The Future of Quality is to Actually Do What People Talked About Decades Ago

Posted on June 3, 2015 by John Hunter

In the current ASQ Influential Voices post, Laurel Nelson-Rowe, ASQ managing director, asks: What’s the Future of Quality?

The report they link to is hidden behind a register-wall. Hopefully in the future ASQ will have better User Experience (Ux) practices in place on the web site.

But it is a good example of the failures to adopt well known, decades old recommended practices. This failure to just do what the best experts have suggested for a long time is an example of the kind of thing we should hope to see eliminated in the future.

We don’t need fancy new ideas or breakthroughs. We just need to adopt what many people have been saying for decades. Read Russell Ackoff, W. Edwards Deming, Peter Scholtes, George Box, James Womack and Brian Joiner you will be well on your way to knowing what you need to know to help us to reach a good future for quality.

There are quite a few people that have provided very good material on lean thinking and the other ideas on management improvement. This list isn’t meant to say you should limit yourself to these people. I just feel you don’t need to go in search of new things, we have much better ideas than any new things being sold now from management experts that have been decades of material we would benefit greatly from applying today.

If you want a bit on user experience (given the importance of the internet and software applications today ) you can read: Signal to Noise, Boxes and Arrows and A List Apart.

If you want to appeal to those that think you must read something new you can read a bit of Eric Reis, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Dan Pink. They offer good ideas, Eric Reis offers the most concrete suggestions in this group (Dan Pink is next). And those that like shiny new things will be happy with your new names (for a while). The Ux people also will provide concrete ideas to use. I personally find many excellent management bloggers are valuable resources to managers.

We haven’t done nearly as much with all the great management concepts explained decades ago. Not much of what is said to be new in the last 20 years provides more value than the stuff we haven’t gotten around to doing yet that was laid out long ago. If we want better managed organization to provide better results to customers, employees, stockholders and other stakeholders would be wise to make the future of quality actually applying what Deming, Ackoff, Scholtes and the other provided us.

I think we will be able to make this the future of quality. We take a long time to adopt better ideas for management but we do adopt them (with lots of backsliding in many organizations, but over the decades the movement is in the right direction in most ways).

Related: We really need to change how we improve the practice of management – New or Different? Just Choose Better – Good management is good management: it doesn’t matter if someone figured out the good idea 100 years ago or last week. – New Rules for Management? No!

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Top 21 Executives at Toyota Getting a Raise to a Combined US$14.9 Million

Posted on May 20, 2015 by John Hunter

The difference between Toyota and so many other companies is obvious in many ways. One of the stark differences is how executives are paid. Toyota’s belief in a strong management system contrasts with the self worship many USA executives practice. How the executives pay themselves illustrates this very well.

Even with a proposed 19% pay boost the top 21 executives at Toyota would get a combined US$14.9 million in the proposal for this year.

Toyota Plans 19% Boost in Director Pay After Record Profit

Toyota proposed 1.52 billion yen ($14.9 million) in combined compensation and bonuses to 21 directors, including President Akio Toyoda, in a notice to shareholders today. The Toyota City, Japan-based company paid 1.28 billion yen the previous fiscal year.

After recording an unprecedented 1.82 trillion yen profit last fiscal year, Toyota forecast this month that net income will slip 2.4 percent in the year ending March 31. The company predicts deliveries to increase in every major region except Japan, where the nation’s first sales-tax increase in 17 years is expected to temper demand.

Toyota has proposed raising its year-end dividend to 100 yen a share, or 165 yen for the full year.

The deadly disease of extremely excessive executive pay has been doing more and more damage every year in the USA. Toyota has avoided the pitfall shared by so many self-centered USA CEOs. The 19% raise does possibly indicate that Toyota is slipping (they also received a 19% increase last year). But they have a long way to go before executive pay becomes a serious problem at Toyota.

The 21 Toyota executives together don’t get paid what CEOs at companies in the USA that make as much as Toyota does (few companies are as successful as Toyota). Many senior executives that are not CEOs in companies in the USA make much more that all 21 Toyota executives together. Europe has largely adopted the massively overpaid practices for senior executives from the USA. Most European companies lag behind the abuse of USA executives, but the European companies use the excuse of the USA to grab ever increasing amounts from corporate treasuries. In do so they adopt similar reckless management practices in order to justify taking so much.

