Blog posts on business

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

• Kleptocrat CEOs and Their Apologists

  "These CEOs act like kleptocrat dictators, taking what they can and challenging anyone to do anything about it. As with the kleptocrats they surround themselves with apologists and spread around the looting (from corporate treasuries for the CEO and the countries for the dictators) to those that support their kleptocrat ways.'

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• Risks Should be Taken Wisely

  Accepting risk doesn't mean failure is good. And it doesn't mean the results of experiments are all blameless. You can do a poor job of taking risks. If that is done, we should learn from it and improve how we take risks going forward.

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• The Tendency for Lean Experts to Distrust Technology

  Technology also is often seen as this wonderful simple quick fix by executives - letting them avoid the gemba and just put hope in a essentially magic bullet solution.

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• Steve Jobs on Quality, Business and Joseph Juran

  "The importance of customer focus is obvious at the companies Jobs led. It wasn’t a weak, mere claim of concern for the customer, it was a deep passionate drive to delight customers."

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• George Box Webcast on Statistical Design in Quality Improvement

  There is great value in creating iterative processes with fast feedback to those attempting to design and improve. Box and Deming (with rapid turns of the PDSA cycle) and others promoted this 20, 30 and 40 years ago and now we get the same ideas tweaked for startups. The lean startup stuff is as closely related to Box’s ideas of experimentation as an iterative process as it is to anything else.

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• A Vision can be a Powerful Driver but Most Often It is Just a Few Pretty Words

  When the vision is merely a pretty collection of words that doesn’t drive decisions and behavior it is pointless. When it does drive behavior it is powerful. Sadly that is rarely the case.      

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• Out of Touch Executives Damage Companies: Go to the Gemba

  The very first thing that needs to happen is executives need to go the gemba and actually understand what their business units are doing. Only amazingly out of touch executives could sit unconcerned in their offices while Comcast practices are creating results so obviously horrible.

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• Revolutionary Management Improvement May Be Needed But Most Management Change is Evolutionary

  Revolutionary change is powerful but very difficult for entrenched people and organizations to actually pull off. It is much easy to dream about doing so.

  Often even revolutionary ideas are adopted in a more evolutionary way: partial adoption of some practices based on the insight provided by the revolutionary idea.

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• Strategy Based on Capability and Integrated with Execution

  “Strategy” without a thorough understanding of the organization as a system or an understanding of the capabilities of the organization is little more than dreams. Planning and strategy without the capability in the organization or a process to turn strategy into action are not much use.

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• Health Care Crisis (2006)

  The USA health care system is broken and has been for a long time. Symptoms like the huge cost of health care, medical errors, ER problems etc. are all related.

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• The Importance of Leadership by Those Working to Improve Management

  There is a need to communicate with executives in a language they understand in order to make big changes. That requires an understanding of business and an appreciation for the importance of actually delivering value over talking about good plans.

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• Economics: Digital Nomads, Visas, Foreign Currency

  The prohibition against work on tourist visas makes sense when work is defined as it was historically (being hired by a company in the country that otherwise would have hired a citizen)...

  Few laws say what is legal they normally say what is not. I would imagine few countries specifically say it is legal to do work from another country (as a digital nomad, as a employee answering an email on your vacation, as a private investor reading the news and using the internet to buy or sell a stock using your broker at home, as a writer writing your book that will be published back home or whatever).  It seems pretty obvious you are not blocked from answering a work email while on vacation but exactly at what point a country wants to draw a line on acceptable work on a tourist visa and unacceptable work is not easy.

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• Reducing Waste - Zero Waste to Landfill

  A great improvement strategy. Determine what you are trying to do. Understand the system. Set up process measures that measure that system. Improve the system and track the results. Repeat. Maintain focus over the long term. Result: success.

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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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• Bezos on the Internet Boom (2007)

  The webcast shows Jeff Bezos, Amazon.com founder and CEO, speaking at TED on the internet boom. He compares the boom to the gold rush highlighting the similarities. But then he compares the internet to the development of industry around electricity. I think he is exactly right on the internet: “there’s more innovation ahead of us than behind us.”

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