Blog posts on culture

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

• The Importance of Working with Suppliers Over the Long Term

  Working together in partnership is a much more complex matter than saying you will cooperate. Sadly many companies are willing to say they will cooperate with suppliers over the long term, many fewer companies are willing to follow through with the actions needed to make that a reality.

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• Transforming a Management System – A Case Study From the Madison Wisconsin Police Department

  You may ask what the role of Quality Leadership was in the transformational process? To put it bluntly, unless Madison changed their top-down leadership style within the organization they knew they were not going to be able to sustain any of the other changes.

  This may be the major finding of Madison’s experience!

  To get a snapshot of what went on within the Madison department during this time of intense organizational transformation, see the following ten years of organizational effort (1981 to 1993) that occurred and the steps that were taken.

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• Bill Scherkenbach Interview with Dr. Deming

  This video also provides a view of W. Edwards Deming's personality. He repeatedly expresses the importance of changing the management of our organizations to let those doing the work use their brains, which far too often American management represses due to heirarchacal management systems.

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• Inquiring Minds: Improving Elementary Science by Linda Lippe

  This presentation also makes it obvious how well Leander ISD intergrates the use of quality tools into their efforts. Quality tools alone are not sufficient but the effective use of quality tools is extremely important to long term success of efforts to improve the system. And most organizations use quality tools far too infrequently.

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• Product and Service Innovation is Driven by Customer Focused Organizations

  At the core of W. Edwards Deming’s philosophy is a focus on delighting customers, allowing everyone to contribute what they have to offer and continually improving.

  ...

  An organization must have a deep focus on customers in order to continually improve the value delivered to those customers and to innovate and create new products and services that delight those customers and future customers that the business can win over.

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• Support Theatre

  Support theatre provides the appearance of supporting customers when in fact it is just treating customers poorly based on a management system that disrespects customers. It is a similar idea to security theatre that has become so popular for government in the USA for the last 10 years.

  Companies that practices support theatre are usually very focused on cutting the company's cost and not "wasting" the companies time fixing the problems they create for customers or even helping customers put on "band-aids" to cope with the injuries the company has inflicted on the customer.  Those companies also don't learn from their failures to improve and stop future customers from suffering the consequences of their poor processes.

  It is painful to interact with such companies.

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• Unintended Consequences - distorting the system or distorting the data

  Using data to understand your processes and improve them is very useful.

  But using data often results in unintended consequences. If you don’t have a good understanding on the pressures collecting data will bring to bear on the system you can create pressure for results that damage the delivery of value to customers...

  Distorting the system or distorting the data are often the result, instead of the process improvement that is desired and expected.

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• Addressing Systemic Policing Issues in the USA

  I have long been concerned about problems with our system of law enforcement in the USA. In recent years one good thing is that the problem is getting much more attention (the increasing militarization of police department however is a very bad trend that has gotten much worse over the last 10 years).
  
  I strongly believe the former police chief of Madison, Wisconsin has very good ideas on what should be done. His blog has many useful ideas and he discusses Deming's ideas often. He also wrote a guest post for the W. Edwards Deming Institute blog: Quality Beginnings: Deming and Madison, Wisconsin.

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• Management Tools for Quality Improvement Succeed When Practicing Respect for People

  An article, by my father, also addresses this area very well, while explaining how to capture and improve using two resources, largely untapped in American organizations, are potential information and employee creativity. It is only by engaging the minds of everyone that the tools of “technical” quality will result in even a decent fraction of the benefit they potentially can provide if used well.

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• Applying Toyota Kata to Agile Retrospectives

  Retrospectives are a good method to help improve but if there is no time to think about the issues raised and come up with experiments to improve and review of whether those experiments worked or not and why failure to improve is the expected result.

  Creating a culture where it is expected that any improvement ideas are tested and evaluated is one of the most important changes on the path to a company that will be able to continually improve.

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• Promoting Open Science

  We need to take back science from the closed-science journals. Historically journals were useful (before the internet). With the advent of the internet instead of maintaining the mission they started with (to aid the spread of scientific knowledge) the journals sought to maximize their profit and their own pay and jobs at the expense of sharing scientific knowledge with the world.

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• The Psychology of Change is Often the Trickiest Part of Process Improvement

  The psychology of such efforts is usually much trickier than the process improvement. This point is actually one of the reasons creating a continual improvement culture that has respect for people at the core. When you create such a culture the psychology of change piece becomes much much easier which and as you continually improve processes the most obvious process improvements are made. If you don't create the right culture continuing the continual improvement process gets more and more difficult but if you do create the right culture it gets easier.

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• How to Lead From Any Level In the Organization

  From an interview with me:

  2. Help people solve their problems.

   Similar to helping other people grow their careers is the idea of helping other people to solve their problems. Again, this starts with a clear understanding of your sphere of influence. “It determines what strategies you can pursue, and building your sphere of influence should be part of your decision making process.”

  What it comes down to is proving yourself in this way—and doing so consistently. “It isn’t some secret sauce. Prove yourself to be valuable and you will gain influence. Help people solve their problems. They will be inclined to listen to your ideas.”

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• Continually Improving Using a Focus on Delighting Customers

  A deep appreciation for the long term needs of your customers and potential customers should guide where in the system to continually improve. And my belief on how to continual improve is to create and continually improving management system with principles of experimentation (with the necessary understanding of what conclusion can be drawn from results and what cannot), an understanding of the organization as a system and respect for people as principles to be guided by to achieve continual improvement.

  Quality practices of experimentation directed at continually improving management practices and internal processes need to be completely integrated with the efforts to continual improve customer delight. Those efforts should be one process and therefore they automatically grow together.

  The success of improvements should be evaluated at the system level (outcome measures not merely efficiency measures). In process measures are useful in adding evaluating improvement and monitoring processes but the end result for the overall system must always remain the primary concern.

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• Interview of Bill Hunter: Improving Quality and Productivity in Organizations

  Bill discusses the parallels to how a manager applying management improvement principles is very similar to an educator facilitating adult learning. Rather than an authoritarian approach where the boss tells subordinates what to do a manager helps employees achieve better results by supporting their efforts.

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