Posted on June 27, 2011  Comments (0)

The W. Edwards Deming Institute is working with the NTUC LearningHub to offer management seminars in Singapore. I will be co-facilitating a Deming 2 1/2 day seminar in Singapore with Kelly Allan in July.

The 2 1/2 day Seminar, Deming’s New Philosophy of Management, is open for registration to the public so if you want to join us, sign up for the seminar which will be held July 25 to 27, 2011 in Singapore.

In the seminar you will learn the way of thinking taught by Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Those ideas have been used by leading companies around the world and the value of these management ideas is as high today as it has ever been. Applying these ideas will allow your organization to achieve higher quality, lower costs and increased productivity. As regular readers of this blog know I often write about these ideas here.

Seminar Overview
Application of Dr. Deming’s “New Philosophy of Management” gives you the insight to remove barriers to success, increase efficiencies, reduce waste, boost motivation, stimulate innovation and understand your organization and its real capabilities. Some improvements are as simple as stopping current practices and enjoying productivity increases. Others require learning and understanding the four key components of the “New Philosophy of Management:”
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Posted on June 20, 2011  Comments (0)

Snow pack on the Helitrope Ridge Trail in North Cascade National Park. Photo by John Hunter.

The Curious Cat Management Improvement Carnival has been published since 2006. We find great management blog posts and share them with you. We hope you find these post interesting and find some new blogs to start reading. You may submitted a post to the management subreddit to have it considered for the next carnival. See more photos from North Cascade National Park, Washington, USA.

• To Change Culture, Change the System by David Joyce – “Deming learned it’s not a problem of the people it’s a problem of the system that people work within. He found that if you want to change behaviour, then you need to change the system, and change management thinking that creates it. Doing so, culture change is then free.”
• Customer Engagement is Employee Engagement (and vice versa) by Julian Birkinshaw and Simon Caulkin – “And that was the conclusion: putting every employee in the customer loop on a regular basis could strengthen the entire culture of the company. Every time a Roche employee met with a customer, the employee would leave more engaged in the work of the company.”
• Looting Factories For Fun and Profit by Bill Waddell – “These sorts of leveraged buyout games have made investment bankers millionaires, and destroyed tens of thousands of manufacturing companies over the last thirty years. It is a legal way to suck all of the value others have created from a company without adding anything.”
• Why? Such a powerful question by Mishkin Berteig – “This communication is paramount during the Sprint or Cycle but is absolutely mandatory during the planning meeting. A team cannot simply be given a list of instructions to follow. The team needs to understand what their Goal is.”
• Whoever Experiments Fastest, Wins by Mike Rother – “our current management paradigm tends to seek certainty. How rarely do we hear, ‘I don’t know,’ ‘Let’s observe what happens,’ ‘Not sure yet,’ ‘We’re testing that.’ (it is a shame when people are afraid of saying “I don’t know” – John)

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Posted on June 15, 2011  Comments (2)

Kanban and Tragedy of the Commons

One of the comments on this post suggested that the tragedy of the commons wasn’t an accurate description. My comment:

I think the “tragedy of the commons” analogy works. As long as the users don’t have pay for use (or decide to prioritize) the danger exists for the abuse. So if you have a developer team and everyone just gets to dump tickets on to them and then whine if they don’t get what they want, when they want, I see the analogy as accurate. If people can just treat a resource as though it was suppose to just serve them and the resource is overwhelmed I see that as tragedy of the commons.

There are many ways to manage that problem (some manager deciding the priority for example). Then you may have other problems, but may avoid the tragedy of the commons scenario (in reality this setup is often done, but most don’t accept the prioritizations and just expect the development team to get everything done – which means you don’t avoid the tragedy of the commons problem).
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Posted on June 13, 2011  Comments (3)

The aim of leadership should be to improve the performance of man and machine, to improve quality, to increase output, and simultaneously to bring pride of workmanship to people. Put in a negative way, the aim of leadership is not merely to find and record failures of men, but to remove the causes of failure: to help people to do a better job with less effort.

W. Edwards Deming, page 248, Out of the Crisis

This is a great quote, from Deming’s classic Out of the Crisis. He continues with the following lines:

Actually, most of this book is involved with leadership. Nearly every page heretofore and hereafter states a principles of good leadership of man and machine or shows an example of good or bad leadership.

I recommend Out of the Crisis for those that are serious about improving management. The book isn’t as easy to read as some management books, but the value within its covers is enormous. Deming’s 14 points for management are meant to help tie together various ideas (they not meant to be complete as a stand alone list). The 14 points were included in Out of the Crisis. He evolved to explaining his management ideas using the system of profound knowledge as a better way to capture the systemic nature of the management system. Dr. Deming’s point number 7 (in his 14 points) was to “Adopt and institute leadership for the management of people, recognizing their different abilities, capabilities, and aspiration.” His quote above explains that leadership was not some idea of being charismatic or commanding or the like but leading a system of people using all the ideas laid out in Out of the Crisis (many of which people don’t usually think of when thinking of leadership – such as using control charts).

