Blog posts on change

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

• Managing the Supplier Relationship, at Ford and Elsewhere

  Ford said they were committed to the Deming philosophy in the 1980’s and 1990’s. Donald Petersen, former CEO of Ford Motor Company, was one of those included in the Deming Library Tapes.

   

  Nothing has changed from 1990 to today [October 2005] that explains why Ford saying they are going to deal with suppliers differently now should work any better then such statements 15 years ago. Until they acknowledge what problems in their management system have caused them to fail to use sensible management practices that have been well know for decades I see no reason to believe their claims that they will behave differently this time.

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• Seven Leadership Leverage Points

  IHI has the courage to say one of the 3 sources for there hypothesis as “Hunches, Intuition, and Collective Experience.” While attempting to base plans on data and not hunches is good. Often you must make decisions without data. It is why Dr. Deming was so concerned with mobility of top management: that mobility means many managers don’t really understand what they are managing. Lean thinkers understand the value of having managers with deep knowledge of the areas they manage.

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• Six Keys to Building New Markets by Unleashing Disruptive Innovation

  Unfortunately we do not often stop to examine the theory and therefore fail to learn as we should as we experiment and get new results. The most effective way I know of to improve the learning is to use the PDSA cycle, predict the effects of change and then examining the results of change. As simple as those two acts are, they are skipped far to frequently.

  His second point, that managers frequently use overly simplistic models or theories is also important. Management is not well suited for simple theories that can be applied in any situation. Many interdependent variables are often at play and management requires not application of simple rules but applying knowledge in complex situations as best you can. Management is challenging and simple answers are often of little value – even though they are desired.

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• New Business Ideas Take Time

  It is much easier to find a measurement of the benefit of eliminating some problem than the benefits of learning and taking more time to think.

  [Also see: How To Create a Continual Improvement Culture, Transform the Management System by Experimenting, Iterating and Adopting Standard Work]

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• Innovate or "Play it Safe: to Avoid Risk

  There are many reasons why avoiding risks is smart and should be encouraged. But when avoiding risks stifles innovation the risks to the organization are huge.

  Playing it safe isn't always safe. In rapidly changing markets (which are quite common lately) "playing it safe" is often riskier than "taking chances" on new ideas.

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• Quality, SPC and Your Career

  Success is not as easy as we might hope. Just discovering the ideas of Deming or Toyota or Ackoff is not enough. The great ideas don’t, by themselves, convince managers to try a new way of managing. There is a great deal of education needed for most organizations to get to the point where they realize they could improve by applying “old” ideas such as: control charts, lean thinking, spc, not tampering…

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• Goofy but Widespread Thinking

  I can’t really understand why people seem unwilling to do the simple known things to improve performance. But there does seem to be the attitude that we need to find secret or fantastic new ideas in order to improve.
  
  People seem to think: “I can't just read some idea in a book published 30 years ago and improve. If it were that easy everyone would be doing it.” Well it isn’t quite that easy but it is close.

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• Change is not Improvement

  We trained hard… but it seemed that every time we were beginning to form up into teams we would be reorganized. I was to learn later in life that we tend to meet any new situation by reorganizing; and a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion; inefficiency, and demoralization.

  These lines, from the Satyricon of Petronius written 2,000 years ago…*

  * Unfortunately it seems this quote is not actually his.

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• Learning, Systems and Improvement

  Errors of omission, lost opportunities, are generally more critical than errors of commission. Organizations fail or decline more frequently because of what they did not do than because of what they did.

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  The corrective action is itself the result of a decision. A record of this decision should be made and treated as the original decision. In this way the process can not only yield learning but also learning how to learn.

  A record of the entire process (all four steps) should be made and stored for easy access by those who may later be confronted by the need to make a similar type of decision.

  Russel Ackoff

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• Quality Customer Focus

  Customers expectations change over time. Often what was once enough to delight a customer (remote control for a TV) becomes expected. Once a feature is expected the organization gets no credit for providing it they only risk a negative reaction if they fail to provide it.

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• Lean Thinking and Management

  I agree that we should acknowledge the paucity of success stories for improving the practice of management. The failures of management are not minor. The problems are large and the successes seem limited. The biggest thing I think we need to learn from this is that improving management is not easy. The concepts may seem simple but most of us can look around and see much more Dilbert Boss behavior than lean thinking behavior. And the gap between those two types of behavior seems to rise as you go “up” the organization chart.

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• Lean Beyond the Factory Floor

  Experts (in TQM, Deming’s idea’s, Six Sigma, BPR, Lean…) always stress the importance of involving not just others (when talking to management) but their (managers) work too. But fairly consistently management adopts improvement ideas mostly for others, not for their own work.   As organizations apply management improvement ideas on some portion of the work the talk of going beyond “factory floor” improvements becomes more common as improvements are seen where it is applied.

  Fast Cycle Change in Knowledge-Based Organizations by Ian Hau and Ford Calhoun, Jun 1997 is a good example of lean thinking, eliminating waste… outside the factory floor.

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• Our Policy is to Stick Our Heads in the Sand

  The failure to adapt to a changing world (the internet is here to stay folks) is amazing. Most companies would benefit from just adapting to the changing world without elaborate innovation plans. Innovation is great, but challenging. Don’t ignore the possible improvements short of innovation.

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• Toyota Homes

  I still am surprised Toyota isn’t doing more with mass transit but they obviously know more than me. Toyota partner robots are a good strategic vision in my opinion.

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  Could Toyota’s efforts beyond automobiles create problems over the long term? Yes. But Toyota’s solid management system is built with the knowledge that change is inevitable (Toyota’s Early History – Toyota was a loom maker before moving into the automobile industry). If Toyota wants to prosper in the future it needs to contoinue to grow and adapt and take risks.

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• Going lean Brings Long-term Payoffs

  The early successes provide resources to invest in making large more fundamental changes to the organization. Those successes also help convince people these lean ideas have merit. Dilbert does a good job of illustrating how many workers feel about the latest words spoken by their management. Without visible success expecting employees to believe the new management practices is unwise.

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