Posted on September 28, 2009  Comments (2)

The Top Five Managerial Fallacies Concerning Layoff Survivors by David Noer, author of Healing the Wounds: Overcoming the Trauma of Layoffs and Revitalizing Downsized Organizations.

Read the full post, for more good points by David Noer. Obviously when managements failures result in layoffs it is a huge blow to respect for people. It is very challenging to maintain lean thinking or Deming based improvement efforts when layoffs are needed. And if that failure isn’t addressed and explained and details provided on why the leadership failed and what is being done to fix those problems with the management system, the challenges grow.

I am very disappointed in management that resorts to layoffs as the easy solution to their failed leadership. Most of the time layoffs are an indication management does not respect people in any way, no matter what they say. Now, I do believe, it is possible that a company has been failed by past leadership and gotten into a position where layoffs are the right choice, but most companies choose layoffs as just another MBA spreadsheet “management” exercise and those companies pay a heavy price for such poor management.

Related: posts on layoffs and reducing staff – Honda has Never had Layoffs and has been Profitable Every Year – Creating Jobs

Posted on September 23, 2009  Comments (0)

Most credit card issues seem to use business models based on tricking customers into paying high fees. PartnersFirst is focusing on providing value to customers. A Different Kind of Credit-Card Company

The companies involved in banking and credit cards in the USA have been hostile to customers for quite some time. I have been waiting for someone to decide to provide value to customers and take a fair profit. Hopefully PartnersFirst will continue this model, though I am suspicious, if they succeed they will be bought by another financial firm that is too-big-to-fail in order to once again restrict competition via their standard practice of buying any competitors instead of providing value to customers.

Related: How to protect yourself from your credit card company – Don’t Let the Credit Card Companies Play You for a Fool – Retail Credit Card Fees Much Higher in the USA

Posted on September 21, 2009  Comments (4)

If you read this blog, you know I believe extrinsic motivation is a poor strategy. This TED webcast Dan Pink discusses studies showing extrinsic rewards failing. This is a great webcast, definitely worth 20 minutes of your time.

• “you’ve got an incentive designed to sharpen thinking and accelerate creativity and it does just the opposite. It dulls thinking and blocks creativity… This has been replicated over and over and over again for nearly 40 years. These contingent motivators, if you do this then you get that, work in some circumstances but in a lot of tasks they actually either don’t work or, often, they do harm.”
• “there is a mismatch between what science knows and what business does“
• “This is a fact.”

What does Dan Pink recommend based on the research? Management should focus on providing workplaces where people have autonomy, mastery and purpose to build on intrinsic motivation.

via: Everything You Think about Pay for Performance Could Be Wrong

Related: Righter Incentivization – What’s the Value of a Big Bonus? – Dangers of Extrinsic Motivation – Motivate or Eliminate De-Motivation – Great Marissa Mayer Webcast on Google Innovation

Posted on September 20, 2009  Comments (0)

Kevin Meyer is hosting the Management Improvement Carnival #76 on the Evolving Excellence blog, highlights include:

• The World Used to be Flat (Indexed): Question what is accepted as fact, ubiquitous in effect, and practiced by people. Traditional accounting…?
• The Retrospective of Retrospectives (Agile Tips): How large agile teams with multiple sub-teams can effectively implement the Retrospective phase.
• Timeboxing for Creative Professionals (Change Order): Using short, structured sprints to defeat procrastination.
• Standard Work and the Folly of Multitasking (Time Back): Even more data that supports the admittedly counterintuitive notion of single flow sequential work being more efficient that multitasking.

Read more management improvement carnivals

Posted on September 19, 2009  Comments (0)

I don’t see any evidence six sigma is making a comeback but magazines like to talk about new ideas rather than just explore what continues. They like to discuss common cause variation as though it were special cause. Six Sigma Makes a Comeback

How sad. Six sigma has always been hampered by a lack of core values (like respect for people, constancy of purpose) and a focus on cost cutting but the direct desire to pursue a deadly disease (short term focus) is sad indication of where some have taken what can be very useful tools.

