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Talking with Toyota’s CEO

Posted on February 23, 2007 by John Hunter

Talking with Toyota’s Top Man [the broken link was removed]

But there’s still more work to be done?
The scariest symptom of “big-company disease” is that complacency will breed in the company. To be satisfied with becoming the top runner, and to become arrogant, is the path we must be most fearful of. There are so many challenges and issues that we need to address. Each individual [needs] to have the mentality to challenge those problems. Problems must be made visible. Not just in Japan but in all affiliated activities around the world.
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That’s a very good point and a key element of my own management: how we make sure our own DNA is transferred to the younger generation at Toyota. So long as certain things are achieved, this will be ensured. Going and seeing for oneself is the key. It’s very easy to understand. When there’s a problem, one should drill down and [see] what’s taking place and why a certain problem has occurred. [The key thing is to] teach the method of identifying a problem and implementing the resolution.

Posted in Management Articles, Toyota Production System (TPS) | Tagged Toyota | Comments Off

Transformation and Redesign

Posted on February 23, 2007 by John Hunter

Photo of the White House, see more of my photos of Washington DC.

Here is an excellent article from 1999: Transformation and Redesign at the White House Communications Agency (WHCA) (pdf link) by March Laree Jacques

This article describes an organizational transformation effort undertaken at the White House Communications Agency. It shares the Agency’s efforts through the period of 1992-1998, beginning with a Deming-based approach to continuous quality improvement through implementation of a total organizational redesign using systems thinking precepts. It describes the obstacles to implementing quality concepts in a high visibility, high security organization and examines the influence of Agency’s organizational culture on quality performance and improvement. The discussion examines the applicability of several broadly accepted quality concepts to the “ultimate command-and-control” organization.

The article is informative and interesting, enjoy. A couple years after this article I went to work for Gerald Suarez at the White House Military Office (WHMO). WHCA is one of seven operational units of WHMO, others include: Air Force One, Camp David and the White House Medical Unit.

See more management improvement articles including in the Curious Cat Management Improvement Library.

Posted in Deming, Management, Management Articles, Public Sector, Systems thinking | Tagged Ackoff, organization as a system, Public Sector, transformation | Comments Off

New Zealand Creativity

Posted on February 22, 2007 by John Hunter

Saving money by thinking creativity and leanly. $10 wok keeps TV station on air [the broken link was removed]:

Why pay $20,000 for a commercial link to run your television station when a $10 kitchen wok from the Warehouse is just as effective? This is exactly how North Otago’s newest television station 45 South is transmitting its signal from its studio to the top of Cape Wanbrow, in a bid to keep costs down.

45 South volunteer Ken Jones designed the wok transmitter in his spare time last year when he wanted to provide wireless broadband to his Ardgowan home. “A group of us wanted to connect our computers to each other and then we worked out a way to get of getting the signal between two points,” he said.

“The $20,000 for a commercial link was just money we didn’t have, so we bought several woks from The Warehouse instead which was convenient and cheap,” he said. Pre-recorded clips at the studio are fed through a computer and beamed to Cape Wanbrow where they are relayed off to television sets around North Otago.

Posted in Creativity, Lean thinking, Management | Tagged Creativity, problem solving | 1 Comment

Performance Appraisals Performance

Posted on February 21, 2007 by John Hunter

Appraising the Performance Of Performance Appraisals [the link that IEEE broke was removed] by Harry Goldstein:

The traditional annual review covers a lot of ground: coaching and guidance for the employee, feedback and communication, compensation, staffing decisions and professional development, legal documentation, and ultimately, improvement for both the employee and the organization.

According to Jenkins and Coens, all of the above can be done better and far less painfully by untangling these functions and designing a process for each. First, they argue, companies should decouple compensation decisions from feedback about how the employee is doing. The point is that outside, or extrinsic, motivators such as money do not really work for the vast majority of employees.

One company that found that to be true is Brighton, Mich.-based Peaker Services, which rebuilds locomotive diesel engines and does application engineering work for control systems. In the past, Peaker relied on merit raises linked to annual evaluations, according to president Ian Bradbury.

Posted in Deming, Performance Appraisal, Psychology, Respect | Tagged Deming, Performance Appraisal, Psychology | Comments Off

Seven Steps to Remarkable Customer Service

Posted on February 20, 2007 by John Hunter

Once again Joel Spolsky spins a great post with, Seven steps to remarkable customer service. Read it.

It’s crucial that tech support have access to the development team. This means that you can’t outsource tech support: they have to be right there at the same street address as the developers, with a way to get things fixed.

This idea is powerful yet ignored by most companies. Management must look at the best way to improve the entire system not to lower the cost per support call.

Many qualified people get bored with front line customer service, and I’m OK with that. To compensate for this, I don’t hire people into those positions without an explicit career path. Here at Fog Creek, customer support is just the first year of a three-year management training program that includes a master’s degree in technology management at Columbia University.

Posted in Customer focus, Deming, IT, Management, Process improvement, Systems thinking | Tagged customer service, Deming, Software Development | 2 Comments

More Positive Press for Toyota Management

Posted on February 19, 2007 by John Hunter

via NY Times Magazine on Toyota, a very good article: From 0 to 60 to World Domination

Certainly the most obvious example of Toyota’s long view is the Prius hybrid.

I don’t think so, that is an example of their medium term thinking. Personal Robot Aids, biotechnology, housing and environmental development – that is long term thinking. More on Non-Automotive Toyota.

And yet deconstructing Toyota means breaking down a corporation that uses all its resources, and more than 295,000 employees worldwide, to construct things that are not meant to come apart.

