Organizations are social systems made up of people.
Social systems often amplify what happens.
If good things happen, more good things often follow.
When bad things happen, more bad things often follow.
To improve it is wise to this into account and design elements of the management system to encourage the amplification of what is good and that seeks to stop what is bad from being amplified.
Financial Independence/Retire Early (FI/RE) is about creating conditions that allow you to focus on what you value. Some people do focus too much on saving money quickly as though the goal is to save as much as quickly as possible. But that isn’t what FI/RE means. FI/RE doesn’t mean make yourself a slave to saving quickly in order to remove yourself from being a slave to a job until you are 65.
To me what is most important about FI/RE is examining the choices you make and taking control of the decisions instead of just floating along as so many people do without considering the choices they make.
Avoiding bacteria is not feasible. Our bodies have evolved with this constant interaction with bacteria for millions of years. When we are healthy bacteria have footholds that make it difficult for other bacteria to gain a foothold (as does our immune system fighting off those bacteria it doesn’t recognize or that it recognized as something to fight).
Human health is a fascinating topic. It is true antibiotics have provided us great tools in the service of human health. But we have resorted to that “hammer” far too often. And the consequences of doing so is not understood. We need those scientists exploring the complex interactions we contain to continue their great work.
The global competition in manufacturing is intense. But America is still the largest manufacturer in the world and managers should not be allowed escape responsibility for their failure to manage effectively with claims that manufacturing in the USA cannot compete. The biggest change needed is an improvement in management. Other things would also help greatly, such as improving the health care system.
Far too often companies promote employees into management positions and expect them to fulfill the obligations of their new position without helping prepare them to meet their new responsibilities. People who excelled at doing their non-supervisory job often have little education or experience to succeed with their new responsibilities.
Managing a software development team is a completely different job from being a great software developer. Most everyone would acknowledge that: but if you look at what actually happens in many organizations the management system is not setup with this fact in mind.
If you see your job from the customer’s perspective you may change the scope of your offerings. You can add services that help the potential customer chose you. In the book, they explore the example mentioned in the article in more detail. They also discuss how an online university changed their processes to address the issues their potential customers faced in the “hiring” process. They changed, not the “product” (education), but the processes supporting potential students making the decision to hire Southern New Hampshire University.
Both the tools and the underlying principles are catalysts to better management. Alone each can result in a bit of improvement. But when they are used together is when you see remarkable improvement. The effective integration of the principles and the tools is what separates the remarkable companies we respect (and maybe envy) from all the others that are having some success but that are also struggling in many ways.
One strategy to help identify special causes so they can be studied and addressed is to stratify your data.
By stratifying the data you refine your view to make it easier to identify what is causing the problem. Instead of looking at all vehicles and seeking to find the cause they had stratified the data and learned they could exclude looking at most of the processes (those that don’t impact large vehicles). And they then sought to further refine the scope by stratifying the data to further isolate the scope of the investigation. As you refine the scope you can discover what is common just to the population you have isolated by stratifying the data.
This interview with Dorothy Graham is part of my series of “Testing Smarter with…” interviews: gaining insights and experiences from many of the software testing field’s leading thinkers.
The best way to have fewer bugs in the software is not to put them in in the first place. I would like to see testers become bug prevention advisors! And I think this is what happens on good teams.
Toyota has grown in the past few years, but [there’s a risk] that a belief that the current status is satisfactory creeps into the minds of employees. That’s what I’m worried about.
We should never be satisfied with the current status. In each division, function, or region, we still have numerous problems to cope with. We need to identify each one of those tasks or problems and fully recognize them and pursue the causes. This needs to be done by all the people working for Toyota.
Customer delight requires understanding your customers needs and desires. Often even your customers don’t understand these well. Businesses that have a deep appreciation for what their customers, and potential customers, desire and that create systems to deliver solutions that delight those customers benefit greatly from that effort.
To build a sustainable enterprise you must provide value customers will appreciate.
Your customers do not have one unified set of desires. Some customers may want as good an experience as is possible and if that costs substantially more they are happy to pay. Others want to pay the least possible while having an acceptable experience.
It is confusing to know that better methods exist but to see those better methods being ignored. It seems that if there were better ways to manage, people would adopt those methods. But this just isn't the case; sometimes better methods will be adopted but often they won't. People can be very attached to the way things have always been done. Or they can just be uncomfortable with the prospect of trying something new.
Occasionally innovation involves meeting completely new needs of customers. For example Toyota started as a loom company and is now known as a car company. Making such a radical change is not often successful.
Will Toyota be able to add robots to the products it produces successfully? I believe they have a chance. But it won’t be easy.
Innovation is one of the areas of management improvement that is not given sufficient attention. Innovation is critical to the success of organizations and to the Deming management philosophy. Deming however, never had much specific advice on how to innovate. The management strategies he proposed do support innovation: truly knowing your customers, constancy of purpose, truly knowing your business, understanding your purpose, etc..