Six sigma and quality management other efforts can be very useful. But many of the efforts (as many of any management efforts) are executed poorly and do little good and much that is rightly ridiculed.

Related: Quality and Innovation – Six Sigma Much More than Common Sense – Process Improvement and Innovation

Posted on September 16, 2009  Comments (2)

How ‘Buy American’ Can Hurt U.S. Firms

The challenges of trying to legislate market choices such as what products to buy are difficult. It is understandable to want to direct stimulus funds to improving the economy today in the USA. Creating legislation that can cope with interactions and unintended consequences inherent in such attempts is not easy.

Related: China and the Sugar Industry Tax Consumers – New Look American Manufacturing – Russell Ackoff Webcast on Systems Thinking – Why Congress Won’t Investigate Wall Street

Posted on September 14, 2009  Comments (1)

An Introduction to Deming’s Management Teaching and Philosophy by Peter Scholtes – webcast from the Annual W. Edwards Deming Institute conference in Madison, Wisconsin, November 9th, 2008. My previous post on this speech: 6 Leadership Competencies.

Next month, the Annual Deming Institute conference will be held at Purdue on Oct 10th, 2009.

Related: Peter Scholtes’ Life – Curious Cat’s Deming on Management – The Leader’s Handbook – Performance without Appraisal

Unfortunately I cannot actually use the website to watch more than 5 minutes because the site fails to support linux operating system with their solution for longer videos. Google will only allow 10 minute videos without special permission – YouTube has not replied to my request for over 6 months. Update: Twitvid let me upload the whole video.

Posted on September 12, 2009  Comments (3)

The unspoken truth about managing geeks by Jeff Ello

The article makes very good points. As I have said before software developers expect more of management than most staff do. And I would say software developers are seen as more cynical than most staff because they accurately evaluate management’s failures (and are more willing to speak up about problems).

Pretending software bugs don’t exist doesn’t work. Pretending management bugs don’t exist doesn’t work either, but most are willing to pretend management bugs don’t exit. Programmers often figure bugs should be acknowledged and dealt with, rather than pretending they don’t exist. But they are called cynical when they mention management bugs – which only makes them less confident in the ability of management to preform their responsibilities.
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Posted on September 10, 2009  Comments (0)

• Agile Lessons from a Management Guru by Ahmed Yousuf – “Agile methodologies have a fundamentally different approach to quality – an approach that is inherent in this teaching from Deming. Quality cannot be achieved by testers inspecting work done by developers. Quality can only be achieved if developers, business analysts, architects and testers – all take measures to ensure that it is part of every task they perform.”
• How Resource Constraints Can Set You Free by Matthew E. May – “He envisioned a self-contained, self-sustaining water system complete with a high-capacity water tank and four large spaces for billboard advertising and public service messages. The ad revenue pays for maintenance. Children playing powers it.” (Appropriate technology is something I have always been very interested in, as a child I traveling around with my father (engineer, statistician, professor and management consultant) as he worked on such practical projects. See my Curious Cat Engineering and Science Blog posts on appropriate technology, including both examples in the post – John Hunter).
• ScrumButs Are the Best Part of Scrum by Jurgen Appelo – “Scrum teams are self-organizing complex systems… then you must accept that optimal behavior of a team cannot be predicted. It is impossible to design the process up-front. It must emerge, just like the design of the solution.”
• Whirlpool Evansville Dies the Unnecessary but Expected Death By Kevin Meyer – “Rest in peace Whirlpool of Evansville. With a management team focused on the cost of hands instead of the value of brains we’ll probably be saying the same for Whirlpool as a whole in a few years.”

