Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog: Deming, lean thinking, innovation, customer focus, continual improvement, six sigma.
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Some of our favorite management improvement books are: The Leader’s Handbook by Peter Scholtes, The Improvement Guide, The Art of Problem Solving by Russ Ackoff, Fourth Generation Management by Brian Joiner and Lean Solutions by James Womack and Daniel Jones.
Find many more books at the Curious Cat Management Improvement Bookstore.

August 6, 2009

Bogus Theories, Bad for Business

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.

Mr. Stewart quotes Bruce Henderson, the founder of the ­Boston Consulting Group, who describes consulting as “the most improbable business on earth” and who goes on to ask: “Can you think of anything less ­improbable [sic] than taking the world’s most ­successful firms, leaders in their businesses, and ­hiring people just fresh out of school and telling them how to run their ­businesses, and they are willing to pay ­millions of dollars for their ­advice?”

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 IncentivizationAnother Quota Failure ExampleManagement Advice FailuresWhy Extrinsic Motivation FailsInnovation StrategyDoes the Data Deluge Make the Scientific Method Obsolete?Data Based BlatheringDoing the Wrong Things RighterHarvard’s Masters of the Apocalypse
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May 26, 2009

In-N-Out Burger’s Six Secrets for Success

image of In-N-Out Burger book cover

In-N-Out Burger’s six secrets for out-and-out success

Listen to Your Customers — One of the company’s mottos is “Our customer is everything.” Applying that belief led to the company policy of preparing burgers just the way customers asked for them. Some of the customer favorites became popular and were eventually adopted as the restaurant chain’s “secret menu.” By listening to their customers, In-N-Out created menu choices other stores couldn’t duplicate.

Treat Employees Well — The Snyders always held their employees in high esteem, paying them higher wages than competitors and calling them associates to make them feel more connected to the franchise.

“They believed in sharing their success with their employees,” says Perman, noting that In-N-Out associates make $10 an hour working part-time and starting store managers make $100,000, plus bonuses tied to store performance. The company benefits package is also generous. Such treatment engenders loyalty from workers.

“They have the lowest turnover rate in the fast food industry, which is notorious for turnover,” says Perman. “They say that the average manager’s tenure is 14 years, but they have managers who have been there 30 or 40 years.”

Keep Things Simple and Consistent

The fundamental idea of respecting people is something most executives seem to have no interest in. Treating employees as the critical partners in organizational success is just something that doesn’t leap out at you based on the actions of most managers, unfortunately. And that poor management damages the performance of the organization.

Read more about In-N-Out Burger management practices in Stacy Perman’s new book In-N-Out Burger: A Behind-the-Counter Look at the Fast-Food Chain That Breaks All the Rules.

Related: Respect for Workers at In-N-Out Burger (Nov 2006)Building a Great WorkforceAnother Year of CEO’s Taking Hugely Excessive PayRespect for People, Understanding PsychologyPeople are Our Most Important Asset

March 28, 2009

Jeff Bezos Spends a Week Working in Amazon’s Kentucky Distribution Center

Photo of Jeff Bezos, Amazon CEOPhoto of Jeff Bezos during the 2005 O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference by James Duncan.

Jeff Bezos, Amazon CEO, is working for a week in Amazon’s Kentucky distribution center. I hope, and based on his past, I believe, that he is going to the gemba (Genchi Genbutsu) to learn more about how Amazon operates. That would be great.

He worked on wall street and understands the fake constraints they attempt to put companies (you must focus on short term profits, you must focus on pleasing wall street analysts not customers…). He understood the importance of managing cash flow and the unimportance of short term profits. And he understands the importance of customer focus. He understands lean thinking. We need more CEO’s like him.

Amazon CEO comes to Lexington

“Thanks so much for your interest in speaking with our CEO Jeff Bezos,” said spokeswoman Patty Smith. “Unfortunately, I’m not going to be able to arrange any interviews or photos this week while he is in Lexington.

“He is there to work,” Smith said, “and, unfortunately, we are just not scheduling any interviews while he is in town.”

Local Amazon employees say Bezos is working in the warehouse with the company’s hourly employees to see what they do and hear their comments about their work. Most CEOs would benefit from spending a few days on the shop floor.