Far too many leaders think their role is to hold people accountable. Such thinking shows much that is wrong with those that seek simple answers instead of improvement.

Related: Management and Leadership quotes by Dr. Deming – The Best Leadership Is Good Management – Problems with Management and Business Books – Leadership is the act of making others effective in achieving an aim. – The Leader’s Handbook

Posted on June 10, 2011  Comments (0)

The Curious Cat management blog carnival is published 3 times a month with select recent management blog posts. I also collect management improvement articles through Curious Cat Management Articles, you can subscribe via RSS to new article additions.

• Why I can’t convince executives to invest in UX (and neither can you) by Jared Spool “Neither I, you, nor anybody else can convince an executive to invest in user experience… You’ll need to do something custom. Something specific to their current focus. And if that doesn’t work, maybe it’s time for you to find someplace else to work. Someplace where the executives are already convinced and want to make the investment.” [You can substitute "lean, six sigma, customer focus or any other wise management strategy for UX in the quote above. - John Hunter]
• Jeff Bezos on innovation at Amazon – Jeff Bezos: “If you invent frequently and are willing to fail, then you never get to that point where you really need to bet the whole company… We are stubborn on vision. We are flexible on details…. We don’t give up on things easily. Our third-party seller business is an example of that. It took us three tries to get the third-party seller business to work. We didn’t give up.”
• Kanban and Shifting the Burden by Karl Scotland – “The Containment action is the symptomatic solution taken to resolve the problem quickly. Then, after root cause analysis, the Countermeasure action is the fundamental solution to prevent repeated recurrence.”
• The Iceberg That Sinks Performance by Dan Markovitz – “Time management ‘problems’ are really just manifestations of dysfunction in one or more of the following areas: strategy; priorities; internal systems and processes; corporate cultural expectations; or individual skills.”
• About that bus … by Wally Bock – “This is the kind of guru advice where the principle (get the best people you can) is good, but to use it you have to deal with reality that’s a lot messier than it seems in the books. “
• Drucker and Executive Compensation – Are CEOs Paid Too Much? by Robert Swaim – “Few people- and probably no one outside the executive suite – sees much reason for these very large executive compensations. There is little correlation between them and company performance.” Peter F. Drucker, The Frontiers of Management, 1986.

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Posted on June 8, 2011  Comments (0)

Here are a few posts from the Curious Cat Management Blog back in 2006.

See more management posts from July 2006, June 2006, all of 2006.

Posted on June 1, 2011  Comments (1)

The Curious Cat Management blog carnival highlights recent management blog posts 3 times each month. The posts generally focus on the areas I have focused on in the Curious Cat Management Guide since 1996 (Deming, agile software development, systems thinking, lean manufacturing, customer focus…).

• If management stopped demotivating their employees… by Mark Graban – “Think of a person in your workplace who is considered to have a “bad attitude.” Do you think they started their career or their job at that point? If so, why were they ever hired? … What do you think happened to turn the “live trees” you hired into “dead wood” as Peter Scholtes said?“
• The Poison of Performance Appraisals by Nicole Radziwill – “Progressive organizations might use a 360-degree approach, a la Jones & Bearley, but the underlying dynamic is the same: I’m telling you what I think about you and that’s my evaluation. I’m not familiar with any managers or organizations who can pull this off with impartiality and avoid the many sources of bias that can creep into the process.”
• One factor at a time (OFAT) Versus Factorial Designs by Bradley Jones – “The most common argument I read against OFAT these days has to do with inability to detect interactions and the possibility of finding suboptimal factor settings at the end of the investigation. I admit to using these arguments myself in print.
  I don’t think these arguments are as effective as Fisher’s original argument.”
• Lean Strategy: The Role of Ideal State Thinking by Jamie Flinchbaugh – “One of the opportunities in building a strategy is really understanding the roles that all the different product/services that you offer fit together”
• Lean UX at work by Jeff Gothelf – “It seems that as a team matures and the trust bonds between the members grow, the rituals of formal process fall away in favor of less-prescribed, more “understood” cadences.”
• TryStorming by Lee Fried – “stop brainstorming and start “trystorming (actual simulation or creation of the idea).” This meant putting away the flip charts and sticky notes and getting out on the floor and getting our hands dirty. Having the 3D, tangible “mock-ups” allowed the teams to quickly understand each others ideas and iteratively improve the solution in a way that would not be possible on paper.”

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