Category Archives: Psychology

Hire People You Can Trust to Do Their Job

Posted on February 5, 2009 by John Hunter

How great companies turn crisis into opportunity The right people don’t need to be managed. The moment you feel the need to tightly manage someone, you’ve made a hiring mistake. The right people don’t think they have a job: They have responsibilities. If I’m a climber, my job is not [just] to belay. My responsibility is that if we get in trouble, I don’t let my partner down. The right people do what they say they will do, which means … Continue reading →

Posted in Deming, Management, Management Articles, Psychology, Respect, Systems thinking | Tagged coaching, hiring, jobs, Management Articles, managing people, training | 4 Comments

Negativity

Posted on January 22, 2009 by John Hunter

Don’t be negative. Most people agree with that statement. We see being negative as bad. If you don’t have something good to say, don’t say anything. Well, I don’t agree. While presenting your ideas in a constructive way is helpful, I don’t agree with those that try to discourage negative comments. I understand that the psychology of many people has lead them to want confirmation and to dislike criticism of ideas they propose. And I understand our society has re-enforced … Continue reading →

Posted in Management, Psychology | Tagged managing people, Psychology, Systems thinking | 6 Comments

Checklists Save Lives

Posted on January 17, 2009 by John Hunter

Checklists are a simple quality tool that have been used widely for decades. Pilots use them, without fail, to save lives. Some surgeons have been using them and the evidence is mounting that checklists can save many more lives if more in health care use them. Studies Show Surgeons Could Save Lives, $20B by Using Checklists Eight hospitals reduced the number of deaths from surgery by more than 40% by using a checklist that helps doctors and nurses avoid errors, … Continue reading →

Posted in Deming, Health care, Management, Process improvement, Psychology, Quality tools, Systems thinking | Tagged checklist, continual improvement, Deming, health care system, Process improvement, Psychology, Public Sector, Quality tools | 3 Comments

What to Wear to an Interview

Posted on January 3, 2009 by John Hunter

Response to What to Wear for an IT Job Interview?. Is this just a huge bit stereotypical? Who can blame them for not wanting to bother with their wardrobes? Fashion is fickle. Fashion is expensive. Fashion requires imagination and inspiration, and let’s face it, after a long day spent debugging code or trouble-shooting computer problems, there’s not a lot of creativity left for clothing. But if there’s one professional occasion when a tech worker should think fashion first, it’s the … Continue reading →

Posted in Career, IT, Psychology, Software Development | Tagged Career, commentary, curiouscat, hiring, jobs, Joel Spolsky, John Hunter, productivity, programming, Software Development, tips | 6 Comments

Managing Passionate Employees

Posted on December 22, 2008 by John Hunter

Passion vs. Productive There are actually few organizations that can support passionate employees – even if they say they want them. That’s because the original industrial revolution was designed to support productivity. Productivity means you produce. That’s how you’re measured. Passion is difficult to quantify … Managers want passionate employees, but don’t always know how to manage them. Passionate employees question things, probe and push. Who’s got the time to deal with that? Productive employees get things done. No questions … Continue reading →

Posted in Creativity, Management, Psychology, quote, Respect, Systems thinking | Tagged commentary, curiouscat, John Hunter, management, managers, productivity, Psychology, quote, respect for people, Systems thinking, tips

What’s the Value of a Big Bonus?

Posted on November 21, 2008 by John Hunter

What’s the Value of a Big Bonus? by Dan Ariely To look at this question, three colleagues and I conducted an experiment. We presented 87 participants with an array of tasks that demanded attention, memory, concentration and creativity. We asked them, for instance, to fit pieces of metal puzzle into a plastic frame, to play a memory game that required them to reproduce a string of numbers and to throw tennis balls at a target. We promised them payment if … Continue reading →

Posted in Data, Deming, Management, Psychology, Respect, Systems thinking | Tagged bonus, Data, executive pay, experiments, extrinsic motivation, Psychology

6 Leadership Competencies

Posted on November 13, 2008 by John Hunter

At the recent Annual W. Edwards Deming Institute Annual conference (this year held in Madison, Wisconsin) Peter Scholtes gave an excellent speech on the 6 Leadership Competencies from his book: The Leader’s Handbook. Those competencies are: The ability to think in terms of systems, and knowing how to lead systems. The ability to understand the variability of work in planning an problem solving Understanding how we learn, develop and improve. Leading true learning and improvement. Understanding people and why they … Continue reading →

Posted in Deming, Management, Psychology, Systems thinking | Tagged Deming, John Hunter, Madison, Peter Scholtes, quote, tips, variation | 8 Comments

Righter Incentivization

Posted on November 5, 2008 by John Hunter

Incentive schemes to get people “motivated” often backfire. Why can’t we figure out how to incentivize the behavior we desire and have it not backfire on us? What is the righter way to dangle incentives in front of our employees to get them to do what we want? Well aiming at that is a bad strategy. Using extrinsic motivation less badly is possible but the correct answer is just don’t do it. The problems of individual incentives seem to far … Continue reading →