Read more

Posted on September 9, 2009  Comments (0)

Chart showing loan default rates for real estate, consumer and agricultural loans for 1998 to 2009 by the Curious Cat Investing Economics Blog, Creative Commons Attribution, data from the Federal Reserve.

Default rates on commercial (up another 151 basis points) and residential (93 basis points) real estate continued to increase dramatically in the second quarter. Credit card default rates increased but only by 20 basis points.

Real estate default rates exploded in 2008, in the aftermath of the financial market meltdown. In the 4th quarter of 2007 residential default rates were 3.02% by the 4th quarter of 2008 they were 6.34% and in the 2nd quarter of this year they were 8.84% (582 basis points above the 4th quarter of 2007). Commercial real estate default rates were at 2.74% in the 4th quarter of 2007, 5.43% in the fourth quarter of 2008 and 7.91% in the 2nd quarter of 2009 (a 517 basis point increase).

Credit card default rates were much higher than real estate default rates for the last 10 years (the 4-5% range while real estate hovered above or below 2%). Now they are over 200 and 300 basis points bellow residential and commercial default rates respectively. From 4.8% in the 3rd quarter 2008 to 5.66% in the 4th and 6.5% in the 1st quarter of 2009.

Small steps to reduce the large consumer debt have been made recently: consumer debt declined a record $21.5 billion in July. Since April of 2008 consumer debt has been reduced by $70 billion in the USA. Unfortunately we still have $2.47 trillion or
$8,233 for every person (using 300 million as the total population).
Data from the Federal Reserve

Posted on September 6, 2009  Comments (5)

The Best Leadership Is Good Management by Henry Mintzberg

Very well said. I have never been comfortable with the attempts to separate leadership from managing. Normally the tone is that leadership is what matters and managing is just then carrying out what leaders have determined and allowed.

I understand why we focus some areas of management as in the area of leadership: it is hard to understand the whole all at once. We can make sense of things more easily by breaking them down (analysis) and speaking of aspects as within the realm of leadership is part of this. We can discuss certain traits as leadership-related. And we can discuss the difference between leadership and power based on position: so leaders within an organization separate from those with authority shown on the organizational chart. But I do not see management and leadership as separate things.

Books by Henry Mintzberg: Managing (2009) – Managers Not MBAs – The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning

Related: Akio Toyoda’s Message Shows Real Leadership – Seven Leadership Leverage Points – If Your Staff Doesn’t Bring You Problems That is a Bad Sign – Management Improvement Leaders
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Posted on September 1, 2009  Comments (0)

Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog Carnival

• What Else Can Software Development and Testing Learn from Manufacturing? Don’t Forget Design of Experiments (DoE). by Justin Hunter – “In short, Design of Experiments methods are a proven approach to creating and manage experiments that alter variables intelligently between each test run in a structured way that allows the experimenter to learn as much as possible in as few experiments as possible.”
• The Versatile Leader by Ron Pereira – “I firmly believe the best leaders are those that can apply the appropriate leadership style at the appropriate time.”
• Manually Collecting Data is a Good Thing! by Lee Fried – “having the teams and local managers collect the data manually is one of the best things they can do to learn their processes and understand the problems of their area.”
• Scrum of Scrums: Making it visual by Xavier Quesada Allue – “There are only two columns: ‘Story’ and ‘Status’. Story has a copy of the story card that is on the team board. Status is normally ‘not started, ‘in progress’, ‘done’ or ‘done-done’ (a curious distinction between ‘we think we’re done’ and ‘we’re sure we’re done’).”
• Hospital Gets Vendor Visits Under Control by Karen Wilhelm – “An estimated $10 million has been saved as doctors now prescribe generic drugs 74% of the time, up from 60% in the past. Without sales reps prodding them, they use more tried-and-true medications unless the new ones have been shown to be really more effective.”
• Lean Energy Treasure Hunts at GE by Jon Miller – “The energy treasure hunt is the classic ‘go see’ activity. Form a cross-functional team and go find energy waste.”

Read more