Tag Archives: evidence based management

Stratification and Systemic Thinking

Posted on January 6, 2008 by John Hunter

I am reading a fascinating book by Jessica Snyder Sachs: Good Germs, Bad Germs. From page 108: At New York Hospital, Eichenwald and infectious disease specialist Henry Shinefield conceived and developed a controversial program that entailed deliberately inoculating a newborn’s nostrils and umbilical stump with a comparatively harmless strain of staph before 80/81 could move in. Shinefield had found the protective strain – dubbed 502A – in the nostrils of a New York Hospital baby nurse. Like a benign Typhoid … Continue reading →

Posted in Creativity, Data, Deming, Health care, Innovation, Management, Quality tools, Science, Statistics, Systems thinking | Tagged critical thinking, Data, evidence based management, Health care, Science, Statistics, Systems thinking | 2 Comments

Data Can’t Lie

Posted on August 9, 2007 by John Hunter

Many people state that data can lie. Obviously data can’t lie. There are three kinds of lies: Lies, damn lies and statistics – Mark Twain Many people don’t understand the difference between being manipulated because they can’t understand what the data really says and data itself “lying” (which, of course, doesn’t even make sense). The same confusion can come in when someone just draws the wrong conclusion from the data that exists (and them blames the data for “lying” instead … Continue reading →

Posted in Data, Management, Psychology | Tagged curiouscat, Data, evidence based management, Statistics | 13 Comments

Jeffrey Pfeffer on Evidence-Based Practices

Posted on March 11, 2007 by John Hunter

Jeffrey Pfeffer Testifies to Congress About Evidence-Based Practices [the broken link was removed]: In this short statement, I want to make five points as succinctly as possible, providing references for background and documentation for my arguments. First, organizations in both the public and private sector ought to base policies not on casual benchmarking, on ideology or belief, on what they have done in the past or what they are comfortable with doing, but instead should implement evidence-based management. Second, the … Continue reading →

Posted in Books, Data, Management, Performance Appraisal, Public Sector, Statistics, Systems thinking | Tagged evidence based management, Public Sector

Game Theory Management

Posted on January 26, 2007 by John Hunter

Interesting article on applying game theory to business decisions. Game theory is a tool that is not often used. Though most organizations are probably better off improving how they use the rest of their management tools, it is fun to read about and does have merit in the right situations. 16,777,236 [the broken link was removed] – That’s the number of outcomes that are possible when eight competitors each consider three strategic options. California Institute of Technology professor R. Preston … Continue reading →

Posted in Creativity, Innovation, Management, Quality tools | Tagged Data, evidence based management, Innovation

Evidence-based Management

Posted on October 3, 2006 by John Hunter

Bob Sutton’s writing includes the excellent article “Management Advice: Which 90% is Crap?” (which we discussed in: Management Advice Failures) and the Knowing Doing Gap. I just discovered his blog today which is quite good: Work Matters. A recent post includes some good advice on data and process improvement Continue reading →

Posted in Creativity, Data, Deming, Health care, Management, Process improvement | Tagged economic data, evidence based management, Management | 1 Comment

The State of Lean Implementation

Posted on October 2, 2006 by John Hunter

Interesting survey by the Lean Enterprise Institute notes the following as the major obstacles to transforming to a lean organization. 1 Lack of implementation know-how: 48% 2 Backsliding to the old ways of working: 48% 3 Middle management resistance: 40% 4 Traditional cost accounting system doesn’t recognize the value of lean: 38% I wonder if asking why several more times would help [broken link replaced with a new link]? It is not as though the difficulty in adopting lean thinking … Continue reading →

Posted in Lean thinking, Management | Tagged evidence based management, Lean thinking, Management

Problems Caused by Performance Appraisal

Posted on May 17, 2006 by John Hunter

People are increasingly challenging the notion that we just have to live with performance appraisal systems. As usually, I will make my suggestion that chapter 9 of the Leader’s Handbook offers great material on performing without appraisal (and the rest of the book is great too). Continue reading →

Posted in Deming, Management, Management Articles, Performance Appraisal | Tagged Deming, evidence based management, Management, Performance Appraisal, respect for people | 2 Comments

The Customer Knows Best?

Posted on May 16, 2006 by John Hunter

The Customer Knows Best? Better Think Again by Anthony W. Ulwick It’s important to listen to customers – but not follow their words without skepticism. Ask them to design your next product and you’re likely to miss the mark, suggests this Harvard Business Review excerpt. Excellent point. Some management ideas are pretty easy and straight forward. But many management practices require knowledge and judgment to apply them successfully. Easy solutions may be desired, but, often you must choose between easy … Continue reading →

Posted in Customer focus, Deming, Innovation, Management, Management Articles | Tagged critical thinking, Customer focus, Data, evidence based management, organization as a system, variation

Data Based Decision Making

Posted on December 6, 2005 by John Hunter

Acumen visits Google: As a first step, we hope to collaborate with interested Googlers to find better ways to learn what works around the world. Identifying powerful solutions to poverty that are useful to people in different settings, and that are market-driven, scalable, and sustainable, is our greatest challenge. Second, we’re hoping to strengthen how the world measures both social and financial returns to investments in delivering critical goods and services to the poor. Like Google, we hold a deep … Continue reading →

Posted in Data, Google, Management | Tagged critical thinking, Data, evidence based management, Google | 4 Comments

Measuring and Managing Performance in Organizations

Posted on October 8, 2005 by John Hunter

Forward [the broken link was removed] (by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister) to Measuring and Managing Performance in Organizations: measurement is almost always part of an effort to achieve some goal. You can’t always measure all aspects of progress against the goal, so you settle for some surrogate parameter, one that seems to represent the goal closely and is simple enough to measure. So, for example, if the goal is long-term profitability, you may seek to achieve that goal by … Continue reading →

Posted in Data, Management | Tagged Data, evidence based management, management, organization as a system | 2 Comments

Operational Definitions and Data Collection

Posted on September 22, 2005 by John Hunter

Americans’ Dirty Secret Revealed [the broken link was removed] by Bjorn Carey See also: Google News on washing hands [broken link was removed] – Soap and Detergent Association press release [another broken link was remove] A study released recently spawned a flurry of articles on washing hands. I have seen such reporting before and again I find it interesting (as sad as that might be). The stories repeatedly say things like: “Men’s hands dirtier than women’s.” The study actual was … Continue reading →

Posted in Data, Deming, Management | Tagged critical thinking, Data, evidence based management, operational definition, Statistics | 1 Comment

Measurement and Data Collection

Posted on September 10, 2005 by John Hunter

This is my response to the Deming Electronic Network message (the site is dead, so I removed the link) on measurement. I find it useful to ask what will be done with the results of data collection efforts (in order to confirm that the effort is a wise use of resources). If you don’t have an answer for how you will use the data, once you get it, then you probably shouldn’t waste resources collecting it (and I find there … Continue reading →

Posted in Data, Deming, Management, quote, Statistics | Tagged continual improvement, curiouscat, Data, Deming, evidence based management, quote, Statistics | 5 Comments