For now, executive pay (and with it all the management distortions caused by massively unjust pay packages for executives cause within companies) is a big competitive advantage for Toyota. Not all USA companies allow executives to loot the company, for example, Costco continues to pay executives and staff fairly and does very well. But many USA companies are being torn apart by executives seeking and taking hugely unjust pay packages.

Total pay for union workers at Toyota will increase 8.2% on average from last year (I think this is pay for Japanese union workers, though I am not sure about that). This was also the same amount as the increase was in 2014. This seems an unlikely coincidence, it seems intentional. If you see data like this from a process it often indicated an artificial cap exists (or there are restraining forces on the process that make data points beyond certain limits very unlikely).

If you have seen lower figures for pay increases for Toyota workers, that was for the regular pay level which did not go up much. Toyota has a very large profit sharing plan. Profit sharing payments to union workers were over 6 months of regular pay. The main increase in pay for employees was in profit sharing. The “profit sharing” payments are negotiated so it isn’t exactly like what you may think of as profit sharing but it is essentially what those payments are it seems to me.

Related: Toyota Post Record Profit and Splits $15 million in Pay and Bonus for top 21 Executives (2014) – CEOs Plundering Corporate Coffers – Too often, executive compensation in the U.S. is ridiculously out of line with performance – Warren Buffett (2006 – it is even worse today) – No Excessive Senior Executive Pay at Toyota (2007) – Honda’s 36 board members, included the CEO, were paid $13 million in 2008

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The Aim Should be the Best Life – Not Work v. Life Balance

Posted on May 13, 2015 by John Hunter

My father had the most job satisfaction of anyone I have known. He had no separation between work and life. We toured factories on vacation. I visited Davidson College in North Carolina because he was consulting with a client in Charlotte before we went up to Duke and North Carolina for visits and asked the CEO what school I should visit. His grad students would call the house frequently.

Many of his best friends were colleagues. That is how I grew to know people like George Box, Brian Joiner, Soren Bisgaard and Peter Scholtes as I grew up. Various permutations of our family lived overseas based on his jobs in London (before kids), Singapore, Nigeria and China. Those experiences dramatically impacted all our lives and they were not about separating work from life.

The desire for a life embedded in other cultures and for travel drove decisions about work. He lived in Japan (because of his Dad’s job) for 2 years as a kid and that sparked his desire to do more of that as an adult.

My little brother, Justin, pushing me on a scooter at our house in Singapore.

My little brother, Justin, pushing me on a scooter at our house in Singapore.

The sensible aim is to optimize your life. Work is a big part of life. As with any system the results depend on the overall system not the performance of individual parts taken separately. Dad also died young. He was happy to have lived such a good life, even if he wished he could have lived longer he wasn’t bitter about missing anything.

When he learned he would die (of cancer) he mainly continued what he had always been doing living life and working on what he thought was worthwhile. One project he did take on, along with George Box, was creating the Center of Quality and Productivity Improvement at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. George’s speech about Dad’s work provides a nice look at how work and life – William G. Hunter: An Innovator and Catalyst for Quality Improvement.

He honestly looked back on his life and felt he had a life that few could have topped, even though it was cut short. He was certainly optimistic and positive. But my sense was this was his honest assessment, it wasn’t just some fake front he put on for others. He had been living his life as well as he could his whole life. And continuing to live it as long as he could was all he wanted to do.

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Visual Management and Mistake-Proofing for Prescription Pills

Posted on May 5, 2015 by John Hunter

Good ideas often just require some sensible thought to think of an improved approach. Management concepts can help guide such thinking, such as mistake-proofing and visual management.

To apply visual management requires giving a bit of thought to how to make visually obvious what is important for people to know. Mistake proofing is often really mistake-making-more-difficult (for some reason this term of mine hasn’t caught on).

prescription pills packaged together

Image from PillPack, they provide a service to deliver packages based on your prescriptions.

I believe mistake-proofing should put barriers in the process that make a mistake hard. Often what is called mistake-proofing doesn’t really fit that definition. The pill package shown above for example, doesn’t prevent you from continuing past the time on the package (Monday at 8AM) without taking the pills.

To call it mistake-proofing I would like to see something that makes it harder to make the mistake of failing to take the pills: something that blocks progress beyond that time without taking the pills.

