Category Archives: Management

Making Suits in the USA

Posted on March 21, 2007 by John Hunter

Trying On Toyota’s Methods (site broke link so I removed it): Keeping Abboud’s suit manufacturing in the United States has advantages, such as reduced shipping time, he said. He also believes overseas workers can’t beat the quality and price of the suits Abboud produces in New Bedford, which sell in Nordstrom Inc. and Bloomingdale’s for $700 to $1,000. Abboud says its sales are about $400 million a year. The company is doing fine, but management says the U.S. factory has … Continue reading →

Posted in Economics, Lean thinking, Management

Eric Schmidt Podcast – Google Innovation and Entrepreneurship

Posted on March 20, 2007 by John Hunter

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 … Continue reading →

Posted in Google, Innovation, IT, Management, webcast | 1 Comment

Errors in Thinking

Posted on March 19, 2007 by John Hunter

The Doctor’s In, But Is He Listening?, text and podcast from NPR: Jerome Groopman (photo) is a doctor who discovered that he needed a doctor. When his hand was hurt, he went to six prominent surgeons and got four different opinions about what was wrong. Groopman was advised to have unnecessary surgery and got a seemingly made-up diagnosis for a nonexistent condition. Groopman, who holds a chair in medicine at Harvard Medical School, eventually found a doctor who helped… “Usually … Continue reading →

Posted in Health care, Management, webcast | Tagged , ,

Experiment and Learn

Posted on March 18, 2007 by John Hunter

Experimenting with milkshakes? I have been on a mission to convince firms to do simple experiments that will give them feedback regarding the decisions that they make. Just as with people (as Anders Ericsson studies), firms cannot learn with feedback. It turns out, however, that it is not easy for people in companies to see the wisdom in experiments. Experiments are useful and underused. PDSA and design of experiments are two concepts that aid in experimenting successfully. Related: Google: Experiment … Continue reading →

Posted in Customer focus, Deming, Design of Experiments, Management, Quality tools | Tagged , ,

Deming Institute Seminar

Posted on March 16, 2007 by John Hunter

The Deming Institute is sponsoring, How to Create Unethical, Ineffective Organizations That Go Out of Business [the broken link was removed], 23-25 April, 2007 in Lansing, Michigan. I will be co-presenting the seminar. Twenty-seven faulty management and corporate governance practices create most of the problems in any organization. These practices will be identified, and better practices recommended. It will be shown that as better practices are introduced, quality of products and services increases, costs decline, and you create a globally … Continue reading →

Posted in curiouscat.com, Deming, Education, Management

Management Improvement Carnival #7

Posted on March 14, 2007 by John Hunter

How are stories of successful companies leading us astray? by Karen Wilhelm – “correlation does not equal causation, a inspecting a “sample” consisting only of good parts will not yield good information about a process, and anecdotal evidence is interesting but not acceptable as proof of a hypothesis.” SBTI Response to WSJ Article by Joe Ficalora and Joe Costello – “By and large the executives who have left GE and AlliedSignal (now Honeywell) and other Six-Sigma companies who became top … Continue reading →

Posted in Carnival, Management

Simple Solutions That Work

Posted on March 13, 2007 by John Hunter

Nurse, the maggots [the broken link was removed] Maggots clean wounds 18 times faster than normal treatments, can conquer MRSA and would save the NHS millions. … Recent studies have indicated that maggot therapy can cut treatment duration from 89 days to just five, and slash the cost from £2,200 to £300 per patient. Moon describes the grubs as “a highly cost-effective, highly efficient but forgotten and undervalued method of treatment”, and Caroline Flint, the Public Health Minister, says that … Continue reading →

Posted in Creativity, Health care, Management, Science | Tagged ,

Jeffrey Pfeffer on Evidence-Based Practices

Posted on March 11, 2007 by John Hunter

Jeffrey Pfeffer Testifies to Congress About Evidence-Based Practices [the broken link was removed]: In this short statement, I want to make five points as succinctly as possible, providing references for background and documentation for my arguments. First, organizations in both the public and private sector ought to base policies not on casual benchmarking, on ideology or belief, on what they have done in the past or what they are comfortable with doing, but instead should implement evidence-based management. Second, the … Continue reading →

Posted in Books, Data, Management, Performance Appraisal, Public Sector, Statistics, Systems thinking | Tagged ,

