Category Archives: Management

Good Customer Service Example

Posted on July 9, 2007 by John Hunter

IRA Toyota – Milford; Great Service [the broken link was removed] I was pleasantly surprised to find a “Service wizard” available. You create an account, specify the standard details about the car (make, model, year, mileage). If you add the VIN, they will be able to provide and maintain additional details. The slickest part of the wizard was the capability to pick a service and schedule a date. Depending upon what service you picked, the calendar changed. This wasn’t any … Continue reading →

Posted in Creativity, Customer focus, IT, Management, Quality tools, Systems thinking | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

New Articles on Toyota Management

Posted on July 8, 2007 by John Hunter

Harvard Business Review has a new article on Toyota that both the Elegant Solutions blog (by Matthew E. May author of Elegant Solutions: Toyota’s Formula for Mastering Innovation – via: lean blog) and Got Boondoggle, have raved about. Amazing HBR Interview with Toyota President Watanabe on Elegant Solutions: Pick up the latest issue of Harvard Business Review (July/August double issue) for a real treat: a fantastic interview with Toyota President Katsuaki Watanabe. This is a ground-breaking piece of journalism and … Continue reading →

Posted in Lean thinking, Management, Management Articles, Manufacturing, Toyota Production System (TPS) | 2 Comments

Health Care the Toyota Way

Posted on July 6, 2007 by John Hunter

Clare Crawford-Mason produced the 1980 NBC news white paper on W. Edwards Deming that sparked a movement to improve management. She produced the Deming library tapes to help reach those taking steps to improve management and looking for more help. Last year she teamed up with Lloyd Dobbins on a new documentary – Good News – How Hospitals Heal Themselves. Better Questions, Wiser Answers by Clare Crawford-Mason For example, doctors and nurses from SSM Health Care, a Midwest system, with … Continue reading →

Posted in Deming, Health care, Management, Toyota Production System (TPS)

Focus on Customers and Employees

Posted on July 5, 2007 by John Hunter

As I have stated I believe it is the purpose of organization to serve many stakeholders (customer, employees, stockholders, community…). Thankfully some companies agree: Compensation at Whole Foods – Starbucks: Respect for Workers – Google: Ten Golden Rules – Amazon Innovation. Here is another example – How Costco Became the Anti-Wal-Mart: But the Pièce De Résistance, the item he most wanted to crow about, was Costco’s private-label pinpoint cotton dress shirts. “Look, these are just $12.99,” he said, while lifting … Continue reading →

Posted in Customer focus, Management, Respect, Systems thinking | Tagged , , , , , | 4 Comments

Process Improvement and Innovation

Posted on July 4, 2007 by John Hunter

Every so often an article appears discussing the need to change focus from process improvement to innovation (and recently they are followed with quite a bit of blog talk). I disagree on several grounds. First you have needed to focus on both all the time. Second, it is not an either or choice. Third, the process of innovation should be improved. I do not believe process improvement is bad for innovation. Bad process changes can be bad for innovation. But … Continue reading →

Posted in Creativity, Deming, Innovation, Management, Process improvement, Psychology, Quality tools, quote, Systems thinking | Tagged , , , , , , | 5 Comments

Visual Instructions Example

Posted on July 4, 2007 by John Hunter

How to get people to actually use instructions for using your product: make it easy to do so. This blog post illustrates a well designed instruction guide for the Seagate FreeAgent backup drive. Simple pictures make it very obvious what to do (and even includes a time stamp showing how long into the process you are – which shows you the total time it will take at one simple glance 1 minute and 36 seconds). Such instructions are a great … Continue reading →

Posted in Management, Quality tools | Tagged , , , , | 4 Comments

Failure to Address Systemic SWAT Raid Failures

Posted on July 3, 2007 by John Hunter

The systemic failure of police raids continues to cause deaths of innocent people. In congressional testimony last month Radley Balko presented more evidence in: Our Militarized Police Departments: Pay particular attention to the red markers on the map. Those are the approximately 40 cases where a mistaken raid resulted in the death of a completely innocent American citizen. The most recent example of course is the drug raid in Atlanta last fall that killed 92-year old Kathryn Johnston. Ms. Johnston … Continue reading →

Posted in Management, Public Sector, Respect | 3 Comments

Deming’s 14 Points

Posted on July 2, 2007 by John Hunter

The Project Management Student blog has posted point 14 of the series covering Deming’s 14 points for Project Management. I have mentioned it before, and the series is worth reading (in this Deming advocates opinion). A sample, from Enable Pride of Workmanship [the broken link has been removed]: Project managers should be looking for the great things their teams are doing. People on their projects should know that when they go above and beyond, they will be recognized. A huge … Continue reading →

Posted in Deming, Management

Management Improvement Carnival #14

Posted on July 1, 2007 by John Hunter

Management Improvement Carnival #14 is hosted by Kevin Meyer at Evolving Excellence. Some highlights include: Reducing Waste for Shoppers at Lean Blog. “The traditional grocery store is to spread out common items to force you to walk the whole store – that’s waste for the customer. Target is trying a new approach.” 10 Common Misperceptions About Lean Manufacturing at Gemba Panta Rei. “There is nothing inherently Japanese about Lean manufacturing, nor are Japanese people naturally better at Lean than any … Continue reading →

Posted in Carnival, Management

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