Tag Archives: commentary

Support Theatre

Posted on June 21, 2016 by John Hunter

Support theatre provides the appearance of supporting customers when in fact it is just treating customers poorly based on a management system that disrespects customers. It is a similar idea to security theatre that has become so popular for government in the USA for the last 10 years. Dilbert does a good job of illustrating “support theatre” in this webcast: I have had the exact experience Dilbert does of tech support refusing to think about the actual symptoms of the … Continue reading →

Posted in Customer focus, Fun, Management | Tagged bad customer service, commentary, customer service | 2 Comments

Functional Websites are Normally Far Superior to Apps

Posted on April 23, 2016 by John Hunter

An email to I just sent to Uber I understand the regular Uber app not having a functional website. Uber Eats not having a functional website is super lame. It strikes me similar to Walmart 15 years ago telling people “we only have stores go to them, we just use the internet for advertising our stores.” Today for Uber: we only have apps, “we only use the web for advertising our apps.” Both you and Walmart want to use a … Continue reading →

Posted in Customer focus, Innovation, IT, Software Development | Tagged commentary, Customer focus, Innovation, internet, IT, Software Development | 1 Comment

Giving Executives 40% of Revenue is Insane

Posted on March 21, 2016 by John Hunter

I have previous written on my belief that excessive executive compensation had reached the level of a deadly disease of western management (building on the W. Edwards Deming’s list of 7 deadly diseases). I named excessive executive pay and a broken “intellectual property” system as new deadly diseases in 2007. Here is a graphic from, It’s Twitter’s birthday, and its executives are getting huge stock-based gifts, showing the massive executive give-away at Twitter. Twitter has given executives $2,000,000,000 in just … Continue reading →

Posted in Respect, Systems thinking | Tagged commentary, executive pay, leadership, management, overpaid executives, respect for people

The Aim Should be the Best Life – Not Work v. Life Balance

Posted on May 13, 2015 by John Hunter

My father had the most job satisfaction of anyone I have known. He had no separation between work and life. We toured factories on vacation. I visited Davidson College in North Carolina because he was consulting with a client in Charlotte before we went up to Duke and North Carolina for visits and asked the CEO what school I should visit. His grad students would call the house frequently. Many of his best friends were colleagues. That is how I … Continue reading →

Posted in Health care, Psychology, Respect, Systems thinking | Tagged Bill Hunter, Career, commentary, Creativity, curiouscat, John Hunter, Joy in Work, Popular, Psychology, respect for people, Systems thinking, tips | 11 Comments

Revolutionary Management Improvement May Be Needed But Most Management Change is Evolutionary

Posted on August 26, 2014 by John Hunter

This month the ASQ Influential Bloggers were asked to respond to the question – will the future of quality be evolutionary or revolutionary? I think it has been and will continue to be both. Revolutionary change is powerful but very difficult for entrenched people and organizations to actually pull off. It is much easy to dream about doing so. Often even revolutionary ideas are adopted in a more evolutionary way: partial adoption of some practices based on the insight provided … Continue reading →

Posted in Deming, Lean thinking | Tagged ASQ Influential Voices, change, commentary, continual improvement, leadership, Lean thinking, Toyota Production System (TPS) | 1 Comment

Out of Touch Executives Damage Companies: Go to the Gemba

Posted on August 20, 2014 by John Hunter

When your customer service organization is universally recognized as horrible adding sales requirements to customer service representatives jobs is a really bad practice. Sadly it isn’t at all surprising to learn of management doing just that at our largest companies. Within a system where cash and corruption buys freedom from market forces (see below for more details) such practices can continue. Such customer hostile practices shouldn’t continue. They shouldn’t be allowed to continue. And even though the company’s cash has … Continue reading →

Posted in Customer focus, Data, Management, Psychology, Systems thinking | Tagged bad management, business, commentary, curiouscat, Customer focus, customer service, Economics, executives, gemba, Google, government, internet, leadership, management, Psychology, regulation, respect for people, sales, targets

Deming and Software Development

Posted on March 17, 2014 by John Hunter

I am sometimes asked about how use Deming’s ideas on management in a software development context. My belief is Deming’s ideas work extremely well in a software development context. The main issue is often unlearning some assumptions that people might have about what the Deming management system is. It really is surprising to me how many “knowledge workers” respect Deming’s ideas but then say his attempts to treat factory workers as thoughtful people who should be respected and involved in … Continue reading →

Posted in Deming, IT, Management, Popular, Process improvement, Respect, Software Development | Tagged build capability, commentary, Creativity, curiouscat, Deming, John Hunter, managing people, Popular, Software Development, Systems thinking, technology | 7 Comments

Kleptocrat CEOs and Their Apologists

Posted on March 10, 2014 by John Hunter

I am disgusted by the lack of ethical and moral fiber of many CEOs of the largest corporations (along with their cronies and apologists) in the USA. This lack comes out in many ways (see all the scandals at the too-big-to-fail banks etc.) but the problem I am upset about now is the increasingly commonplace kleptocrat behavior. CEOs, and their cronies, were well paid decades ago. As their greed about their pay got to be unethical Peter Drucker started to … Continue reading →

Posted in Economics, Investing, Psychology | Tagged business, commentary, ethics, executive pay, Investing, overpaid executives, respect for people | 2 Comments

