Bill George on Leadership

Posted on March 15, 2010 by John Hunter

Bill George is professor of management practice at the Harvard Business School and former chairman and CEO of Medtronic, the world’s leading medical technology company. Under his leadership, Medtronic’s market capitalization grew from $1.1 billion to $60 billion, averaging 35 percent a year. He is the author of the best-selling Authentic Leadership and a board member of Goldman Sachs, Target, and Novartis.

His board membership at Goldman Sachs certainly leaves him with something to answer for (which I don’t think he does in this webcast). With the damage that company has done to the USA economy you certainly can’t excuse a board member of responsibility for the actions that company has taken. You can listed to his first few minutes and don’t get the idea that he was a leader of the company most responsible for the credit crisis.

His words do sound nice but seem a bit short on much new. Lots of the “new leadership ideas” (like today you can’t have one leader that everyone follows – isn’t that at least 20 years old as a well know bad idea?). Also the idea that an organization exists to provide value to customers not to maximize shareholder value. I understand more people do not understand this point, so it is nice a Harvard MBA professor is pushing this idea (but again it isn’t new at all).

I guess I am a little disappointed in the video but others seem to like it and I do think he makes worthwhile points, just nothing really special (from where I sit). I did like how he discussed value tests come in real life.

I share what seemed to be his opinion that talking abstractly about values is less important than actions you take in the real world. I must admit I am getting more and more frustrated in the lack of moral and ethical values in those with power in our society (this is my feeling, not the speakers). And I do not have must patience for their ability to try to explain away their unethical behavior. I repeatedly see our lack of accountability of those with power (just look at how many people are in jail for all the hundreds of billions of financial fraud in the last few year (what maybe 5 people? 10?) and compare that to those in jail for much much less damaging crimes that have less power). His blog has some posts worth reading.

Related: Jeff Bezos Spends a Week Working in Amazon’s Kentucky Distribution Center – Harvard’s Masters of the Apocalypse – An Introduction to Deming’s Management Ideas by Peter Scholtes (webcast) – Eric Schmidt on Management at Google – Looting: Bankruptcy for Profit

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Management Improvement Carnival #91

Posted on March 11, 2010 by John Hunter

The Curious Cat Management Blog Carnival provides links to recent articles to help managers improve the performance of their organization.

  • A Mindless Worker is a Happy Worker “when people are given a chance to participate in creating something good, solving a problem, and play a role in adding value through the use of their mind, hands, and heart, good things happen.”
  • Creating a Culture of Process Improvement by Rip Stauffer – “If you listen and act, you’ll soon find that you can’t keep up with the suggestions for improvement. That will be the beginning of changing the culture to one of improvement.”
  • Creating Employee Engagement by Jamie Flinchbaugh – “Organizations will often want people engaged and even teach them some skills to get them engaged, but fall short of creating a mechanism that actually enables this.”
  • Why do we spend so much time putting out fires? by Dan Markovitz – “The process keeps everyone up to date on where things stand throughout the organization — no tedious, long-winded, meanderings in the 60 minute weekly (or god help you, 90 minute monthly) meeting.”
  • 5 Reasons Why Agile Development Must Be Driven from the Top by Kelly Waters – “Another key concept of agile software development is co-location. Ideally the whole team will all be located in the same place – not just the same office but literally sitting side by side in the same room or space.”
  • Counter Measures: Bringing balance to the process by JC Gatlin – “A Temporary Counter Measure is ‘immediate containment.’ This is an action or series of actions that the PDCA group will take to temporarily remedy the problem. This action may have no connection to the root causes.”
  • Testing in the Data Center (Manufacturing No More) by James A. Whittaker – “This is the challenge of the new century of software. It’s not a process of get-it-as-reliable-as-possible-before-we-ship. It’s health care, cradle to grave health care … prevention, diagnosis, treatment and cure.”

    • Continue reading →

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Improving Software Development with Automated Tests

Posted on March 8, 2010 by John Hunter

Automated software testing is a mistake proofing (poka-yoke) solution for software development.

