Blog posts on respect for people

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

• Marissa Mayer Webcast on Google Innovation
  1. Ideas come from anywhere (engineers, customers, managers, executives, external companies – that Google acquires)
  2. Share everything you can (very open culture)
  3. You’re Brilliant. We’re Hiring [Google Hiring]
  4. A license to pursue dreams (Google 20% time)
  5. Innovation not instant perfection (iteration – experiment quickly and often)
  6. Data is apolitical [Data Based Decision Making – this is true but as an operating principle requires people that really understand data. See: Data can’t lie.
  7. Creativity loves Constraints [process improvement and innovation]
  8. ...

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• Motivation is Most Often Misguided

  To me the problem is in the belief of needing to motivate workers (that is theory x thinking). I think it is much more accurate to say managers need to focus on eliminating de-motivation.

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• What Is Muda?

  And the biggest waste of all is the underutilization of people’s talents. If you just learn to ask people for their ideas and get them to participate in creative problem-solving activities, you will be amazed at what people can do.

  Norman Bodek

  I agree: "Two resources, largely untapped in American organizations, are potential information and employee creativity. Managing Our Way to Economic Success, William G. Hunter, 1987. Also "The greatest waste in America is failure to use the ability of people." W. Edwards Deming, Out of the Crisis, 1982.

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• Vacation: A Systems Thinking Perspective

  Health care insurance costs are high, if you can get 1900 hours of work a year for the health care premium instead of 1500 hours that can add up to a great deal of savings...

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• Eliminate Slogans

  Text from the poster: “If a pretty poster and a cute saying are all it takes to motivate you, you probably have a very easy job. The kind robots will be doing soon.”

  One of Deming’s 14 obligations of management was to eliminate slogans - Stop Demotivating Employees.

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• Improving the 401(k) System

  Many people don’t even take advantage of a 401(k) to save for their retirement. From a public policy perspective it creates a huge long term problem. The economy will end up with millions of people that didn’t save for retirement and will be a drain on those who did save for retirement and the rest of the economy.

  So Congress actually passed a good revision to the law. Employers will now be required to default to having employees save for their retirement in 401(k) plans. The employee still has the option to decline doing so, but now, without such a choice, they will automatically save for retirement. 

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• Gladwell (and Drucker) on Pensions

  The most influential management theorist of the twentieth century was Peter Drucker, who, in 1950, wrote an extraordinarily prescient article for Harper’s entitled “The Mirage of Pensions.” It ought to be reprinted for every steelworker, airline mechanic, and autoworker who is worried about his retirement. Drucker simply couldn’t see how the pension plans on the table at companies like G.M. could ever work.

  Pension plans did work well for a short period of time. But recently they (along with the attached retiree health care) are one of the big problems facing large old companies: like GM. Gladwell talks about the dependency ratio for an economy and the dependency ratio of companies. Worsening dependency ratios can cause pension plans to kill companies (if they are not funded when the obligation is incurred) – as the company is forced to pay for more and more retirees with fewer and fewer workers.

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• Internet Access at Work (2006)

  Providing internet access at work can create some management issues. However, the correct solution to those problems is not to be overly restrictive on access to the internet.

  ...coach and work with your employees to make sure they behave responsibly. The information available on the internet can aid employees in doing their job in many ways. And it can also aid them in living their lives – don’t discount this benefit.

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• Complicating Simplicity

  This post on the excellent signal vs. noise blog illustrates how one can lose their way when trying to simplify. Lean and other management improvement folks can learn a lot about eliminating non-value added steps, clean design, simplifying systems to improve performance… from this blog. The examples are mainly relating to software development from a true understanding of lean thinking(though I don’t have any evidence they are familiar with the Toyota Production System or lean tools/concepts)...

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• Thoughts on Hospital Management by Deming

  A physician cannot change the system. A head nurse cannot change the system. Meanwhile, who would know? To work harder will not solve the problem. The nurses couldn’t work any harder.

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• Going lean Brings Long-term Payoffs

  The early successes provide resources to invest in making large more fundamental changes to the organization. Those successes also help convince people these lean ideas have merit. Dilbert does a good job of illustrating how many workers feel about the latest words spoken by their management. Without visible success expecting employees to believe the new management practices is unwise.

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• Lean is Harmony

  The tools are useful, but they are not the end. Just using the tools can help move an organization to the point where they are ready to truly examine how to improve. Most often the attempts (just like previous attempts with quality management, six sigma… did) stop short of more than superficial change where a few new tools are used in the same old system. 

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• More on Overpaid CEO’s

  As Drucker, Buffet and many others have said CEO overpayment is bad for companies, workers and shareholders. Even when they are fired they often take away tens of millions of dollars. Absolutely ridiculous. I sure hope the bubble of CEO pay bursts soon – the only suitable comparison this century is the internet stock bubble. But every year it just gets worse. I would add overpaying CEO’s to Deming’s seven deadly diseases of western management.

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• Righter Performance Appraisal

  Just because it would be nice for performance appraisal to work doesn’t mean it does work. As Deming said some numbers are unknown and unknowable and the wish that it is possible to quantify the contributions of people doesn’t mean you can. People cling to the idea that performance appraisal is the only tool we have to manage performance so we must use it. Even if most people realize it is just a game that accomplishes little, if anything positive, and causes great frustration and animosity they persist. Hopefully performance appraisal will be seen as “artifact of the past” sometime soon.

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• Creating and Sustaining Great Management Systems

  It is hard enough to create and sustain great management systems without adding more challenges to achieving success. When the management system results in having credit for each success fought over (to allocate credit to whoever convinces others they deserve the credit) it is much harder.

  This is one of the many ways Performance appraisals schemes (where people have to claim responsibility for successes in order to get more cash) create problems.

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