Monthly Archives: June 2007

Funding Google Gadget Development

Posted on June 28, 2007 by John Hunter

Google Gadgets are small tools and toys that integrate with iGoogle. Google is funding developers to work on creating gadgets through Google Gadget Ventures. Great idea. They offer: 1. Grants of $5,000 to those who’ve built gadgets we’d like to see developed further. You’re eligible to apply for a grant if you’ve developed a gadget that’s in our Google gadgets directory and gets at least 250,000 weekly page views. To apply, you must submit a one-page proposal detailing how you’d … Continue reading →

Posted in Creativity, Fun, Google, Innovation, IT, Management, Software Development | 4 Comments

How to Get Ahead

Posted on June 27, 2007 by John Hunter

Deep Thinkers Need Not Apply: How To Get Ahead In the Modern Business World [the broken link has been removed – when will sites be managed with the known wise practices from 1998 (web addresses need to live forever)?]: Fast forward to my first real job out of college. It didn’t take long for me to realize that management’s perception of who should be promoted was heavily biased by who they liked. There was one engineer in particular who was … Continue reading →

Posted in Career, Management, Performance Appraisal, Psychology | Tagged ,

Lean Health Care Interview

Posted on June 24, 2007 by John Hunter

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 … Continue reading →

Posted in Health care, Management, webcast

No Excessive Senior Executive Pay at Toyota

Posted on June 23, 2007 by John Hunter

Toyota Boosts Executives’ Bonuses on Record Earnings (link broken by Bloomberg has been removed – why can’t companies with huge IT budgets follow even basic web usability rules like not breaking urls?): Toyota Motor Corp., the world’s biggest automaker by market value, will increase the total amount of executives’ bonuses by 33 percent for the year ended in March after the company posted record earnings. The automaker will pay a total of 970.5 million yen ($7.8 million) in bonuses to … Continue reading →

Posted in Deming, Lean thinking, Management, Psychology, Respect, Toyota Production System (TPS) | Tagged , , , , | 5 Comments

At Ford, Quality Was Our Motto in the 1980s

Posted on June 22, 2007 by John Hunter

Former Ford President responds to the Wall Street Journal with At Ford, Quality Was Our Motto in the 1980s: I strongly disagree with a statement in “Detroit Pursues Sweeping Cuts in Union Talks” (page one, June 14), that the Big Three U.S. automakers “allowed quality to deteriorate in the 1980s,” at least as it applies to Ford Motor Co. I was first president, then chairman and CEO of Ford in those years, and my major undertaking was to make significant … Continue reading →

Posted in Deming, Management, Manufacturing | 3 Comments

Standard Prepaid Cell Phone Policy

Posted on June 21, 2007 by John Hunter

I ran across a specific example of standard policy that I found amusing (related to the post earlier today on Why Isn’t Work Standard). Like the authors, I can’t really see a reason for why you would want a policy that no more than two prepaid cell phones can be purchased. But if it is important, couldn’t you design a much better system to assure this policy was followed. And, at the very least, let customers hear your reasoning (so … Continue reading →

Posted in Customer focus, Management, Process improvement, Respect | 1 Comment

Why Isn’t Work Standard?

Posted on June 21, 2007 by John Hunter

Are You Really Asking? by Mark Graban The worst form would be, “Why the hell aren’t you following the standard work??? How many times do I have to emphasize that??” A better approach might be, “It appears that the standard work isn’t being followed. Why is this the case? Has something changed? Is there a problem we need to fix?” (as a legitimate question that you want the answer to). Good advice. When standard work is not followed by one … Continue reading →

Posted in Lean thinking, Management, Quality tools, Systems thinking | 5 Comments

Mistakes in Experimental Design and Interpretation

Posted on June 19, 2007 by John Hunter

Mistakes in Experimental Design and Interpretation Humans are very good at detecting patterns, but rather poor at detecting randomness. We expect random incidents of cancer to be spread homogeneously, when in fact true randomness results in random clusters, not homogeneity. It is a mistake for an experiment to consider a pool of 47,000 possibilities, and then only report on the 7 cases that seem interesting. … A proper experiment states its hypothesis before gathering evidence and then puts the hypothesis … Continue reading →

Posted in Data, Design of Experiments, Management, Psychology, Science, Statistics | 2 Comments

