Posted on March 29, 2011  Comments (0)

Investing time and effort to attract “the right kind” of contributors to a news site

I agree. And I think this is a good example of an organization needing to adapt to the changing environment. I thought about what I would do if I ran a news site and how I would try to take advantage of the possibilities to increase engagement using internet technology.

I do think if I was trying to increase engagement I would try to figure out how to highlight thoughtful commenters. I would probably try to look into something like the commenting system on Reddit (with Karma) and also the ability to follow commenters (like you can follow article contributers on Seeking Alpha). I would look at giving value back to good comments (maybe something like commentluv). I would definitely have a pages where you could view more comments by a commenter. I would try to set up categories and then list top commenters on local politics, local sports, health care… I would display in the order of popular comments (like Reddit) not just list in order made. There are lots of ideas I don’t see used (but I haven’t really thought about it until 5 minutes ago – maybe these are already widespread, or maybe I haven’t really though out why they wouldn’t work well).

I just remember a post here previously about a newspaper in Kansas that was taking some sensible actions, and seemed to get the value chain they were serving. I would also take a look at them if I were really going to do this for a news organization.

This blog has a failure miserable, engagement with readers. Hopefully I can work on improving that in the next year. My last post, Customer Focus and Internet Travel Search (is the effort of one of the 4 founders of Reddit).

Related: Joel Spolsky Webcast on Creating Social Web Resources – John Hunter online (Reddit comments…) – Delighting Customers – Price Discrimination in the Internet Age

Posted on March 24, 2011  Comments (1)

The internet should make finding airline flight information easy. Instead it is a huge pain. Hipmunk has taken on the challenge of doing this well, and I think they have done a great job. This video provides an excellent view of both web usability and customer focus. This is a great example of focusing on providing customer value and using technology to make things easy – which is done far to little at most companies.

Related: Innovation Example (Farecast – which seems to have been bought by Microsoft and broken) – Making Life Difficult for Customers – Confusing Customer Focus – Joel Spolsky Webcast on Creating Social Web Resources – CEO Flight Attendant

Posted on March 21, 2011  Comments (1)

Mark Hamel is hosting the Management Improvement Carnival #126 on the Gemba Tales blog, highlights include:

• Data and Facts Are Not the Same. Matt Wrye’s Beyond Lean blog further echos the necessity of being gemba-based.
• Are You “Under New Management” Yet? Brian Buck of Improve with Me contrasts traditional versus lean leadership practices.
• Individual vs Team Performance. TWI Blog’s Bryan Lund explores how our industrial attention deficit disorder drives the flawed belief that (short-term) heroics trump the long-term application of daily kaizen.

Related: Dangers of Forgetting the Proxy Nature of Data – Management Reddit – management and leadership quotes

Posted on March 17, 2011  Comments (3)

I don’t have any problem with the words resource or assets when discussing people (I know lots of people seem to get excited about those words). What I care about is behavior and organizational systems that embody respect for people. I have never seen much correlation between those and the use of the words resource and asset for discussing the role of people in organizations. Maybe others do see the correlation between the use of those words and bad behavior.

Related: People are Our Most Important Asset – Motivate or Eliminate De-Motivation – Respect for People – Understanding Psychology – Don’t Treat People How You Want to be Treated

The idea that people need to be treated like people I agree with. I just think focusing on the use of words resource and asset isn’t the right focus and I don’t see the correlation to bad behavior by those using those words.

Dr. Deming’s management system had 4 interrelated components, one of which was an understanding of psychology. Deming’s management system embodies an understanding that managing human systems needs to understand that human systems are different from systems that do not have people as one of the components. Deming’s management system is excellent, and my preferred way of optimizing the management of organizations.

I do agree most people that say “people are our most important asset” don’t back that up with action that shows the organization values people. I just don’t think the problem is the use of the word asset or resource.

Response to: People Are Not Our Most Valuable Resource

Posted on March 14, 2011  Comments (2)

The 3 Factors That are Limiting Your Productivity by Evan Carmichael

I agree that eliminating non-value/low-value work should be done much more often. Automating makes a great deal of sense, though I would generalize it to process improvement. Automation is great: I think that is a specific form of process improvement – automation is wise, but maybe limiting. You improve productivity both by taking less time and by producing more effectively. If you produce something of more value to customers in the same time that improves productivity.

