Tag Archives: culture

Publish Articles Promoting Better Management Using Open Journals

William Woodall shared this wonderful article he wrote with George E. P. Box with me, Innovation, Quality Engineering, and Statistics. My thoughts on being able to read it online:

Thanks Bill, it is a great article. And thanks for having it openly available. I really wish professors would stop allowing their work to be published by those seeking to close access to the ideas we are trying to promote. I realize there are pressures to publish in historically prestigious journals.

For professors that have “made it” you will do a great service to others (and help promote the ideas in your field that you have devoted your life to) by refusing to submit to closed science journals (or closed professional society journals etc.). For those trying to secure full professorships I wish they would too, but I realize the hard choices they face.

The maximum closed-ness we should tolerate, in my opinion, is closed access for 1 year after which it becomes open. Require this in writing in the agreement, don’t just accept that the current practice is to promote the sharing of ideas; if it isn’t in writing some person may have the publisher adopt closed science later and block access to the content you wanted to share.

It is especially distressing, to me, when government dollars fund the time the professor spends and then the end result is closed to the public. Thankfully some universities and some government agencies paying for the writing of these articles are demanding that the articles be published in an open access fashion.

On the other hand if you want to publish on rate and rank, the value of annual performance appraisals, bonuses for hitting targets etc. feel free to use closed science publishers.

Ackoff: Corporations Are Not Led By Those Seeking to Maximize Shareholder Value

If I had to limit myself to a handful of management experts, Russel Ackoff would definitely be in that group. Thankfully there is no such limit. Ackoff once again provides great insight, with great wit, in the above clip.

A corporation says that its principle value is maximizing shareholder value. That’s non-sense. If that were the case executives wouldn’t fly around on private jets and have Philippine mahogany lined offices and the rest of it. The principle function to those executives is to provide those executives with the quality of work life that they like. And profit is merely a means which guarantees their ability to do it.
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If we are going to talk about values, we got to talk about what the values are in action, not in proclamation.

Creating a Quality Culture

This month Paul Borawski (CEO of ASQ) has asked the ASQ Influential Voices to share their thoughts on the Feelings and Quality Culture.

I don’t think creating a culture of continual management improvement is complex but it takes more commitment than most organizations seem to have. To build a culture that supports customer focused continuous improvement a management system needs to reinforce consistent behavior over the long term.

There is far too much saying certain things (customers are valued, people are our most important assets, etc.) but not backing those claims up with management systems that would be needed to operationalize those beliefs. Failing to do this just results in surface changes that have no depth or commitment and will shift with the winds (no culture change).

It is very difficult to create a culture that supports customer focused continuous improvement that doesn’t understand the failings of: extrinsic motivation and arbitrary numerical goals.

An understanding of variation and how to properly use data to aid improvement is also critical (otherwise huge amount of waste are generated on all sorts of fruitless efforts to explain common cause variation leaving far to little time to actually for on quality). An appreciation of the long term is necessary, which means reducing time spent on trivially urgent matters so focus can be given to important but not urgent matters.

And a respect for people is needed: a real respect, not just claims – which nearly every organization makes. The huge egos of most USA senior executives result in them taking huge amounts from the company to such an extent that they are inherently dis-respectful. The hero culture they profess with their pay package makes it extremely difficult for anyone to take them seriously when they claim to care about a culture that values the stakeholders of the organization.

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Respect for People: Optimize for Developer Happiness at Etsy

The webcast above discusses the culture of software engineering at Etsy (a very popular site providing a marketplace and community for small businesses – artisan focus). Some of the key points of the talk. Etsy trusts employees. Etsy’s strategy is to optimize for developer happiness. Etsy has lunches twice a week where employees build community.

Etsy sees code as craft. The echos Etsy’s value on authorship: “the people behind what we buy make commerce meaningful.” It re-inforces the belief that work has meaning and is valued and should have intrinsic value to those doing the work, people should have the opportunity to take pride in their work.

Chad Dickerson discussed the importance Peter Drucker placed on connecting people to the value provided to customer. Etsy takes steps to connect employees to the value provided to customers, including emphasizing the community of the company and the customers of Etsy.