Once again his actions indicate he is the type of CEO I want to invest in.

via: Jeff Bezos Works In Kentucky Distribution Center For A Week

Related: Jeff Bezos and Root Cause AnalysisManagement by Walking AroundAmazon InnovationAmazon’s Amazing AchievementLouisville Slugger, Deming PracticesManagement Excellence

March 23, 2009

Knowledge, Imagination, Innovation and Risk

A consumer can seldom say today what new product or new service would be desirable and useful to him three years from now, or a decade from now. New product and new types of service are generated, not by asking the consumer, but by knowledge, imagination, innovation, risk, trial and error on the part of the producer, backed by enough capital to develop the product or service and to stay in business during the lean months of introduction.

W. Edwards Deming
Page 182, Out of the Crisis
More of Deming on Innovation

Related: Innovation Thinking with Clayton ChristensenEngineering InnovationManaging InnovationGary Hamel on Management Innovation

January 5, 2009

Statistics for Experimenters in Spanish

book cover of EstadĂ­stica para Investigadores

Statistics for Experimenters, second edition, by George E. P. Box, J. Stuart Hunter and William G. Hunter (my father) is now available in Spanish.

Read a bit more can find a bit more on the Spanish edition, in Spanish. Estadística para Investigadores Diseño, innovación y descubrimiento Segunda edición.

Statistics for Experimenters – Second Edition:

Catalyzing innovation, problem solving, and discovery, the Second Edition provides experimenters with the scientific and statistical tools needed to maximize the knowledge gained from research data, illustrating how these tools may best be utilized during all stages of the investigative process. The authors’ practical approach starts with a problem that needs to be solved and then examines the appropriate statistical methods of design and analysis.

* Graphical Analysis of Variance
* Computer Analysis of Complex Designs
* Simplification by transformation
* Hands-on experimentation using Response Service Methods
* Further development of robust product and process design using split plot arrangements and minimization of error transmission
* Introduction to Process Control, Forecasting and Time Series

Book available via Editorial Reverte

Related: Statistics for Experimenters ReviewCorrelation is Not CausationStatistics for Experimenters Dataposts on design of experiments

October 25, 2008

Appropriate Management

Low-Tech, High Impact Innovation

Adopting the perspective of “appropriate technology” is an excellent way to promote and increase innovation. Your solutions don’t have to be high tech, they just have to provide wide benefits – and taking this sometimes counterintuitive approach can be enlightening.

Great post. My father, Dr. William Hunter, did a great deal of work with appropriate technology (he was a chemical engineering, industrial engineering and statistics professor) and in management improvement.

Often the failure to adopt appropriate technology solutions results from a combination of 3 things:

  • Failing to understand the conditions where the solution will be applied. Failing to “go and see” in lean manufacturing terms.
  • Short term thinking, the failure to see the challenges in maintenance, is how short term thinking manifests itself with the inappropriate technology solutions often applied by those siting in Washington DC or Paris. The failure to consider maintenance is also very related to the first point. Appropriate technology solutions are often very simple, less sensitive (less moving parts to break, able to deal with dust, rain…) and more easily repairable (with tools, expertise and spare parts available at the location of use).
  • A desire to use the cool new gadget and ideas.

Thinking about why appropriate technology is so effective, but underutilized can help anyone improve the solutions they adopt. Thankfully the adoption of appropriate technology solutions has been increasing over the last few decades.

I would especially encourage people to stop looking for the newest management book and actually read and adopt and then re-read and… the excellent management books from the last 50 years. Stop chasing some new shiny thing and adopt solutions that are effective – even if they seem boring.
(more…)

September 23, 2008

Conference Calls with Scholtes and Joiner

Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne’s Enterprise Thinking Network Ongoing Discussion series this month features conference calls with Peter Scholtes (Thursday, September 25th, Noon to 2pm Pacific Time – USA) and Brian Joiner (Friday the 26th, Noon to 2pm Pacific Time – USA). See more details and register online.

Peter’s books (The Team Handbook and The Leader’s Handbook) are thought pieces for Thursday’s conversation with Peter. As a place to begin the conversation with Peter, we might consider the possibility that teamwork and leadership are perhaps even more in our awareness today than when Peter wrote these books. And if you’d like to explore more of Peter’s thinking and writing, see also a variety of articles and letters by and about Peter at his website.

Brian has offered us several Thought Pieces related to his current work. According to Brian, “The thing I am most excited about now is the Transition Towns movement which started in the UK a few years ago. It’s what I will be focusing on once the First Unitarian Society green building is effectively launched.” In addition, the following site gives a brief intro to the Transition Town approach, with much more detail on the Transition approach available in their Primer. Says Brian, “I hope this will be enough to start conversations.”

