Within your circle of control you have much more autonomy and have less need to win others over to your plan. However, in practice, even here, you benefit from winning over those who are involved (for example you are their boss).

Our circle of concern covers those things we worry about. Often, we believe because we worry we should find solutions. Problems that fall into this category (but outside our circle of influence) however often prove difficult to tackle. And often people don’t understand why they get frustrated in this case. You can save your energy for more productive activities by seeing some things are outside your influence and avoid wasting your energy on them.

A problem with this, I see in practice however, is that if you are creative many things that people think are beyond their influence are not. With some imagination you can find ways to have influence. Good ideas are powerful. And often that is all that is needed for influence is offering a good idea.

Understanding to what extent an issue is within your control or influence can help a great deal in determining good strategies. Where you have a good chance to influence the process you can focus on strategies that may require much more of your participation to be successfully adopted. As you have less influence such a strategy is likely a poor one.

You should remember, that there is a temporal component to your circle of influence. On some current issue, I may have a very low chance of success for getting the organization to adopt an improvement I think is best. But certain actions can build the understanding that will allow me later to have more influence. This can even be completely separate from how people normally think of circle of influence. By building an organization that moves toward data based decision making and therefore reduces HiPPO (Highest Paid Person’s Opinion) decision making I increase my ability to influence decision making in the future.

Long term thinking is a very powerful, and much under-practiced, strategy. Your influence within an organization is limited today but has great potential to expand, if you act wisely.

Thinking about the extent a current issue falls within your sphere of influence is important it determining the best strategies. But the most valuable insight is to understand how import your sphere of influence is. It determines what strategies you can pursue. And building your sphere of influence should be part of your decision making process.

By taking the long view you can put yourself in good positions to have influence on decisions. There are many ways to do this. My preferred method is fairly boring. Prove yourself to be valuable and you will gain influence. Help people solve their problems. They will be inclined to listen to your ideas. Provide people useful management tools and help them apply them successfully. Help get people, that you know are good, opportunities to succeed. Often this gains you two allies (the person you helped gain the opportunity for and the person that was looking for someone to step in). Work hard and deliver what is important. It isn’t some secret sauce for quick success but if you make those around you successful you grow your circle of influence.

Related: How to Improve – Helping Employees Improve – Operational Excellence – Management Advice Failures – Management Improvement

I think he overestimates the lack of central planning, still it is another interesting view of Google.

Related: Eric Schmidt on Management at Google – Google: Ten Golden Rules – The Myth of the Genius Programmer

Slogans mainly are bad. But like most things they can be used in ways that help or hurt. The main problem is when they substitute for a method to achieve the aim (most of the time). If the slogan serves like a mission statement to focus people on something useful to focus on and it is one minor part of a system to achieve a result it can be fine and even useful.

The issue, to me, is not so much that slogans are innately horrible. It is that, in practice, slogan are used in harmful ways most often (especially outside of sports). They tend to substitute for system improvement. The main work of shifting psychology (we do expect to win now, we do expect a focus on reducing bugs in our code…) after years of creating a different culture has to be in changing methods, priorities, values… Slogans, if done right, can be a way of focusing on the change. Or they can be a real reminder of values. But the slogan only provides value as part of a system confirming the aim they emphasis.

Unfortunately, they also to be used as a way to focus criticisms on individuals. Don’t you know/care that our slogan says zero defects? Can’t you read? Jeez, I even put up a huge poster with our slogan saying zero defects and you can’t even do what it says in this beautiful poster? Well, I will give you a bad performance review now, you can’t say you don’t have that coming after you failed to do what our slogan told you to do.

A slogan by itself has negative value. Take any wonderful slogan and move it somewhere else it will do more harm than good. As a minor part of a system though it can tap into how we people think and act (psychology) and provide value. Be careful though, it is much easier to do harm with slogans than to provide value.

If the slogan emphasizes what is being practiced every day, it can be a helpful reinforcer. If it conflicts with what is done every day it breeds cynicism and shows disrespect for people. This which is a huge problem. And managers have to know it is very easy for people to see the lack of cloths on the emperor slogan. Dilbert does a great job showing the risks of using slogans. Those you are targeting the slogan to are more likely to think like Dilbert than the they are to think like the pointy haired boss (and if you are the one pushing the slogan that means you are well on your way to being the phb – so be careful).

Slogans clearly fall under Deming’s understanding psychology area of management. To use them effectively you need to make sure the value provided, exceeds the cost and risk. I see no better way to evaluate slogans than through the lens of Deming’s system of management, interdependent components of: psychology, systems thinking, understanding variation and theory of knowledge. If the slogan is not supported by they system of management in place it will do harm.

