Management Improvement Blog Carnival #179

Posted on October 1, 2012 by John Hunter

The Curious Cat Management Blog Carnival has been published since 2006. The carnival links to great management blog posts; it is published twice a month. I hope you find these post interesting and find some new blogs to start reading. Follow me online: Google+, Twitter and elsewhere.

  • Lean Versus Historical TPS by Art Smalley – “identify what are your impediments to improvement and work on those. In particular as what are barriers to higher equipment uptime, higher process capability, safer equipment, higher capital and labor productivity without adding cost, more highly trained personnel, and you will be on the right track. I call this building better process stability and it is an essential yet often ignored element of the historical Toyota Production System.”
  • 5 Critical Control Chart Characteristics You May Not Be Aware Of by Ron Pereira – “No matter if you call yourself a ‘lean practitioner’ or ‘six sigma practitioner’ or some combination of the two… one ‘tool’ you should have a deep understanding of is the control chart.”
    • photo of Mount Merapi in Indonesia

    Mount Merapi, Yogyakarta, Java, Indonesia by John Hunter.

  • Adaptability vs Evolutionary Change by David J. Anderson – “Organizations with evolutionary capability have resilience – they remain relevant despite changing circumstances and maintain high levels of effectiveness as the environment around them changes. Kanban is a means to install evolutionary capability and deliver on higher level agility. Evolutionary capability defines second generation Agile methods.”
  • Completion: Limiting WIP Post II by Jim Benson – “When we limit work-in-progress, we not only limit the number of projects we are working on, but also the number of tasks. This helps us complete tasks efficiently and effectively. When we are done, we understand what we did. While we are doing the tasks we are fully aware of how long they are taking.”

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Seminar in Singapore: Deming’s Philosophy of Management

Posted on September 25, 2012 by John Hunter

The local partner cancelled the seminar, therefore I have deleted the post.

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Build Systems That Allow Quick Action – Don’t Just Try and Run Faster

Posted on September 21, 2012 by John Hunter

This month Paul Borawski (CEO of ASQ) has asked the ASQ Influential Voices to share their thoughts on the cries for “faster, faster, faster” that so often is a refrain heard today.

I have long said that the measure of management improvement isn’t only about improving. It is the speed at which the management system and internal processes are being improved. Improvement is a given. If an organization is not improving every year the odds of long term success is low.

One of the common objections to a need for improvement is that we are doing fine and we are improving (so leave us alone we are already improving). That is better than not doing fine and not improving but it isn’t a reason to be complacent. Managers should be continually pushing the improvement acceleration higher.

The biggest problems I see with a focus on being faster are attempting move faster than the capability of the organization and falling back on working harder as a method to achieve the faster action. Really these are the same issue – working harder is just a tactic to cope with attempting to achieve better results than the system is capable of.

Agile software development has a principle, sustainable development, which is a reaction to the far too common attitude of management to just have software developers work longer and longer hours to meet targets. Any attempt to be faster internally or respond to a faster marketplace should first put the principle of sustainable workload as a requirement. And next build the capability of the enterprise to respond quickly and keep increasing how quickly it can respond effectively.

The well know management improvement concepts, practices and tools will lead an organization to improve that capability reliably, sustainable and continuously.

My new book, Management Matters: Building Enterprise Capability, delves into how to manage an enterprise based on the ideas needed to apply management improvement concepts, practices and tools to achieve results, including, but not limited to, faster.

Related: Process Improvement and Innovation – Find the best methods to produce the best results over the long term – Think Long Term Act Daily

Posted in Management, Process improvement, Respect, Systems thinking | Tagged , , , , , | 4 Comments

Management Improvement Blog Carnival #178

Posted on September 16, 2012 by John Hunter

The Curious Cat management blog carnival is published twice a month: with hand picked recent management blog posts. I also collect management improvement articles for the Curious Cat Management Articles site.

  • Disruptive Management by Bill Waddell – “The professional management experts break the fundamental rule of lean – they miss Dr Deming’s essential point. Failure is ascribed to personal failing, rather than flawed processes.”
  • Amazon’s Play by John Gruber – “What he’s [Bezos] done that is Jobs-like is doggedly pursue, year after year, iteration after iteration, a vision unlike that of any other company — all in the name of making customers happy.”
photo of stupas at Borobudur Buddhist temple with mountains in the background

Stupas at Borobudur Buddhist temple in Java, Indonesia. Photo by John Hunter. See a video and more photos of the Borobudur temple.

