I have established the Curious Cat Management Improvement Institute as a non profit that will serve as an online resource to help those that want to improve the practice of management.
Curious Cat Management Improvement Institute is dedicated to furthering the education, professional growth and development of current and future managers and the practice of management in organizations.
That is quite a vast aim. We do think we can provide a useful service by connecting those interested in improving the practice of management with resources that will help them do so successfully.
We are building a web site to share resources (books, articles, webcasts, blogs…) on many management improvement topics (including: respect for people, systems thinking and data. I will be spending a fair amount of time the next few months adding to those pages.
Please let me know if you have comments, questions or suggestions for how to make the Curious Cat Management Improvement Institute useful to those trying to improve the practice of management. We believe there is a great deal of desire to improve how our organizations are managed. But decade after decade pass and the progress in how we manage organizations is very disappointing.
We believe we can help improve how we manage organizations. It is certainly a large task. But it is a worthwhile task and I believe an achievable one if we can think clearly and continually improve as we strive to improve the practice of management over the long term.
Quality is a Journey to Excellence is a 2 day management seminar that Bill Hunter (my father) recorded in 1985 in Green Bay, Wisconsin. The embedded clip shows the second section of a the seminar discussing customers and how to organize your systems to serve customers well. See part one of the seminar, and the full seminar.
Some aspects of managing an organization well are quite challenging. But some aspects really are not and yet we still often fail to do even those aspects well. Bill’s suggestion to ask the customer what they want is one such area which offers an easy path to significant improvement. Though even such a simple concept is a bit challenging to adopt if the management culture doesn’t have an understanding of the organization as a system.
In the first part of this part of the seminar Bill talks about the value of talking to those in your organization that take what you produce (a product or service) and use that in their work as your organization continues to work to deliver to the “end users” (final customers). This seems so simple and unlikely to provide value but it is surprising how often what one part of the organization believes are the most important aspects of their output to others is not actually accurate.
Bill discusses how focusing on improving quality is the best way to reduce costs and increase productivity. Improving processes to reduce waste reduces costs and increases value to the customer. With costs decreasing prices can be lowered, providing more value (better products and services) to customers at a lower price. That leads to increasing sales which provides more work for more employees (see the Deming Chain Reaction).
Bill also talked about new jobs to do to work in a new way:
Look for what could be improved. Then work on improving how the organization functions.
Continual improvement of processes.
The focus is on continual never ending improvement. This is a much different mindset than focusing on what is most broken right now and how can we put in place some band-aid to allow things to keep working as they have but stop the visible issue as quickly as possible.
Both human (how to work effectively together, how to get people communicating, respect for people) and technical (problem solving tools, statistical methods, scientific approach) skills are needed to create a continual improvement culture.
I recently uncovered this 2 day management seminar that Bill Hunter (my father) recorded in 1985 in Green Bay, Wisconsin. The embedded clip shows the first section of a the seminar.
There is a bit of presentation that is outdated (mainly about general economic conditions and specific business conditions from the 1980s). If you don’t have the patience to sit through that (I find it useful but I can understand some people won’t want to listen to that part) just skip to about 21 minutes in and you will get great ideas of improving the management of our organizations today. You may even want to skip to about 36 minutes into the video if your attention span is less open to taking in a bit of background material.
In the section of the talk included here Bill discusses:
Bigger Picture (economic conditions and history)
Introducing Deming (as a person)
Quality Improvement as Driver
US companies seem to be like a train. Up at the front there is the engine and that is where the motor is and this is what pulls the train along. The big bosses tell everyone what to do and then everybody does it…
In Japan, we like to run things differently. The engine is not just up in front and we all follow. We want to have all the employees have their own motors, start their own engines and that is much more powerful.
One would hope the model of designing business to treat employees with respect and enable everyone to think and act based on their knowledge and function would be widespread 40 years after this presentation. While I do think some businesses have learned to be less driven by a few bosses telling everyone how things must be done, overall USA businesses still fail to use the brains and drive all of their employees possess. See: Managing Our Way to Economic Success by William Hunter.
Business and Labor—from Adversaries to Allies by Donald Scobel was published in 1982 (I believe this is the article Bill referred to in the talk, though I could be wrong about that). In response to the article Russell Schrader, field representative AFL-CIO, wrote:
The present system in the US has not provided for any meaningful contribution from the workers themselves to improve the methods of production and the quality of work life. They have no opportunity to exercise their judgement, imagination, creativity or versatility in ways that could contribute to their productivity and sense of dignity. It is no surprise that they undergo frustration and discouragement, feelings certainly not apt to contribute to their efficiency. The solution to our productivity problem is the necessity for management and labor to recognize the intrinsic value of the human being.
