Posted on January 28, 2010  Comments (0)

Gipsie B. Ranney has a great new article – The Trouble with Incentives: They Work

She sums it up very well:

Find more articles on management improvement in the Curious Cat Management Improvement Library, including: An Interim Report on Motivation in the Workplace by Gipsie Ranney, Remembering NUMMI by Gipsie Ranney and Improving Problem Solving by Ian Bradbury and Gipsie Ranney.

When you can’t prevent arbitrary targets and rewards based on meeting them the strategy I attempt to put in place is figure out how the system will be distorted in order to meet those targets and then put in measures that will discourage such distortions. It isn’t perfect but can help prevent some of the worst distortions (and degradation of system-wide performance they cause).

Related: Righter Incentivization – The Defect Black Market – Dr. Deming on the problems with managing with targets (and incentives based on them) – Extrinsic Incentives Kill Creativity

Posted on January 26, 2010  Comments (3)

The practice of stopping (either the machine automatically detecting a problem and stopping or a person stopping) the line when a problem is detected is part of Jidoka. Jidoka is also highlighting and making problems visible. Jidoka and Just in Time are the two pillars of the Toyota Production System. Today Toyota practiced Jidoka on a large scale: Toyota Halts Sales of Eight Models After Recall

My guess is there are quite a few people in Toyota that are getting a frustrated that they continue to have problems that they have been unable to successfully address. This strikes is as the kind of action initiated near the top of the organization chart to remind the organization that problems must be addressed immediately. It is not ok to continue business as usually when problems have not been addressed in the Toyota Production System. Toyota is capable of failing to live up to the principles of lean manufacturing. But they also seem to understand this risk and continue to strive to improve. To succeed though they need to improve results – intentions alone are not enough.

Related: Cease Mass Inspection for Quality – Recalls at Toyota and Sony – Reacting to Product Problems – Workplace Management by Taiichi Ohno

Posted on January 25, 2010  Comments (1)

This is an interesting video on Deming and American management (by the BBC in 1992): Prophet Unheard. It includes some nice old footage of Deming in Japan. The importance of respect for people is clear and the video also touches on the idea the danger of relying on data (when you do not understand variation and that many important matters and unmeasurable). The video features many snippets of Dr. Deming speaking and includes Don Peterson, Ford CEO; Clare Crawford Mason, If Japan Can, Why Can’t We producer; and Myron Tribus.

Related: Dr. Deming Webcast on the 5 Deadly Diseases – Red Bead Experiment Webcast – Performance without Appraisal – management webcasts

Part two of the documentary explores the Deming Prize, understanding data and the PDSA cycle:
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Posted on January 24, 2010  Comments (1)

The collection of posts from 10 blogs that made up the 2009 annual management blog are counted as Management Improvement Carnival #85, making this post #86.

• Are Slogans Always Bad or Can They Inspire? by Mark Graban – “Why are slogans bad? Dr. Deming writes, in part, ‘They are directed at the wrong people. They arise from management’s supposition that the production workers could, by putting their backs into the job, accomplish zero defects, improve quality, improve productivity, and all else that is desirable.””
• Fail, Learn, Lead by Jamie Flinchbaugh – “we don’t want to encourage people to make mistakes, but what do we want? We want people to surface mistakes or errors as they occur. We want them to own them and fix them. And we do want them to learn from them when they do occur”
• Five Change Management Errors that Make You Wish You’d Read this Article Sooner by Jon Miller – “it’s best to spend most of the time debating the guiding principles and values of lean in order to gain deep alignment, and then let the tools and specific solutions follow from that.”
• Joy, hope, and lean by Karen Wilhelm – “I think it’s joy and hope that propel continuous improvement. We’re just humans, with primitive brains that run on emotions more often than on facts and figures.”
• Motiv’s Scott Wilbur Teaches Brunswick a Lesson by Kevin Meyer – “Brunswick moved a bowling ball factory from Michigan to Mexico to chase cheap labor… and paid for it in quality. Meanwhile Scott Wilbur decided to stay behind, started Motiv, and became profitable making bowling balls in Michigan.”

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Posted on January 19, 2010  Comments (0)

Business Week has a good article on the strides one hospital has been able to make at reducing costs and improving quality. Hospitals: Radical Cost Surgery

There are many more great examples of positive actions being taken in health care. But all you have to do is look at the overwhelming evidence of how amazingly poorly the health care system in the United States is doing to know that it is, overall, an enormous failure. For decades the enormous cost of supporting special interest groups that benefit from the current broken system have forced the rest of society to pay for their unwillingness to improve. We can no longer afford to accept the poor performance. We need to adopt the new ideas much more quickly and eliminate the taxes on the rest of society to support those that want to take an every increasing amount from society to support their outdated, failed policies.