Both Brian and Peter are from Madison, Wisconsin (where I grew up) and both worked with my father: Bill Hunter. Brian Joiner also wrote Fourth Generation Management and co-authored the Team Handbook with Peter.

Related: Curious Cat Essential Management BooksBrain Joiner on Dr. DemingTotal Quality Leadership vs. Management by Control by Brian L. Joiner and Peter R. Scholtes

March 5, 2008

Quotas are Not the Answer

Rich Sharpe posted to his blog on his recent reading of Dr. Deming – The American Who Taught the Japanese About Quality by Rafael Aguayo in Lean Programming and Dr. Deming. And he posted a response he received from Rafael Aguayo with some good points including:

But in your case you have a company that demands quotas or targets. Maybe there is a belief within management that this will help the stock. It will not, but that is a different matter that would require a much lengthier explanation.

But the whole point of this is to bring back intrinsic motivation. People should be coming to work to because they love being there. They love the work, they love the respect and appreciation they get, they love the team environment, they love that the company is looking after them and it is a two way agreement. And in this environment people and teams perform miracles. The quotas and targets become meaningless, which is what they are anyway.

Related: Another Failure Due to QuotasTargets Distort the SystemGoodbye Quarterly TargetsBooks on Deming’s management ideasMaking Changes and Taking Risks

February 7, 2008

Using Books to Ignite Improvement

Leader's Handbook cover graphic

Recommended Reading From an Employee-Owned Company

Soon after, another Web Industries employee picked up “Kanban Made Simple,” a guide for adopting Kanban, Toyota Motor Corp.’s just-in-time manufacturing process by John M. Gross and Kenneth R. McInnis. Within weeks, other employees were reading it. A group of machine operators used the book’s ideas to slash chronic late deliveries and improve scheduling processes.

In the 18 months since Mr. Quarrey picked up “Ideas Are Free,” he’s gotten back into business books – largely because of his enthusiastic employees. Web Industries, a Hartford, Conn., manufacturer, is a 100% employee-owned company. “It’s a very weird experience to be in your factory and have people comparing business books they’ve read,” he says.

There are excellent books available that would help you improve your organization. I have mentioned some of my favorite management books before but here some are again: The Leader’s Handbook by Peter Scholtes, Toyota Talent by Jeffrey Liker and David Meier, Six Sigma Beyond the Factory Floor by Ron Snee and Roger Hoerl, Lean Solutions by James Womack and Daniel Jones and The New Economics for Industry, Government, and Education by W. Edwards Deming.

My main suggestion is to read excellent books regardless of when they were written. The Human Side of Enterprise by Douglas McGregor, Fourth Generation Management by Brian Joiner, and many others might not be new but they offer more than almost any new books you will find. There is nothing wrong with excellent new books, just don’t think that because a book is 10 or even 30 years old your organization has already adopted most of the good ideas. In my experience, if more than 20% of the books you read for management ideas in the last few years are less than 5 years old you are making a mistake and would benefit a great deal from reading books written earlier.

Related: Curious Cat management article libraryCurious Cat Management Improvement booksWorkplace Management reviewAckoff’s New Book, Management f-Laws

October 20, 2007

How Curiosity Empowers Toyota

How Curiosity Empowers Toyota by Keith McFarland:

As I read Magee’s book one idea kept surfacing in my mind. Throughout its history, Toyota appears to have put an emphasis on an important but oft-overlooked characteristic: Curiosity. You can trace Toyota’s institutionalized curiosity back to its founder, Sakichi Toyoda (1867-1930), who became interested in improving the effectiveness of weaving looms, and who went on to revolutionize weaving technology in Japan and secure more than 100 patents on his ideas. You might say Toyota’s founder was “loopy” for looms. Not content just to build the best looms in Japan, Toyoda traveled to Europe, toured leading Western loom makers, and carried key ideas back to Japan. Son Kiichiro Toyoda carried on his father’s tradition of curiosity—and a visit to a Detroit auto plant in the 1920s inspired him to move a renamed Toyota into the car business.

For more than 70 years, Toyota’s curiosity has allowed it to build, brick by brick, a commercial fortress. It has scanned the globe for the best ideas—from styling to manufacturing to quality management—and imbued those ideas with a power that often surprises even the people who came up with them in the first place.

