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Is Using the Words Resources or Assets When Talking About People the Problem?

Posted on March 17, 2011 by John Hunter

I don’t have any problem with the words resource or assets when discussing people (I know lots of people seem to get excited about those words). What I care about is behavior and organizational systems that embody respect for people. I have never seen much correlation between those and the use of the words resource and asset for discussing the role of people in organizations. Maybe others do see the correlation between the use of those words and bad behavior.

The idea that people need to be treated like people I agree with. I just think focusing on the use of words resource and asset isn’t the right focus and I don’t see the correlation to bad behavior by those using those words.

Dr. Deming’s management system had 4 interrelated components, one of which was an understanding of psychology. Deming’s management system embodies an understanding that managing human systems needs to understand that human systems are different from systems that do not have people as one of the components. Deming’s management system is excellent, and my preferred way of optimizing the management of organizations.

I do agree most people that say “people are our most important asset” don’t back that up with action that shows the organization values people. I just don’t think the problem is the use of the word asset or resource.

Response to: People Are Not Our Most Valuable Resource

Posted in Deming, Lean thinking, Management, Psychology, Respect | Tagged Deming, lean management, management, managing people, Psychology, respect for people | 3 Comments

Productivity Improvement for Entrepreneurs (and Everybody Else Really)

Posted on March 14, 2011 by John Hunter

The 3 Factors That are Limiting Your Productivity [the broken link has been removed] by Evan Carmichael

Elimination is at the core of every successful business. You have to focus on what you’re really good [at], what drives your business forward, and what you’re legally required to do in order to stay in business. Everything else should be eliminated.
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Just because everyone else does it or because you’ve always done it that way, it doesn’t mean you have to continue doing it.
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The order of Eliminate, Automate, Delegate is very important.

Eliminate is first. You don’t want to automate or delegate something that can be eliminated because it’s a non-productive task. Automate is next. You don’t want to delegate something that can be automated because it is more expensive and more prone to error.

I agree that eliminating non-value/low-value work should be done much more often. Automating makes a great deal of sense, though I would generalize it to process improvement. Automation is great: I think that is a specific form of process improvement – automation is wise, but maybe limiting. You improve productivity both by taking less time and by producing more effectively. If you produce something of more value to customers in the same time that improves productivity.

I also think there is another important area for people to think about – new ideas. Spending more time on something might seem counter-productive to productivity improvement. It takes time after all. Going and seeing what is really going on with your own eyes takes time, but trying to save time by acting based on reports results in ineffective and therefore unproductive action.

One of the things I first when looking at using internet technology to improve performance was that the technology opens new opportunities that were not feasible previously. People often focused just on how to improve what was done. People forget to look at things that were not pursued before that are now possible. With the time you save by eliminating, improving and delegating maybe you would get a big productivity improvement by coaching someone – or by being coached yourself. Or by reading about how to apply successful management improvement strategies that are too often ignored. Or you can learn about a new strategy that is more effective such as, combinatorial testing. Or learn to eliminate ineffective strategies such as: multitasking .

A number of “new ideas” are round about ways to eliminate work, in some form, though in a bit less direct way than people normally would consider elimination. For example, if you focus on reducing turnover, you can eliminate time spent bringing new people up to speed. If you make a process more reliable you can reduce the time spent dealing with the problems from a less reliable process.
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Posted in Career, Management, Process improvement, Systems thinking | Tagged Career, coaching, entrepreneur, leadership, management, Process improvement, productivity, Systems thinking, waste | 2 Comments

Management Improvement Carnival #125

Posted on March 10, 2011 by John Hunter

photo of cypress trees in swamp in South Carolina

Photo of Cypress Trees by John Hunter

The Curious Cat Management Blog Carnival selects recent management blog posts 3 times each month. You may submit a link to the management Reddit to have it considered for inclusion in our carnival. More photos from Cypress Gardens, South Carolina.

