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Kenji Hiranabe talks about Toyota’s development process (webcast). Kenji shares a presentation he attended earlier this year by Nobuaki Katayama, a former Chief Engineer at Toyota, and the lessons he learned from him.
The webcast takes awhile to get going. If you are impatient you might want to start at the 6 minute mark. Some thoughts from the talk:
The webcast includes a nice (though short) discussion of agile management in software development and lean manufacturing (the different situation of manufacturing versus software development). Kenji Hiranabe has also translated several agile and lean books into Japanese including Implementing Lean Software Development.
Related: Kenji Hiranabe’s blog - Marissa Mayer Webcast on Google Innovation - Articles and webcasts by Mary Poppendieck - Future Directions for Agile Management - Interview with Toyota President
Malcolm Gladwell presented at the New Yorker conference on the Challenge of Hiring in the Modern World. As usually, he provides some great thoughts. I wrote on Hiring the Right Workers
Malcolm Gladwell doesn’t use the same language but I think he says many of the same ideas: “Insisting on managing by the numbers even when the most important figures are unknown and maybe unknowable.” etc. This idea he frames as a mismatch problem.
Related: Hiring: Silicon Valley Style - People are Our Most Important Asset - Malcolm Gladwell Synchronicity - Hiring, Does College Matter? - Interviewing and Hiring Programmers - Gladwell (and Drucker) on Pensions
| Training new employees and then paying them to quit, sounds pretty bizarre; Zappos is not afraid of doing things differently. Why Zappos Pays New Employees to Quit - And You Should Too:
Zappos sells shoes—lots of them—over the Internet. The company expects to generate sales of more than $1 billion this year, up from just $70 million five years ago…
Zappos has also mastered the art of telephone service - a black hole for most Internet retailers. Zappos publishes its 1-800 number on every single page of the site - and its smart and entertaining call-center employees are free to do whatever it takes to make you happy. There are no scripts, no time limits on calls, no robotic behavior, and plenty of legendary stories about Zappos and its customers. This is a company that’s bursting with personality, to the point where a huge number of its 1,600 employees are power users of Twitter so that their friends, colleagues, and customers know what they’re up to at any moment in time. But here’s what’s really interesting. It’s a hard job, answering phones and talking to customers for hours at a time. So when Zappos hires new employees, it provides a four-week training period that immerses them in the company’s strategy, culture, and obsession with customers. People get paid their full salary during this period. |
About 10% of employees take them up on the offer.
Do any of you readers want to convince Zappo’s to buy a couple airlines (Jet Blue and Southwest don’t seem to go where I need to go, too often) a cell phone company, an internet service provider and a credit card company? I could appreciate the good service in those areas 
If I were them I would start with the credit card company - I really don’t understand why someone doesn’t provide good service in that area - with the huge profits it provides and competitors that treat customers like rubes to be fleeced. Airlines you have to be crazy to buy (so don’t try to convince them of that one first).
My friend, Sean Stickle, went to work for custom ink a few months ago. I don’t think they offer to pay new employees to leave but they are devoted to customer service and to not just saying customer service is important but focusing attention on delivering it. They publish “Uncensored Customer Reviews” on their home page. There are some companies that really do value customer service even while most companies do everything they can to provide horrible service.
Related: Respect for People - Understanding Psychology - Starbucks: Respect for Workers and Health Care - Company Culture - Enhancing Passion in Employees - Respect for Workers - Mistreated Customers Let the World Wide Web Know
The webcast shows Jeff Bezos, Amazon.com founder and CEO, speaking at TED on the internet boom. He compares the boom to the gold rush highlighting the similarities. But then he compares the internet to the development of industry around electricity. I think he is exactly right on the internet: “there’s more innovation ahead of us than behind us.”
Related: Bezos on Lean Thinking - Amazon Innovation - Amazon’s Amazing Achievement - Innovation Thinking with Christensen - management webcasts
Illustration of how 2-Bin Systems work, by Bill Hanover.