The way automated testing works is that software code is written that tests the software code of the application. This automated testing code test that business rules are correctly being followed by the code in the application.

So for example, a user should not be able to create a new account without entering password. Then you create code that does not allow an account to be created without a password. And you write a test that passes if this is true and fails if it is false.

The best implementation will then not allow deploying code to your production environment until the code has passed all the automated tests. So if a software developer changes the code, the automated tests are all run and if there is an error noted by the automated testing the code cannot be deployed to the production environment. So, in the example above, if somehow the changes made to the application code somehow now let an account be created without a password the test would fail, and the developer would know to fix the problem before putting the code into production.

Thus automated testing mistake proofs the process. Now the mistake proofing is only as good as the test that are added. Software development is complex and if the code has an error (based on the business rules) that is not tested then the code can be deployed to production and affect customers. Automated software testing tools are a huge help in preventing many errors from affecting customers.

It seems pretty obvious but until the widespread adoption of agile software development techniques and frameworks that make it easy to adopt automated testing (like Ruby on Rails) this sensible process improvement tool was used far less often than you would think.

Related: Combinatorial Testing for Software – Metrics and Software Development – Checklists in Software Development – Google testing blog – Hexawise software testing blog

Posted in IT, Lean thinking, Management, Process improvement, Quality tools, Software Development | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 8 Comments

Improving Education with Deming’s Ideas

Posted on March 4, 2010 by John Hunter

This interview (link broken, so removed) with David Langford discusses how to improve education using ideas from Deming. Along with Alfie Kohn, David have long been the learning and management experts I find most valuable.

I have long remembered is his idea that he was the CEO of his classroom. On hearing Deming discuss how critical it was to have the CEO active in a management improvement effort to achieve success he tried to get those above him in the organization chart to change. Which didn’t work very well. Seeing that method was not successful he took a new look and decided to view the problem in a different way.

He looked for what he was in charge of and decided he could decide how to run his classroom. I think this is a very valuable idea for anyone looking to improve their organization. What is your sphere of control? Focus on how you can improve there. Don’t just try to change others. See how you can change and improve what you can.

The interview provides a good insight into the great ideas David has.

  • “Make changes that let all kids get good grades.”
  • That comes from the theory (incorrect theory) grades motivate students.
  • There is no level of education sub-quality that is acceptable. Success or need to work more, which category are you in. B, C, D does not make sense.
  • People keep trying things we have proven over and over again don’t work, like pay for performance schemes for individual teachers.

Anyone interested in improving education should listen to this interview and search out more ideas from David Langford and Alfie Kohn. I really like David’s capacity matrix.

Related: Orchestrating Learning With Quality by David P. Langford and Barbara A. Cleary – K-12 Educational Reform – Deming on being Destroyed by Best Efforts

Posted in Creativity, Deming, Education, Manufacturing | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Management Improvement Carnival #90

Posted on March 2, 2010 by John Hunter

The Curious Cat Management Improvement blog carnival provides links to recent blog posts for those interesting in improving management of organizations.

  • Leader Standard Work Should Be…Work! by Mark Hamel – “A lean leader’s standard work, among other things, may require him to check a particular work cell once in the morning and once in the afternoon to ensure that the workers are maintaining their plan vs. actual chart (usually by hour), and that specific and meaningful reasons for any shortfalls are documented.”
  • Innovations in innovation by Karen Wilhelm – “Innovation, for example, is hampered by patent processes and the extensive litigation often rising around them… These models all seem to fit into the emerging philosophy of Open Innovation growing out of the open-source software movement.”
  • “Single Piece Flow” in Medicine by Mark Graban – “They could have done it at the doctor’s office at the same time as the EKG, but the insurance company won’t pay for it there, so she has to take this afternoon off to go to the hospital instead.”
  • A different view of leadership by Glyn Lumley – “1) Thinking and acting systemically 2) People are the route to performance 3) Achieving through impact on others”
  • Identifying the Root Cause by JC Gatlin – “By taking systematic steps to get to the root cause of a problem, the trouble shooter should be able to avoid assumptions and logic traps to keep the problem from recurring in the future.”
  • The Emerging Importance of Nemawashi by Connor Shea – “it’s about aligning individuals to see the whole picture, share a disgust with the actual, and agree to a standard / standard process to close the gap.”

