The Need to Improve Management While Building Organizations Fit For Human Beings

Posted on September 29, 2011 by John Hunter

[embedded video link broken, so that code was removed but you can watch the video by following this link: Gary Hamel: Reinventing the Technology of Human Accomplishment.

I agree with Gary Hamel that we need to adopt new management strategies. I happen to believe most of new strategies we need to adopt have been known for decades, we just fail to implement many of them.

He argues it is hard to retain knowledge advantages (within companies). I agree. However execution advantages it seems to me are not that difficult to maintain. Few companies actually focus on the customer and continual improvement. Toyota can be incredibly open but still few others are not willing to actually put in the effort to execute fully.

The reverse accountability idea he discusses I don’t love as much as he does. I do believe it is good to value the entire workforce more and not base decisions on HiPPOs. Accountability is a loaded term, in my opinion. Even in he talk he focuses on the “fear” – if the supervisor doesn’t fix the issue to the reporters satisfaction in 24 hours it is escalated to the next level. The process could be better, without what seems like driving in fear, to me.

I agree that the best management strategy is to adopt the thinking he captures with “you cannot build a company that is fit for the future, without building one that is fit for human beings.” The part I don’t agree with is phrase he lead that quote with: “Because I think for the first time since the industrial revolution…” isn’t right. I think Dr. Deming taught that idea to Japan in the 1950’s and as we all know Toyota adopted as the core “Respect for People” principle. That concept was important in 1950. That management idea is needed. Adopting that principle would be new for many of our organizations. But it also is true that the idea has been known for decades.

I return to this theme frequently. We don’t need many new ideas. We just need to adopt the good ideas that have been proven for decades. The new ideas are mainly just a bit of flavoring to tweak the good ideas we have had available and just chosen to ignore.

Related: Respect People by Creating a Climate for Joy in Work – Management Advice Failures – Positivity and Joy in Work

Posted in Competition, Deming, Innovation, Management, Respect, Toyota Production System (TPS) | Tagged , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Rude Behavior Costs Companies

Posted on September 26, 2011 by John Hunter

Approximately one-third of consumers surveyed reported they’re treated rudely by an employee on an average of once a month and that these and other episodes of uncivil worker behavior make them less likely to patronize those businesses.

Customers rarely report such behavior to employee supervisors, and management systems are so poor they don’t deal with this problem (good systems will – Trader Joe’s or Crutchfield, for example) ensuring a relentless cycle of poor employee behavior that leaves consumers angry and frustrated and saps businesses of customer loyalty, return business and profits, according to researchers from the University of Southern California and Georgetown University. Having tried many times to report failures in their systems to organizations I can say I am either treated with we have no way to accept your feedback or obvious disinterest.

Even, long after Brian Joiner told me he stopped wasting his time for most companies as they obviously had no interest in improving systems to avoid customer hardship I keep banging my head against a wall. It is very rarely that I don’t get complete disinterest. About the best is “you are so right, this is a problem I have to deal with all the time, I have told ‘them’ about the problem but nothing ever happens, I’ll pass on your comment.” It is no surprise people don’t bother to point out problems.

A majority of the respondents went home and told friends and family members about the incident (and connected customers often speak out online to large audiences about bad customer service). Managers are unable to address the issue with employees if the managers don’t have a grasp on what is going on at the gemba. The study found that witnessing employee incivility makes customers angry. Customers are less likely to repurchase from the firm and express less interest in learning about the firm’s new services. For managers who are made aware of the offending behavior, their own harsh treatment of the employee can also prompt negative reactions from consumers.

Related: Customer Service is Important – United Breaks Guitars – Flaws in Understanding Psychology Lead to Flawed Management

“Regardless of the perpetrator or the reason, witnessing incivility scalds customer relationships and depletes the bottom line,” report the co-authors, Georgetown University Assistant Professor of Management Christine Porath and USC Professors of Business Administration and Marketing Debbie MacInnis and Valerie S. Folkes.

The best response is a simple apology, which researchers found was a just and proper response from both the employee and the supervisor. Of course, you should also address any other issue the customer has. Once you mistreat people they often are much more sensitive to things that they would have accepted otherwise. So I believe you would be wise to apologize and ask if there is anything you can help them with. Leave them with a positive, rather than just apologizing for the negative. It would be best to avoid the problems in the first place. Training programs that foster employee civility in order to prevent harmful outbursts may well be wise.

