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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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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
Robert Lloyd, PhD From the IHI Open School’s, presents a nice overview of the PDSA Cycle (plan-do-study-act). The webcast includes an example of using PDSA to improve the discharge process for a hospital.
As I have said many times the keys to success are to turn the PDSA cycle rapidly, predict the results in advance, and analyze the results to continually improve. the Improvement Handbook is an excellent resource.
The IHI Open School is a great resource and exactly the type of thing organizations with a mission to improve performance should be doing. Provide resources online that are easy for people to access and then apply in their organization. See more management webcasts.
Related: Tom Nolan on PDSA – Saving Lives: US Health Care Improvement – 5 Million Lives Campaign
Webcast introduction to lean manufacturing by Ron Pereira. This is a great 9 minute introduction to the topic, for those not familiar with lean thinking. It sets the context for lean thinking and provides some history on how lean manufacturing has developed. Get videos on learning about lean from the Gemba Academy.
Related: Oranges, Pebbles, and Sand – Dr. Russell Ackoff Webcast on Systems Thinking – An Introduction to Deming’s Management Ideas by Peter Scholtes – Eric Schmidt on Management at Google – Management Webcasts – Workplace Management by Taiichi Ohno
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.
The W. Edwards Deming Institute has posted Dr. Deming’s 1984 video on the 5 deadly diseases of western management.
Dr. Deming added 2 diseases to reach his famous 7 deadly diseases: excessive medical care costs and excessive legal damage awards swelled by lawyers working on contingency fees.
Personally I believe all 7 of those diseases are still prevalent and causing damage. I do think some progress has been made on longer term thinking but far too many organizations still are extremely short term focused. And I would add two new deadly diseases of management: excessive executive compensation and an outdated intellectual property system.
Related: Deming Companies – Purpose of an Organization – Continual Improvement – Creating Jobs – New Management Truths Sometimes Started as Heresies
This lean thinking webcast from India actually does a pretty decent job of providing an overview (for a business TV channel) even if they get some things a bit confused. The discuss TQM in India preceding lean which is an accurate view in my opinion – quality management shared many lean principles. They even talk of lean at Ford doing lean first. But they get the decades for that a bit off. They seem to mash together the “quality is job one” refocus on quality lead by Dr. Deming in the 1980’s with Henry Ford in the early 1900’s.
The webcast includes Jim Womack discussing lean thinking. He mentions the misunderstanding of lean as primarily cost cutting.
Related: Curious Cat Lean Management Resources – 2008 Deming Prize: Tata Steel – Lean management in India – TVS Group Director on India, Manufacturing and the Economy
Nice webcast by Martin Fowler, Three Years of Real-World Ruby. This talk is probably only of interest to those of you in software development, but for them I think it is an excellent presentation.
At work we have been use Ruby for the last 3 years and have found it to be a powerful language that helps make writing software applications fun. And that is important. By providing a powerful language and a rails framework that takes away much of the drudgery of writing code you can create an environment where develops are happy and productive. We are hiring, by the way.
The talk provides a good background on their experience using ruby to manage projects; and how they manage ruby application development projects.
Related: Combinatorial Testing for Software – Checklists in Software Development – Future Directions for Agile Management
Unfortunately companies like United have created cultures where people take pride in doing their job poorly. And the continued long term customer hostility companies take shows no sign of letting up. My suggestion is to take Southwest or Jet Blue (or Singapore Airlines or Cathay Pacific).
Unfortunately sometimes you need to travel somewhere that no airline that cares about customer service flies. Then just hope somehow the broken system you must trust to get you someplace somehow doesn’t fail you too badly. Or you can follow the increasingly common trend and publicize the horrible service you were subjected to, in your blog or perhaps your own webcast.
Related: Airline Quality – CEO Flight Attendant – Japan Airlines CEO on CEO Pay – Respect for Employees at Southwest Airlines – Incredibly Bad Customer Service from Discover Card
Nice talk on fear of looking foolish. The speakers discuss the idea that visibility is good. Don’t hide. Make everything visible and the benefit from many people’s ideas. The talk focuses on software development but is true for any work.
“criticism is not evil” – Very true. “At Google we are not allowed to submit code until there is code review.” At the bottom line they are repeating Deming’s ideas: improve the system – people are not the problem, bad systems are the problem. Iterate quickly.
Related: 10x Productivity Difference in Software Development – The Software Engineering Manager’s Lament – Respect for People, Understanding Psychology
Google Wave is a new tool for communication and collaboration on the web, coming later this year. They are developing this as an open access project. The creative team is lead by the creators for Google Maps (brothers Lars and Jens Rasmussen). A wave is equal parts conversation and document. People can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more. You really have to watch to understand what it is.
This is a long webcast (1 hour and 20 minutes) and likely will be best only for those interested in internet technology solutions. But it also provides useful insight into how Google is managing the creation of new tools. But the ideas are not explicit (the demo was meant to present the new product Google Wave, not explain the thought behind producing useful technology solutions), so you have to think about how what they are doing can apply in other situations.
For software developer readers they also highly recommended the Google Web Development Kit, which they used heavily on this project. They also have a very cool context sensitive spell checker that can highlight misspelled words that are another dictionary word but not right in the context used (about 44:30 in the webcast). And they discuss using Wave to manage bug tracking and manage information about dealing with bugs (@ 1 hour 4 min point).
