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Posts selected fromManagement Blog - Engineering Blog - Investing Blog and other blogs

• Pleasing Customers

  You need to provide customers what they want, which is not the same thing as what they say they want. Southwest airlines is a good example. Revealed preferences are more important than stated preferences.

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• Toyota’s Commitment

  The Toyota Way is a management philosophy involving 14 principles that is the essence of the DNA of our organization and really all those who make up the company. In its basic form, the Toyota Way boils down to two fundamental practices: Respect for People and Continuous Improvement.

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• Systemic Workplace Experiments

  ... good old PDSA at work – try things on a small scale and then institute those experiments that succeed on a wider scale.

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• Management Advice from Warren Buffet

  Charlie and I look for companies that have a) a business we understand; b) favorable long-term economics; c) able and trustworthy management; and d) a sensible price tag. We like to buy the whole business or, if management is our partner, at least 80%
  …
  A truly great business must have an enduring “moat” that protects excellent returns on invested capital. The dynamics of capitalism guarantee that competitors will repeatedly assault any business “castle” that is earning high returns.

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• Stupid Bureaucratic Requirement

  Is it really unquestioningly doing whatever you are told that is the value that is what is being aimed for? Seems pretty clear to me from even this short article this teacher understands the constitution much better than most people and cares enough to take the values that constitution endorses seriously. While the government looks like they only care about getting their form on file and don’t care at all what the purpose of that form is (the purpose can’t really be just to coerce everyone to sign it, can it?).

  ...

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• Customers Get Dissed and Tell

  There are those rare companies where interacting with them is not a dreaded experience: Trader Joe’s, Southwest Airlines, Ritz Carlton, Crutchfield...

  ...

  And then instead of fixing the system, just burn the toast (follow the link for an explanation). Then wait for those that get the burnt toast to tell everyone that you sold them burnt toast. Then, after they do that, go scrape it for them.

   

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• Corporations Do Not Exist Solely to Maximize the Bottom Line

  The corporation should seek to benefit all stakeholders  (employees, customers, suppliers, etc.).

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• Car Powered Using Compressed Air

  The car is said to have a driving range of 125 miles so by my calculation it would cost about 1.6 cents per mile. A car that gets 31 mpg would use 4 gallons to go 124 miles. 

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• Losing Consumers’ Trust

  People are emotional about their food safety. It is not just the final results that matter but the impression given. And the impression I think many see is that those involved in the food industry often place money about a mission to feed the world.

  I think it is a mistake for any company to focus on only money rather than a larger purpose. But that is especially true if customers have an emotional connection to your product that requires customer to trust you care about them.

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• User Happiness with Search Engines

  Awhile back I wrote about why I didn’t think the American Customer Satisfaction Index claim that Yahoo beat Google for customer satisfaction was evidence of a broken indicator. Well here is another indicator...

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• What Motivates Programmers?

  ...I will repeat my statement for all managers for all employees: your job is to eliminate de-motivation not to motivate.

  If you really want to manage programmers well, read these blogs and take action to prevent yourself from becoming a pointy haired boss: Signal vs. Noise – Joel on Software – Paul Graham – Coding Horror – Scripting News – xkcd

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• Giving Away Your Service for Free on Weekends

  Well, recently we figured out that we’re paying for a lot of bandwidth over the weekends that we don’t need, so we decided to make Copilot absolutely free on weekends. Yep, that’s right… free as in zero dollars, free, no cost, no credit card, no email address, nothing.

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• Nice Design Example, the eco-cook

  Basically I just think this is cool. I could try and explain how it shows creativity and reducing waste… but really I just like it.

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• Creating Jobs

  Job losses are the result of poor management – one of the core principle of lean thinking, Deming’s thoughts… is respect for people (providing good jobs, no layoffs, etc.). It is obvious that productivity continues to improve, which is a great thing. Management must manage that, and other matters, successfully. When management fails employees pay with their jobs (and very unfortunately senior management just pay themselves more and more).

  The way to create jobs is to follow Deming’s chain reaction of systemic improvement.

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• Poor Service from Amazon

  First, it is very lousy service to sell someone something and then figure out you don’t have it to sell a few weeks later. Second, if you find you have done such a lame thing – buy it from someone else and deliver it as promised. Third, don’t make it nearly impossible for the customer you just wronged to contact you. This is the equivalent of providing lousy service and then closing the door in someones face refusing to deal with your failure.

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