Estate Tax Repeal

Topic:

The estate tax is the most capitalist tax that exists. Capitalism, which some seem to think is based on people inheriting assets from their relatives, is not. Capitalism is based on the concept that each person gets to receive rewards for their work.

Long before Adam Smith, noble rich passed on their wealth to their heirs. It was not Capitalist then and it is not Capitalist now.

Unfortunately many seem to have skipped economics in school and accepted the claim that Capitalism is about protecting the rich. They seem to believe it is a tenant of Capitalism that those that have the gold make the rules. That is in fact a risk that Capitalists must protect the economy from, not something Capitalist approve of. Those who believe in the wealth being passed from those who earn it to those who they like, believe not in Capitalism but in the state not taxing the idle rich but instead taxing those who don’t have millions given to them. While many have come to believe that such idiocy is Capitalist, it is not. People should read the Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith to get a much clearer idea of what Capitalism is about than those in Washington DC have.
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Posted in Economics | Tagged | 2 Comments

Stretching Agile to fit CMMI Level 3

Topic: Management Improvement

Stretching Agile to fit CMMI Level 3
by David J. Anderson.

I highly recommend reading this article. My work happens to straddle both the management improvement and software development areas that this article covers. But, if you are interested in either area, this article offers some great material. And if you are interested in both, you are in for a treat.

At Microsoft, we’ve adopted the teachings of W. Edwards Deming and stretched our MSF for Agile Software Development method to fit the requirements for CMMI Level 3. The resultant MSF for CMMI Process Improvement is a highly iterative, adaptive planning method, light on documentation, and heavily automated through tooling.

Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) is the process developed by the Software Engineering Institute (at Carnegie Mellon) that was heavily influenced by Quality Management. When I first ran across it (then called Capacity Maturity Model) in the mid 1990’s, as I remember, I was struck that the model did a better job of integrating Quality Management ideas than most programs specifically calling themselves Quality programs.
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Posted in Deming, Management, Quality tools, Software Development | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Online Lean Manufacturing Tutorials

Tutorials on Lean Production / Lean Manufacturing [the broken link was removed] from the Defense Acquisition University. The site includes five short online videos by James Womack [the broken link was removed]. The site provides a nice introduction to lean ideas.

Mr. John Shook… “Lean Manufacturing is a manufacturing philosophy which shortens the time between the customer order and the product build/shipment by eliminating sources of waste.”

Key lean principles are:

– Waste minimization by removing all non-value added activities making the most efficient use of scarce resources (capital, people, space), just-in-time inventory, eliminating any safety nets.

– Continuous improvement (reducing costs, improving quality, increasing productivity) through dynamic process of change, simultaneous and integrated product/process development, rapid cycle time and time-to-market, openness and information sharing.

– Long-term relationships between suppliers and primary producers (assemblers, system integrators) through collaborative risk-sharing, cost-sharing and information-sharing arrangements.

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Design of Experiments Articles

We have added several Design of Experiments articles to the Curious Cat Management Improvement Library recently, including:

  • Teaching Engineers Experimental Design With a Paper Helicopter by George Box
  • Rethinking the Paper Helicopter [the broken link was removed] by David H. Annis
  • DOE It Yourself by Mark J. Anderson, A list of Design of Experiments exercises that can be done in a classroom setting or as home by students with short explanations and links to documents online wtih more details.
  • A Personal Story of DOE [the broken link was removed] by Bill Kappele
  • Back in the lab, I tackled ink with DOE. I was able to perform a small number of experiments and learn about interactions among the ingredients. I could see which ingredients appeared to be the most important, which ingredients interacted, and which interactions were most important. This really was a powerful technique

  • What Can You Find Out From 8 and 16 Experimental Runs? by George Box

See more Design of Experiments related online resources.

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Vice President Presents Baldrige Awards

Vice President Presents Baldrige Awards (sadly NIST broke the link so it was removed), press release from NIST (July 20, 2005).

The 2004 Baldrige Award for Quality recipients (links to case studies, NIST also broke all these links, so removed – when are they going to hire people that understand the web?):

The Bama Companies, Tulsa, Oklahoma (manufacturing category)

In its endless quest for improvement, Bama uses a battery of advanced strategies and tools, including the Bama Quality Management System, based on the quality improvement philosophies of W. Edwards Deming and the company’s own performance excellence model. The Bama Excellence System provides a framework for all decision-making. A Principle Centered Bama Culture, based on tenets developed by Stephen Covey, provides a context for creating and measuring excellence. Using Six Sigma methodologies since 2000, Bama has dramatically improved processes throughout the company. Total savings from Six Sigma improvements equates to over $17 million since 2001.

Texas Nameplate Company, Inc., Dallas, Texas (small business category) They also won an award in 1998.

Technology and training have led to dramatic improvements in production. Between 1998 and 2004, the incidence of product nonconformity with specifications, as a percentage of sales, dropped from 1.4 percent to about 0.5 percent, significantly lower than the Industry Week median (2 percent). In that same period, TNC reduced its quote response time from 6 hours to less than 2 hours, and it trimmed the length of its production cycle from 14 days to under 8 days.

Kenneth W. Monfort College of Business, Greeley, Colorado (education category)

MCB continually evaluates its performance and incorporates those evaluations into its short- and long-term planning cycles. The process includes use of Key Performance Indicators

Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital Hamilton, Hamilton, New Jersey (health care category)

Also with a focus on Excellence Through Service, the leadership team works within a system that links all management functions—from planning and implementing policies, new technologies, and new facilities through ongoing cycles of evaluation and improvement—with unhindered communications at all levels. Each Executive Management Team member, including the CEO, holds daily briefings that are designed to share key information with the staff and to answer questions. As a result, over the past four years, employee satisfaction with hospital leadership has
improved to almost 100 percent.

