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  • Signs You Have a Great Job ... or Not

    I believe managers need to look to provide opportunities for the people that work with you.  They need to make time for doing so (because it is something that often is neglected).  If someone doesn't want new opportunities, that is fine, but don't accept that as a permanent state.  Make sure you continue to offer opportunities, people may want to change at a later date.

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  • Lean Software Development

    Software development can be extremely complicated and can benefit greatly from making problems visible – jidoka

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    Lean thinking has a great deal to offer for those involved in software development.

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  • Improving Engineering Education

    Olin’s aim is to flip over the traditional “theory first, practice later” model and make students plunge into hands-on engineering projects starting on day one. Instead of theory-heavy lectures, segregated disciplines, and individual efforts, Olin champions design exercises, interdisciplinary studies, and teamwork.

    This requires radically changing the normal university education model. To me this is definitely a different versus better (see last post) improvement effort. It will be interesting to see the success they achieve going forward. It almost makes me want to go back to school.

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  • Better and Different

    The answer, as I see it, is to be better and different (when necessary).

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    if you have to choose one, just being better will work most of the time. The problem is (using an example from Deming, page 9 New Economics) when, for example, carburetors are eliminated by innovation (fuel injectors) no matter how well you make them you are out of business.

    Often people mistake Deming’s ideas as only about being better. He stressed not only continual improvement (Kaizen, incremental improvement, SPC) but also innovation. He stressed innovation both in the normal sense of innovating new products for customers and also innovation in managing the organization.

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  • Financial Education

    The financial decisions we make have huge impacts on the quality of lives. This blog focus largely on management improvement: in such posts we often mention the importance of long term thinking and systems thinking. When planning our personal financial paths long term thinking and systems thinking (to optimize our long term financial well being given the options available in our individual situation) are necessary.

    Related: Curious Cat Investment blog - financial literacy posts

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  • Forget Targets

    While targets and goals can distract from improvement some guidance is useful. Systems thinking is important when using targets. As is an understanding of psychology (given the tendency to manage to what is measured the system can often be distorted to achieve a target). See more in: dangers of forgetting proxy nature of data.

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  • Parfrey’s Glen, Wisconsin

    Parfrey’s Glen is about an hour outside of Madison next to the Ice Age National Scenic Trail.  The trail covers over 1,200 miles throughout Wisconsin.

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  • Problems Caused by Performance Appraisal

    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).

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  • The Customer Knows Best?

    Some management ideas are pretty easy and straight forward. But many management practices require knowledge and judgment to apply them successfullyEasy solutions may be desired, but, often you must choose between easy and effective (hint, I suggest effective is the better target).

    Listening to customers is important but it is not sufficient.

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    People could assume the numbers at Enron proved what Enron was doing was correct. But it did not prove that. Until we start to evaluate data more accurately we will continue to mistakenly see proof where it does not exist.

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  • Management: Geeks and Deming

    Several of Deming’s 14 obligation of management and 7 deadly diseases are noted in this quote, including: “Remove barriers that rob people of joy in their work” and the disease – “Emphasis on short term profits.” Deming was a physicist so that may explain the similarity of this ideas to geek management culture.

    • “Geeks seek knowledge for it’s own sake” – Deming’s point 13 “Institute a vigorous program of education and self-improvement.” Deming encouraged organizations supporting education of employees – even when unrelated to work in any direct way.
    • “Geeks like to experiment” – many of Deming’s ideas focus on this point, most obviously is the emphasis on PDSA
    • “Geeks openly debate the merits of technical ideas”

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  • Understanding Data

    Effective use of data is an important part of management improvement. Emphasis is needed on “effective”; data misuse is rampant and creates problems. Use of data by itself is not sufficient.

    To be effective you need to learn to think about not what is printed on the page but what lies behind the numbers you see. The numbers are just proxies for the real situation.

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  • Respect for People

    “Ohno was absolutely ruthless, employees and suppliers lived in fear of him.” I would say that while Taiichi Ohno was truly remarkable that doesn’t mean he did everything right.

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    The difference between respect and disrespect is not avoiding avoiding criticism. In fact often if you respect someone you can be much more direct and critical than you can with someone you treat as though they don’t have the ability to listen to hard truths and improve. I think we often have so little respect for people we just avoid dealing with anything touchy because we don’t want to risk they won’t be able to react to the issues raised and will instead just react as if they have been personally attacked.

    It may also be that it is easier to train managers to behave in this way than to effectively deal with though issues. But that is not training them to respect people, it is your organization accepting you don’t respect your people (managers and others) so just train people how to behave in a way that avoids difficult areas.

     

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  • Six Sigma and Process Drift

    Quality Quandaries: Six Sigma, Process Drift, Capability Indices, and Feedback Adjustment by George Box and Alberto Luceno. This article is for the more statistically inclined.

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    Feedback adjustment can be dangerous: tampering. In fact, I would say attempting it is likely to be tampering, unless those doing so are careful and knowledgeable. It might be wise to read Box and Luceno’s book on the topic – Statistical Control: By Monitoring and Feedback Adjustment if you are tempted to try.

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  • Our Energy Future (2006)

    Huge price increases will provide incentives to those in the market to innovate to find alternative ways to make money by providing usable energy sources. If the market, overall, chooses to look forward over a long period of time, then investment in alternatives will begin in earnest early and prices of oil will slowly rise. And as prices rise slowly new alternatives (including ways of reducing consumption) will slowly come into the market. Those alternatives will slowly substitute for oil as a smooth transition is made.

    If markets actual were efficient and driven by looking far into the future and discounting cash flows to the present this slow and steady model is what would happen. The market can only be efficient if good long term predictions can be reflected in the market.

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  • Find the Root Cause Instead of the Person to Blame

    Why did they make that error? Why did the process let them make that error? When you follow the why chain a couple more steps you can find root causes that will allow you to find a much more effective solution. You can then pilot (PDSA) an improvement strategy that doesn’t just amount to “Do a better job Joe” or “that is it Joe we are replacing you with Mary.” Neither of those strategies turns out to be very effective.

    But investigating a bit more to find a root cause can result in finding solutions that improve the performance of all the workers. 

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