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

• 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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• Prediction Markets with Google Employees

  Google’s prediction markets are reasonably efficient, but did exhibit four specific biases: an overpricing of favorites, short aversion, optimism, and an underpricing of extreme outcomes.

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• Measuring the Health of Nations

  Rankings: 1) France 2) Japan 3) Australia 4) Spain 5) Italy 6) Canada… 18) Portugal 19 and last) USA.

  The United States health system has some things to point to positively but the system seems to be losing ground to the rest of the world more and more quickly while many cling to a belief it is the best system around.

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• IT Talent Shortage, or Management Failure?

  ... the main problem is poor management.

  So what should managers do? Read the Curious Cat Management Blog and follow the advise in our previous posts, including: Stop Demotivating Employees (IT employees are especially disdainful of pointy haired boss actions that others tolerate more easily) – Signs You Have a Great Job … or Not – Joy in Work for IT – hiring silicon valley style...

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• Stratification and Systemic Thinking

  This is a great example of a positive special cause. How would you identify this? First you would have to stratify the data. It also shows that sometimes looking at the who is important (the problem is just that we far too often look at who instead of the system so at times some get the idea that it is not ok to stratify data based on who – it is just be careful because we often do that when it is not the right approach and we can get fooled by random variation into thinking there is a cause...

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• It Just Works

  The Kano model of customer satisfaction is an excellent way to view customer expectations.

  The Kano model states that you have expected quality – it just does what it needs to (what is expected). Then more is better type – give me more at the same price and I am happier. But where you really want to get as a company is products and services that delight customers.

  When you are delighted you are not easy prey to other companies. When you are satisfied you are ready for offers that say we will give it to you a bit cheaper or give you a bit more. But if you are delighted you don’t want to leave and instead are telling everyone you know how great this product or service is.

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• Communicating Change

  I believe the best way to communicate such changes is to explain how they tie into the long term vision of the organization. This requires that such a vision actually exists (which is often not the case). Then all strategies are communicated based on how they support and integrate with that vision. In addition that communication strategy incorporates an understanding about what weaknesses with past practices are addressed by this new strategy...

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• Bigger Impact: 15 to 18 mpg or 50 to 100 mpg?

  ...

  It also illustrates that the way the data is presented makes a difference. You can also view 100 mpg as 1/100 gallon per mile, 2/100 gallons per mile, 5.6/100 gpm and 6.7 gpm. That way most everyone sees that the 6.7 to 5.6 gpm saves more fuel than 2 to 1 gpm does. Mathematics and scientific thinking are great – if you are willing to think you can learn to better understand the world we live in every day.

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