Posted in Deming, Management, Psychology, quote, Respect, Systems thinking | Tagged curiouscat, Deming, Douglas McGregor, extrinsic motivation, John Hunter, motivation, quote | 7 Comments

Appropriate Management

Posted on October 25, 2008 by John Hunter

Thinking about why appropriate technology is so effective, but underutilized (though things are much better now than they were several decades ago) can help anyone improve the solutions they adopt. I would especially encourage people to stop looking for the newest management book and actually read and adopt and re-read adopt… the excellent management books from the last 50 years Continue reading →

Posted in Books, Innovation, Management, Psychology | Tagged Bill Hunter, Books, commentary, engineering, management, Psychology | 4 Comments

Flaws in Understanding Psychology Lead to Flawed Management

Posted on October 21, 2008 by John Hunter

I people are self interested and somewhat rational. However, self interest, is complex. People want to be liked, people want to be part of something good, people want to feel they are appreciated… Continue reading →

Posted in Management, Psychology, Respect | Tagged commentary, curiouscat, Deming, John Hunter, Psychology, quote, respect for people | 5 Comments

Restaurant Eliminates Tipping to Improve System Performance

Posted on October 13, 2008 by John Hunter

Why Tip? by Paul Wachter When he opened the Linkery [the broken link was removed], Porter said, he hoped his employees would become as emotionally invested in the venture as he was, sharing a sense of purpose and joy in their work. … Porter instead proposed a service fee of 18 percent, to be pooled and split roughly 3 to 1 between the restaurant’s front of the house and its kitchen. … Porter, like the anti-tippers of yore, was persuaded … Continue reading →

Posted in Creativity, Deming, Economics, Management, Psychology, Systems thinking | Tagged bonus, commissions, extrinsic motivation, Joy in Work, Psychology | 1 Comment

Motivate or Eliminate De-Motivation

Posted on October 7, 2008 by John Hunter

A huge failure I still see is managers thinking in a theory x way, 50 years after McGregor’s The Human Side of Enterprise. Continue reading →

Posted in Deming, Management, Psychology, Respect | Tagged commentary, curiouscat, demotivate, John Hunter, motivation, Psychology, respect for people, Software Development | 5 Comments

Dr. Deming’s 15th Point

Posted on September 24, 2008 by John Hunter

Guest post from John McConnell, Wysowl Pty Ltd Dr. Deming opened his first Australian seminar in 1986 with the question, “What are we here to do”? After some discussion he answered his own question with, “To learn”, and “To have a good time”. He repeated this opening at subsequent seminars. The Fifteenth Point Mr. Murray Mansfield of Melbourne has what I believe to be the only completely up to date version of Dr. Deming’s famous Obligations for Top Management. After … Continue reading →

Posted in Deming, Fun, Management, Psychology, Respect | Tagged Deming, guest post, Joy in Work, respect for people

Individual Bonuses Are Bad Management

Posted on August 7, 2008 by John Hunter

Gojko Adzic provides a nice post on Mary Poppendieck’s presentation at Agile 2008 on bonus, compensation and motivation: Paying programmers: are bonuses bad and what to do about it? In software development, it is very hard to establish the effects of individual contributions and good teamwork is key to the project. Most individual compensation schemes, according to the presentation, absorb vast amounts of management time and resources and leave nobody happy, but team compensation strategies are not easy to implement. … Continue reading →

Posted in Competition, IT, Management, Performance Appraisal, Psychology, Respect, Software Development, Systems thinking | Tagged bonus, Deming, Performance Appraisal, programming | 1 Comment

Multitasking Decreases Productivity

Posted on August 1, 2008 by John Hunter

The problems with multitasking are becoming more and more well know, thankfully. Here is another article on the lower productivity multitasking produces – Multitasking Madness Decreases Productivity [the broken link was removed] by Barbara Bartlein: In a recent study by Eric Horvitz and the University of Illinois, a group of Microsoft workers took, on average, 15 minutes to return to serious mental tasks, like writing reports or computer code, after responding to incoming e-mail or instant messages. They often strayed … Continue reading →

Posted in Management, Process improvement, Psychology, Science | Tagged management research, Psychology, theory of knowledge | 2 Comments

Better Meetings

Posted on July 7, 2008 by John Hunter

Meetings are perennial problems. People sit through meetings and then complain about how big a waste of time it was. Here are a couple very simple tips to try and actually improve (instead of just agreeing that meetings are wasteful, but doing nothing to improve). Have an agenda (with desired outcomes – decision on x, or whatever) and stick to it (I think you can successfully adapt as the meeting goes on, but be truthful, can you do so successfully … Continue reading →

Posted in Deming, Management, Process improvement, Psychology, quote, Systems thinking | Tagged curiouscat, management, meetings, Process improvement, Psychology | 4 Comments