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Building Adoption of Management Improvement Ideas in Your Organization

Continuation of How to Get a New Management Strategy, Tool or Concept Adopted

Target something that actually provides a good story. It often helps if there have been failures in attempts to solve a problem in the past. That makes the new success more impressive. Something that is relate-able to the audience you are trying to win over is also useful. Even if senior management cares about an issue, if the solution is so technical they are completely baffled, they will be happy with a solution but they won’t be as excited about expanding the strategy you are trying to encourage when they can understand the process that lead to a solution.

Favor efforts that will help you build organizational capacity to do more of what you want going forward (adopt lean thinking, use design of experiments…). Some of this is about building expertise in the organization. It is also about building your circle of influence. Growing your ability to influence how the organization grows will help you encourage the improvements you believe in.

It is very helpful to show connections between individual efforts. Often you build using various tools: in several instances using PDSA cycle to guide improvement, in others mistake-proofing to cement improvement, in another adopting one piece flow to make problems visible and encourage improvement, in another assuring the respect for people to build the right culture for improvement, and in another using an understanding of variation to make evidence based decision rather than jumping to faulty conclusions with limited information. These management tools, concepts, methods and ideas any many more, are used together for a reason. They support each other. So it is very helpful if you tie them together. As you start adding new tools, ideas and concepts to the management system show how they support each other. Individual tools can help. But the gains they offer are minor compared to the gains possible with a systemic change of management.

Another good strategy is picking the right people to involve in an effort. If you are trying to gain support, find those people in the organization that set the tone that others follow (which are not merely those with organizational power due to their job title). It is nice if you can find such people that have generally positive outlooks and like new challenges (this is often the case). If the culture is very toxic you may well have some who are likely to try and discourage hope in others (often because they have been disappointed so many times themselves they have finally decided not to be disappointed again). Often (though not always) you can win these people over.
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How to Get a New Management Strategy, Tool or Concept Adopted

Often when learning about Deming’s ideas on management, lean manufacturing, design of experiments, PDSA… people become excited. They discover new ideas that show great promise to alleviate the troubles they have in their workplace and lead them to better results. But how to actually get their organization to adopt the ideas often confounds them. In fact, I believe most potential improvements efforts may well fail even before they start because people can’t get past this problem.

I believe the way to encourage adoption of management improvement tools, methods and ideas is to solve people’s problems (or give them new opportunities). Instead of trying to convince people by talking about why they need to adopt some new ideas, I think it is much better to show them. To encourage the adoption of whatever it is (a philosophy like Deming or a new tool) try to find projects that would be good candidates for visible success. And then build on those successes.

For adopting whole new ways of working (like lean thinking) you go through this process many times, adding more and more new ideas to the accepted way of doing things. It is a bit easier if you are the CEO, but I think the strategy is very similar whoever you are. For smaller efforts a boss can often just mandate it. But for something like a large improvement in the way work is done (adopting a lean management system, for example), the challenge is the same. You have to convince people that the new methods and ideas are valuable and that they can use the ideas to help improve results.

Start small, it is very helpful if initial efforts are fairly small and straight forward. You often will have limited resources (and limited time people are willing to invest) at first. so start by picking projects that can be accomplished easily and once people have seen success more resources (including what is normally the most important one – people’s time) should be available. Though, honestly getting people to commit will likely be a challenge for a long time.

It is a rare organization that adopts a continual improvement, long term focus, system thinking mindset initially. The tendency is often strong to focus on fire fighting, fear (am I taking a risk by doing x, if I spend time improving y – what about the monthly target my boss is measuring me on…) and maintaining the status quo. It is baffling to many hoping for improvement, when you have huge successes, and yet the old way of doing things retains a great hold. The inertia of organizations is huge.
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Respect People: Trust Them to Use good Judgment

Nordstrom’s employee handbook used to be presented on a single 5 x 8 card:

Welcome to Nordstrom
We’re glad to have you with our Company. Our number one goal is to provide outstanding customer service. Set both your personal and professional goals high. We have great confidence in your ability to achieve them. So our employee handbook is very simple.