Even something as simple as an alert to your smart phone that gets your attention and doesn’t allow the smart phone to be used without indicating you have taken the pills would reach the “mistake-proofing” level in my opinion (for someone that has their phone with them at all times). The Apple Watch could be a good tool to use in this case. Even so those wouldn’t make mistakes impossible (you can say you took the pills even if you didn’t, the phone/watch may lose power…). It would depend on the situation; this smart phone/watch solution is not going to be good for some people.

Another idea is that these pill packages should be tied to the room (in a hospital) and at home if a home care nurse (or even family or others) are responsible for assuring the pills are taken with a big display that perhaps 30 minutes before the pill is due posts a message that says “pills to be taken at 8 AM” and once that time is past it could become more obvious, perhaps after 15 minutes it produces an audio alert. The actual solutions are going to be better from those that know the actual situation than someone like me just thinking up stuff as I type.

But the idea is pretty simple: when you have processes that are important and at risk of failure, design processes with elements to make mistakes hard (and ideas such as mistake-proofing and visual management can help you guide your mind to ways to create better processes).

The entire process needs to be considered. The pill packages are nice, because even in failure modes they provide good feedback: you may still fail to take them at the right time, but you can look at the location where the pill packages are kept and see
if any have a time before right now (in which case you can follow the medical guidance – take the pills right now, contact the doctor, or whatever that advice is). Of course even that isn’t foolproof, you could have put the package into your purse and it is still sitting in their but you forgot.

Still the pill packages seem like a good mistake-making-more-difficult solution. And it seems to me that process has room to make mistakes even more difficult (using a smartphone addition, for example).

Continual improvement requires a continual focus on the process and the end user for ways to increase reliability and value. Each process in question should have engaged people with the proper skills and freedom to act using their knowledge to address weakness in the current process that are most critical.

Failure to take prescriptions as directed in a common problem in health care. Knowing this should make those involved in the process think of how they can use concepts, such as mistake-proofing, to improve the results of the system.

Too often to much focus is on making better pills compared to the effort is put into how to improve results with simple concepts such as visual management and mistake-proofing.

Each small improvement contributes to creating a more robust and effective process. And engaged people should continually access how the containing systems, new processes and new capabilities may allow more small steps to provide value to those relying on your products and services.

Related: Great Visual Instruction Example for Taking Pills – Visual Management with Brown M&Ms – Quick Mistake Proofing Ideas for Preventing Date Entry Error

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The Value of Professional Conferences. Also Why Has There Been So Little Innovation?

Posted on April 28, 2015 by John Hunter

In the most recent ASQ Influential Voices post, Julia McIntosh takes a look at the costs and benefits of professionals attending conferences.

I still remember being in high school and George Box talking about the primary value of conferences was talking to colleagues in the hallway. This seemed very odd to me, as it seemed that the reason for going to a conference was to learn from the talks.

I also didn’t really understand the value in catching up with people in person. I could see it would be somewhat useful but I didn’t really understand the benefits of personal communication. Pretty much all of my communication at that point was person to person. So I didn’t really see the huge loss of fidelity of any other communication (phone, email…).

At early conferences that I attended my main benefit was still in sitting in sessions and learning what people had to say. I did also benefit from discussions with other attendees. And I started to form relationships with others which grew over the years. And over time the networking benefits did exceed the learning from sessions benefits.

Part of this also occurs as your knowledge increases and you have less to learn from the average speaker. George was obviously well past this stage when I was talking to him. For me I still learned a lot from some of the speakers but also found I was learning much less and skipping sessions to talk to people I could learn more from was an increasing benefit. Still I have difficulty doing that and would focus more on networking at lunch, between sessions and in the evening.

The costs of attending conferences are easy for companies to calculate. The benefits they bring are very hard to calculate. I can see why companies often are very tight with budgets for conferences.

Egyptian carving of figures into a stone sarcophagus

A stone sarcophagus from ancient Egypt. I took this photo after presenting a Deming 2 1/2 day seminar in Boston (at the Boston Fine Arts Museum – see more photos).

I think the benefits of getting people outside the building and letting them interact with others to learn and think about new ideas is very valuable. I do think it is much less valuable in most companies than is should be because they have bad management systems that are atrophied with poor practices that are going to be extremely difficult to improve even if people have good ideas to try.