People are Our Most Important Asset

Posted on June 18, 2007 by John Hunter

One of the beliefs I try and get the organizations I work for to adopt is to truly value excellent people. The costs are challenges of hiring great people, to me, makes it critical to do what you can to keep your exceptional people. I probably haven’t written about this because it can conflict with my advice against performance appraisals. I do actually believe it is possible to know certain people are great and contribute greatly to the success of … Continue reading →

Posted in Creativity, Deming, Management, Performance Appraisal, Psychology, Respect | Tagged , , , , , , , | 9 Comments

Innovation Thinking with Christensen

Posted on June 16, 2007 by John Hunter

In my opinion Clayton Christensen offers truly insightful ideas on innovation and management. He presents the rare management advice that is not only good but also new – an incredibly rare combination. The current issue of Business Week includes an interview with him: Clayton Christensen’s Innovation Brain: Yes. The problem is when you say “listen to your customers,” your customers are only going to lead you in a direction that they want to go in. Generally, that will never lead … Continue reading →

Posted in Customer focus, Deming, Innovation, Management, Management Articles | Tagged , , , , | 3 Comments

Management Improvement Carnival #13

Posted on June 14, 2007 by John Hunter

Please submit your favorite management posts to the carnival. Outrageously Good Customer Service by Steven Levitt – “I would trade it all for a few more instances in which the airline does something out of the ordinary to get me home faster to see my wife and kids.” Reflections on the Role of Technology in the Lean Workplace by Richard Tucker – “Observe the actual people, doing actual work, in the actual workplace. Second, Kaizen the process before implementing an … Continue reading →

Posted in Carnival, Management

How to Avoid Kaizen

Posted on June 13, 2007 by John Hunter

‘Disillusioned’ surgeon quits UK: In the theatre anaesthetists at the James Paget Hospital prepared the next patient while he was operating on another. He said: “I found I was wasting time between operations so I came up with this solution. Now I don’t waste any time and I have no waiting lists. … “After I won my award, I met Tony Blair. He said he would send someone from the Department of Health and that happened only after six months. … Continue reading →

Posted in Health care, Lean thinking, Management

Tilting at Ludicrous CEO Pay

Posted on June 11, 2007 by John Hunter

I continue to tilt at the robber barron CEO pay packages. Hopefully, at some point, the people approving these obscene pay packages can be shamed into stopping or replaced by people with some sense of decency. I was taught in the days of robber barrons the business world was seen as an amoral place (morality did not belong in this area of human endeavor) but that over time society decided that in fact morality did apply there. It is hard … Continue reading →

Posted in Deming, Economics, Management, Performance Appraisal, Psychology, Respect, Systems thinking | Tagged , , , , , , | 10 Comments

Awesome CatCam

Posted on June 10, 2007 by John Hunter

I posted this to our science and engineering blog last week: Awesome Cat Cam. It doesn’t really have anything to do with management: I suppose I could make a case for creativity… but basically it is just really cool (it also illustrates some good product design and testing points). CatCam by Juergen Perthold – this great project involved taking a digital camera and some additional equipment to create a camera that his cat wore around his neck which took pictures … Continue reading →

Posted in Creativity, curiouscat.com, Fun

Continuous, Constructive Feedback

Posted on June 7, 2007 by John Hunter

Employee performance: Continuous, constructive feedback yields results [the broken link was removed]: Be specific. If you simply say “Good job, Frank,” Frank won’t know exactly what he did to get that atta boy. Therefore, he can’t consciously work to repeat that behavior. Instead, say something like “Frank, that new procedure you developed for handling service calls has really improved customer satisfaction. Thanks for coming up with it.” Include coaching. Annual reviews often are used as the only performance communication tool. … Continue reading →

Posted in Management, Performance Appraisal, Psychology, Respect | Tagged , , | 4 Comments

Lean Progress at Label Printing Companies

Posted on June 6, 2007 by John Hunter

Continuous Improvement [the broken link was removed], an article from the Label and Narrow Web trade magazine (“for the narrow web segment of converting and printing”), is an article with some nice anecdotes of successfully applying lean thinking. “The dollar ramifications are huge. We pay bills in 10 days now because we have fewer bills to pay, and now we have discounts. We made back the money we paid last year in interest on our credit line because we have … Continue reading →

Posted in Lean thinking, Management, Management Articles, Quality tools | Tagged , ,