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Google’s Answer to Filling Jobs Is an Algorithm

Posted on January 4, 2007 by John Hunter

Google Answer to Filling Jobs Is an Algorithm. First, from a “what should I do,” view, I believe, Kevin Meyer’s advice is more appropriate: The False God of the Almighty Algorithm. But Google can do some things well that are unwise for others to try.

Desperate to hire more engineers and sales representatives to staff its rapidly growing search and advertising business, Google — in typical eccentric fashion — has created an automated way to search for talent among the more than 100,000 job applications it receives each month. It is starting to ask job applicants to fill out an elaborate online survey that explores their attitudes, behavior, personality and biographical details going back to high school.

They are comparing this to answers provided by Google employees (who were asked to fill out 300 question surveys). I can’t see this as an effective strategy for most companies. And even for Google, I don’t see it as a great idea, but trying ideas that might seem crazy can be an effective innovation strategy. Google experimenting in this way, seems fine to me – though I think it will fail. Better: Google’s brain teasers – but that effort probably will not scale to meet Google’s needs.

Interested in management improvement jobs. Try out Curious Cat Management Improvement Jobs. Those looking to hire can post announcements for jobs in lean manufacturing, six sigma, quality engineering, customer focus, process improvement… for free.
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Posted in Career, Creativity, Google, Innovation, Management | Tagged Creativity, Google, hiring, Innovation | 6 Comments

Epidemic of Diagnoses

Posted on January 3, 2007 by John Hunter

What’s Making Us Sick Is an Epidemic of Diagnoses by Dr. Welch, Dr. Schwartz and Dr. Woloshin:

For most Americans, the biggest health threat is not avian flu, West Nile or mad cow disease. It’s our health-care system.

True, and probably the biggest economic threat too. See: Deming’s Seven Deadly Diseases and Health Insurance Premiums Soar Again.

But it also leads to more diagnoses, a trend that has become an epidemic.
This epidemic is a threat to your health. It has two distinct sources. One is the medicalization of everyday life. Most of us experience physical or emotional sensations we don’t like, and in the past, this was considered a part of life. Increasingly, however, such sensations are considered symptoms of disease.

Lack of understanding systems and understanding variation? To me this is a very similar idea to seeing everything as a special cause and addressing each problem with special cause thinking (find the one special cause). Instead, often (97+% according to Dr. Deming) the most effective improvement strategy is to examine the whole system (use common cause thinking). This view in itself, might be a sign that I have “Demingitis” – the propensity to see the excessive focus on special cause thinking everywhere I look.
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Posted in Deming, Health care, Management, Process improvement, Psychology, Quality tools | Tagged control chart, Deming, process thinking, Quality tools, tampering, variation | 4 Comments

Messiness is Good?

Posted on January 2, 2007 by John Hunter

Time to get organized? Not so fast [the broken link was removed], interview of David Freedman on Marketplace. Marketplace is a great show on PBS that covers economics and related matters. This interview, though, fails to inspire me.

RYSSDAL: Is it expensive in a corporate sense to be neat?

FREEDMAN: It’s extremely expensive. I mean let’s start off with the fact that U.S. corporations spend some $45 billion a year on management consultants. They come in and they help companies figure out what’s the best way to organize your work processes and your work force.

Ok, first what does hiring consultants having to do with being neat? Basically it seems the interviewee has a book with the gimmick that being a mess is good – creativity and all that. Yes, I am sure sometimes messiness helps (and I am sure having a easy, catchy, gimmick is a good marketing idea). But as a management strategy it seems lousy to me. 5s is the correct strategy (even if I fail to do so – my desk tends to get messy as I get busy and… which is often 🙁 See: Planning 5s? First Know Why!

On the point of hiring consultants haphazardly being a waste of money – true. Bob Sutton wrote the excellent: Management Advice: Which 90% is Crap? [the broken link was removed]. What percentage of books fit that bill – over 90% I would say. And I have a guess where the interviewees book fits.