Curiosity seems like just what a cat (or company) needs to grow and learn and improve :-)

Related: Curious Cat management articlesposts on the Toyota Management Systemlean manufacturing portal

August 30, 2007

Data Visualization

Data is often displayed poorly, making it difficult to see what is important. When data is displayed well the important facts should leap off the page and into the viewers mind. Edward Tufte is an expert on this topic with great books. If you have not read them, you should: Beautiful Evidence, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, Envisioning Information and Visual Explanations.

Smashing magazine has some nice examples of good display techniques in Data Visualization: Modern Approaches. I don’t like all the examples they show but it does provide some help by showing some creative ways to display data.

Related: Edward Tufte’s new book: Beautiful EvidenceGreat ChartsData Visualization Example

August 8, 2007

Workplace Management by Taiichi Ohno

images of cover of Workplace Management

Workplace Management by Taiichi Ohno is an excellent management book. Taiichi Ohno is known as the father of the Toyota Production System (TPS), also called lean manufacturing. He dictated the text to the Japan Management Association (in a series of interviews in 1982), which gives the book a sense of listening to him talk about the ideas. I found the conversational tone made it very easy to read and reminiscent of Dr. Deming’s tone in many places.

Ohno focused a great deal on the faulty perceptions derived from cost accounting thinking. He discussed the importance of not letting your understanding be clouded by thinking with the accounting mindset. “If you insist on blindly calculating individual costs and waste time insisting that this is profitable of that is not profitable, you will just increase the cost of your low volume products. For this reason there are many cases in this world where companies will discontinue car models that are actually profitable, but are money losers according to their calculations. Likewise, there are cases where companies sell a lot of model that they think is profitable but in fact are only increasing their loses.” page 32

Another area covered in the book is the whole concept of one piece flow (with quick changeovers of equipment, just in time, small lot production…). This is one of the true innovations within the Toyota Production System. I don’t think this book alone can convey how it works and why it is important but this book does a good job of giving another take on these ideas, from the person most responsible for making it work at Toyota.

The book is full of wonderful quotes including:

“There is a sequence for implementing automation that must be followed, even though it is hard. Automation just for its own sake is a problem.” page 81

“If you are observing every day you ought to be finding things you don’t like, and rewriting the standard immediately. Even if the document hanging here is from last month this is wrong.” page 125
(more…)

May 5, 2007

Out of the Crisis

Entrepreneur.com has named their 9 best classic business books of the past 30 years including Out of the Crisis by W. Edwards Deming:

Deming’s teachings challenged American business practice at almost every point. Among his most revolutionary ideas were the notions that poor management–not slacker workers–was responsible for most quality problems, and the way to boost quality was to carefully measure defects and the effects of changing processes.

The article includes a section on what to ignore from each book, including for Out of the Crisis – “he was strenuously opposed to incentive pay plans of all types.” Incentive pay plays havoc with teamwork, systems improvement (encouraging sub-optimization), long term thinking, sales volumes (commissions increase variation in sales creating problems for production), shedding light on problems… Ignoring that is not a good idea. Other books they mention include: Innovation and Entrepreneurship by Peter Drucker and The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey.

Related: Deming’s ideas on ManagementCurious Cat Management BooksDrum-buffer-rope

via: MIT Press Log

April 27, 2007

Womack: Toyota Now and the Risks They Face

Why Toyota Won and How Toyota Can Lose by James Womack

Toyota’s great risk, the way it can lose, is that its new managers and the managers in its new suppliers will revert to the old, mass-production mentality of the companies or schools they have come from. If this happens, Toyota’s management performance will regress toward the mean. Instead of moving the whole world to embrace lean management, Toyota will become just another company. And that will be a tragic failure for us all.

The heart of the lean manager’s knowledge is strategy deployment originating with senior managers, A3 problem solving for line managers in the middle of the organization, and standardized work for primary supervisors near the bottom.

This is another excellent article by Womack. See more articles on lean management by Womack. Reissue addition of the Machine that Changed the World (with revised forward and afterword).