In response to: Are Slogans Always Bad or Can They Inspire?

Related: Deming on eliminating slogans and motivational posters – Eliminate Slogans – Toyota Targets 50% Reduction in Maintenance Waste – posts on psychology – How to Improve – Stop Demotivating Employees

• Lean in Sweden: Tools < Thinking by Mark Graban – “Tools have some value, but only in context of lean thinking and the lean management philosophy. Tools aren’t value-less, but thinking is better.”
• Manufacturing starts to come home by Dan Markovitz – “NCR sees domestic manufacturing as key to increasing sales as well. It enables them to make higher value-added products that their customers want.”
• Correlation or Causation? Interceptions and the Playoffs by Jeff Hajek – “this is a classic case of confusing correlation with causation. If this data truly was a cause and effect relationship, meaning interceptions caused losses, fixing the problem would be simple… If you never threw the ball, you could win nearly four out of five times.”
• Learning from Toyota’s Stumble by Steven Spear – “But as we are now sadly seeing, the capacity for developing people can be overstretched. It was not recognizing this and succumbing to the temptation to make growth its first priority that led to Toyota’s current problems.”
• When in doubt, timebox it by Mark Imbriaco – “If we can solve the compatibility problems in those 30 minutes, it will be a nice win and we can make use of the plugin that we want to. On the flip side, we already have a known solution to the problem.”
• Be Proactive – Prevent your problems! by Sonja Hughes – “Monitoring process performance through statistical process control or other performance measures allows us to detect changes or trends so we can take appropriate action before problems occur.”
• Should You Encourage Employee Side Projects? by Josh Spiro – “Companies of varying sizes ranging from Google, to Gore-Tex and from 3M to Jason Fried’s 37 Signals have experimented with different ways to catalyze their employees’ idiosyncratic interests for the benefit of the entire company and its culture.”
• Former Toyota Quality Manager’s Thoughts on Historic Recall by Jon Miller – “if it was an American supplier and they couldn’t figure out the problem, they would have a Japanese supplier make the parts and fly them in from Japan. In fact I was flown out at 2AM on Sunday to Delphi because it was 3 months to launch and there was a quality issue.”
• Protect People by Jurgen Appelo – “As a manager you are responsible for both promoting self-organization and protection of people”
• Do I Need User Stories? by Angus McDonald – “I’m still not sure about how to set my user stories, I sure appreciate the discipline they grant even quick feature specifications, but I’m loathe now to simply bang them out when the reality is that I might need to use either less, or more, detail for a given feature. I’m going to keep experimenting because that’s what Agile is all about.”
• Toyota Stops Lines, Lots of Lines by John Hunter – “This strikes is as the kind of action initiated near the top of the organization chart to remind the organization that problems must be addressed immediately. It is not ok to continue business as usually when problems have not been addressed in the Toyota Production System.”

Follow the W. Edwards Deming Institute and me, @curiouscat_com, on Twitter.

She sums it up very well:

Find more articles on management improvement in the Curious Cat Management Improvement Library, including: An Interim Report on Motivation in the Workplace by Gipsie Ranney, Remembering NUMMI by Gipsie Ranney and Improving Problem Solving by Ian Bradbury and Gipsie Ranney.

When you can’t prevent arbitrary targets and rewards based on meeting them the strategy I attempt to put in place is figure out how the system will be distorted in order to meet those targets and then put in measures that will discourage such distortions. It isn’t perfect but can help prevent some of the worst distortions (and degradation of system-wide performance they cause).

Related: Righter Incentivization – The Defect Black Market – Dr. Deming on the problems with managing with targets (and incentives based on them) – Extrinsic Incentives Kill Creativity

My guess is there are quite a few people in Toyota that are getting a frustrated that they continue to have problems that they have been unable to successfully address. This strikes is as the kind of action initiated near the top of the organization chart to remind the organization that problems must be addressed immediately. It is not ok to continue business as usually when problems have not been addressed in the Toyota Production System. Toyota is capable of failing to live up to the principles of lean manufacturing. But they also seem to understand this risk and continue to strive to improve. To succeed though they need to improve results – intentions alone are not enough.