Exactly, they have a system of management. Related: Systemic Thinking – Excessive CEO Pay – Lean is Harmony – Purpose of an Organization – Ackoff, Idealized Design and Bell Labs

Toyota is as much a philosophy as a business, a patchwork of traditions, apothegms and precepts that don’t translate easily into the American vernacular. Some have proved incisive (“Build quality into processes”) and some opaque (“Open the window. It’s a big world out there!”). Toyota’s overarching principle, Press told me, is “to enrich society through the building of cars and trucks.”

Continue reading →

Posted in Management, Management Articles, Toyota Production System (TPS) | Comments Off

What Job Does Your Product Do?

Posted on February 19, 2007 by John Hunter

Finding the Right Job for Your Product* by Clayton M. Christensen, Scott D. Anthony, Gerald Berstell and Denise Nitterhouse (available online for a limited time only). The article has a very simple point. Customers buy your product or service to fill some specific need or desire. Knowing what need the customer is filling can help you improve your offering. Knowing what job the customer is using your product for lets you focus on improving your product for that market. The article provides several examples.

The basic idea is familiar: customer focus, specifically see how your customers uses your product (there might well be several market segments that use your products in different ways – to do different jobs in the words of the article).

Related: articles by Clayton Christensen – Customer Un-focus – What Could we do Better? – Genchi Genbutsu is the lean term for the concept going to see with your own eyes: go and see the customer actually use the product, don’t just listen to what they say – Quality Conversation with Gary Convis – management improvement articles

* broken link removed. Sadly MIT isn’t even up to kindergarden web management standards – the broke their web link. It is sad organizations with so much cash can’t even avoid the basic web management failures identified over a decade ago. Truly astounding how poorly managed this organization that seeks to tell other people how to manage is. Then have lots of cash given to them to pay smart people like Clayton Christensen to create good content but then waste the value they can add to the world with lousy management.

It also is another example of lots of fancy talk isn’t really what is needed in most cases. Just do basic stuff identified decades ago. MIT seems to focused on fancy new ideas while failing to even do a mediocre job applying decades old simple guidance. MIT has lots of great content (hire lots of smart people with donations and so would anyone) but is highly biased toward fancy, smart sounding stuff rather than just doing what anyone that pays attention could find in decades old material.

Posted in Customer focus, Management, Management Articles, Process improvement | Tagged Customer focus | 12 Comments

SWAT Raids – Systemic Failures?

Posted on February 18, 2007 by John Hunter

I have mentioned Reddit (an online community that is highly skewed toward software engineers who are a bit irreverent) before: Dell, Reddit and Customer Focus. The site highlights stories voted up by the community and so the makeup of the community has a huge impact on what is highlighted. The users are very willing to challenge authority (and in fact anxious to do so I think). So some topics are common: criticizing DRM, science, criticizing the United States’ role in the war in Iraq, programming, iconoclasts, xkcd, criticiszing stupid corporate behavior, Paul Graham, criticizing Fox.

Lately there have been a large number of stories on people being killed in raids by police on the wrong house: police in full swat gear storming the wrong house by accident and then killing occupants. The media in general sees these as “special causes” – isolated incidents. So while tragic the strategy is then to examine what mistake in this unique situation lead to tragedy. I believe that the readers of Reddit sense this is a systemic problem and therefore see the proper examination to undertake is to look at the whole system. That is, to use the common cause improvement strategy – when the tragedy is seen not as an isolated incident but the result of a system.

It seems to me the Reddit readers are right – I think the users natural tendencies (a willingness to question authority and a trained sense of what is a special cause and what is a common cause, even if they don’t use those terms) result in the stories gaining traction within Reddit. To limit future tragedy the system as a whole needs to be examined. Do not seek to find the special cause that led to the problem in one instance. Look to the system and see why this trend has increased. I don’t actually have good data – I am making a guess that this trend has increased in the last 20 years (getting some decent data on what is really going on is obviously one of the first things to do in looking at this issue).
Continue reading →

Posted in Management, Systems thinking | Tagged management, mistake-proofing, Public Sector, risk, society, Systems thinking | 4 Comments

Management Improvement Carnival #5

Posted on February 16, 2007 by John Hunter

New Directions, Bad Lean Strategies and Leading Lean by Jamie Flinchbaugh – “Throughout my travels, I continue to be frustrated with the lack of creative thinking that is going into lean transformation strategies… When you begin convincing yourself that you are on the journey, when you really are not, you will get disappointed in the results and not really learn what should be different.”
Start with the Customer, and Work Backwards by Peter Abilla – “Describe in precise detail the customer experience for the different things a customer might do with the product. For products with a user interface, we would build mock ups of each screen that the customer uses.”
Customer service gone shockingly right by Saska – “So this is my Valentine to Nintendo. That was the most awesome customer service experience I ever, ever had.”
The Most Important Trait? by Frank Patrick – “It’s management’s responsibility to determine the priorities, either by edict or, preferably, by some systematic process, and to provide processes to minimize re-prioritization as much as possible.”

Continue reading →

Posted in Carnival, Management | Comments Off

Toyota Institute for Managers

Posted on February 15, 2007 by John Hunter

The ‘Toyota Way’ Is Translated for a New Generation of Foreign Managers [the broken link was removed]

“For Americans and anyone, it can be a shock to the system to be actually expected to make problems visible,” said Ms. Newton, a 38-year-old Indiana native who joined Toyota after college 15 years ago and now works at the North American headquarters in Erlanger, Ky. “Other corporate environments tend to hide problems from bosses.”
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It is the Toyota Institute, charged with preparing executives to enter the leadership class at Toyota by inculcating in them some of the most prized management secrets in corporate Japan. The institute sends off its executives to offices around the world as missionaries of sorts for the Toyota Way.

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