In a response to that quote, Donald Scobel wrote:
In the last 4 years while researching the article, I have heard employees say over and over again in their own vernacular: “I want to contribute more than the organization will let me.”
Links to items mentioned in the presentation: text of the 1950 Dr. Deming talk in Japan – My First Trip to Japan by Peter Scholtes – “Building a Quality Movement,” with E. Chacko, August, 1972, Quality Progress (Bill mentioned talking to Deming about building a country-wide quality effort before bill spent a year and half as a professor in Singapore)
When the Japanese talk about quality control a better translation into English would be excellence. It is a much more all encompassing idea than what we think of as quality control.
…
When the Japanese talk about quality, it means not only the quality of the product, the quality of the processes producing the product, the quality of the designs that go into processes and the product, quality people, quality systems, quality everything. Quality service, just quality through and through everywhere. What they are really talking about is a new way to manage and run organizations.
Ishikawa talks about it as a thought revolution for managers. And that is what a lot of visitors to Japan have just missed.
Bill ends this portion of the presentation by saying “Quality is a journey, not a destination.”
I knew Brian Joiner as a child growing up in Madison, Wisconsin. He and my father worked together and our families spent time together. As I grew I interacted with Brian in my professional life and that relationship made my life better.
Brian Joiner, 1984 by Bill Hunter
We often saw things similarly. We could see things that we thought should improved and liked to focus on actually making improvements. Doing that is quite a bit more difficult than just pointing out all the problems that exist (in management and in society in general).
Brian was one of the people that best captured the desire and ability to make positive change, in my experience. Sometimes that means making compromises that will lead to actual improvements. I really enjoyed talking about ideas with him. He and Peter Scholtes were very similar to my father in their desire to improve people’s lives and the willingness to do the work to realize those improvements. It is very difficult to do.
His book, Fourth Generation Management, is one of the top handful of books I most recommend for those interested in improving the practice of management in their organization.
I have posted about Brian previously on this blog including:
My life is much richer for having known Brian. Many people’s lives are better due to the work Brian did during his lifetime. And more people’s lives will be better as his ideas, in Forth Generation Management and elsewhere, are applied in the future.
Here is an example of improvement made possible by expanding the view of the system (and viewing the results from the perspective of the customer instead of just looking at internal process measures).
I was working to improve the processing time for court orders of child support (in the retirement system for the USA federal government). The time to process the court orders was taking far too long (longer than legally allowed). The first process improvements took place in the office (there were many easy ways to improve the process). In a few months things we finally starting to be under control and it was obvious the results were still far from acceptable. Looking at the whole process the time delay due to our office had been nearly entirely eliminated.
However the total time was still far too long. That time was not under our control, so how could it be our problem? Just because you do not control a portion of the process does not mean you cannot influence those results. By using a system that was already in place (but was used very rarely) to have the mail go directly to us rather than to a central mail processing location I was able to improve the process by more as any internal improvements.
Madison County courthouse in London, Ohio (Wikimedia image).
The delay from getting mail forwarded to our location from the central mailing location was many weeks long. I was able to have the orders for child support sent directly to us. Thus I was able to greatly improve the results with an improvement that was seen as not part of our system (the mail system delay before we received the orders). There are often ways to make improvements that are (or seem) outside of your area of responsibility and control.
By expanding the system view and looking at the results of the entire system it is often possible to find improvements that are not possible by only looking at “your” system. These changes can sometimes be more challenging to accomplish as they may require convincing others to make changes.
Sports provides visible examples of the futility of accurate performance appraisal. We have athletes who thousands of people devote a huge amount of time to dissecting their strengths and weaknesses and those evaluations are constantly shown to be wrong. Teams are constantly paying free agents tens of millions that completely flop. Others hire someone no-one else wanted for the league minimum and they become a big contributor.
Yes, it isn’t hard to figure out Stephen Curry is a far better basketball player than some bench warmer. But trying to value some non-world-class-superstar is extremely difficult. Yet we have many people that think they can provide a great assessment of exactly what rating their people deserve. If someone is really able to judge people that well they should move into the front office of a sports team because they would pay a huge amount for such talent.