Managers Are Not Non-Leaders: Managers Need to Practice Things We Classify as Leadership Traits

Posted on October 14, 2013 by John Hunter

Saying “Managers care about efficiency and leaders care about effectiveness” is like saying “Doctors care about theory and nurses care about patients.” Managers that don’t care about effectiveness are lousy managers. Leaders that don’t care about the gemba are lousy leaders. Doctors that don’t care about patients are lousy doctors. Nurses that don’t care about theory are lousy nurses. Your role in the organization (and for the particular situation in question) and training and the situation will impact how you … Continue reading →

Posted in Lean thinking, Management, Popular, quote | Tagged commentary, curiouscat, leadership, Lean thinking, Management, Popular, Systems thinking | 5 Comments

Leadership and Management

Posted on June 4, 2013 by John Hunter

I don’t think the attempts to separate leadership and management are useful. I read plenty of things that are variations on Peter Drucker’s: “Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.” A manager that is not concerned about doing the right things is a lousy manager. And a leader that doesn’t care about doing things right is a lousy leader. Another theme of this contrasting type quote says some version of: “Managers care about efficiency and leaders … Continue reading →

Posted in Lean thinking, Management, quote, Systems thinking | Tagged commentary, curiouscat, John Hunter, leadership, lean manufacturing, management, quote, system thinking | 7 Comments

The Market Discounts Proven Company Leadership Far Too Quickly

Posted on January 28, 2013 by John Hunter

Developing a strong executive leadership culture is not a short term effort. It isn’t based on one person. It almost never deteriorates quickly. Yet markets continually overact to minor blips on the long term success of companies. I think this is mainly due to a failure to appreciate systems and a failure to appreciate variation along with plenty of other contributing factors. The market’s weakness does provide investment opportunities. Though taking advantages of them is much more difficult than spotting … Continue reading →

Posted in Data, Economics, Investing | Tagged business, commentary, Investing, leadership, stockholders, Toyota | 1 Comment

Respect for Everyone

Posted on November 7, 2012 by John Hunter

TL;DR – The two pillars of the Toyota Way are: respect for people and continuous improvement. One of the big reasons my career followed the path it did (into management improvement) was due to the impact of respect for people. My father was a professor (in statistics, engineering and business) and consulted with organizations to help them achieve better results. To achieve results he took advantage of the gains possible when using statistical tools to manage with respect for people. … Continue reading →

Posted in Deming, Lean thinking, Management, quote, Respect, Toyota Production System (TPS) | Tagged commentary, Deming, lean management, lean manufacturing, quote, respect for people, Toyota Production System (TPS), William Hunter | 7 Comments

Long Term Thinking with Respect for People

Posted on May 9, 2012 by John Hunter

Toyota nearly went bankrupt near 1950 and had to lay off a third of their employees. A huge focus of the Toyota Production System as envisioned by Taiichi Ohno was to secure the long term success of the company. The priority of doing so is easier to see when you respect people and are in danger of witnessing the destruction of their careers. I can’t find the quote (maybe Jon Miller, or someone else, can provide one), but I recall … Continue reading →

Posted in Deming, Lean thinking, Management, Respect, Toyota Production System (TPS) | Tagged commentary, curiouscat, Deming, Economics, Investing, leadership, lean management, long term thinking, respect for people, Taiichi Ohno, Toyota, Toyota Production System (TPS) | 6 Comments

Lean Manufacturing and the Toyota Production System

Posted on May 3, 2012 by John Hunter

In this post I explore my thoughts about what lean (lean manufacturing, lean thinking…) means. The way I think about it is that lean manufacturing sprung from Toyota. It seems to me the lean manufacturing name was meant to capture the entire Toyota Way. Capturing the whole of what that encompasses isn’t possible in 1 or 2 or even 10 books so it wasn’t done completely. To me the difference between lean manufacturing described early on by Womack and Jones … Continue reading →

Posted in Deming, Lean thinking, Management, Toyota Production System (TPS) | Tagged commentary, curiouscat, Deming, lean management, lean manufacturing, Toyota, Toyota Production System (TPS) | 6 Comments

How Could They Know?

Posted on March 28, 2012 by John Hunter

I am a big fan of Dr. Deming’s ideas on management. The way I see one of the quotes of Dr. Deming used I don’t agree with. Dr. Deming said “How could they know?” to explain why people continued to follow less successful practices (for example, page 55 of Out of the Crisis). How could they know of better practices, he would say. I must say I have always thought the answer to that question was pretty easy. They could … Continue reading →

Posted in Deming, Management | Tagged Books, Career, commentary, Deming, leadership, learning, management | 6 Comments

Why Use Lean if So Many Fail To Do So Effectively

Posted on February 15, 2012 by John Hunter

If less than 1% of companies are successful with Lean, why are we doing it? Lots of us are not. I would say the efforts I see “fail” are because they don’t do it. They have something they call TQM, six sigma, lean management or whatever and try out 10-30% of it in some half-measures, with big doses of Dilbert’s pointy haired boss methods and then don’t get great results. Wow. The biggest complaint (with some merit) I see is … Continue reading →

Posted in Deming, Lean thinking, Management, Process improvement, Six sigma, Systems thinking | Tagged commentary, curiouscat, Deming, John Hunter, lean management, lean six sigma, management, Quality tools, Six sigma | 11 Comments