    • Continue reading →

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Get Rid of the Performance Review

Posted on February 25, 2010 by John Hunter

How Much Do You Hate Performance Reviews? by Bob Sutton

Deming emphasized that forced rankings and other merit ratings that breed internal competition are bad management because they undermine motivation and breed contempt for management among people who, at least at first, were doing good work.
…
If you want to read the most compelling and complete case against the traditional performance evaluation, however,I suggest that you pre-order UCLA Professor Sam Culbert’s new book Get Rid of the Performance Review. He first made this argument in the Wall Street Journal, but the book digs into this argument in far more detail and offers solutions for managers and companies who want to replace the traditional review — or at least reduce the damage that they do. To help spread the word about the book, and to find out if as many people despise the performance review as Sam (and I) believe, he has — a bit like the ARSE — designed a ten-item test called How Much Do You Hate Performance Reviews? I just took it and scored a 36, which means I really hate them.

Related: The Trouble with Performance Reviews by Jeffrey Pfeffer – Deming and Performance Appraisal – Performance Appraisals, Good Execution is not the Solution?

Posted in Books, Deming, Management, Performance Appraisal | Tagged , , , , , | 3 Comments

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi: Creativity, Fulfillment and Flow

Posted on February 24, 2010 by John Hunter

“After a certain basic point, which translates, more or less, to just a few thousand dollars above the minimum poverty level, increases in material well being don’t see to affect how happy people are.”

The speech includes, the first purpose of incorporation at Sony:

To establish a place of work where engineers can feel the joy of technological innovation, be aware of their mission to society, and work to their heart’s content.

Excellent books by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi:
Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, 1991. People enter a flow state when they are fully absorbed in activity during which they lose their sense of time and have feelings of great satisfaction.
Good Business: Leadership, Flow, and the Making of Meaning.
Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, 1997. Drawing on hundreds of interviews with exceptional people, from biologists and physicists to politicians and business leaders to poets and artists, the author uses his famous “flow” theory to explain the creative process.

Related: Extrinsic Incentives Kill Creativity – posts on psychology Interviews with Innovators – Innovation Strategy – The Purpose of an Organization – Flow

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Management Improvement Carnival #89

Posted on February 22, 2010 by John Hunter

The Curious Cat Management blog carnival highlights management blog posts 3 times each month. Also visit the Curious Cat Management Library for online management improvement articles.

  • Three Surprises About Change by Chip and Dan Health (this is actually the full text of the first chapter of their new book, Switch, they wrote the great Made to Stick previously) – “we don’t promise that we’re going to make change easy, but at least we can make it easier. Our goal is to teach you a framework, based on decades of scientific research, that is simple enough to remember and flexible enough to use in many different situations—family, work, community, and otherwise.”
  • The Switch to Kanban – “By limiting the work in progress rather than limiting the work per time Kanban presented a viable alternative we felt better reflected how we actually work, while preserving the discipline necessary to deliver working software multiple times a week.”
  • Not Going Away by Lee Fried – “changes in behavior throughout management, discipline to not stray far from the principles for too long and most importantly each and every employee needs to have meaningful and direct involvement in improving their own work.”
  • Obvious and Underutilized by Kevin Meyer – “How often do we look for a complex solution to what is really a simple problem? Spend a few million on nightmarish ERP software instead of mapping and improving a process to remove complex flows and massive WIP, which will usually show how simple good manufacturing really is”
  • How do you check that you are engaging people? by Bruce Baker – “I take suggestions that recommend fairly specific countermeasures as a sign of higher engagement. When small groups or individuals work really thorough ‘plan phases’ autonomously I take it a sign that they are ‘in the game.'”
  • Designing a kanban board – not as simple as you might think by Adam Shone – “Needless to say, this all came out during our first sprint retrospective and our kanban boards have evolved since that first attempt. But it taught me something – you might think that you can draw out your workflow with your eyes closed, but how closely does your theory match reality?”

