Blog posts on management

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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• Deming and Software Development

  "Dr. Deming’s ideas are about finding ways to improve the effectiveness and reliability of delivering value going forward. That idea is natural for many software developers. I find that software developers understand the value of designing the process to achieve repeatable success over the long term more than others (including managers)."

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• Analysis Must be Implemented by People to Provide Value

  "The greatest statistical analysis is nothing if it can’t be implemented by people. But people learn in different ways."

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• Resources for Using the PDSA Cycle to Improve Results

  "Using the PDSA cycle (plan-do-study-act) well is critical to building a effective management system..."   

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• What Motivates Programmers?

  ...I will repeat my statement for all managers for all employees: your job is to eliminate de-motivation not to motivate.

  If you really want to manage programmers well, read these blogs and take action to prevent yourself from becoming a pointy haired boss: Signal vs. Noise – Joel on Software – Paul Graham – Coding Horror – Scripting News – xkcd

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• 94% Belongs to the System

  I should estimate that in my experience most troubles and most possibilities for improvement add up to the proportions something like this: 94% belongs to the system (responsibility of management), 6% special.

  Page 315 of Out of the Crisis by Dr. W. Edwards Deming.

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• The Art of Discovery with George Box

  Great video of George Box on the process improvement process.

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• Knowing How to Manage People Is the Single Most Important Part of Management

  The challenge with managing people is not that good sources on what is important don’t exist it is that far too often we make superficial application of management ideas and then give up and superficially try another management idea.

  Learning from the gemba is important. But superficially visiting the gemba and doesn’t work. Without an understanding of how the components of a management system fit together and a long term commitment to create a management system that focuses on respect for people the organization fails to capture most of the gains possible with better management of people.

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• Improving Problem Solving

  suggest reading this excellent paper on Improving Problem Solving by Ian Bradbury and Gipsie Ranney. As they note, problem solving is not a substitute for innovation and improvement as solving a problem solving only returns you to the status quo. The paper also considers the relationship between problem solving and system improvement.

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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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• But, That Won't Work Here

  George Box, a good friend (and a close colleague to my father), put the problem of getting new ideas adopted this way (from Management Matters by John Hunter):

  1. It won’t work
  2. It won’t work here
  3. I thought of it first

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• Apply Management Improvement Principles to Your Situation

  take principles first (and then tools) that are helpful and apply them to your situation/system. The business type will affect decisions (likely software businesses or hospitals will be more similar to those in their industry than others due to some features of that that of business) as will your specific organization.
  
  If you design a system to have much more cross training of people then it will allow you to take advantage of that compared to another organization that instead focused more on specialization.

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• Setting Goals Can Easily Backfire

  I achieved my goal by not my aim. That happens a lot, we honestly translate aims to goals. And then we do stupid things in the name of the goal get it the way of the aim. We forget the aim sometimes and put the goal in its place.

  Mike Tveite

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• Mistake Proofing and Mistake Making Less Easy

  Making it harder to make mistakes and making them more visible is good. Preventing them is even better.

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• Early "Lean" Thinking

  Here are some early reports (so early it preceded the lean terms widespread use). It also means the focus hasn't already been set by the Machine that Changed the World but it is the same stuff that those that studied in 1980, 1990, 2000 or 2013 saw - it is more about respect for people and using everyone's brain than any specific tool. And these articles have a bit more focus on using statistics and data than much of lean literature today (partially because George Box and Dad were statisticians and partially, in my opinion, because current lean literature is light on using data).

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