Blog posts on leadership

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

• Innovative Thinking at Amazon: Paying Employees $5,000 to Quit

  Amazon continues to be innovative not just in technology but with management thinking. Jeff Bezos has rejected the dictates espoused most vociferously by Wall Street mouthpieces and MBAs that encourage short term thinking and financial gimmicks which harm the long term success of companies.

  Most CEOs and executives are too fearful or foolish to ignore what they are told they must do because Wall Street demands it.

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• Statistical Techniques Allow Management to do a Better Job

  Deming thoughts on consumer research are rarely discussed. I think this is because to some extent these ideas have become part of the accepted way of operating. But even in this area the full richness of Deming’s ideas are still missed today

  ...

  most importantly gaining intimate insight into customers so that you can predict and innovate was key to Deming’s way of thinking but is often far short in businesses today.

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• Secrets of the World’s Best Companies

  ... great management ideas are found in the thoughts of leading management thinkers (now it is true most I think most “writings or speeches of gurus and consultants” don’t provide much use but the right thinkers do offer great value).

  As Dr. W. Edwards Deming said there is no instant pudding for management (no quick fix). And management requires customization to the organization. You cannot just copy management practices from one place, where they are successful, to another. You can learn from what has been successful and adopt it to your organization if you have knowledge and theory and know how to test (PDSA) the effectiveness of new ideas in your organization...

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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.

  Russel Ackoff

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• Innovation at Toyota

  While targets and goals can distract from improvement some guidance is useful. If the desire to is have incremental improvement one strategy may be reasonable but if the desire is to aim for huge improvement another strategy is likely required...

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• Don’t Do What Your Users Say

  You must focus on customers but you must bring thought into how you react. Just doing what they say is likely a bad idea. Ignoring them is also bad. But listening and learning and then adjusting is good.

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• Using Outdated Management Practices Can Be Very Costly

  The dangers of strict sales targets are well understood by those that study management and human behavior. Sadly our management practices often fail to advance even as those that do seek to understand how to better manage our organizations make great strides in advancing our knowledge...

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• Improving Software Development with Automated Tests

  ... Thus automated testing mistake proofs the process. Now the mistake proofing is only as good as the test that are added. Software development is complex and if the code has an error (based on the business rules) that is not tested then the code can be deployed to production and affect customers. Automated software testing tools are a huge help in preventing many errors from affecting customers.

  It seems pretty obvious but until the widespread adoption of agile software development techniques and frameworks that make it easy to adopt automated testing (like Ruby on Rails) this sensible process improvement tool was used far less often than you would think.

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• Thinking Required – Not Just a Recipe to Follow

  One of the most powerful aspects of Deming’s management ideas also frustrates some people. Dr. Deming didn’t believe in simple guides telling managers what to do – his ideas are not prescriptive. The challenges of management don’t lend themselves to simple instructions spelling out exactly what steps managers need to take. What managers need to do depends on the organization and current state.

  There are general principles such as respect for people and understanding variation...

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• How to Develop Thinking People

  “Developing people requires physical endurance.” Frequent follow up is necessary, in person. It is not acceptable to give an assignment and follow up or scold only after three months, during a progress report meeting. Specific actions and detailed follow up are necessary.

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