What Next? by David Ing – “The underlying problem is that it seems to come down to having to completely change the culture of an existing business. This can be done internally, and often is done by heroic souls today, but like the advice of how to eat an elephant (‘one bite at a time’) after a while anyone’s going to get pretty sick of tasting just bad elephant every day.”
Systems in Place to Prevent These Medication Errors? Seems Not… by Mark Graban – “We’re taught in the Lean methodology that ‘standardized work’ is not just a matter of writing procedures. We need a culture and an environment where standardized work is actively managed.”
Driving Out Fear and Other Similarities Between Drucker and Deming by Kelly Allan – “[Drucker] Inherent in the managerial task is entrepreneurship: making the business of tomorrow. Inherent in the task is innovation. Innovation is above all, top-management attitude and practices. [Deming] The moral is that it is necessary to innovate, to predict the needs of the customer.” (Deming on Innovation – John Hunter)
The second death of agile by Niklas BjÃ¸rnerstedt – “Agile should evolve, but I think it should not loose its focus on software. If you are interested in “agile” outside of software you should study systems thinking. Why reinvent the wheel? The combination of systems thinking and agile is much more potent that some new bloated variant of agile.”
Lean’s Fork In The Road by Bill Waddell – “They are driven by the idea that the future is unknown, but if you continually improve the processes for getting work done you will be in good shape, no matter what the future holds. Do the work well in terms of minimal waste, excellent quality, driving yourself to take the best care of customers, and things will turn out all right. Better than all right, in fact…”

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Posted in Carnival, Management | Tagged agile management, management | 2 Comments

Learn by Seeking Knowledge – Not Just from Mistakes

Posted on March 7, 2011 by John Hunter

Being open to new ideas and new knowledge is what is needed to learn. Experimenting, seeking out new knowledge is even better.

You can be successful and see an even better way to do things and learn from it. This seems the best way to learn to me – not to just learn from mistakes. Of course this means your goal has to be improvement not just avoiding more mistakes than before.

Your actions are based on theories (often unconsciously): and learning involves improving those theories. Learning requires updating faulty ideas (or learning new ideas – in which case ignorance rather than a faulty theory may have lead to the mistake). Encouraging people to learn from mistakes is useful when it is about freeing them to make errors and learn from them. But you should be learning all the time – not just when you make mistakes.

You can be also be wrong and not learn (lots of people seem to do this). This is by far the biggest state I see. It isn’t an absence of people making mistakes (including carrying out processes based on faulty theories) that is slowing learning. People are very reluctant to make errors of commission (and errors of commission due to a change is avoided even more). This reluctance obviously makes learning (and improvement) more difficult. And the reluctance is often enhanced by fear created by the management system.

It is best to be open and seek out new knowledge and learn that way as much as possible. Now, you should also not be scared to be wrong. Taking the right risks is important to improving – encouraging creativity and innovation and risk taking is wise.

Experiment and be open to learn from what could be better and improve (PDSA is a great way to try things and evaluate how they work). And the idea is not to be so conservative that every turn of the PDSA cycle has no failures. In order to get significant successes it is likely you will try things that don’t always work.

The desire to improve understanding (and the desire to improve results provides focus to the learning) is what is valuable in learning – not being wrong. Creating a culture where being wrong needs to be avoided harms learning because people avoid risk and seek to distance themselves from failure instead of experimenting and digging into the details when something goes wrong. Instead of learning from mistakes people try to stay as far away from them and hide them from others. That is not helpful. But what is needed is more desire to continually learn – learning from mistakes is wise but hardly the only way to learn.

Posted in Career, Creativity, Deming, Innovation, Process improvement, Psychology, Systems thinking | Tagged Career, continual improvement, Creativity, Deming, experiments, fear, Innovation, learning, Process improvement, Psychology, Systems thinking, theory of knowledge | 6 Comments

Warren Buffett’s 2010 Letter to Shareholders

Posted on March 3, 2011 by John Hunter

Warren Buffett has published his always excellent annual shareholder letter. His letters, provide excellent investing insight and good management ideas.