Posted in Lean thinking, Management, Quality tools | Tagged Lean thinking, management tools, Quality tools | Comments Off

Management Improvement Carnival #2

Posted on January 1, 2007 by John Hunter

Please let me know what you think of these carnival posts.

Lean Consumption at the Post Office by Mark Edmondson – “With so much of this customer facing process broken, and the salsa dance suggestion thrown in by an earnest postal worker, my mind went tilt. Yet another example of a good employee coping as well as possible with a broken process.”
Toyota Questions… Everything by Kevin Meyer – “Of course Toyota is questioning kaizen, one of the core underpinnings of their Toyota Production System. Just like they question every single aspect of their business, all the time”
More on Mulally’s “First Impressions” by Mark Graban – “It’s a great lesson in defining value from the customer’s standpoint as opposed to the engineer’s standpoint.”
Profit Beyond Measure by Jamie Flinchbaugh – “Lean must change the principles that shape peoples’ beliefs, behaviors and actions…. Johnson goes on to describe a lean organization as ‘countless nonlinear feedback loops in a complex, self-adaptive and self-corrective living system.’ As an engineer and a scientist, I find that to be an incredibly descriptive and insightful articulation. As a manager, my response is more like ‘uh…what?!?’
Don’t make the Demo look Done by Kathy Sierra (on software application development “when it’s an early demo, think fuzzy. Think sketchy. Think underpromise-and-overdeliver.”
Selecting a Management and Improvement System [the broken link was removed] by Jon Miller – “how does a decision maker select the appropriate management and improvement system when faced with many choices such as Lean manufacturing, Six Sigma, TOC, QRM, DFT or any hybrid?”

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Posted in Carnival, Lean thinking, Management | Comments Off

The IT Iceberg Secret

Posted on December 29, 2006 by John Hunter

The Iceberg Secret, Revealed by Joel Spolsky

It’s pretty clear that programmers think in one language, and MBAs think in another. I’ve been thinking about the problem of communication in software management for a while, because it’s pretty clear to me that the power and rewards accrue to those rare individuals who know how to translate between Programmerese and MBAese.
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Customers Don’t Know What They Want. Stop Expecting Customers to Know What They Want. It’s just never going to happen. Get over it.

When developing software applications in house, developers should work in cooperation with those who will use it. Working from requirements is not a very effective way to proceed. It is similar to the old idea of suppliers working to specifications. Dr. Deming taught long ago that companies needed to work with suppliers and customers to improve the overall system. Well managed companies have learned this and practice it.

You know how an iceberg is 90% underwater? Well, most software is like that too — there’s a pretty user interface that takes about 10% of the work, and then 90% of the programming work is under the covers

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Posted in IT, Management, Software Development | 2 Comments

Change Your Name

Posted on December 28, 2006 by John Hunter

Best Buy Asks Man To Change Name [the broken link was removed]:

Turns out if your last name is less than three letters, the online sign-up isn’t an option for you.

Companies often put up barriers for no reason, then leave customer service agents to try and explain. And then this happens:

When he called Best Buy one customer service agent even suggested he change his name

Now that is great 🙂

Charles Yu: “I said well, I think that is a little ridiculous – I don’t want to change my last name just to sign up for this.”

When 7 On Your Side contacted Best Buy, the company apologized for the problem saying… “We were aware that our online system for creating Reward Zone accounts does not recognize a name with less than three letters and the decision has already been made to correct it.” The company went on to say they have no definite timeline for the fix…

My advice. Don’t create stupid restrictions (in IT systems or otherwise). What do you care how long people’s names are? There are many people with 2 character names.

