Read the previous management carnivals.
- Caring for Your People: Part of the Boss’s Job by Wally Bock – “Caring for your people means helping them grow and develop. You can help them develop skills to keep them out of trouble in the future.”
- Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule by Paul Graham – “You can’t write or program well in units of an hour. That’s barely enough time to get started. When you’re operating on the maker’s schedule, meetings are a disaster.”
- Getting things done when you’re not in charge by Kathleen Fasanella – “This can be difficult but you need to negotiate for permission to work on projects that your employer may not consider to be real work. These projects should be opportunities to experiment with processes or changes that can result in big savings. Not all of these will pan out but I guarantee that you’ll end up using what you learned in future projects.”
- Are Lean and Kanban being stretched to the breaking point? by Si Alhir – “As a tool, a Kanban System supports making the work visible. However, visibility may be necessary, but is it sufficient for self organization and continuous improvement?”
- Measuring for Improvement by Mark Graban – “Process measures are important — having the right measures, in a timely way is critical to any lean implementation.”
- Another Post on Lean Management by Lee Fried – “The best way to see this is to visit their visual system and see if they are tracking their own data, that it is up to date and that it is clear what processes they are working to improve. If there is no visual or it is being maintained by management it is obvious that they need to re-commit.”
- Standard work, by any other name… by Dan Markovitz – “Standard work is not just something for the metal stamping line, or for the invoicing process. Standard work can be — should be, must be — applied to the way you work on an individual level as well. Because when you start applying lean principles to your own work, you’ll not only improve your own performance, you’ll set a model that will inspire others as well.”
Narcissistic Cadre of Senior Executives
In yet another voice against the looting mentality of the current crop of executives Chris Bones, dean of Henley Business School writes a A crisis of confidence?
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Secondly, a responsible organisation should set limits above which senior reward will not stray. I cannot see a reason why any annual bonus plan should be worth more than 100% of salary or should pay out more than 50% of this in the year in question. I do not think there is any justification for the annual value of chief executives’ rewards to be more than 20 times that of the average employee. Rocketing executive pay is in no one’s interests, except the small number of executives involved, and limiting it voluntarily is a better solution than the state intervening through taxation changes.
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Business schools can help rebuild confidence in business leadership. But they too have to change—to become critical friend rather than fawning supporter. MBA programmes have to produce values-driven general managers, not finance-driven technocrats. They must build critical thinkers with the ability to make decisions that benefit all stakeholders, not just themselves.
It really is a shame that the executives leading so many companies are so moral, ethically and managerially bankrupt. We need to stop allowing such people to become executives in organizations. With such fundamental problems in their basic understanding of human systems the correct solution is to stop allowing such flawed people to have power not to try and convince such flawed people to behave responsibly.
That executives believe they should act as royalty taking what they wish from the value produced by others is so fundamental a failure that I do not believe reform is the best solution. They should just be removed. If you are lucky some competitor will hire them and you can gain not only from their removal but from the damage they cause your competitor.
Related: Warren Buffett on Excessive CEO Pay – Honda Executives not Overpaid – Unconscionable Executive Pay – Tilting at Ludicrous CEO Pay 2008 – Looting: Bankruptcy for Profit – More on Obscene CEO Pay