Yearly figures, it should be noted, are neither to be ignored nor viewed as all-important. The pace of the earth’s movement around the sun is not synchronized with the time required for either investment ideas or operating decisions to bear fruit. At GEICO, for example, we enthusiastically spent $900 million last year on advertising to obtain policyholders who deliver us no immediate profits. If we could spend twice that amount productively, we would happily do so though short-term results would be further penalized. Many large investments at our railroad and utility operations are also made with an eye to payoffs well down the road.
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At Berkshire, managers can focus on running their businesses: They are not subjected to meetings at headquarters nor financing worries nor Wall Street harassment. They simply get a letter from me every two years and call me when they wish. And their wishes do differ: There are managers to whom I have not talked in the last year, while there is one with whom I talk almost daily. Our trust is in people rather than process. A “hire well, manage little” code suits both them and me.
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Cultures self-propagate. Winston Churchill once said, “You shape your houses and then they shape you.” That wisdom applies to businesses as well. Bureaucratic procedures beget more bureaucracy, and imperial corporate palaces induce imperious behavior. (As one wag put it, “You know you’re no longer CEO when you get in the back seat of your car and it doesn’t move.”) At Berkshire’s “World Headquarters” our annual rent is $270,212. Moreover, the home-office investment in furniture, art, Coke dispenser, lunch room, high-tech equipment – you name it – totals $301,363. As long as Charlie and I treat your money as if it were our own, Berkshire’s managers are likely to be careful with it as well.
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At bottom, a sound insurance operation requires four disciplines… (4) The willingness to walk away if the appropriate premium can’t be obtained. Many insurers pass the first three tests and flunk the fourth. The urgings of Wall Street, pressures from the agency force and brokers, or simply a refusal by a testosterone-driven CEO to accept shrinking volumes has led too many insurers to write business at inadequate prices. “The other guy is doing it so we must as well” spells trouble in any business, but none more so than insurance.

I don’t agree with everything he says. And what works at one company, obviously won’t work everywhere. Copying doesn’t work. Learning from others and understanding what makes it work and then determining how to incorporate some of the ideas into your organization can be valuable. I don’t believe in “Our trust is in people rather than process.” I do believe in “hire well, manage little.” Exactly what those phrases mean is not necessarily straight forward. I believe you need to focus on creating a Deming based management system and that will require educating and coaching managers about how to manage such a system. But that the management decisions about day to day operations should be left to those who are working on the processes in question (which will often be workers, that are not managers, sometimes will be supervisors and managers and sometimes will be senior executives).

Posted in Data, Investing, Management | Tagged evidence based management, Investing, management, Psychology, Systems thinking, Warren Buffett | 1 Comment

Management Improvement Carnival #124

Posted on March 1, 2011 by John Hunter

Helitrope Ridge Trail, North Cascades National Park

The management blog carnival is published 3 times a month with select recent management blog posts. Also try Curious Cat Management Articles for online management improvement articles.

Jerry Seinfeld’s Productivity Secret by Brad Isaac – “Think for a moment about what action would make the most profound impact on your life if you worked it every day. That is the action I recommend you put on your Seinfeld calendar.”
Employee Engagement by Krista Ogburn Francis – “Meaningful work. Most people want to know that their 8+/- hours of effort aren’t in vain, that their day results in a product or service they can believe in and feel proud of.”
Going to Gemba by Pascal Dennis – “The more time spent at Gemba, the more you know about what’s actually happening, so the less time you need to spend in meetings trying to figure out what’s going on, and the faster you’ll solve small problems before they become large business killers.”
The 0th Trap of Teams by Esther Derby – “The zeroeth trap of teams is calling any old group of people a team and then expecting teamwork and collaboration. “
More Problems is a Good Thing by Kevin Meyer – “To fix the process you must first understand the failures occurring in the process. If you focus on the person caught up in the failed process you won’t learn about many of the failures and therefore won’t have the ability to even start to fix and improve the process.”
Five Steps to Breaking the Multitasking Cycle by Holly Green – “research shows time and again that business leaders need long periods of uninterrupted time in order to perform at peak levels… Most important, it enables us to refocus on the high-level activities we should be doing that move us closer to our strategic goals.”
The Toyota Way has worked as it’s supposed to, helping the company to face its challenges by Michael BallÃ© – “The “problems first” spirit is still alive and well in Toyota, from the president’s comments to reactions on the floor, and as we all know, facing problems doesn’t make them disappear in the instant: it’s a long hard slog. But Toyota has expressed its challenges, and has been working at solving them.”
The Fine Line Between Micro-Management and Surfacing Problems by Jamie Flinchbaugh – “The problem is that you cannot manage work that you cannot see… The difference between engagement and micro-management is how management responds to this increased transparency.”
How to Balance Life and Work – “I want you to pause for a minute, you wretched weaklings, and take stock of your miserable existence.” Nigel Marsh paraphrasing Saint Benedict.