    • Continue reading →

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Short Term Investing Focus

Posted on February 17, 2010 by John Hunter

Buffett’s New CEO Shows Analysts, Hedge-Fund Managers to Door [the broken link was removed]

Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc. completed the buyout yesterday after winning the approval of Burlington Northern investors. The deal, valued at $100 a share, allows Rose to hand out returns of nearly 300 percent, plus dividends, to investors who bought stock the day he was named CEO in 2000. The problem, he said, is that shareholders with that length of commitment are dwindling in number and influence.

“When I started as CEO 10 years ago, the typical investor had a time frame of three to five to seven years,” Rose said in an interview. “Year-by-year, that’s gotten shorter.”

The increased focus on short-term results, fueled by real- time media and quarterly analyst calls, can be a distraction for a railroad executive who needs to buy locomotives that run for 20 years and put down tracks that last for 40, Rose said. Burlington Northern said last month it would commit $2.4 billion this year to capital projects, including track, signal systems and locomotives, about $240 million less than in 2009.

“The money I spend this year really won’t pay off for three, four, five or seven years down the road,” said Rose, 50. “There’s the advent of the hedge fund which has changed the time horizon of what satisfies the institutional investor.”
…
“The speed of the news today I think has harmed, quite frankly, investors looking at long-term assets,” Rose told reporters in a news conference this week. A long-term perspective is “one thing that our country has kind of lost sight of, not just for the railroad equity investor but for a lot of investors.”

Decades ago Dr. Deming said short term focus was one of the seven deadly diseases of western management. Unfortunately we have made very little progress on the deadly diseases. The failed, health care system with it’s focus on a few special interests fighting to keep the broken system that does great harm to society but benefits the special interests is another a disease that has definitely gotten much worse.

Related: Think Long Term Act Daily – posts related to Warren Buffett – Goodbye Quarterly Targets – A Great Day for Georgia-Pacific

Posted in Deming, Investing, Management | Tagged , , , , , | 4 Comments

Management Improvement Carnival #88

Posted on February 15, 2010 by John Hunter

Since 2006 the Curious Cat Management Improvement Carnival has provided links to interesting blog posts for those interesting in improving the practice of management especially focused on the ideas of Deming, Ohno, Ackoff, Scholtes, McGregor, Womack, Christensen…

  • Putting the Checklist Manifesto to Work by Wally Bock – “Checklists are simple but powerful tools that can help you improve performance without improving either skill or abilities. Use them to take a load off your memory, assure consistent process performance, and remain calm in a crisis.”
  • The Role of Purpose and Your Role by Mark Graban – “Are you just laying bricks or are you building a cathedral? You want people to understand their purpose, not just their job description or the tasks that are assigned to them. This is very similar to Jim Womack’s ‘Purpose, Process, People’ model. Your ‘role’ (what you are responsible for) is more than your task assignments” [great post – John]
  • Stretch, Don’t Break – 5 ways to grow your people by Mark Hamel – “Make people think. Don’t give people the answers. Help guide and challenge them to apply PDCA thinking – to become experimentalists. This means that people will often fail. Lean leaders must see these failures as learning opportunities.”
  • Measurement Misnomers, and Toyota Dealership Problems by Jamie Flinchbaugh – “Any time a measurement is tied to an incentive, then it is likely to be manipulated at some level… Metrics are abstractions, by definition. That means they never truly represent reality… Don’t throw out your measurements. Just know that they don’t give you the whole story. Take the time to understand the current state as it actually happens, through direct observation.”
  • Suddenly, Deming is Relevant Again by Art Petty – “I’m also critically concerned about learning from the past and understanding the wisdom of those that came before us. We’ve not yet moved beyond the flaws and failings that Deming saw clearly in the management practices of the industrial revolution. ” [I agree, John – ]
  • It’s not a promise, it’s a guess by David Heinemeier Hansson – “Software development is inherently unpredictable… That’s the true value of estimates. That it sets up conversational constraints that can be used as boundaries for trading concessions.”

    • Continue reading →

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