Blog posts on leadership

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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• Companies Trumpet Stock Buybacks and Act as Though Stock Givaways Don’t Matter

  "One of the things that annoy me as an investor is how happy the executives are to grant themselves huge amount of pay in general and stock in particular. The love to giveaway huge amounts of stock to themselves and their buddies and then pretend that isn’t a cost.

  Thankfully the GAAP rules changed a few years ago to require making the costs of stock giveaways show up on official earnings statements. Now, the companies love to trumpet non-GAAP earnings that exclude stock based compensation to employees."

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• Change has to Start from the Top – Presentation by David Langford

  You are the top of your system. Change your thinking, change your process – you change your system. As soon as you start to modify your system you are going to have an effect on the larger system: the way you organize, the way you manage what you do everyday, how you process the work that you are doing [will impact the larger system].

  David Langford

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• Create a Continually Improving Management System - not the Perfect Management Solution

  In most instances I think a PDSA approach to the approach to use it best. Test out various options in parts of the company. See what works. Build and improve the process and spread it more widely.

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• Sustaining Management Improvement Through Personnel Changes

  Executives can't just have whims (usually driven by a desire to "make their mark") that throw out the principles used to manage the company if there is actually a strong management system.
  
  Most organizations just float with whatever fads are going on, so in most they can flip flop as new executives come into place.

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• Individual Bonuses Are Bad Management

  The idea that bonuses are bad management is one of the more difficult management improvement ideas for people to accept. See related post links for much more on the problems with them and what to do instead...

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• Aligning Marketing Vision and Management

  If you believe the vision of your marketing then make sure your organization has embraced those principles. I think, often, companies would be wise to follow the vision their marketers came up with. But instead they tell customers to expect one thing and manage the organization to provide something else. I just don’t see how that is sensible...

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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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• Culture Change Requires That Leaders Change Their Behavior

  ...Real gains can be made by applying a few tools and concepts effectively; without transformation. But changes to the culture come from significant changes in how people think...

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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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• Leadership While Viewing the Organization as a System

  Over time, I have become more and more focused on the overall system and figuring out how to look at whatever problem we're having within a larger context. And I find that usually leads me to a better solution. There are a couple of ways to see this in respect to leadership.

  The first one is when you have one of Deming's deadly diseases (or his 14 points), like the mobility of top management...

   

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• Attracting Members and Volunteers to Professional Organizations

  Organizations frequently get attached to their ways of doing things and fail to adapt to changing conditions.

  ...

  many membership organizations... turn from being focused on promoting their mission to being focused on perpetuating their organization.

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• Don’t Ignore Customer Complaints

  If the complaint is not something that should be addressed or explored fine. But that has nothing to do with the category of the person (“complainer” or not); it has to do with the merit of the complaint.

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