Posted in Carnival, Lean thinking, Management | Tagged Carnival, Lean thinking, management | Comments Off

Nigel Marsh: How to Make Work-Life Balance Work

Posted on February 25, 2011 by John Hunter

“I want you to pause for a minute, you wretched weaklings, and take stock of your miserable existence.” Nigel Marsh paraphrasing (or quoting, I can’t find the source though) the advice that Saint Benedict gave his startled followers.

I wrote some about focusing on your whole life recently: Work and Life.

Posted in Psychology, Systems thinking | Tagged problem solving, Psychology, Systems thinking | Comments Off

Management Improvement Carnival #123

Posted on February 21, 2011 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 Improvement guide since 1996 (lean manufacturing, Deming, agile software development, innovation, six sigma, customer focus…).

Tradable Quality Hypothesis by Martin Fowler – “Instead it’s vital to focus on the true value of internal quality – that it’s the enabler to speed. The purpose of internal quality is to go faster” (add I believe better reliability – John)
Lean Mindsets for Healthcare by Mark Graban – “Problem solving, leadership, and kaizen can’t be done effectively from an office or conference room… Instead of fighting the same fires each and every time, it’s time to focus on improving systems and processes.”
Working smarter by Gabriel Weinberg – “By planting a lot of different seeds, you are spreading your risk a bit hoping that some of them will blossom, or more often than not, prompt you to think of new related or combined efforts that eventually turn into something meaningful.”
The Fine Line Between Micro-Management and Surfacing Problems by Jamie Flinchbaugh – “The difference between engagement and micro-management is how management responds to this increased transparency.”
Toyota’s Recall Crisis: What Have We Learned? by Jeffrey Liker – “We also learned that the NHTSA knew all along that the only problems were floor mats and sticky pedals, but they had to go ahead with the NASA study to convince members of Congress who believed electronics were the cause of sudden acceleration despite a total lack of evidence to support that belief.”
What’s Next for the Agile Manifesto by Dennis Stevens – “We need to learn how to do a better job of defining value and aligning the cadence across the organization and improving the flow of value from concept to delivery.”

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Posted in Carnival, Management, Systems thinking | Tagged management, Systems thinking | Comments Off

Management Improvement Carnival #122

Posted on February 10, 2011 by John Hunter

The management blog carnival is published 3 times a month with select recent management blog posts. Since 2006 the carnival has focused on finding interesting posts for managers on improving the performance of organizations (lean manufacturing, Deming, agile software development, leadership, systems thinking…).