I also think there is another important area for people to think about – new ideas. Spending more time on something might seem counter-productive to productivity improvement. It takes time after all. Going and seeing what is really going on with your own eyes takes time, but trying to save time by acting based on reports results in ineffective and therefore unproductive action.

One of the things I first when looking at using internet technology to improve performance was that the technology opens new opportunities that were not feasible previously. People often focused just on how to improve what was done. People forget to look at things that were not pursued before that are now possible. With the time you save by eliminating, improving and delegating maybe you would get a big productivity improvement by coaching someone – or by being coached yourself. Or by reading about how to apply successful management improvement strategies that are too often ignored. Or you can learn about a new strategy that is more effective such as, combinatorial testing. Or learn to eliminate ineffective strategies such as: multitasking .

A number of “new ideas” are round about ways to eliminate work, in some form, though in a bit less direct way than people normally would consider elimination. For example, if you focus on reducing turnover, you can eliminate time spent bringing new people up to speed. If you make a process more reliable you can reduce the time spent dealing with the problems from a less reliable process.
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Posted on March 10, 2011  Comments (2)

Photo of Cypress Trees by John Hunter

The Curious Cat Management Blog Carnival selects recent management blog posts 3 times each month. You may submit a link to the management Reddit to have it considered for inclusion in our carnival. More photos from Cypress Gardens, South Carolina.

• What Next? by David Ing – “The underlying problem is that it seems to come down to having to completely change the culture of an existing business. This can be done internally, and often is done by heroic souls today, but like the advice of how to eat an elephant (‘one bite at a time’) after a while anyone’s going to get pretty sick of tasting just bad elephant every day.”
• Systems in Place to Prevent These Medication Errors? Seems Not… by Mark Graban – “We’re taught in the Lean methodology that ‘standardized work’ is not just a matter of writing procedures. We need a culture and an environment where standardized work is actively managed.”
• Driving Out Fear and Other Similarities Between Drucker and Deming by Kelly Allan – “[Drucker] Inherent in the managerial task is entrepreneurship: making the business of tomorrow. Inherent in the task is innovation. Innovation is above all, top-management attitude and practices. [Deming] The moral is that it is necessary to innovate, to predict the needs of the customer.” (Deming on Innovation – John Hunter)
• The second death of agile by Niklas Bjørnerstedt – “Agile should evolve, but I think it should not loose its focus on software. If you are interested in “agile” outside of software you should study systems thinking. Why reinvent the wheel? The combination of systems thinking and agile is much more potent that some new bloated variant of agile.”
• Lean’s Fork In The Road by Bill Waddell – “They are driven by the idea that the future is unknown, but if you continually improve the processes for getting work done you will be in good shape, no matter what the future holds. Do the work well in terms of minimal waste, excellent quality, driving yourself to take the best care of customers, and things will turn out all right. Better than all right, in fact…”

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Posted on March 7, 2011  Comments (1)

Being open to new ideas and new knowledge is what is needed to learn. Experimenting, seeking out new knowledge is even better.

You can be successful and see an even better way to do things and learn from it. This seems the best way to learn to me – not to just learn from mistakes. Of course this means your goal has to be improvement not just avoiding more mistakes than before.

Your actions are based on theories (often unconsciously): and learning involves improving those theories. Learning requires updating faulty ideas (or learning new ideas – in which case ignorance rather than a faulty theory may have lead to the mistake). Encouraging people to learn from mistakes is useful when it is about freeing them to make errors and learn from them. But you should be learning all the time – not just when you make mistakes.

You can be also be wrong and not learn (lots of people seem to do this). This is by far the biggest state I see. It isn’t an absence of people making mistakes (including carrying out processes based on faulty theories) that is slowing learning. People are very reluctant to make errors of commission (and errors of commission due to a change is avoided even more). This reluctance obviously makes learning (and improvement) more difficult. And the reluctance is often enhanced by fear created by the management system.

It is best to be open and seek out new knowledge and learn that way as much as possible. Now, you should also not be scared to be wrong. Taking the right risks is important to improving – encouraging creativity and innovation and risk taking is wise.