Also, have customer service personnel who are trying to improve the system, not trying to get the customer off the phone to meet some arbitrary numerical target. Most often the representatives seem most concerned with getting you off the phone. An effective system to discover what needs to be improved is not something that management has bothered to design into the system. Big mistake.
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Posted in Customer focus, IT, Management, Software Development | Tagged bad customer service, bad usability, IT, management, usability | 6 Comments

Customer Un-focus

Posted on December 28, 2006 by John Hunter

Counties caught in conundrum: getting Amish to take food stamps [the broken link was removed] by John Horton

Accepting public assistance is verboten within the Amish culture. It simply is not done. But Taylor is under orders to at least try to get them enrolled. The Ohio Department of Job & Family Services has asked Geauga and Holmes counties, which feature the state’s largest Amish populations, to lift dismal food-stamp participation rates.

Taylor and his Holmes counterpart, Dan Jackson, called the mandate a waste of tax dollars, time and resources. In their eyes, the directive is government bureaucracy that ignores the obvious in setting an unrealistic goal.
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Taylor and Jackson said they’ve both asked the state to readjust participation goals for their counties. Carroll said the request is under consideration. This is the first year for the performance standard.

Data, such as participation rates can be used as in-process measures to help you locate areas to look at for improvement. When you discover a good reason for the numbers then look to other in-process measures. Don’t make the mistake of managing to the measure. The measure should help you manage. Improving the number is not the goal. Improving the situation that the number is a proxy for is the goal.

via: Amish Refusal to Accept Food Stamps Makes Welfare Workers Look Bad

Posted in Customer focus, Data, Management, Public Sector | Tagged Customer focus, Data, in-process measures, Public Sector | 2 Comments

Poor Service – Industry Standard?

Posted on December 27, 2006 by John Hunter

More Trouble Canceling HP Orders by Bob Sutton:

I wrote a post a couple months ago about how difficult it was to cancel an order I had JUST made for an HP computer, and how when I complained on the phone to the HP salesperson, his justification was that it was “industry standard,” which really pushed my buttons — as the logic is “I am going to treat my customers badly just because everyone does.”

How true. One good example, one bad example from: Ritz Carlton and Home Depot. I find it very frustrating how poor the service is most everywhere these days. Have you shopped in a Trader Joe’s? The contrast is amazing. I am used to most employees, on the phone, or in person, seeing the customer as a bother. I have been in Trader Joe’s maybe 10 times and the staff always seems happy to have customers. Which seems like a good indication that management is doing a number of things right. That with almost everyplace else that I interact the service is the opposite, does not speak well for management.

Posted in Customer focus, Management | Comments Off

Create Your Own Book

Posted on December 26, 2006 by John Hunter

I received a custom made photo book from my brother. It is amazing. It is a hardcover book, full of photos. The quality is amazing. The book is printed by blurb. Looking on their web site the pricing is surprisingly cheap: 150 page full color hardcover book – $39.95 (for 1 copy! – 10% discount at 25 copies…), as little as $18.95 for a full color softcover book up to 40 pages. The site says books are normally printed in under a week.

I have not tried it but it appears printing your own great looking book is about as easy as creating a blog. I knew it was getting easier to print books, but still I find this very cool. Blurb can import photos from Flickr [the broken link was removed] and Picasa [the broken link was removed].

Posted in Books | Tagged Books, Creativity, Innovation, technology | Comments Off

Holding Improvement Gains

Posted on December 26, 2006 by John Hunter

The Hard Part: Holding Improvement Gains [the broken link was removed] by Ron Snee

The long term goal should be to combine all improvement initiatives into an overall improvement system and create the management framework to sustain that system. Thus, improvement will become a routine managerial process, just like any other.
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One of the strongest spurs to maintaining momentum and sustaining the gains of an improvement initiative comes from the effect achieving significant, measurable benefits has on the culture. People like to succeed. When they see tangible results, they are eager to repeat the process. That is the simple, but powerful, principle of the kind of culture change that sustains improvement over the long term: Culture change doesn’t produce benefits; benefits produce culture change.

Posted in Management, Process improvement | Tagged culture, Psychology | Comments Off