Slow and Steady, and Routine by Jamie Flinchbaugh – “Truly internalizing behaviors and skills cannot be done all at once. It takes repetitive practice, which cannot be compressed into one single experience.”
Scott Heiferman looks back at Meetup’s bet-the-company moment – “This is going to sound terrible, but the thing I would have done differently is frankly, to have respectfully listened to everyone but, not taken the complaints too seriously.”
Why Do Some Testers Find The Critical Problems? by Michael Bolton – “Testers, to be successful, must be given the freedom and responsibility to explore and to contribute what they’ve learned back to their team and to the rest of the organization.”
Lean Lego Game – 4 Rounds to Successful Lean Training – “Covering many Lean concepts including waste (the seven wastes), inventory buffers and kanban, kaizen and workcells, it’s perfect for facilitating your own Lego session, whether you’re implementing Lean in software development or on a manufacturing shop floor.”
The Hole in the Soul of Business by Gary Hamel – “Apple is in the beauty business. It uses its prodigious software and design talents to produce products and services that are aesthetic stand-outs. There are many within Google who believe their company is in the wisdom business, who talk about raising the world’s IQ, democratizing knowledge and empowering people with information. Sadly, though, this kind of dedication to big-hearted goals and high-minded ideals is all too rare in business.”
Why Don’t We See More QC Circles? by Jon Miller – “The lean community seems to be largely rediscovering ideas that were developed 100 years ago, abandoned, adopted, rediscovered, abandoned and discovered yet again. Perhaps QC Circles are the next thing for lean?”
Thinking about Moving to Management by Wally Bock – “Are you willing to make decisions and be accountable for the results? Leaders take the blame and share the credit. Are you OK with that? Do you enjoy helping others succeed? It will be your primary job…”
Continual Learning by John Hunter – “Look at people like Ackoff and Deming. They knew more than pretty much anyone about management. Yet both continued learning until the day they died. They were quick to credit others. They were quick to challenge people but also had an obvious respect and compassion for people.”

Posted in Carnival, Management | Tagged Carnival, management | Comments Off

Management Improvement Carnival #121

Posted on February 6, 2011 by John Hunter

This edition of the Management Improvement Carnival is #121 (editions 119 and 120 were the annual 2010 blog reviews part 1 and part 2). Also try Curious Cat Management Articles for online management improvement articles: you can subscribe to an RSS feed for management articles now.

Managing Nerds – “Until you’ve experienced the solving of a seemingly impossible problem, it’s hard to understand how far a nerd will go to protect his problem solving focus and you can help. The road to either High is a mental state traditionally called the Zone. There are three things to know about the Zone: 1. The almost-constant quest of the nerd is managing all the crap that is preventing us from entering the Zone as we search for the Highs. Meetings, casual useless fly-bys…”
Jeffrey Liker on Toyota’s Challenges and His New Books by Mark Graban – “Toyota didn’t react very quickly because the engineers in Japan didn’t see these problems as defects with the car. Engineers in Japan are pretty isolated from the gemba and they don’t understand how Americans would use the car… ‘The ultimate root cause was not listening to customers well enough and they took too a long time to investigate and respond.’ That was the problem they needed to solve.”
What being in a band taught me about management by Neil Johnson – “Limit work in progress – Getting a song to a performable state is massive step. It brings the group together and feels like progress. It’s better to have three presentable songs than nine nearly finished ‘things’, not least because it then provides a means for feedback from outside of the group.”
We Need Less FAKE Lean, More FAIL Lean by Jon Miller – “What we need is less FAKE lean and more FAIL lean: the type of lean that stretches, bends and turns things inside out to the point where were are forced to look at the mental, business and organizational models and challenge our dogma that what worked in the past is still valid today.”
Experience agile in an accelerated form and focus on innovation at the same time by Yuval Yeret – ” During the sprints we worked on elaborating our ideas, using Agile User Stories and techniques such as story mapping, as well as started implementation and delivery of “Working Software”. It proved a real challenge to deliver on such short sprints, especially for those of us who didn’t have a somewhat formed idea at the starting point.”

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Posted in Carnival, Management | Tagged Lean thinking, management | Comments Off

Is Using the Words Resources or Assets When Talking About People the Problem?

Productivity Improvement for Entrepreneurs (and Everybody Else Really)

Management Improvement Carnival #125

Learn by Seeking Knowledge – Not Just from Mistakes

Warren Buffett’s 2010 Letter to Shareholders

Management Improvement Carnival #124

Nigel Marsh: How to Make Work-Life Balance Work

Management Improvement Carnival #123

Management Improvement Carnival #122

Management Improvement Carnival #121

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