Blog posts on management

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

• Hiring the Right People

  The job market is an inefficient market. There are many reasons for this including relying on specification (this job requires a BS in Computer Science – no Bill Gates you don’t meet the spec) instead of understanding the system. Insisting on managing by the numbers even when the most important figures are unknown and maybe unknowable. Using HR to find the right person to work in a process they don’t understand (which reinforces the desire to focus on specifications instead of a more nuanced approach). The inflexibility of companies: so if a great person wants to work 32 hours a week – too bad we can’t hire them. And on and on.

  ...

  it seems to me that the visible waste (time and money spent on the hiring process) is seen as the only waste and the much more difficult to see waste of hiring the wrong people is ignored.

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• Write it Down

  It is very easy for people to think everyone agrees to some somewhat clear statements made in the meeting. Only later it becomes obvious several people have different understandings of what was agreed to...

  Writing down decisions greatly reduces the chance of miscommunication. In a meeting clearly writing down decisions (action items etc.) for everyone to see (on a flip chart for example) is a vey useful tactic to improve communication.

  ...

  Russell Ackoff also has some great stuff on the importance of documenting decisions – both to serve as guide posts to future action and to serve as documentation that can be examined over time to find historic weaknesses and strengths with decision making in the organization.

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• Don’t Expect Short Quotes to Tell the Whole Story

  Quotes can help crystallize a concept and drive home a point. They are very rarely a decent way to pass on the whole of what the author meant, this is why context is so important. But, most often quotes are shared without context and that of course, leads to misunderstandings.

  ...

  When you understand that concept well it is pretty easy to see how it all fits together. If you try and take 1 or 2 quotes and understand how they fit together, without understanding the system, it can easily be less obvious how they fit together.

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• Compensation and Executive Pay at Whole Foods (2007)

  the average large corporation in the United States distributes 75% of their total stock options to only 5 top executives with the remaining 25% going to everyone else in the company (actually most of the remaining 25% goes to the next level of executives below the top 5). At Whole Foods, the exact opposite is true: the top 16 executives have received 7% of all the options granted while the other 93% of the options have been distributed throughout the entire company with all Team Members eligible for a grant after 6,000 hours of service to the company.

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• 3M CEO on Six Sigma

  ...the adoption of a newly branded management fad (from MBO to TQM to BPR to Six Sigma to Lean Six Sigma…) as the “solution” to this problem is doomed to fail (just like the last 5 times it was done) and rightfully make managers adopting such a re-branding solution the subject to ridicule by Dilbert readers. Adopt a management system. Make it yours. Incorporate good ideas from the outside but incorporate them into a long term management system that remains stable.

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• Management f-Laws by Russell Ackoff

  We found that we could improve part of a corporation and destroy the whole by improving the part.

  ...

  Russell Ackoff thinks that, imprisoned in centuries of Western education which values only analytic thought, most people cannot do the “synthetic” thinking that sees an organisation as an intermoving whole.

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• Lean Six Sigma Efforts

  ...management is the most common and most persistent obstacle, not “shop-floor personnel.” Others can resist yet another effort to adopt the latest management fad but the real challenge is in getting management to change their poor practices.

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• Lean and Theory of Constraints

  I tend to believe the theory of constraints view is helpful but can be misleading since often the interdependencies within the system mean that it is not true that “optimizing non-bottlenecks will introduce waste” (that may be true but is not necessarily true – that is how I see it anyway)...

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• Better Meetings

  Meetings are perennial problems. People sit through meetings and then complain about how big a waste of time it was. Here are a couple very simple tips to try and actually improve (instead of just agreeing that meetings are wasteful, but doing nothing to improve).

  • Have an agenda
  • Document decisions

  ...

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• What Job Does Your Product Do?

  Customers buy your product or service to fill some specific need or desire. Knowing what need the customer is filling can help you improve your offering. Knowing what job the customer is using your product for lets you focus on improving your product for that market.

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• Systemic Failures Lead to Many Fatal SWAT Raids in the USA

  ...people being killed in raids by police on the wrong house: police in full swat gear storming the wrong house by accident and then killing occupants. The media in general sees these as “special causes” – isolated incidents. So while tragic the strategy is then to examine what mistake in this unique situation lead to tragedy. I believe this is a systemic problem and therefore see the proper examination to undertake is to look at the whole system. That is, to use the common cause improvement strategy – when the tragedy is seen not as an isolated incident but the result of a system.

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• Long Term Thinking at Toyota

  Certainly the most obvious example of Toyota’s long view is the Prius hybrid.

  I don’t think so, that is an example of their medium term thinking. Personal Robot Aids, biotechnology, housing and environmental development – that is long term thinking.

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• Transformation and Redesign

  ...transformation effort undertaken at the White House Communications Agency. It shares the Agency’s efforts beginning with a Deming-based approach to continuous quality improvement through implementation of a total organizational redesign using systems thinking precepts. It describes the obstacles to implementing quality concepts in a high visibility, high security organization and examines the influence of Agency’s organizational culture on quality performance and improvement. The discussion examines the applicability of several broadly accepted quality concepts to the “ultimate command-and-control” organization.

  A couple years after this article I I went to work for Gerald Suarez at the White House Military Office (WHMO). WHCA is one of seven operational units of WHMO, others include: Air Force One, Camp David and the White House Medical Unit.

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• Firing Workers Isn’t Fixing Problems

  I am far from convinced short term thinking is Wall Street’s fault, it seems to me many executives have this problem and blame “Wall Street.” I believe short term thinking is mainly management’s fault.

  Short term thinking is part of the management system. Exorbinant executive pay exacerbates the problem. A failure to understand variation exacerbates the problem.

  
  Failure to understand systems exacerbates the problem...

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• Motivating Employees

  When a manger views the problem as one of motivating workers that puts the problem within the worker. They need to be changed. That is the wrong strategy, most of the time. People want to do a good job; the job of a manager is to remove the de-motivation within the system.

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