We have only one rule: Use good judgment in all situations.

Please feel free to ask your department manager, store manager, or division general manager any question at any time.

That is no longer the case, however, as they have become more like everyone else. Simple ideas like this only work within the right context. Taking such ideas and applying them to an organization that isn’t ready will backfire. But if you build a culture where trust, respect, customer service and responsibility are encouraged lots of rules just get in the way of people doing their best. If you can’t trust employees to do their jobs, the problem is with the system you have that results in that, not the people you can’t trust.

Holding Improvement Gains

The Hard Part: Holding Improvement Gains [the broken link was removed] by Ron Snee

The long term goal should be to combine all improvement initiatives into an overall improvement system and create the management framework to sustain that system. Thus, improvement will become a routine managerial process, just like any other.
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One of the strongest spurs to maintaining momentum and sustaining the gains of an improvement initiative comes from the effect achieving significant, measurable benefits has on the culture. People like to succeed. When they see tangible results, they are eager to repeat the process. That is the simple, but powerful, principle of the kind of culture change that sustains improvement over the long term: Culture change doesn’t produce benefits; benefits produce culture change.

Ritz Carlton and Home Depot

Don MacAskill writes of his great service from Ritz-Carlton and horrible service from Home Depot. Neither result is surprising, see related posts below. On the Ritz:

The next day, Ritz employees were still greeting us in the halls by our name and wishing us “Happy Anniversary”. The bottom line: We felt special. We felt pampered. We felt like the Ladies and Gentlemen of the Ritz-Carlton knew us personally and really cared about making sure we were happy. They’ve earned a customer for life.

Ritz-Carlton’s motto [the broken link was removed, sadly while they strive to be ladies and gentlemen Ritz-Carlton hasn’t learned basic web usability practices such as not breaking web links] is “We are ladies and gentlemen serving ladies and gentlemen.” And they actually turn those words into reality. They are not platitudes with no action. The system is guided toward achieving that vision.

Worst. Service. Ever: Home Depot & HOMExperts [the broken link was removed] (which includes videos of NBC investigation of customer service problems [the broken link was removed]):

As the CEO of a company that strives to provide top-notch customer service, this has been incredible to watch. At no time during the process, other than the design and purchasing phase, have we felt taken care of, or even like our satisfaction was even a consideration. I wish I could say that the experience has been highly educational, like my visit to the Ritz-Carlton, but I have to imagine that any human being would realize that this is ludicrously bad customer service. The two companies involved, The Home Depot and their contractors, HOMExperts, must have some serious problems internally.

Related: Customer Focus at the Ritz – Effective Leadership Strategies are Driven by Total Quality Management (TQM) Principles [the broken link was removed] – 1999 Ritz Baldrige Application Summary [the broken link was removed] – Not Lean Retailing – More on Obscene CEO Pay

No Customer Focus

John Battelle writes the excellent searchblog. A recent post, Rant: The Comcast HD DVR Is Simply, Terribly Awful, provides another example of a company lacking customer focus. See the comments for even more confirmation of the lack of customer focus.

The interface is simply abominable. Unintuitive and careless, it copies the major features of Tivo’s approach but fails at every single detail – and in UI design, everything is in the details. No surprisingly, it utterly misses the core purpose of a DVR: to treat television as a conversation instead of a dictation. Without a doubt, this is an interface built either by Machiavelli’s cohorts, or by graceless bureaucrats, or both. No, wait, it’s worse.
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Not to mention, the damn thing is slow – beyond unresponsive. There’s no way you can accurately predict where and when the thing might stop and start when you are fast forwarding or rewinding. The Tivo is like an Audi, but the Comcast drives like a 1972 Gran Torino Station wagon.
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But that’s not where the crappiness ends. No, not by a long shot. Turns out, the ####### Comcast HD DVR *does not have a hard drive.* That’s right, when the power goes out, the ####### box loses ALL OF THE SAVED PROGRAMS!!!!