. They are built around having enthusiasm, humility and the strength to not let results come before leadership. Most of us who lead or attempt to do so are lacking in one or more of these areas. If I said that my weakness was enthusiasm, would that mean I fail at humility?
• Lean Accounting SuperGroup – Although not exactly a blog, the Lean Accounting SuperGroup is a destination for its growing body of information on lean, management and how to count correctly. The five videos introducing lean accounting are not t be missed.
• When is it time for lean “lite”? – For a full scale implementation there are certain things that should first be in place, but there are plenty of broken windows we can fix. Jamie Flinchbaugh tells us that it’s better to get started where you can, stumble and learn than to wait.
• What if we chose leaders differently? – This was a thought provoking piece on Wally Block’s Three Star Leadership Blog. Those of us who live in countries where we can elect our leaders are fortunate, and should ask ourselves this question. I do every election cycle, looking at the choices we are given for leaders. On a more practical level, anyone who is a member of a team or a leader of a team has influence on the selection of a leader. The answers to this question aren’t easy but this is a question worth pondering.

Visit the Curious Cat Management Improvement Carnival home

Posted on August 8, 2009  Comments (2)

Where are the Shareholders’ Mansions? CEOs’ Home Purchases, Stock Sales, and Subsequent Company Performance by Crocker H. Liu, Arizona State University and David Yermack, New York University – Stern School of Business

That we put in power CEO’s that see themselves as nobility with the right to build castles (and many of these CEO castles dwarf all but the most conspicuous castle built by nobility) by taking the wealth produced by others from corporate coffers is a sign of our failure to select acceptable leaders for companies.

Related: Another Year of CEO’s Taking Hugely Excessive Pay – Excessive Executive Pay – Exposing CEO Pay Excesses – Narcissistic Cadre of Senior Executives – 9 Deadly Diseases

Posted on August 6, 2009  Comments (0)

The Wall Street Journal has a book review of The Management Myth by Matthew Stewart. The book flushes out the ideas Matthew Stewert explored in a previous article in the Atlantic about the failure of management to mature as a discipline.

I’m not sure about the book, I have not read it but that is a great statement. And I firmly believe managers need to become experts at managing and by and large they have quite a long way to go. Dr. Deming talked about how we “know” what we know in the aspect of his management called the theory of knowledge (which is not included in any other management philosophy I have seen). That area (with interactions in other areas) explores why people often believe what is not so. And management seems to have a surplus of beliefs that are not based on sound theories.

Read this good article I have mentioned before on this topic by Carlie and Christensen: The Cycles of Theory Building in Management Research.

Related: Righter Incentivization – Another Quota Failure Example – Management Advice Failures – Why Extrinsic Motivation Fails – Innovation Strategy – Does the Data Deluge Make the Scientific Method Obsolete? – Data Based Blathering – Doing the Wrong Things Righter – Harvard’s Masters of the Apocalypse
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Posted on August 3, 2009  Comments (2)

When Economic Incentives Backfire by Samuel Bowles, Sante Fe Institute

Punished by Rewards, by Alfie Kohn, is a great book on this topic. The area of “motivating” employees is one it is often hard for managers to learn. Even managers that have been studying Deming, Ackoff, Ohno… for years still have trouble with the idea that trying to find the right incentive scheme to motivate the right behavior is the wrong approach. Read the The Human Side Of Enterprise by Douglas Mcgregor (in 1960) to re-enforce the understanding of human motivation provided by Toyota’s respect for people principles.

Managers need to eliminate de-motivation in the work systems not try and find bonus schemes to motivate behavior. Eliminating de-motivation is often much more work. You can’t just get some money from the bonus pool and start giving it away. You have to manage. But if you are a manager you shouldn’t be afraid to actually manage the system and make it better.

Related: “Pay for Performance” is a Bad Idea – Reward and Incentive Programs are Ineffective — Even Harmful by Peter Scholtes – The Defect Black Market – What’s the Value of a Big Bonus? – Problems with Bonuses – Losses Covered Up to Protect Bonuses – Stop Demotivating Employees

When performance-related pay backfires:
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Posted on August 1, 2009  Comments (1)

Read the previous management carnivals.

• Caring for Your People: Part of the Boss’s Job by Wally Bock – “Caring for your people means helping them grow and develop. You can help them develop skills to keep them out of trouble in the future.”
• Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule by Paul Graham – “You can’t write or program well in units of an hour. That’s barely enough time to get started. When you’re operating on the maker’s schedule, meetings are a disaster.”
• Getting things done when you’re not in charge by Kathleen Fasanella – “This can be difficult but you need to negotiate for permission to work on projects that your employer may not consider to be real work. These projects should be opportunities to experiment with processes or changes that can result in big savings. Not all of these will pan out but I guarantee that you’ll end up using what you learned in future projects.”
• Are Lean and Kanban being stretched to the breaking point? by Si Alhir – “As a tool, a Kanban System supports making the work visible. However, visibility may be necessary, but is it sufficient for self organization and continuous improvement?”
• Measuring for Improvement by Mark Graban – “Process measures are important — having the right measures, in a timely way is critical to any lean implementation.”
• Another Post on Lean Management by Lee Fried – “The best way to see this is to visit their visual system and see if they are tracking their own data, that it is up to date and that it is clear what processes they are working to improve. If there is no visual or it is being maintained by management it is obvious that they need to re-commit.”
• Standard work, by any other name… by Dan Markovitz – “Standard work is not just something for the metal stamping line, or for the invoicing process. Standard work can be — should be, must be — applied to the way you work on an individual level as well. Because when you start applying lean principles to your own work, you’ll not only improve your own performance, you’ll set a model that will inspire others as well.”

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