Related: Community Medical Care Successes – CEOs Want Health-Care Reform – USA Spends Record $2.3 trillion ($7,681 Per Person) on Health Care in 2008 – Health Care: Lessons for the USA from Switzerland

Posted on January 17, 2010  Comments (0)

The 2009 annual management improvement blog carnival continues with more bloggers posting highlights from some of their favorite management blogs. Also see 2009 Annual Management Blog Review Part 1 and part 2.

Mark Graban’s review took a Boston theme covering Chasing the Rabbit, Running a Hospital, Gemba Coach and John Shook’s Management Column. Highlights include:

• Medical Intensive Care Units go Lean: Result = Happiness
• What’s health care reform missing? Quality!
• How Do I Convince People to Practice Lean?
• A Trip to the Dentist That You’ll Enjoy

In the 3rd carnival post on the Stats Made Easy blog Mark J. Anderson took a look at Seth Godin’s blog and among other things liked: Godin suggests that under the bright light of the internet being generous and fair in business dealings pays off now more than ever.

Bryan Lund found some inspiration from the Three Star Leadership Blog, Process Rants, Capable People? and the Leadership Styles Blog. Highlights include:

• A simple questioning method to help people buy-in to process improvement
• Wally Bock showing how problems are like dinosaurs
• Underpromising and overdelivering, not such a good idea
• Shaun Sayer’s debunking a number of ISO myths in Quality Policy and Quality Objectives

And I covered, Training Within Industry, Visual Management Blog and Making IT Clear to bring the annual management carnival to a close. Highlights include:

• Information Technology is all about the Business
• Visual Management for Agile Teams
• Building up Standard Work Using Job Instruction

This year 10 blogs took a look back at excellent post from 34 management blogs in 2009, providing some great idea to help managers improve. Don’t forget to visit each carnival post and find some excellent ideas you can use and perhaps some new blogs to add to your RSS reader.

Related: Management blog directory – 2008 Annual management blog review

Posted on January 11, 2010  Comments (7)

I am skeptical that this reality show (Undercover Boss) will actually do any good but the webclip looks fun. It will premier right after the Super Bowl on CBS.

The concept, if done right, could actually be interesting. But even in that case, I would be skeptical it would do much good. I may be wrong, but I would think we will get a whole bunch of thoughts based on one single data point (no appreciation of a system, no understanding variation, no understanding psychology – just playing to psychology, and no understanding of how we form beliefs). My guess is the show will largely be having fun with making bosses actually do physical and customer service work. And probably the bosses trying to appeal to the common working man with admiration about how hard this work is.

They then will go back to their overinflated salaries and continue to limit the rewards for those they spoke so highly of while TV cameras rolled, and in general practice disrespect for people not respect for people. If it actually gets a few MBAs to stop managing by spreadsheet and start actually managing with an understanding the business systems they manage that would be great.

Going to the Gemba, where the rubber meets the road is great. But unless the management systems are in place to improve it is more like a site-seeing trip than a management tool. More like those people that go to a working ranch for a vacation (where they work on a ranch) to experience something new before returning to their normal life.

via: Dan McCarthy, How to be an “Undercover Leader”. He is more hopeful than I am about the show.

Related: Management Advice Failures – How to Improve – The CEO is Only One Person – Management Improvement

Posted on January 9, 2010  Comments (3)

10 management blogs are participating in the 2009 Management Blog Carnival. Be sure to check out all the great posts. Here we are looking at some exceptional posts on the , Training Within Industry and Making IT Clear. The quotes below are taken from blog posts on these blogs (and include links to the posts they are taken from)

Visual Management Blog by Xavier Quesada Allue

“Visual Management is the practice of using information visualization techniques to manage work. A simple example is using sticky notes on a wall to manage a list of tasks, a better (and more complex) example is kanban.”

Agile and lean management both stress to the importance of making work in process visible. With agile software development workload is often managed using short iterations to create software code and deploy it (similar to continuous flow). “The goal is that any team can do any story in the backlog. You should stress that the ‘real’ Team is the big one. Sub-teams are just created for communication and coordination purposes. In my opinion, they should not develop too strong a team identity. For example, I would not measure sub-team velocity, and I would make sure people rotate from sub-team to sub-team a lot.”

Short software development iterations “require both soft and hard commitments from team members. The team is required to work as a team (for which soft commitment is required) and to commit to finishing a certain amount of work in one Sprint.”

Training Within Industry by Bryan Lund

Another method of making in process work clear is to make clear what the process is.
Building up Standard Work Using Job Instruction explains why job instruction is critical skill that supports standardized work, in that training is used as a countermeasure against variability. An important idea that is far to often ignored.