From the abstract of the paper:
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Posted in Competition, Customer focus, Psychology, Respect | Tagged , , , , , | 6 Comments

The Theory of Knowledge in Deming’s Management System: How Do We Know What We Know?

Posted on September 21, 2011 by John Hunter

I contributed an article to the Process Excellence Network’s Deming Files that was published yesterday: How Do We Know What We Know?. I took on the task of explaining the theory of knowledge, as one article in a four part series looking at the four components of Dr. Deming’s System of Profound Knowledge.

The other 3 articles are:

I hope you enjoy all 4 articles. Every two weeks a new article is published by the Deming Files exploring Dr. Deming’s ideas on management. The articles provide a nice dose of views on applying Deming’s ideas today. The network also has series on Drucker ideas and articles on many other management topics (six sigma, lean, etc.).

Related: Deming on Management – 2009 post: How do we Know What we Know – Data Doesn’t Lie, We Can Draw Incorrect Conclusions from Data – Correlation is Not Causation

Posted in Deming, Management, Management Articles, Psychology, Systems thinking | Tagged , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Management Improvement Carnival #143

Posted on September 20, 2011 by John Hunter

The Curious Cat Management Improvement Carnival has been published since 2006. We find great management blog posts and share them with you 3 times a month. We hope you find these post interesting and find some new blogs to start reading. Follow me online: Twitter, LinkedIn, more.

  • U.S. Patent Overhaul Won’t Help Innovators by “What they found is that America’s patent system only provides positive incentives for innovation in two industries: pharmaceuticals and chemicals. The value that a patent confers on its owner is outweighed by the cost of obtaining, asserting, and defending that patent for almost all American companies. Anyone innovating outside of those two industries would be better off if there were no patent system at all.” [9 deadly diseases – adding outdated intellectual property practices and excessive executive pay to Dr. Deming’s 7 deadly diseases, John]

  • An Explanation and Some Reflection by Reed Hastings (Netflix CEO – see video also) – “Companies rarely die from moving too fast, and they frequently die from moving too slowly. When Netflix is evolving rapidly, however, I need to be extra-communicative. This is the key thing I got wrong.” [Clayton Christensen: “Netflix are going to be held up as a gold standard of how to avoid being disrupted“].
  • User stories applied by Luigi Agosti [from User stories applied for agile software development by Mike Cohn, a great book – John]- “A user story is composed of three aspects:
    Card : written description of the story used for planning and as a reminder
    Conversation : conversations about the story that serve to flesh out the details of the story
    Confirmation : tests that convey and document details and that can be used to determine when a story is complete”
  • “Do You See What I See?” by Mark Hamel – “An example – three people walk the newly designed leader standard work. They stop at each audit point and, without conversing, do the audit…and then share.”

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Management Improvement Carnival #142

Posted on September 10, 2011 by John Hunter

The Curious Cat management improvement blog carnival is published 3 times a month with hand picked recent management blog posts. I also collect management improvement articles through Curious Cat Management Articles, you can subscribe via RSS for new article additions.

  • 5 Things a Good Product Manager Should Think About by Joseph Puopolo – “User experience has become such a core function to any product manager. Is this easy to use? Do people get pissed off when they have to use key features on the site? Will it cause people to abandon your site? UX can be a core competency and key differentiator. Always focus on this!”
  • 21 Concrete Practices for Agile Managers by Jurgen Appelo – “1) Take part in a team’s stand-up meetings, and also answer the questions “What I did yesterday”, etc… 9) Keep every morning free of meetings, so you can do a gemba walk and solve problems… 18) Regularly have a look at a team’s output (the application that they are building).”
  • Why Create Poka-yokes—and Why Disconnect Them? by Michael Ballé – “Lines with overly complex Poka-Yoke devices tend to lose much productivity by having operators simply run the part through the detection device again until a part would be consistently stopped. Not surprisingly, production management can be tempted to simply disconnect the poka- yoke in order to run the line.”
  • 10 Signs You Have a Bad Boss by Alison Green – “7) Ruling by fear. Managers who rule through rigid control, negativity, and a climate of anxiety and fear don’t trust that they can get things done any other way… 10) Fear of conflict. If your manager avoids conflict and tough conversations, chances are high that employees don’t hear much feedback and problems don’t get addressed.”
  • Should fixing bugs count toward velocity? by Jason Yip – “Velocity is a vector, not a scalar. So, should fixing bugs count toward velocity? No, we are measuring progress toward a goal, not effort expended.”
  • Interview with Akio Toyoda about Toyota Under Fire – Akio Toyoda on Jeff Liker’s new book, and Toyota: “you emphasize that you have to go back to the basics and this is the thing that I want them to learn the most. The business environment keeps changing. It is a dynamic environment, but as a company Toyoda was able to grow for the past 70 years or so and this is because there are some timeless values that we always have to keep true to. And that is the basics and that is what I would like them to learn.”