Related: lean manufacturing portallean thinking articlesToyota Production System posts

March 11, 2007

Jeffrey Pfeffer on Evidence-Based Practices

Jeffrey Pfeffer Testifies to Congress About Evidence-Based Practices:

In this short statement, I want to make five points as succinctly as possible, providing references for background and documentation for my arguments. First, organizations in both the public and private sector ought to base policies not on casual benchmarking, on ideology or belief, on what they have done in the past or what they are comfortable with doing, but instead should implement evidence-based management. Second, the mere prevalence or persistence of some management practice is not evidence that it works — there are numerous examples of widely diffused and quite persistent management practices, strongly advocated by practicing executives and consultants, where the systematic empirical evidence for their ineffectiveness is just overwhelming. Third, the idea that individual pay for performance will enhance organizational operations rests on a set of assumptions. Once those assumptions are spelled out and confronted with the evidence, it is clear that many — maybe all — do not hold in most organizations. Fourth, the evidence for the effectiveness of individual pay for performance is mixed, at best — not because pay systems don’t motivate behavior, but more frequently, because such systems effectively motivate the wrong behavior. And finally, the best way to encourage performance is to build a high performance culture. We know the components of such a system, and we ought to pay attention to this research and implement its findings.

Great stuff. Read the entire document. via: Bob Sutton’s Work Matters

Related: Evidence-based ManagementIllusions – Optical and Other

Books: The Knowing-Doing Gap by Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert Sutton – Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths And Total Nonsense: Profiting From Evidence-Based Management by Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert Sutton

March 1, 2007

Evolving Excellence – The Book

Evolving Excellence – the book takes posts from the excellent Evolving Excellence blog by Keven Meyer and William Waddell. Those familiar with their work know that the authors provide great insight and take strong positions – they are not timid. The book is an enjoyable read and packed with great ideas focused on lean manufacturing and lean management thinking. I enjoyed the different format of reading the material presented in the blog (though I like the blog even better, linking to other resources…, but books have advantages in certain ways).

Another nice feature is since the material is from a living blog, you can visit the blog and find out new thoughts they have posted on areas that you find especially interesting in the book. The blog also includes comments others have shared on the thoughts expressed in the book and links to online resources.

Related: Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog Directory

February 24, 2007

Interview with Mary Poppendieck

Lean for Software: Interview with Mary Poppendieck:

We start by asking people to draw a Value Stream Map. You start with a customer problem-need request, and you go to where that request is filled. So, you put on “customer glasses”, and now I want to watch what happens to that problem until it is back and the customer problem is solved. You draw a map or a timeline of everything that happens from the time the customer request comes in the organization until the customer has their problem solved. You lay out the activities there and how much of the time are you really adding customer value and how much of the time is just sitting there contending with other work that has to happen.

New book – Implementing Lean Software Development: From Concept to Cash by Mary and Tom Poppendieck.

Related: Competing On The Basis Of Speed (webcast)Problems Caused by Performance Appraisal

February 9, 2007

Ackoff’s New Book: Management f-Laws

Russell Ackoff is in London promoting his new book: Management f-Laws (see previous post: Ackoff’s F-laws: Common Sins of Management). A BBC article captures some of some of the great ideas from one of his talks (more articles… by Ackoff). How to avoid the fatal F-Laws by Peter Day:

“Companies and organisations get things wrong most of the time,” he said.

“The average life of a US corporation is only 11-and-a-half years, the rate of bankruptcy is increasing very year. There’s a great deal of evidence that we don’t know how to manage organisations very effectively.

“The F-Laws are simply based on observations over the year about regularities which are destructive to organisations.”

As always he is insightful and not afraid to shake up conventional wisdom.
(more…)

January 16, 2007

Management Improvement Carnival #3

More links to interesting management improvement blog posts.

January 9, 2007

Breakthrough Thinking the Toyota Way

The Elegant Solution: Breakthrough Thinking the Toyota Way (pdf) by Matthew May:

One Million. That’s how many ideas Toyota implements each year. Do the math: 3000 ideas a day. That number, more than anything else, explains why Toyota appears to be in a league all their own, playing offense on a field of innovation, while their competitors remain caught in a crossfire of cost-cutting. Here’s the thing: it’s not about the cars. It’s about ideas. And the people with those ideas.

I believe the best definition of innovation is the one given by David Neeleman, founder and CEO of JetBlue: “Innovation is trying to figure out a way to do something better than it’s ever been done before.” Thomas Edison would agree. Asked his philosophy, he said: “There’s a way to do it better—find it.”

Very worthwhile read. And if you like it try the book – The Elegant Solution: Toyota’s Formula for Mastering Innovation by Matthew E. May and Kevin Roberts. The drumbeat of positive Toyota and Google news just keeps going – and with good reason.

Related: Management Advice FailuresToyota Production System blog postsinnovation blog postsCEO Flight Attendant
via: Guy Kawasaki

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