Blog posts on leadership

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

• A Good Management System is Robust and Continually Improving

  A good management system doesn’t rely on heroic efforts to save the day. The organization is designed to succeed. It is robust. It will succeed with all the variation thrown at it by the outside world. A good management system takes advantage of the contributions people offer, but it will not perform poorly when others are relied on.

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• Executives Again Treating Corporate Treasuries as Their Own Money

  A huge problem with current practices at American companies is that senior executives believe they personally are due what the company earns. The repeated ethical lapses perpetrated by the senior executives and supported by their well paid board continue to undermine the economy of the country...

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• Toyota’s Commitment

  The Toyota Way is a management philosophy involving 14 principles that is the essence of the DNA of our organization and really all those who make up the company. In its basic form, the Toyota Way boils down to two fundamental practices: Respect for People and Continuous Improvement.

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• Pleasing Customers

  You need to provide customers what they want, which is not the same thing as what they say they want. Southwest airlines is a good example. Revealed preferences are more important than stated preferences.

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• Unconscionable Executive Pay

  The behavior of executives that take what they have no right to in unjustifiable pay schemes continues to be a disgrace... Excessive executive pay is both a sign of awful ethics and a driver of bad management action.

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• How Downsizing is Handled When Management Respects People

  Developer #1 is the guy you want to lead your development team. He will take a project and run with it, and it will come out better than you had hoped. He’ll find the fatal flaws in your specifications, either propose a change or work around them as appropriate, and do it in an extensible way that will save you time in the future. He really is the cream of the crop....

  Developer #2 is the guy you need if you already have a lead developer and he needs a code monkey who can get code out that works the first time...

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• Keeping Good Employees

  ...What can we do to keep you? What do you enjoy about your job? What do you dislike? What can I do to increase your joy in work? What one thing would you most like to see changed? What do you want to see continue? Would you like help in some aspect of your career development? What can I do better? Am I providing too much oversight, not enough?

  Give honest straight forward answers to questions. If someone wants to move ahead and needs to work harder to advance their career tell them that. If they need to be more cooperative, develop certain skills… tell them. The idea is not just to make the person happy in that meeting...

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• Drucker’s Ideas at Toyota

  Encourage employees to voice their opinions even if they are contrary. The people in top management must be open to hearing critical comments from employees and listening to opposing views if they want to engender new ideas and new ways of doing things.

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• Toyota Understands Robots are Best Used to Enhance the Value Employees Provide

  Toyota has always seen robotics as a way to enhance what staff can do. Many USA executives think of robotics as a way to reduce personnel. Toyota wants to use the brainpower of employees to continually improve the organization. Toyota wants to free people for monotonous or dangerous work to let them use their minds.

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• How to Build a Great Software Development Team

  "Without confidence, honest debate about ideas is suppressed as people are constantly taking things personally instead of trying to find the best ideas (and if doing so means my idea is criticized that is ok).

  ...

  This is also one of many areas where the culture within the team was self reinforcing. As new people came on they understood this practice. They saw it in practice. They could see it was about finding good ideas and if their idea was attacked they didn’t take it nearly as personally as most people do in most places."

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• Warren Buffett’s 2005 Shareholder Letter

  Too often, executive compensation in the U.S. is ridiculously out of line with performance. That won’t change, moreover, because the deck is stacked against investors when it comes to the CEO’s pay. The upshot is that a mediocre-or-worse CEO – aided by his handpicked VP of human relations and a consultant from the ever-accommodating firm of Ratchet, Ratchet and Bingo – all too often receives gobs of money from an ill-designed compensation arrangement.

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• Change is not Improvement

  The Improvement Guide: the Practical Approach to Enhancing Organizational Performance, is an excellent handbook on making changes that are improvements rather than just a way to create the illusion of progress. The book uses three simple questions to frame the improvement strategy.

  • What are we trying accomplish?
  • How will we know that a change is an improvement?
  • What changes can we make that will result in improvement?

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• Remembering Brian Joiner

  I knew Brian Joiner as a child growing up in Madison, Wisconsin. He and my father worked together and our families spent time together. As I grew I interacted with Brian in my professional life and that relationship made my life better.

  ...

  His book, Fourth Generation Management, is one of the top handful of books I most recommend for those interested in improving the practice of management in their organization.

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• More Evidence of the Damage Done by Kleptocrat CEO Pay

  As I have said before I wouldn’t think of having people that demand kleptocrat level wages lead my company. If that is how much they demand to accept the job they are not the person hold a leadership position in the company. I will be happy for them to pass by the chance to lead our organization.

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• How Toyota Turns Workers Into Problem Solvers

  ...The main difficulty is not a knowledge gap, but a performance gap. Most of what Toyota does has been published in numerous booksThe Toyota Way, The Machine That Changed the World and articles (see Curious Cat links to books and articles on Toyota’s management ideas). Reading that information is wise, but that is the easy part. The difficult part is actually managing more effectively...

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