When you understand the challenges with evaluating a complex system it isn’t hard to know that evaluating individuals is not easy. Much of the evidence of individual “performance” is so dependent on impacts within the system that are totally out of even the individual’s influence. Yet it is easy to find numbers within a complex system that can be used to argue for or against an individual’s performance.
The contributions any individual brings to an organization is largely dependent on the system in place (see: 94% Belongs to the System).
Years ago I would publish multiple blog posts here every month. More recently I have posted several blog posts a year. For those interested I have several options to receive more frequent updates.
Feeds of my previous management blog posts allow you to subscribe and receive daily updates on management improvement ideas. So even though I am not posting many new posts here anymore you have several options to get you more frequent management improvement content delivered to you. The feeds also allow you to choose to see items on additional topics (investing, engineering, travel, etc.).
John Hunter at Zion National Park, Utah, USA. One of the things I have been doing while not writing blog posts here is hiking in national parks (including Zion National Park earlier this year).
Curious Cat history – selected posts by John Hunter on topics including management, investing, travel, engineering… 2 new items are added to the feed every day from my previously published blog posts.
Some people like to use Twitter as a pseudo RSS feed (getting tweets with links to interesting blog posts and articles). If that is what you would like to do I have two options: @aJohnHunter and @curiouscat_com. [I removed the links here to encourage using Mastodon which is where I am active now. I am leaving the details for Twitter; over time I expect Twitter will drop many of the poor policy changes they have made and return to offering a usable service. We will see if Twitter does actually address the many recent failings over the next few years. In any event RSS provides great value without the drawbacks on any social network service.]
Interview of Bill Hunter on Statistical Variability and Interactions by Peter Scholtes, 1986:
In this interview Bill Hunter describes how results are made up of the impact and interactions of many variables. Many of those variables we don’t know about or account for. What we normally do is try to figure out the most important variables for processes and then experiment with those variables to find the best options given what we are trying to achieve.
Often the description of what is going on in such cases is that there is arbitrary error or random variation that influences the final results. What Bill discusses in this interview is that what is seen as arbitrary or random is often identifiably caused by specific variables. But often we don’t know what those variables are or how they are varying while we are getting different results over time.
He discusses how many research efforts seek to find the most important 2 variables and create a model based on those 2 variables to predict results. Even in PhD level research that is often done. He then discusses how to deal with other important variables.
He discusses the real world problems businesses must face in creating solutions that work.
If they are going to sell the product in Mississippi, and they are going to sell in Arizona and North Dakota, they have to have a robust product that will work in all these different conditions… It is not good enough for them to have a model that works sometimes… they’ve got to probe deeper and learn how relative humidity affects things and build that into the whole system in a different kind of way… they have to try and dig out the effects of these other x’s
So the business has to figure out the impact of many more variables in order to create reliable and robust products and services. This example is about variables that impact the use of the product by a customer, but the same concept applies to processes within your business.
John Willis interviewed me for his Profound podcast series, this posts is about part two of the interview (listen to part two of the podcast, John Hunter – Curious Cat). See my post on part one of the interview.
John Hunter presenting at Deming Institute management seminar in Hong Kong
This post provides links to more information on what we discussed in the podcast. Hopefully these links allow you to explore ideas that were mentioned in the podcast that you would like to learn more about.
This post provides links to more information on what we discussed in the podcast. Hopefully these links allow you to explore ideas that were mentioned in the podcast and that you would like to learn more about.
I mentioned the first Deming Institute blog post, in which I discussed: “Dr. Deming’s personal aim was to advance commerce, prosperity and peace.” I also mentioned that I have seen software developers, more than any other group, seek out the original source of management ideas. I think in this post (Management Advice Failures) I explained why that matters, better than I did on the podcast: “We often accept pale copies of good old ideas instead of going to the good old ideas – which will often lead to a much richer source of knowledge.” John Willis mentioned this speech by W. Edwards Deming to Japanese Leaders in 1950.
We also talked about six sigma a bit on the podcast. While I believe six sigma falls far short of what I think a good management system should encompass I am less negative about six sigma than most Deming folks. I discussed my thoughts in: Deming and Six Sigma. In my opinion the biggest problems people complain about with six sigma efforts are about how poorly it is implemented, which is true for every management system I have seen. I have discussed the idea of poor implementation of management practices previously also: Why Use Lean (or Deming or…) if So Many Fail To Do So Effectively.
I will add another blog post for part two of the interview when I get a chance.