The organization really should focus on improving the management system so it isn’t such a barrier to improvement. But I think most organizations instead find it easy to just estimate a poor return on investments in conferences because those returning don’t actually make any improvements. Again, I think the cause of the failure to improve is more about the bad management system than the benefit of the conferences.

Of course, to some extent, the conferences should be focusing on how to improve given so many attendees organizations are crippled with a poor management system. But often people seem reluctant to acknowledge or discuss that. And those that point out problems often are seen as the problem (based on their actions – I can only conclude blaming the messenger makes sense to some people). And these factors are often even more pronounced in those the organization is willing to invest in (they are often more focused on making the bosses happy rather than something like improvement and change which often rubs people the wrong way).

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Lessons for Managers from Wisconsin and Duke Basketball

Posted on April 6, 2015 by John Hunter

What can managers learn from Duke and Wisconsin’s basketball teams? Duke and Wisconsin are in the college basketball championship game tonight. They reached this stage through a great deal of hard work, skill, training and coaching.

Raw talent matters to mangers and even more to college basketball coaches. But raw talent alone won’t succeed (for college basketball teams a great system starved of raw talent would also fail).

The lesson many people miss is that college teams are mostly about developing a team that wins. Developing individual players is a part of that, but it is subordinate to developing a team. I think college coaches understand this reality much more than most managers do. But a management system that develops a team that succeeds is also critical to the success of business.

Managers can learn from successful college basketball programs the importance of creating a successful team. Part of doing that is developing individual skills of players. A huge part of it is developing an understanding of the system within which those players must operate.

Recruiting is an important part of developing an elite college basketball team. And it is critical to developing a world class business organization (though recruiting is less important to business, in my opinion). Recruiting is important in business, but it is easier to be very successful with good people, the skills needed in business are not often so rare as those needed in high level basketball.

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Encouraging the Next Generation of STEM Professionals

Posted on March 23, 2015 by John Hunter

In the most recent ASQ Influential Voices post, Bill Troy, ASQ CEO, asks: how should we encourage the next generation of STEM Professionals? I addressed a similar question in: Future Engineers and Scientists, which provides many details on this question.

The advantages of gaining science, technology, engineering and math skills (STEM) are fairly well known. However, even so, that is something to emphasize in order to encourage the next generation. While it is fairly well known it still helps to re-enforce and expand on the existing understanding. Some posts from my science and engineering blog on that topic: Engineering Graduates Earned a Return on Their Investment In Education of 21% (the highest of any discipline, math was next); Earnings by College Major, Engineers and Scientists at the Top; Career Prospect for Engineers Continues to Look Positive.

STEM careers often appeal to kids and teenagers (I Always Wanted to be Some Sort of Scientist, Apply to be an Astronaut).

Sadly we often discourage them with unnecessarily challenging education hurdles. It is true the education path for STEM is more challenging than for most careers. That is a reality that won’t change. If people are turned off by hard work, they likely wouldn’t like most STEM careers anyway. So that reality I think is fine. But the design of STEM education could be greatly improved to avoiding turning off many people who would enjoy the education and a career if the education process were better. I have also written about this previously: Improving Engineering Education, Primary School Science Education in China and the USA, Innovative Science and Engineering Higher Education, Infinity Project: Engineering Education for Today’s Classroom (providing middle school, high school, and early college engineering curricula), Engineering Education in the 21st Century, Research findings Contradict Myth of High Engineering Dropout Rate, Fun k-12 Science and Engineering Learning.

Those with STEM degrees have better career options than others (in terms of nearly everything: higher pay, lower unemployment and higher satisfaction with their careers). Some of the career options are more rigid than an average career, but many are actually more flexible and still have all the benefits. They have the opportunity for many rewarding jobs. This is of more importance for a sad reason: our failure to create organizations with a priority placed on respect for people.

Getting a STEM degree requires that students see the appeal of gaining those degrees and many do. Many students are turned off by either the hard work required to get such degrees or the less than optimal STEM education process (which often makes it much harder and also much less inspiring than required due to poor educational systems).

While continuing to promote STEM careers to the young is helpful and wise, we are doing this fairly well. Of course, everything can be done better, and we should keep striving to improve. But the main focus, In my opinion, should be on better education from k-12 all the way through the PhD level for STEM. It would also help if we stopped electing anti-science politicians.