RWJ Hamilton has reduced its rates of mortality, hospital-acquired infections, and medication errors to among the lowest in the nation.

Posted in Management | Tagged | 1 Comment

New Toyota CEO’s Views

The Man Driving Toyota from Business Week:

Toyota has grown in the past few years, but [there’s a risk] that a belief that the current status is satisfactory creeps into the minds of employees. That’s what I’m worried about.

We should never be satisfied with the current status. In each division, function, or region, we still have numerous problems to cope with. We need to identify each one of those tasks or problems and fully recognize them and pursue the causes. This needs to be done by all the people working for Toyota.

I think, this echoes my recent comment on post, Is Quality Foolproof? (unfortunately the link is broken, so I removed it. Luckily I posted my comments here so they are not gone), on the Vision Thing blog:

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Posted in Management, Process improvement, Toyota Production System (TPS) | Tagged , , , | 7 Comments

Agile Management

David Anderson publishes the Agile Management Blog, wrote the Agile Management for Software Engineering: Applying the Theory of Constraints for Business Results, and works for Microsoft. Robert Scoble, technical evangelist [the broken link was removed], also with Microsoft, has posted an online video interview with David Anderson [the broken link was removed] on Microsoft’s Chanel 9 online.

Quote by David Anderson, from the video: “My work focuses on applying the teachings of two management science gurus, one is Eli Goldratt and the other is W. Edwards Deming“.

Take a look at the video and also the Agile Management Blog [the broken link was removed] for all sorts of great posts on software development and management topics. Such as:

Trust is Essential to Agile [the broken link was removed]:

Agile software development brought the idea of trust to the forefront. When there is trust, there is less waste, less extra work, less verification, less auditing, less paperwork, less meetings, less finger pointing, less blame-storming. Building trust between the engineering group and the customers is the first goal for any agile manager. Equally building trust with and amongst the engineering team is also essential.

No More Quality Initiatives [the broken link was removed]

That’s why in MSF for CMMI(R) Process Improvement, I’ve included daily standup meetings to surface issues and monitor and manage risks, eliminate special cause variation and make it everyone’s business to do so. That’s why we’re dropping conformance to plan and conformance to specification in favor of conformance to process and focus on variation reduction. That’s why we’re encouraging a bottom up, empowered team, consensus model. That allows decentralized decisions to be made quickly. The way to institutionalize continuous improvement across an organization is to make it everyone’s business, every day!

The video and blog post provide great ideas on how to apply Deming and Goldratt’s ideas from someone who is applying them to improve the performance of the organization.

Posted in Deming, IT, Management, Software Development, webcast | Tagged , , , | 4 Comments

Managing for Creativity

Managing for Creativity [broken link removed] by Richard Florida and Jim Goodnight, July-August 2005 issue of Harvard Business Review.

Over many years, the leaders of SAS Institute have distilled a set of principles for getting peak performance from creative people. Among them: Value the work over the tools, reward excellence with challenges, and minimize hassles.

Based in Cary, North Carolina, SAS has been in the top 20 of Fortune’s 100 Best Companies to Work For list every year it’s been published. The employee turnover rate hovers between 3% and 5%, compared with the industry average of nearly 20%.

since the pioneering work of Frederick Herzberg, managers have known that learning and being challenged motivate workers more than money or fear of disciplinarian bosses. What’s different about SAS is that it goes to uncommon lengths to find the right intrinsic motivator for each group of employees.

Much management knowledge is not put into practice. I do not agree “managers have known that learning and being challenged motivate workers more than money or fear of disciplinarian bosses.” Maybe good managers know this, but I would wager a vast majority of managers believe the opposite.

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Scobleizer on David Anderson

Scobleizer, one of the most popular blogs (say in the top 50 most read), posted recently about David Anderson [the broken link was removed]. Robert Scoble is a Microsoft employee with the title, technical evangelist. David Anderson is also a Microsoft employee working on Agile Management for software development. David incorporates a good deal of Deming’s ideas, lean thinking, theory of constraints, etc. in posts to his Agile Management Blog [the broken link was removed]:

I interviewed David Anderson this evening. This guy is inspiring. He writes the Agile Management blog [the broken link was removed]. He’s working with teams here at Microsoft to get us to improve our software development process and is getting radical results. More when I get the video done.

I don’t see evidence of the video anywhere. Please let me know if you see it.

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Saving Lives: US Health Care Improvement

8 part special report by US News and Word Report on improving the US Health Care system.

Join IHI in an ambitious initiative called the 100K Lives Campaign. Its goal is to save 100,000 hospital patients’ lives by 9 a.m. on June 14, 2006, exactly 18 months from Berwick’s call to arms, by introducing six changes in hospital procedures. Each change addresses a problem, such as deaths from infections following surgery, and presents an arsenal of weapons to fight it, such as tighter timing of antibiotic doses before surgery.

I have long felt the Institute of Healthcare Improvement and Don Berwick were the leaders in health care management improvement. The Breakthrough Series is a great white paper on an excellent improvement methodology IHI developed and use. IHI white paper library.

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Posted in Economics, Health care, Management Articles, quote, Systems thinking | Tagged | 10 Comments