Related: Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) video by Bill Hanover - Messiness is Bad - Drum-Buffer-Rope Example - lean manufacturing resources
Jim Press and Toyota, Setting Sights on No. 1 former president of Toyota Motor North America
The Purpose of an Organization as stated by W. Edwards Deming described the purpose of an organization in New Economics, on page 51, as:
This is obviously not the view most people have, but I believe Dr. Deming was right.
Related: Jim Press, Toyota N. American President, Moves to Chrysler - No Excessive Senior Executive Pay at Toyota
New Erie County Government Executive, Chris Collins, discusses the director of six sigma position that will drive their new six sigma efforts.
Related: Six Sigma for Erie County Government - Public Sector Management Improvement Site - Posts on improving management in the Public Sector - management webcasts
Mary Poppendieck on The Role of Leadership in Software Development, very nice 90 minute webcast:
via, Leadership is not Obsolete for Self-Organizing Teams!
Once again Mary provides a great resource. This is a great overview. Lean Software Development by Mary Poppendieck and Tom Poppendieck is an excellent book on these topics.
Related: articles and webcasts by Mary Poppendieck - posts on software development - more management webcasts
Peter Pande adds his thoughts on how six sigma and innovation can work together. In his podcast, Innovation vs. Efficiency, he makes the argument that innovation and efficiency can work together. As I have stated many times, while bad six sigma efforts may harm innovation but there is no reason good six sigma efforts would. In fact good six sigma efforts help innovation.
Related: Six Sigma Outdated? No. - Fast Company Interview: Jeff Immelt - Better and Different - New Rules for Management? No! - Six Sigma Success
via: Peter Pande’s Take on Six Sigma and Innovation
Marissa Mayer speech at Stanford on innovation at Google (23 minutes, 26 minutes question and answers). She leads the product management efforts on Google’s search products- web search, images, groups, news, Froogle, the Google Toolbar, Google Desktop, Google Labs, and more. She joined Google in 1999 as Google’s first female engineer. Excellent speech. Highly recommended. 9 ideas:
(inside these are Marissa’s comments) [inside these are my comments]
This podcast by Mark Graban with Dr. Sami Bahri, “The World’s First Lean Dentist” is well worth listening to. It offers a wonderful example of how to apply lean ideas (I really appreciate how obvious the focus on learning and thinking has been key to becoming a lean organization). Dr. Bahri does a great job of explaining how he learned and applied lean thinking with a big focus on one patient flow. He worked with Deming’s ideas and TQM… before, in 1993, he really focused on lean thinking in 1993.
It is easier to see this, I believe, when it is not as easy to just copy what some other organization is doing. Trying to copy is never a good idea. Learning the concepts and then applying them to your situation is what is needed. Seeing what others do can be helpful, but you must learn and then adapt the ideas to your organization - copying is not a good idea. Then practicing continuous improvement and use the PDSA improvement cycle.
Related: Going Lean in Health Care - Lean Health Care Works - PBS Documentary: Improving Hospitals - management improvement podcasts
Interviews on how to hire in Silicon Valley. I especially like Guy Kawasaki’s comment - “the key to getting great people to work for you is to have a great product. That is why Google does so well. That is why Apple does so well.” I agree with the concept that a huge part of hiring good people is offering them a place where they feel proud of what they are working on. This is even more true when you talk about great software developers that have more choice than most in how they choose to earn a living.
via: How Are Companies in Silicon Valley Hiring?
Related: Interviewing and Hiring Programmers - Google’s Answer to Filling Jobs Is an Algorithm - Google Exceeded Planned Spending on Personnel
Gopal Srinivasan is Director of TVS Electronics Limited, Joint Managing Director of Sundaram-Clayton Limited and Director of various other TVS Group companies. TVS group companies, based in India, have been awarded 5 Deming Prizes. He discusses Deming and quality a bit. He also discusses their experiences in manufacturing in China and the strengths they have found in each country. And he discusses the Indian economy and manufacturing.