Related: Science and Engineering Advantages for Economies – S&P 500 CEO’s: Engineers Stay at the Top – Mathematicians Top List of Best Occupations (top 6 are all STEM careers) – Looking at the Value of Different College Degrees

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Transforming a Management System – A Case Study From the Madison Wisconsin Police Department

Posted on March 10, 2015 by John Hunter

This post in an excerpt from The Quality Leadership Workbook for Police by Chief David Couper and Captain Sabine Lobitz (buy via Amazon).

cover image of the New Quality Leadership Workbook for Police

The New Quality Leadership Workbook for Police

Transformational Steps
A Case Study Madison, Wisconsin (1981-1993)

Step 1: Educate and inform everyone in the organization about the vision, the goals, and Quality Leadership. This step must be passionately led by the top leader.

  • Begin discussion with top management team and train them.
  • Discuss and ask employees; get feedback from them.
  • Share feedback with the chief and his management team.
  • Get buy-in from top department managers.
  • Survey external customers—citizens; those who live and work in the community.
  • Create an employee’s advisory council; ask, listen, inform, and keep them up to date on what’s going on.
  • The chief keeps on message; tells, sells, and persuades, newsletters, meetings and all available media.

Step 2: Prepare for the transformation. Before police services to the community can be improved, it is essential to prepare the inside first — to cast a bold vision and to have leaders that would “walk the talk.”

  • Appoint a top-level, full-time coordinator to train, coach, and assist in the transformation.
  • Form another employee council to work through problems and barriers encountered during implementation of the transformation and Quality Leadership.
  • Require anyone who seeks to be a leader to have the knowledge and ability to practice Quality Leadership.

Step 3: Teach Quality Leadership. This begins at the top with the chief and the chief’s management team.

  • Train all organizational leaders in Quality Leadership.
  • Train all employees as to what Quality Leadership is, why the transformation is necessary, and what it means for them.

Step 4: Start practicing Quality Leadership. If top managers within the organization are not authentically practicing Quality Leadership neither will anyone else.

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Hire Me to Manage Your Blog or Web Presence

Posted on March 2, 2015 by John Hunter

I would like to add a client for my blog and web presence management services. The most obvious fit is for management consultants, in my opinion, though others may also be interested.

My blogs have been honored often over the years.

As part of managing a blog on management improvement I can also write posts for the blog. If you wish I can create and host a new blog and/or website.

If you are interested in learning more please contact me (you may also comment on this post to contact me). If you already have an online presence please share the web site addresses and other relevant links (Twitter etc.) and if you have specific things you would like to achieve by hiring me. Here are links to where I can be found online.

Sites I manage, include:

John Hunter at Canyonlands National Park

John Hunter at Canyonlands National Park

Related: Consulting by the minute consulting with John Hunter – Timeline of John Hunter’s professional life – Interviews with John Hunter

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Improving Management Globally

Posted on February 19, 2015 by John Hunter

In the most recent ASQ Influential Voices post, Bill Troy, ASQ CEO, asks: Why Should Quality Go Global?

ASQ’s mission statement talks about increasing the use and impact of quality in response to the diverse needs of the world. Are we doing enough, throughout the world, to accomplish that mission?

I have discussed a serious shortfall in this effort numerous times including in a reply to the ASQ blog before I was an ASQ Influential Voice – ASQ has a long way to go in promoting quality. ASQ is not doing enough. If “increasing the use and impact of quality” is indeed the mission then ASQ should make all quality articles they have published open access. If ASQ is mainly an organization focused on maximizing its revenue then selling articles that were written by authors (not paid by ASQ) and published by ASQ years and decades ago may be sensible.

ASQ has made a very small percentage of such articles available, as far as I can tell.

Not making articles open access is bad enough when all your users are in the USA. It is much worse when you aim to influence a global audience.

On the matter of the importance of promoting better management practices worldwide I agree there is a huge amount of work to be done. And there is a huge vacuum of resources for managers looking for information on how to do better.

ASQ can help fill that need. They are doing some things, including their blog and the ASQ Influential Voices program, but need to do much more to make much of a difference, it seems to me. I think they need to make the articles open access as the most important sign ASQ is changing to put the mission first; to have the organization designed to support that mission instead of the support of the organization itself as the primary focus.

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