Blog posts on management

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• How to Lead From Any Level In the Organization

  Similar to helping other people grow their careers is the idea of helping other people to solve their problems. Again, this starts with a clear understanding of your sphere of influence. It determines what strategies you can pursue, and building your sphere of influence should be part of your decision making process.

  What it comes down to is proving yourself in this way—and doing so consistently. “It isn’t some secret sauce. Prove yourself to be valuable and you will gain influence. Help people solve their problems. They will be inclined to listen to your ideas. And helping people to solve their problems doesn't mean you are giving them the answer. It may mean you asking empowering questions.

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• People are Our Most Important Asset

  ideally the organization would be providing all employees excellent coaching opportunities, all employees would be paid more than fairly, all employees would have the opportunity to develop along their desired plan, all employees would have great leadership, all employees would not be subject to continually annoyance of management system failures, all employees could count on the support of the system when needed…

  But in organizations that I have worked for we are have not reached that point. So while working to move the organization closer and closer to that goal, I believe making some extra effort to focus on those people that are helping move the organization in that direction. But it is risky if done without an understanding of systems, variation, psychology, etc.  Providing extra coaching, advice and attempting to protect people from the management failures you can’t get fixed seem like pretty safe methods.

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• Tilting at Ludicrous CEO Pay

  I continue to tilt at the robber barron CEO pay packages. Hopefully, at some point, the people approving these obscene pay packages can be shamed into stopping or replaced by people with some sense of decency. I was taught in the days of robber barrons the business world was seen as an amoral place (morality did not belong in this area of human endeavor) but that over time society decided that in fact morality did apply there. It is hard to reconcile that change with the behavior of CEOs and board approving ludicrous pay packages.

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• Bring Me Solutions Not Problems

  What they are saying is: if you know of a problem but don’t know of a solution I would rather we continue to have that problem than admit some of my staff don’t know how to fix it (and then have to deal with it myself – maybe then having to accept responsibility for results instead of just blaming you if I am never told and there is a problem later…). I think that is setting exactly the wrong expectations.

  Employees should fix things. They should bring solutions to managers to improve things that might be out of their ability to fix. But if they know of a problem and not a solution and a manager tells the employee they don’t want to be brought problems then I don’t want that manager.

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• How to Get Ahead

  I find that who says something is usually more important in predicting how people will react than what is said. As I have tested this myself I have learned how biased people are by who is talking; and I have tried to correct the judgments I reach (I know I don’t do it all the time but I try to especially for important things).

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• Leading Quality: Some Practical Approaches to the Managers New Job

  Throughout the talk Peter emphasis the importance of viewing the organization as a system and using the knowledge from that view to inform how the organization is lead, managed and how people are able to work. With a systems view it is possible to appreciate how many individual factors interact to impact how successful an organization can be and how those factors interact with each other.

  ...

  Peter Scholtes:

  We need to define what our customers get from us, not in terms of the product that we sell or the service that we offer, but in terms of capability that they acquire from us.

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• Deming Companies

  I see Toyota as the best example of a Deming company. Dr. Deming did not propose a cookbook to follow. Instead he proposed a theory that requires learning and application within the specific institution. Toyota has created a management system that is based on Dr. Deming’s ideas and then they have evolved that over 60 years into something that is consistent with Deming’s management philosophy and has new ideas Deming did not mention. As odd as it may sound that very act of developing new concepts that were not mentioned by Dr. Deming is exactly what makes them the company that most exemplifies Deming’s management system.

  Other companies that have also done a great job applying his ideas. Peaker Services has done great things...

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• No Excessive Senior Executive Pay at Toyota

  Toyota’s 32 top executives received just over $12 million in salary. Toyota made something like $13,000,000,000 in profits. With the top 32 executives getting about $20,000,000 that is .15% of earnings. Even if there are some other benefits not included in the total that .15% figure for the top 32 executives doesn’t really compare to ludicrous pay of many CEOs in the USA. Toyota has a different paradigm than the others (they believe in the organization as a system not hero worship practiced by USA companies to justify ludicras executive salaries).

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• Factfulness – The Importance of Critical Thinking

  I have come to see a willingness to value critical thinking, even when it means forcing the organization to address tough issues, as one the differences between organizations that succeed in applying management improvement methods and those that fail. In many organizations that fail, more weight given to making things easy for your bosses versus continual improvement in providing value to customers (which often requires challenging existing processes, beliefs and power structures in the organization).

  Challenging the status quo is difficult and most organizations prefer to maintain a culture that takes an easier path. Management improvement often requires a willingness to encourage challenges to the status quo. The importance of challenging the status quo in your organization and in your own thinking is under appreciated.

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• Leading The Transformation Process

  Transformation starts with the individual but as they change they can run into organizational barriers and resistance to change. Similarly if the organization institutes changes without helping people change their own understanding and views those people resist the changes in the organization.

  
  Deming’s management system provides a view of the organization as a system, including the people in that organization, and ideas for how to manage the transformation as an integrated system. The interactions between the components of the system and people must be considered and managed to transform. And those interactions continually change as the overall system evolves.

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• The Early History Of Quality Management Online

  I started looking at quality management resources online in 1995 (maybe 1994). At the time I was on the board of the Public Sector Network – what would become the American Society of Quality (ASQ) government division. When we started working with ASQ it took something like 2 months from the time I wrote an article until people received it. Now in 1995, the internet (outside of universities) was in its infancy. I was writing a column on the resources online for quality management – these consisted of bulletin boards (that you used your modem to call directly) and “gopher” and “ftp” sites and email lists a very few web sites... Well things changed frequently back then and by the time my article would be published phone numbers wouldn’t work, addresses would be out of date, etc..

  So I figured I should post my article online so people could just go there and see the updated phone numbers, addresses, etc.. That wasn’t so easy to do back then. But several of us at a W. Edwards Deming Institute conference decided to create a Deming Electronic Network (DEN)...

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• Why Isn’t Work Standard?

  When standard work is not followed by one person then it might be that intervention with that one person is needed (or in some cases it might be that person found a better way and you need to update the standard and figure out why the standard wasn’t updated before – probably a system problem, annoying to follow procedure to get improvement adopted…). Much more often “policy” (which might be similar to standard work – but I think standard work really requires a system that is missing in places where “standard work” is not standard at all) is not followed in general – everyone does their own thing.

  ...

  What needs to be worked on is the failure of the management to create a system where standard work is the way work is done, not blaming everyone for not following the standard in various ways.

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• Failure to Address Systemic SWAT Raid Failures
  The systemic failure of police raids continues to cause deaths of innocent people...

   

  There is a need to fix this system – not just making excuses every time yet another mistake is made. The mistakes are not special causes unique to the individual case but the common cause errors resulting from the current management practices.

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• Process Improvement and Innovation

  Every so often an article appears discussing the need to change focus from process improvement to innovation... I disagree on several grounds. First you have needed to focus on both all the time. Second, it is not an either or choice. Third, the process of innovation should be improved.

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• Deming on Management: PDSA Cycle

  Blog posts

  • What are We Trying to Accomplish?“In The Improvement Guide, the authors add 3 questions to the PDSA cycle: What are we trying to accomplish? – How will we know that a change is an improvement? – What change can we make that will result in improvement?”
  • Keys to the Effective Use of the PDSA Improvement Cycle
  • Do the experiment

  ...

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