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Steve Jobs Discussing Customer Focus at NeXT

Posted on September 8, 2011 by John Hunter

Video from 1991 when Steve Jobs was at NeXT. Even with the customer focus however, NeXT failed. But this does show the difficulty in how to truly apply customer focus. You have to be creative. You have examine data. You have to really understand how your customers use your products or services (go to the gemba). You have to speculate about the future. The video is also great evidence of providing insight to all employees of the current thinking of executives.

Related: Sometimes Micro-managing Works (Jobs) – Delighting Customers – What Job Does Your Product Do?

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Management Improvement Carnival #141

Posted on September 1, 2011 by John Hunter
photo of rushing water joining the sea

Creek joining the Andaman Sea in Khao Lak, Thailand, by John Hunter.

The Curious Cat Management blog carnival highlights recent management blog posts 3 times each month. The posts generally focus on the areas I have focused on in the Curious Cat Management Guide since 1996 (Deming, leadership, lean manufacturing, customer focus, six sigma…).

  • Kill Rats – Not Messengers by Bill Waddell – “Seems pretty clear to me that YUM’s stock price and sales should drop if there are rats running around their restaurants. The YouTube video isn’t the cause of dropping sales and stock prices – lousy management that lets rats have the run of a Taco Bell is.”
  • Jobs made Apple great by ignoring profit by Clayton Christensen and James Allworth – “When the pressure is on and the CEO of a big public company has to choose between doing what’s best for the customer or making the quarter’s numbers… most CEOs will choose the numbers. Apple never has.”
  • Banishing Fear In The Workplace: Interview With Gallup’s Tom Rieger by Matthew May – “We realized that fear was eroding all these companies in very similar ways—so similar, in fact, that the pattern could be easily recognized if you only knew what to look for.”
  • Saving capitalism from itself by Simon Caulkin – “The theories have driven damaging short-termism, fostered amoral and immoral executive behaviour, and favoured the mushrooming growth of parasitic players in the expectations market to whose tune real-market actors are increasingly made to jump.”
  • The Just-Do-It – Reflect cycle by Jason Yip – “We’ll set aside some time to think about what we want to do, which is hard work, but then we’ll just do it… and then based on a trigger and/or a set time, we’ll reflect and adjust.”

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Many Good Employees Want to Continue to Do Their Current Job Well

Posted on August 31, 2011 by John Hunter

Far too much focus on managing people is given to helping them get ahead. Yes many people want to be promoted, and it is good to help them. But I would guess a majority of people really don’t (at this time – they may want to look to promotional later) want to take on new responsibilities (even for more money). But much of the way many speak and coach is disconnected from this reality and really ends up being disrespectful in assuming because I want to climb the ladder as far as I can I you do to.

There are several psychological factors behind this mindset. Many of those striving to get ahead can’t really conceive of the idea that others don’t have the same driving goals (and as many find in a “mid-life crises” – they may not have that either, but they don’t want to question their thoughts on this matter). And it is applying a simplistic one size fits all view of the world.

You can’t coach people effectively to reach their goals if you can’t understand what they are seeking. You can coach them how to do their current job – even if you don’t understand their ambitions (so at least part of the responsibility can be done well, even with this misunderstanding). Often it takes some work to learn what they desire. The culture of your organization may well make people hesitant to say they want to focus at getting better at their current job now, instead of stating a all consuming desire to earn more money.

Stop Ignoring the Stalwart Worker, makes some good points, though I am not so interested in Thomas DeLong’s definition of a stalwart worker. He sees them as not seeking attention and deep loyalty to the organization. I find his point that we ignore most people and the myths he mentions are the points to take note of. Too often the myths are used as the basis for managing people. And that is a mistake.