Related: Cease Mass Inspection for Quality – Recalls at Toyota and Sony – Reacting to Product Problems – Workplace Management by Taiichi Ohno

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:

Part 3 explores the efforts at Florida Power and Light, the first USA Deming Prize winner:

• Are Slogans Always Bad or Can They Inspire? by Mark Graban – “Why are slogans bad? Dr. Deming writes, in part, ‘They are directed at the wrong people. They arise from management’s supposition that the production workers could, by putting their backs into the job, accomplish zero defects, improve quality, improve productivity, and all else that is desirable.””
• Fail, Learn, Lead by Jamie Flinchbaugh – “we don’t want to encourage people to make mistakes, but what do we want? We want people to surface mistakes or errors as they occur. We want them to own them and fix them. And we do want them to learn from them when they do occur”
• Five Change Management Errors that Make You Wish You’d Read this Article Sooner by Jon Miller – “it’s best to spend most of the time debating the guiding principles and values of lean in order to gain deep alignment, and then let the tools and specific solutions follow from that.”
• Joy, hope, and lean by Karen Wilhelm – “I think it’s joy and hope that propel continuous improvement. We’re just humans, with primitive brains that run on emotions more often than on facts and figures.”
• Motiv’s Scott Wilbur Teaches Brunswick a Lesson by Kevin Meyer – “Brunswick moved a bowling ball factory from Michigan to Mexico to chase cheap labor… and paid for it in quality. Meanwhile Scott Wilbur decided to stay behind, started Motiv, and became profitable making bowling balls in Michigan.”
• Sustainability: Ten Factors for Making Culture Change Stick by Tim McMahon – “Many small wins, rather than the occasional big win – Small wins keep up the enthusiasm, and certainly add up. Management needs to continually recognize small wins…”
• Stacking the Box, Throwing Downfield, and PDCA by Dan Markovitz – “a tremendous example of making a plan (run, don’t throw), doing the plan (running on 10 of first 13 plays), checking the results of the plan (0 points, 11 net yards), and then acting upon those results and adapting (throw downfield and more often).”
• Management 3.0: The Era of Complexity by Jurgen Appelo – “The concept of social complex systems makes us realize that we are all participants in self-organizing systems. All of us have to lead and rule in some ways.”
• Undercover Boss – Will They Really Change? by John Hunter – Going to the Gemba is great. But unless the management systems are in place to improve it is more like a site-seeing trip than a management tool.

Related: 2009 Annual Management Blog Review Part 3 of 3 – Curious Cat management articles – past management carnival posts

There are many more great examples of positive actions being taken in health care. But all you have to do is look at the overwhelming evidence of how amazingly poorly the health care system in the United States is doing to know that it is, overall, an enormous failure. For decades the enormous cost of supporting special interest groups that benefit from the current broken system have forced the rest of society to pay for their unwillingness to improve. We can no longer afford to accept the poor performance. We need to adopt the new ideas much more quickly and eliminate the taxes on the rest of society to support those that want to take an every increasing amount from society to support their outdated, failed policies.

Related: Community Medical Care Successes – CEOs Want Health-Care Reform – USA Spends Record $2.3 trillion ($7,681 Per Person) on Health Care in 2008 – Health Care: Lessons for the USA from Switzerland

Mark Graban’s review took a Boston theme covering Chasing the Rabbit, Running a Hospital, Gemba Coach and John Shook’s Management Column. Highlights include:

• Medical Intensive Care Units go Lean: Result = Happiness
• What’s health care reform missing? Quality!
• How Do I Convince People to Practice Lean?
• A Trip to the Dentist That You’ll Enjoy

In the 3rd carnival post on the Stats Made Easy blog Mark J. Anderson took a look at Seth Godin’s blog and among other things liked: Godin suggests that under the bright light of the internet being generous and fair in business dealings pays off now more than ever.

Bryan Lund found some inspiration from the Three Star Leadership Blog, Process Rants, Capable People? and the Leadership Styles Blog. Highlights include:

• A simple questioning method to help people buy-in to process improvement
• Wally Bock showing how problems are like dinosaurs
• Underpromising and overdelivering, not such a good idea
• Shaun Sayer’s debunking a number of ISO myths in Quality Policy and Quality Objectives

And I covered, Training Within Industry, Visual Management Blog and Making IT Clear to bring the annual management carnival to a close. Highlights include:

• Information Technology is all about the Business
• Visual Management for Agile Teams
• Building up Standard Work Using Job Instruction

This year 10 blogs took a look back at excellent post from 34 management blogs in 2009, providing some great idea to help managers improve. Don’t forget to visit each carnival post and find some excellent ideas you can use and perhaps some new blogs to add to your RSS reader.

Related: Management blog directory – 2008 Annual management blog review