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• Do What You Say You Will

  There is the saying “It is better to be thought a fool than speak, and prove it.” Well it is better to be thought a pointy haired boss (PHB) than to ask for feedback, then ignore it, and prove you are a PHB.

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• Amazon S3 Failure Analysis

  Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) is a service providing web hosting. The cloud computing solution has been used by many organizations successfully. However the solution has experienced some problems including failing for much of the day on July 20, 2008.

  Amazon publically shared their evaluation of the failure and plans to improve.

  During our post-mortem analysis we’ve spent quite a bit of time evaluating what happened, how quickly we were able to respond and recover, and what we could do to prevent other unusual circumstances like this from having system-wide impacts.

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• Keeping Good Employees

  ...What can we do to keep you? What do you enjoy about your job? What do you dislike? What can I do to increase your joy in work? What one thing would you most like to see changed? What do you want to see continue? Would you like help in some aspect of your career development? What can I do better? Am I providing too much oversight, not enough?

  Give honest straight forward answers to questions. If someone wants to move ahead and needs to work harder to advance their career tell them that. If they need to be more cooperative, develop certain skills… tell them. The idea is not just to make the person happy in that meeting...

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• Not Exactly Lean Packaging

  Sadly not. What the überbox did contain was 16 smaller boxes “which in turn [each] contained (wrapped in foam so they wouldn’t get broken) exactly two sheets of A4 paper”

  It is hard to imagine what management system creates such solutions. But it is not hard to image Dilbert’s pointy haired boss fitting right in there. It also isn't surprising the incredibly poorly managed HP is responsible for this instance of idiocy.

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• Some Good IT Business Ideas

  Outsourced IT. In most companies the IT department is an expensive bottleneck.

  ...

  Off the shelf security.

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• “Pay for Performance” is a Bad Idea

  The idea of a merit rating is alluring. The sound of the words captivates the imagination: pay for what you get; get what you pay for; motivate people to do their best, for their own good. The effect is exactly the opposite of what the words promise.

  W. Edwards Deming

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• Outcome and In-Process Measures

  An outcome measure is used to measure the success of a system. For example, the outcome measure could be the percentage of people who do not get polio (the result). An output measure, for example, would be the number of people vaccinated with the polio vaccine (the output). Often we measure inputs (amount of money spent) or outputs (number of people vaccinated). They are usually easy to measure but obviously less valuable proxies for what the objective of the system (reducing the incidence of polio).

  ...

  In-process measures can be valuable in providing actionable information sooner than the outcome measure would allow action...

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• Drucker’s Ideas at Toyota

  Encourage employees to voice their opinions even if they are contrary. The people in top management must be open to hearing critical comments from employees and listening to opposing views if they want to engender new ideas and new ways of doing things.

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• Better Meetings

  Meetings are perennial problems. People sit through meetings and then complain about how big a waste of time it was. Here are a couple very simple tips to try and actually improve (instead of just agreeing that meetings are wasteful, but doing nothing to improve).

  • Have an agenda
  • Document decisions

  ...

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• Verizon Provides Lousy Service = Dog Bites Man

  It is obvious a few companies don’t have any ability to provide even just reasonably bad service (for them the goal of decent service is so far away as to not be reasonable). How often do Verizon, Comcast, Time Warner, AT&T, United… get blasted for horrible custom service?

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• Continual Improvement

  ...the continual improvement process

  • must be never ending
  • must focus daily on how any process can be improved
  • must focus on adopting improvement systemically (not just locally, by one person or team)
  • must focus on discontinuous improvement which could include high energy kaizen events and dramatic innovation must include a study phase (PDSA) where the improvements are evaluated to determine whether they actually achieved the predicted results and
  • must include improvement of the improvement process itself

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• Internships Increasing

  The Deming Scholars MBA program at Fordham includes a heavy dose of internships (“Subject matter is delivered in five integrated learning cycles. Five eight-week sessions of classroom lectures, seminars and study are linked by seven-week internships at participating firms”). Sadly the Deming Scholars MBA program has closed.

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• Department of Defense Lean Six Sigma

  Gordon England, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, signed a directive establishing policy and assigning responsibilities to institutionalize the Lean Six Sigma effort throughout the USA Department of Defense.

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• Businesses Tell the IRS They Are Not American but Executives Stay in USA

  I have previously written about the ethically challenged companies that claim they are not American to avoid paying the taxes that they owe. For some reason the executives, often seem to stay in the USA though? They even continue to get huge USA government contracts (military and other). It is sad that such behavior is tolerated.

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• Engineering Innovation

  I was giving a talk, while I was working for the Office of Secretary of Defense Quality Management Office, on Using Quality to Develop an Internet Resource (back before blogs, but after the web, in 1999). I was trimming things as I spoke and cut the tidbit about DARPA and the internet because I figured everyone already knew that (and I had to trim as I was speaking). In discussions afterwards I found many didn’t know DARPA’s involvement.

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