  • The absurdity of the 40 hour workweek by Dan Markovitz – “Even if you’re not a plumber or a lawyer, there’s a tendency to focus on the amount of time you spend on a project and what the output is.”
  • Metrics in Lean – Deming versus Drucker by Michel Baudin – Deming “thought MBO was a bad idea and he would not pussyfoot. 15 years later, Drucker himself came around to the same point of view and recognized that MBO had failed.” [also many comments on the post are interesting – John]

    • Continue reading →

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5s at NASA

Posted on September 11, 2012 by John Hunter

NASA did some amazing things culminating with landing on Moon. Much of what they did was doing many small things very well. They used 5s, checklists, gemba thinking, usability, simplicity, testing out on a small scale and much more.

Here are a few photos from the Smithsonian Air and Space museum in Washington DC. I also have some nicer NASA 5s photos from the new Annex near Dulles Airport, but, ironically, I can’t find them.

photo of container labeled with many compartments for NASA

These kits were used by NASA astronauts on the Apollo 11 mission to the moon. Obviously NASA had to have everything that might be needed where it was needed (picking up something from the supply closet in building 2 wasn’t an option).

Continue reading →

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Manage Better by Managing Less

Posted on September 5, 2012 by John Hunter

Matt May included “Silhouettes” from selected authors in his new book: The Laws of Subtraction (shipping October 26th). I am honored to be included: the following my silhouette.

Early in my career, I had a supervisor ask me why I wasn’t working. I was at from my desk – not reading, not typing on my keyboard, not talking on the phone, not in a meeting, staring off into space, apparently just wasting time. I explained that I was thinking.

The busier we are, the more productive we are. Or so many managers think. It can be tempting to cram your days full of activity to show how hard-working and vital you are. Finding time to think is hard enough; maxing out your capacity makes it next to impossible. Everyone agrees taking time to think is wise. But I have rarely seen managers make it a priority. Managers will say they value it, but they cram schedules so full that they can’t really spend time thinking. Result: people are busy just being busy.

I never forgot that early lesson when I became a manager of a software development team. Software programmers seem to understand the importance of thinking. One of the secrets to successful programming is that it takes deep, uninterrupted thought.

My main focus when managing my software development team was to let the team be. My most important task was to ensure that the developers had a clear vision of our business aims, what the priorities were, then get out of the way and give people uninterrupted time to do their work.

Most of what I needed to do simply required listening, observing, thinking, and sometimes deciding. Action wasn’t high on the list. My goal was to intervene as little as possible, and then only when doing so would optimize the whole system.

I wanted to make sure the developers had an environment that allowed them to succeed: the resources they needed, the time they needed, coaching when they needed it, freedom from unreasonable demands, the opportunity to take risks, and protection when something didn’t work.

Still, I stepped in more than I wanted to. I’m still learning. And by managing even less, I know I’ll become more effective.

Act less, and act well when you do. You’ll make things better for everyone.

My new book, Management Matters, is available now. The book builds on the topics I have written about on this blog the last 8 years.

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Management Improvement Blog Carnival #177

Posted on September 2, 2012 by John Hunter

I am returning to publishing the Curious Cat management carnival twice a month; from the schedule of three times a month that has been the case recently. The posts selected for the carnival focus on the areas of management improvement I have focused on in the Curious Cat Management Improvement Guide since 1996.

  • Delegate or die: the self-employed trap by Derek Sivers – “Because my team was running the business, I was free to actually improve the business!”
  • Why You Must Stop Putting Out Fires: the Urgent Disrupts; the Important Erupts – “Firefighting, sadly, is a lot easier than fire preventing. It takes comparatively little thought. You just get into “action mode” and can be really busy. Busy resembles productive. And you feel like a hero. But, when you really stop to ponder the matter, wouldn’t it be better if you allowed the important, planful, preventive work to erupt from the constraints you’ve placed on it so those fires never occurred?”

  • via, Innovation is Nothing but ECRS by Jon Miller – “The letters ECRS stand for a work analysis and redesign method originating in industrial engineering and commonly used as part of kaizen. The work is observed and the observer looks for opportunities to improve by taking steps to eliminate, combine, rearrange or simplify each step.”