In the second part of the podcast he talks about the growth of the economy of Tamil Nadu and the inclusive approach required to help India grow. via Gopal Srinivasan of TVS Group of Companies on Entrepreneurship
Related: Hopeful About India’s Manufacturing Sector - Toyota Chairman Comments on India and Thailand - Indian Deming Prize Winner Expanding - 2005 Deming Prize Awardees - 2004 Deming Prize
Nice short interview of Professor of Emergency Medicine, Matthew Cooke, on lean health care in the UK (via the lean blog). He mentions that applying lean thinking to health care gets rid of wasted time for patient, eliminates errors (by reducing opportunities for error) and staff spends more of their time on direct patient care.
Related: articles on improving the management of health care - Going Lean in Health Care - Documentary of improving hospitals - Simple Solutions That Work - non-value added steps
Innovation with Joel Barker at the Cranky Middle Manager Show:
How do you make sure that checking out the implications doesn’t turn into a reason not to innovate? The implications wheel is a tool you can use. You can identify and mitigate threats before you invest millions or kill off a species.
The implications wheel is a powerful tool that is underused. It seems to be something that people don’t really see as worthwhile at first glance. The key is how it is used to identify and mitigate threats (to the organization’s future) and to spot opportunities.
Related: Ackoff, Idealized Design and Bell Labs - Systemic Thinking - articles on innovation by Clayton Christensen
In Myths About the Developing World, Hans Rosling shows some great graphics to display data on health care outcomes. This is one of the talks from the great TED conference that we have mentioned before. They really have some great webcasts available on their site.
The presentation also gives a concrete example of faulty knowledge (people thinking things which are not so - related to theory of knowledge). He also makes good points on stratifying data at the 14 minute mark. See gapminder.org for good additional material.
Related: Great Charts - Open Access Education Materials
iinnovate podcast interview with Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google.
“Normal sales quotas” - oops maybe Google can learn from others in this area. I found it interesting that Eric Schmidt teaches at Standford even while being the CEO of Google, because as he says he learns from students questions. The podcast series, done by 2 Stanford students, has quite an impressive list of, I guess, visiting speakers at Stanford: Andy Grove, Alex Counts, David Kelley…
via: Eric Schmidt Interviewed On Entrepreneurship, Management and More
Related: Innovation at Google - Google Shifts Focus - Chaos Management (by design) at Google
The Doctor’s In, But Is He Listening?, text and podcast from NPR:
“Usually doctors are right, but conservatively about 15 percent of all people are misdiagnosed. Some experts think it’s as high as 20 to 25 percent,” Groopman tells Steve Inskeep. “And in half of those cases, there is serious injury or even death to the patient.”
…
Errors in thinking: We use shortcuts. Most doctors, within the first 18 seconds of seeing a patient, will interrupt him telling his story and also generate an idea in his mind [of] what’s wrong. And too often, we make what’s called an anchoring mistake - we fix on that snap judgment.
An understanding of theory of knowledge is helpful to counteract errors in thinking. How we think is not perfect, and an understanding the weaknesses and faulty conclusions we are susceptible to making is helpful. That can help avoid jumping to conclusions that are faulty and to design systems that counteract such behavior.
Related: Epidemic of Diagnoses - Write it Down - The Illusion of Understanding - Illusions - Optical and Other - health care improvement posts
Read an exceprt from the book: How Doctors Think by Jerome Groopman .
Total Quality Service podcast by Michael Tiemann, Redhat Software.
I think the first 10 minutes of the podcast is valuable to anyone. The last 8 minutes might not appeal to those without an interest in software development and IT.
Related: Deming’s 14 Points - Agile Management - Innovation in Software Development Process - What Business Can Learn from Open Source
Short video on TPS History from the Art of Lean web site. The video discusses Toyota history and topics including: Jidoka, Just in Time…
Related: Toyota Production System posts - manufacturing posts - management webcasts
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