Experiment and be open to learn from what could be better and improve (PDSA is a great way to try things and evaluate how they work). And the idea is not to be so conservative that every turn of the PDSA cycle has no failures. In order to get significant successes it is likely you will try things that don’t always work.

The desire to improve understanding (and the desire to improve results provides focus to the learning) is what is valuable in learning – not being wrong. Creating a culture where being wrong needs to be avoided harms learning because people avoid risk and seek to distance themselves from failure instead of experimenting and digging into the details when something goes wrong. Instead of learning from mistakes people try to stay as far away from them and hide them from others. That is not helpful. But what is needed is more desire to continually learn – learning from mistakes is wise but hardly the only way to learn.

Related: The Illusion of Knowledge – confirmation bias – Management is Prediction

Posted on March 3, 2011  Comments (1)

Warren Buffett has published his always excellent annual shareholder letter. His letters, provide excellent investing insight and good management ideas.

I don’t agree with everything he says. And what works at one company, obviously won’t work everywhere. Copying doesn’t work. Learning from others and understanding what makes it work and then determining how to incorporate some of the ideas into your organization can be valuable. I don’t believe in “Our trust is in people rather than process.” I do believe in “hire well, manage little.” Exactly what those phrases mean is not necessarily straight forward. I believe you need to focus on creating a Deming based management system and that will require educating and coaching managers about how to manage such a system. But that the management decisions about day to day operations should be left to those who are working on the processes in question (which will often be workers, that are not managers, sometimes will be supervisors and managers and sometimes will be senior executives).

Related: Too often, executive compensation in the U.S. is ridiculously out of line with performance. – Management Advice from Warren Buffet – Great Advice from Warren Buffett to University of Texas – Austin business school students – 2004 Warren Buffet Report
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Posted on March 1, 2011  Comments (0)

Helitrope Ridge Trail, North Cascades National Park

The management blog carnival is published 3 times a month with select recent management blog posts. Also try Curious Cat Management Articles for online management improvement articles.

• Jerry Seinfeld’s Productivity Secret by Brad Isaac – “Think for a moment about what action would make the most profound impact on your life if you worked it every day. That is the action I recommend you put on your Seinfeld calendar.”
• Employee Engagement by Krista Ogburn Francis – “Meaningful work. Most people want to know that their 8+/- hours of effort aren’t in vain, that their day results in a product or service they can believe in and feel proud of.”
• Going to Gemba by Pascal Dennis – “The more time spent at Gemba, the more you know about what’s actually happening, so the less time you need to spend in meetings trying to figure out what’s going on, and the faster you’ll solve small problems before they become large business killers.”
• The 0th Trap of Teams by Esther Derby – “The zeroeth trap of teams is calling any old group of people a team and then expecting teamwork and collaboration. “
• More Problems is a Good Thing by Kevin Meyer – “To fix the process you must first understand the failures occurring in the process. If you focus on the person caught up in the failed process you won’t learn about many of the failures and therefore won’t have the ability to even start to fix and improve the process.”
• Five Steps to Breaking the Multitasking Cycle by Holly Green – “research shows time and again that business leaders need long periods of uninterrupted time in order to perform at peak levels… Most important, it enables us to refocus on the high-level activities we should be doing that move us closer to our strategic goals.”
• The Toyota Way has worked as it’s supposed to, helping the company to face its challenges by Michael Ballé – “The “problems first” spirit is still alive and well in Toyota, from the president’s comments to reactions on the floor, and as we all know, facing problems doesn’t make them disappear in the instant: it’s a long hard slog. But Toyota has expressed its challenges, and has been working at solving them.”
• The Fine Line Between Micro-Management and Surfacing Problems by Jamie Flinchbaugh – “The problem is that you cannot manage work that you cannot see… The difference between engagement and micro-management is how management responds to this increased transparency.”
• How to Balance Life and Work – “I want you to pause for a minute, you wretched weaklings, and take stock of your miserable existence.” Nigel Marsh paraphrasing Saint Benedict.

Related: Blame the Road, Not the Person – management and leadership quotes – photos of North Cascades National Park