    • Continue reading →

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New Deadly Diseases

Posted on August 29, 2012 by John Hunter

Management and the economy keep evolving. Many good things happen. In the last decade the best things are probably the increased deep adoption of lean thinking in many organizations and the adoption of lean and Deming methods in software development (agile software development, kanban and lean startup [which I do realize isn’t limited to software development]).

Sadly all the deadly diseases Dr. Deming described remain. And, as I said in 2007, I think 2 new diseases have become so widespread and so harmful they have earned their place alongside the 7 deadly diseases (which started as the 5 deadly diseases). The new deadly diseases are:

  • extremely excessive executive pay
  • systemic impediments to innovation

In my view these 2 diseases are more deadly to the overall economy than all but the broken USA health system. The systemic impediments to innovation are directly critical to small percentage (5%?) of organizations. But the huge costs of the blocks to innovation and the huge “taxes” (extorted by those using the current system to do the oposite of what it should be doing) are paid by everyone. The costs come from several areas: huge “taxes” on products (easily much greater than all the taxes that go to fund our governments), the huge waste companies have to go through due to the current system (legal fees, documentation, delayed introduction, cross border issues…) and the denial of the ability to use products and services that would improve our quality of life.

The problems with extremely excessive executive pay are well known. Today, few sensible people see the current executive pay packages as anything but the result of an extremely corrupt process. Though if their personal pocketbook is helped by justifying the current practices, some people find a way to make a case for it. But excluding those with an incentive to be blind, it is accepted as a critical problem.

More people understand the huge problems with our patent and copyright systems everyday, but the understanding is still quite limited. Originally copyright and patents were created to provide a government granted monopoly to a creator in order to reward that creator for contributing to the development of society. Copyrights and patents are government granted interventions in the free market. They are useful. They are wise policy.

Continue reading →

Posted in Creativity, Deming, Economics, Innovation, Lean thinking, Management, quote, Systems thinking | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 12 Comments

Ackoff: Corporations Are Not Led By Those Seeking to Maximize Shareholder Value

Posted on August 23, 2012 by John Hunter

If I had to limit myself to a handful of management experts, Russel Ackoff would definitely be in that group. Thankfully there is no such limit. Ackoff once again provides great insight, with great wit, in the above clip.

A corporation says that its principle value is maximizing shareholder value. That’s non-sense. If that were the case executives wouldn’t fly around on private jets and have Philippine mahogany lined offices and the rest of it. The principle function to those executives is to provide those executives with the quality of work life that they like. And profit is merely a means which guarantees their ability to do it.
…
If we are going to talk about values, we got to talk about what the values are in action, not in proclamation.

Related: Ackoff, Idealized Design and Bell Labs – Dr. Russell Ackoff Webcast on Systems Thinking – A Theory of a System for Educators and Managers – CEOs Plundering Corporate Coffers

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Creating a Quality Culture

Posted on August 21, 2012 by John Hunter

This month Paul Borawski (CEO of ASQ) has asked the ASQ Influential Voices to share their thoughts on the Feelings and Quality Culture.

I don’t think creating a culture of continual management improvement is complex but it takes more commitment than most organizations seem to have. To build a culture that supports customer focused continuous improvement a management system needs to reinforce consistent behavior over the long term.

There is far too much saying certain things (customers are valued, people are our most important assets, etc.) but not backing those claims up with management systems that would be needed to operationalize those beliefs. Failing to do this just results in surface changes that have no depth or commitment and will shift with the winds (no culture change).

It is very difficult to create a culture that supports customer focused continuous improvement that doesn’t understand the failings of: extrinsic motivation and arbitrary numerical goals.

An understanding of variation and how to properly use data to aid improvement is also critical (otherwise huge amount of waste are generated on all sorts of fruitless efforts to explain common cause variation leaving far to little time to actually for on quality). An appreciation of the long term is necessary, which means reducing time spent on trivially urgent matters so focus can be given to important but not urgent matters.

And a respect for people is needed: a real respect, not just claims – which nearly every organization makes. The huge egos of most USA senior executives result in them taking huge amounts from the company to such an extent that they are inherently dis-respectful. The hero culture they profess with their pay package makes it extremely difficult for anyone to take them seriously when they claim to care about a culture that values the stakeholders of the organization.

Continue reading →

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