Very cool stuff. The super easy blog interaction is great. And the user experience with notification and collaborative editing seems excellent. The playback feature to view changes seems good though that is still an area I worry about on heavily collaborative work. Hopefully they let you see like all change x person made, search changes…
Related: Eric Schmidt on Management at Google – Joel Spolsky Webcast on Creating Social Web Resources – Great Marissa Mayer Webcast on Google Innovation – Google Should Stay True to Their Management Practices – Amazon Innovation
Dr. Ackoff is one of two management thinkers that any manager, that is serious about improving management results in their organization, should study (the other is Dr. Deming). There are plenty of others that are also great resources. From part 2 of his talk: “Why-questions, about objects called systems, cannot be answered by the use of analysis… The product of explanation is understanding… The product of analysis is how things work, never why they work the way they do. Explanations always lie outside the system, never inside it.”
Synthesis (thinking about systems) involves 3 steps: 1) what is this system of which this is a part of; 2) understanding the behavior of the containing whole; 3) identify the role of function of the system in question within the containing system. Every system is defined by its role in the larger system.
Related: posts on Russ Ackoff’s ideas – Ackoff’s New Book: Management f-Laws – Write Down Predictions – Knowledge Management – Management is Prediction
Joel Spolsky webcast on creating Stack Overflow (with the goal of providing answers to professional programmers) using ideas from anthropology. Once again he provides great information. This is particularly interesting for software development but also just a good presentation for understanding the importance of customer focus and systems thinking.
What they focused on and did:
Related: posts related to Joel Spolsky – Dell, Reddit and Customer Focus – Information Technology and Management – What Motivates Programmers?
Dr. Deming used the red bead experiment to present a view into management practices and his management philosophy. The experiment provides insight into all four aspects of Dr. Deming’s management system: understanding variation, understanding psychology, systems thinking and the theory of knowledge.
Red Bead Experiment by Steve Prevette
Related: Fooled by Randomness – Performance Measures and Statistics Course – Performance without Appraisal – Exploring Deming’s Management Ideas – Eliminate Slogans
The popular ER TV show highlighted the importance of using checklists in surgery yesterday.
Such powerful quality tools, like the checklist, are just waiting to be used. But far too many fail to use these simple improvement tools. And in health care those failures are potentially critical.
Related: Checklists Save Lives – The Power of a Checklist – management improvement dictionary – Articles on Improving the Health Care System
The Innovator’s Prescription: A Disruptive Solution to the Healthcare Crisis
The push for widespread healthcare reform must come from employers, who in spite of their declared intent to cut healthcare costs also know “they profit when their employees are healthy and productive.” Affordable healthcare, he concludes, “doesn’t come by expecting high end, expensive institutions or expensive caregivers to become cheap, but by bringing technology to lower cost providers and venues of care, so they can become more capable.”
Clayton Christensen is the rare management thinker that I feel real provides profound insights into thinking about management. There are many other good management thinkers that offer valuable idea, just most of them (in my opinion) really are presenting material in ways that offer managers a good way to take action on all the long known good management ideas that we fail to adopt successful for decades.
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Related: Honda has Never had Layoffs and has been Profitable Every Year – Inside Honda’s Brain – Curious Cat Engineering Blog
Nice webbast of CNN clip on Japan Airlines CEO cutting his pay to less than that of the pilots. He really seems to understand the company does not exist for him to plunder (unlike so many CEOs in the USA).
Related: Japan Airlines using Toyota Production System Principles – Under Nishimatsu, Japan Airlines Tries to Rise Above Legacy – Respect for Employees at Southwest Airlines – posts on executive pay – Honda executives not overpaid either
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Eric Schmidt speaks at the Management Lab Summit on May 29, 2008 in Half Moon Bay, California. Conversation with Professor Gary Hamel.
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Related: Eric Schmidt Podcast on Google Innovation and Entrepreneurship – Interview with Google CEO Eric Schmidt – Innovation at Google – Google: Experiment Quickly and Often – Marissa Mayer Webcast on Google Innovation – Google Management by Gary Hamel – Larry Page and Sergey Brin Interview Webcast
Brazil’s Camaçari plant is model for the future
Here is an interesting video on the plant. It is sad how poor management at GM, Ford and Chrysler has created such a bad situation for those working at those companies, their suppliers, the communities that support their production… GM and Ford had the advice they needed to succeed from Deming in the 1980’s but they chose to focus on the short term, large executive payments, accounting gimmicks instead of continual improvement…
They each have improved over the years, but the standard is not just improving but doing so effectively and enough and they failed at that. The UAW shares some responsibility for failing to successfully lead their workers to a promising future but management is much more responsible for the failure in my opinion (the video and article try to say Ford wants to be innovative in the USA but the UAW won’t let them). It is management’s jobs to focus the organization on cooperation and success for all stakeholders. When management is more concerned with getting themselves huge payoffs (from the pockets of the other stakeholders) and then try to blame one of those other stakeholders for fighting management is disingenuous. Executive’s contempt for other stakeholders leads to the other stakeholders feeling that they should be just as greedy as management.
Related: Ford’s Wrong Turn – Ford and Managing the Supplier Relationship – Global Manufacturing Data 2007 – Toyota’s New Texas Plant – Womack Podcast on GM – VW Phaeton Manufacturing plant
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