People do not all want the same thing out of work. A manager should know what their employees want and help them move in that direction. I find far too little actual management of people goes on. Many managers really take less than an hour all year making this happen. They are too busy doing all the busy work their organization has created for managers to actually get to know their employees and then think about how to help them grow (if that is what they want), and then actually coach them. Many managers also seem to think the little coaching they do should be reserved for those seeking rapid advancement. This is a bad concept. And it goes against respect for people principles. Most often the way to deal with the limited time for coaching is to cut out less important things taking up the managers time and increase the time working with all employees.
Continue reading →

Posted in Management, Psychology, Respect | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

When Companies Can Treat You Like an ATM, Many Will Do So

Posted on August 29, 2011 by John Hunter

The End of Refrigeration

One small custom chip, some relays, a transformer, a couple of heat sinks, and a bunch of passive parts. Maybe a build cost of $20-30 or so? But GE’s price to me was $250, plus $150 for the 20 minutes it took to pull out the old one and swap in the new one.

Paying $400 for a big piece of physical gear plus a couple hours of labor didn’t bother me. Paying $400 for a primitive circuit board and a few minutes to plug it in does.
…
Bottom line: $400 because a $2.02 Song Chuan 832 Series 30 A SPDT 12 VDC Through Hole General Purpose Heavy Duty Power Relay burned out.

This is a combination of companies 1) not being customer focused, 2) short term thinking, 3) very ologopolistic markets (very little competition). So when you are looking at this from the view of providing the best system, for in this case refrigeration, it is not a very difficult solution. You would want to minimize loss (have parts last) and in case they don’t minimize replacement cost. You would design the entire system so the parts that do burn out are easily replaceable and cheap and ideally notify you which part is broken (without the need for expensive contractor visits).

However, if your goal is to maximize company profit it is easy to see how you would develop a system that rips off the customer (very expensive part replacement, huge text messaging fees…) and attempts to capitalize on very little competition in the marketplace and customers that cannot reasonable analyze the system to see how they will be penalized by choosing your very expensive to maintain equipment. It is what they seem to teach in business school – take as much advantage of your customers as you can get away with. I prefer the Jeff Bezos school of thinking

There are two kinds of companies, those that work to try to charge more and those that work to charge less

It is a vastly different mentality to try to charge customers less as Amazon does (rather than say the practices of: Verizon, Bank of America, AT&T or Comcast). Your organization has to focused not on your quarterly profit (and if you are think kind of company, probably your personal bonus targets) but in serving your customers well, and in continually improve the value you provide to customers. And the company takes a share of the value just as all other stakeholders do (customer, employees [not just those in the c-suite)], suppliers, society…). Not only do I want to be a customer of this kind of company, I want to be a stockholder.

Related: Drug Prices in the USA – Worse Hotel Service the More You Pay – Customer Service is Important – $8,000 per gallon printer ink – new deadly diseases (often companies rely on bad “intellectual property” policies to restrict customer options)

Posted in Customer focus, Deming, Investing, Lean thinking, Management, Process improvement, Systems thinking | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

Management Improvement Carnival #140

Posted on August 21, 2011 by John Hunter

Benjamin Mitchell hosts Management Improvement Carnival #140. He has choosen quite a few blogs making their first or second appearance on the management carnival (don’t forget to add blogs to your RSS feed that you are not already subscribed to), highlights include:

  • Forecasting misunderstood by David M. Kasprzak
    David writes well about understanding the purpose of forecasting and reporting to avoid counter-productive fire-fighting management behaviour:

    Forecasting has to do with long-term vision and strategy, measurement, and learning. Focusing on reporting without planning leads to delayed information and chronic “hot buttons” that require immediate attention.

    When this occurs, the PDCA cycle is simply broken. The end result is a system where the people in the organization are in a constant state of “Do!” and “Act!” without any sense of why they are doing anything, or if their efforts have actually caused an improvement.

  • Change Artist Challenge #7: Being Fully Absent by Gerald Weinberg
    For managers who want to create systems that allow people to do great work, one solid test is to see if the systems works without you there:

    Your challenge is to take a week away from work, and when you get back, notice what changed without you being there. … Do you think you can’t do this? Then you have a different assignment … “If you’re going on a week-long vacation and feel the project cannot do without you, then take a two-week vacation.”
  • Leadership Coaching Tip: A Process for Change by Barbara Alexander
    Starting with a reference to Deming’s famous quote “It is not necessary to change. Survival is not mandatory”, Barbara writes a summary of the work of Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey including their focus on uncovering the competing commitments and underlying assumptions which keep us “immune from change”:

    One example from Immunity To Change that many of us may relate to is the leader whose goal is to be more receptive to new ideas. As you might imagine the behaviors he’s doing instead of his goal include talking too much, not asking open-ended questions and using a curt tone when an employee makes a suggestion. His hidden competing commitments? You guessed it . . . to have things done his way and to maintain his sense of self as a super problem solver
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