“The primary purpose of a Job Breakdown Sheet is to serve as a trainer’s aid. It is not meant to be read by the trainee.” and “My experience is that Work Instructions are used so a number of objectives may be achieved”: reduce training time, have trainees more directly involved with training and compliance and accountability through a a chain of approvals.

Early in the year Bryan included a series of lean comics, including:

Making IT Clear by Harwell Thrasher

Harwell Thrasher focuses on explaining IT issues to a business audience, and giving business people advice on how to improve the effectiveness of their IT organizations. “IT doesn’t succeed because of technology — it succeeds because of its contribution to the business.”

He has several posts with straight forward ideas for managers such as How to Become a Manager – 13 Skills You’ll Need: “Obstacle Removal… Part of your job is to remove the obstacles that are preventing your employees from doing their best.” Managers responsibility to intervene in the system to remove obstacle preventing people from doing their best is a big key to management I believe. One great thing about agile software development is how clearly this is shown to be a project managers responsibility.

As he says in The 7 Biggest Challenges of a Manager “If you ever get to the point where you honestly have no idea how to improve things further, then you should either (a) seek outside advice, or (b) look for another job. There’s always a better way, and you have to keep looking for it.”

“Most technical people who become managers do so because they want more scope and control… perhaps most important, you don’t become a good manager by being good technically – you become a good manager by being able to get things accomplished through other people.”

Take a look at the full list of posts pointing to excellent posts from over 30 management blogs from 2009.

Related: 2008 Curious Cat Management Carnival – Management Reddit – Curious Cat Management Search

Posted on January 6, 2010  Comments (1)

This webcast, from the MIT Open Courseware initiative, shows a simulation (with legos). And in doing so explores the advantages of lean manufacturing methods.

Related: Red Bead Experiment Webcast – one-piece flow – Applied Quality Engineering Education – The Lean MBA

Posted on January 4, 2010  Comments (0)

The 2009 annual management improvement blog carnival continues with more bloggers posting highlights from some of their favorite management blogs (see 2009 Annual Management Blog Review Part 1). Kevin Meyer looked back through the posts from TimeBack Management, Lean Six Sigma Academy, Curious Cat Management Improvement, A Lean Journey, and Stats Made Easy and found some gems, including

• 7 Practical Ways to Respect People by Ron Pereira
• Sustainability: Ten Factors for Making Culture Change Stick by Tim McMahon
• Experiments for school now safer, but less educational by Mark Anderson
• Standardized Work: The Source of Creativity by Dan Markovitz
• Five Managerial Fallacies Concerning Layoffs by John Hunter

Dan Markovitz reviewed the Lean blog, Evolving Excellence and Jason Yip’s blog. Highlights include:

• This Year’s WSJ “JIT”-Bashing Article by Mark Graban
• The Toyota version for Information Refrigerator by Jason Yip – “When told of plans to use an IT system to monitor and control flow of a certain type of inventory, Hideshi Yokoi’s response: ‘When you put problem in computer, box hide answer. Problem must be visible!’”
• Chief Brain Officer by Kevin Meyer
• When The Neck Bone Isn’t Connected To The Head Bone by Bill Waddell

Hank Anderson has highlighted posts from the Hexawise blog for Stats Made Easy. Mark Anderson has reviewed Work Matters and will be reviewing Seth Godin in an upcoming post. Highlights from the Hexawise blog include: What Else Can Software Development and Testing Learn from Manufacturing? Don’t Forget Design of Experiments (DoE) by Justin Hunter, my brother.
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Posted on January 2, 2010  Comments (4)

The more you pay for your hotel room the more likely they will charge to provide decent WiFi in your room. Whether a company tries to rip you off with exorbitant prices, or lousy service, is just a function of their lack of respect for customers. Obviously it is cheap to provide decent WiFi (as staying at numerous cheap hotels shows – nearly all offer WiFi completely free).

Most expensive hotels show they do not respect their customers. Some actually do rise to the level of a typical budget, and cheaper, hotels and motels so it isn’t all expensive hotels that fail to meet this low standard. The management of those hotels come from the same school of management thought that produces our bankers.

Jeff Bezos captures one difference between poor managers (prevalent in many spreadsheet focused managers) and lean manufacturing managers with the quote: “There are two kinds of companies, those that work to try to charge more and those that work to charge less.”

Thoughts on: Hotel WiFi Should Be a Right, Not a Luxury

Related: Making Life Difficult for Customers – Verizon Provides Lousy Service = Dog Bites Man – Is Poor Service the Industry Standard?