Motivating Employees

Posted on March 7, 2007 by John Hunter

No Matter How Badly You Want It: “When it seems easy, it’s like they already wanted to do it in the first place.” Martin paused. “It seems impossible when they didn’t ever want to do it. So, it doesn’t seem to matter what you want, as the manager, or how badly you want it. The only thing that seems to matter is whether your team members want to do it?” The lights were circling in Martin’s head. The whole time, … Continue reading →

Posted in Deming, Management, Psychology, Respect | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Management Improvement Carnival #6

Posted on March 2, 2007 by John Hunter

Management Improvement ideas from around the web: Lean Q&A by Jamie Flinchbaugh – “There is no recipe, no three-ring binder approach to lean. If someone brings you an approach and says “here is the best way to implement lean,” please, run away.” Seven steps to remarkable customer service by Joel Spolsky – “The superficial and immediate solution is just to solve the customer’s problem. But when you think a little harder you can usually find a deeper solution” The Seven … Continue reading →

Posted in Carnival, Management

Write it Down

Posted on March 1, 2007 by John Hunter

Why Write it down? The longer I pursue Lean, the more I am amazed with its fundamentals. I may write more about this in the near future. Like the emphasis to write things down. In meetings, writing down decisions (what is the issue, who is going to do what…) is very helpful. It is very easy for people to think everyone agrees to some somewhat clear statements made in the meeting. Only later it becomes obvious several people have different … Continue reading →

Posted in Management, Process improvement, Quality tools, quote, Systems thinking | Tagged , , , , | 6 Comments

Evolving Excellence – The Book

Posted on March 1, 2007 by John Hunter

Evolving Excellence – the book takes posts from the excellent Evolving Excellence blog by Keven Meyer and William Waddell. Those familiar with their work know that the authors provide great insight and take strong positions – they are not timid. The book is an enjoyable read and packed with great ideas focused on lean manufacturing and lean management thinking. I enjoyed the different format of reading the material presented in the blog (though I like the blog even better, linking … Continue reading →

Posted in Books, Lean thinking, Management

Curious Cat Management Improvement Web Site

Posted on February 28, 2007 by John Hunter

The Curious Cat Management Improvement site includes a wide array of resources for management professionals (and has been growing and improving, I hope, since 1996). Our calendar now includes several interesting opportunities including Performance Measures and Statistics Workshop [the broken link was removed] in Richland, Washington, USA by Stephen Prevette. This workshop looks interesting. We have mentioned the presenter in other posts. Our management improvement job board currently lists jobs including: Six Sigma/Technical Specialist, Supply Chain Project Manager (Google), Quality … Continue reading →

Posted in Career, curiouscat.com, Management

Firing Workers Isn’t Fixing Problems

Posted on February 26, 2007 by John Hunter

I commented on a post on Evolving Excellence that Jim Jubak is a wall street guy who has good ideas. He has posted another good article: Firing workers isn’t fixing problems [the broken link was removed] Both CEOs, Edward Zander at Motorola and Jeffrey Kindler at Pfizer, of course, kept their jobs and their paychecks. According to Motorola’s latest proxy statement, Zander received a salary of $1.5 million, a $3 million bonus and $2.3 million in restricted stock in 2005. … Continue reading →

Posted in Investing, Lean thinking, Management | Tagged , , , | 3 Comments

Dell Innovation

Posted on February 25, 2007 by John Hunter

Dell has been taking some interesting actions recently. Several months ago they started blogging and interacting with bloggers. Those steps have been interesting since few other companies of their size have taken such action (nothing amazing, but seem much beyond the common corporate, totally out of touch attempts to adopt new technology – they seemed to be committed to actually try to learn about interactive web thinking). They recently created IdeaStorm to Turn Up the Volume of Customer Voice [the … Continue reading →

Posted in Creativity, Customer focus, IT, Management | Tagged , , , | 5 Comments

Interview with Mary Poppendieck

Posted on February 24, 2007 by John Hunter

Lean for Software: Interview with Mary Poppendieck: We start by asking people to draw a Value Stream Map. You start with a customer problem-need request, and you go to where that request is filled. So, you put on “customer glasses”, and now I want to watch what happens to that problem until it is back and the customer problem is solved. You draw a map or a timeline of everything that happens from the time the customer request comes in … Continue reading →

Posted in Books, IT, Lean thinking, Management, Software Development | 1 Comment