Monthly Archives: October 2009

Deming’s 14 Points Revisited: Part 2


757px-flywheel_from_old_factoryThis post picks up on Part 1 and examines the first of Deming’s 14 Management Points. As I said in the first post, I believe Deming’s 14 Points have great resonance in today’s economy, even if his original language seems a little stilted in today’s world of Tweets and sound bites.

Let’s take his first point:

Create constancy of purpose toward improvement of product and service, with the aim to become competitive and stay in business, and to provide jobs.”

Constancy of Purpose

Western Executives, especially in the US, are well known for jumping on management fads – quality circles, total quality management, business process reengineering, balanced scorecards, benchmarking, six sigma, and so on.  I’ve consulted to organizations who were in the midst of both a TQM program and a new reengineering initiative and had a group of teams and initiatives to improve processes and another group trying to blow up and re-engineer the very same processes!  Needless to say, mass confusion reined, lots of effort was wasted and no real improvement was achieved.  I’ve seen many companies caught up in the Six Sigma fad, where “death by 1,000 Six Sigma projects” was a real issue, where keen would-be green-belters are firing up dozens of projects in the interests of belt certification, but with a combined effect that was actually detrimental to firm performance!  I’m sure a dose of enterprise-wide collaboration towards continuous process improvement and innovation would have turned a net-negative to a highly net-positive contribution over time, with the power of compounding!

Collin’s Flywheel Effect

In his excellent book Good To Great, Jim Collins describes how successful transitions don’t happen overnight. He analogizes their success to that of a flywheel, where a sustained momentum accelerates the energy output.  Any phenomenal change in its final state looks like a flywheel going very fast. The thing about a flywheel is it takes a great deal of energy to get it moving, but once it’s up to speed, takes little energy to keep it moving.  The energy to get it up to speed typically has to come in a sustained series of small steps.  In the TQM/Re-engineering example I cited above, you have one set of teams trying to turn the flywheel one way, and another set trying to move it another way.  The flywheel stops and starts, changes direction, and never gets enough momentum to sustain change.

Thus, I see the flywheel analogy as a wonderful way of illuminating Deming’s “constancy of purpose,” and a valid dictum to counteract today’s tendency to jump on management fads, while never sustaining the focus and energy long enough to see positive results.  It’s a form of “short-termism” in part fueled by Wall Street expectations, and “get rich quick” aspirations.

Improve Products and Services

Also note that Deming refers to “product and service”.  He recognizes that both need constant improvement, and that there is typically an important relationship between products and services.  And yet the people responsible for products and those responsible for services are often not collaborating towards the bigger picture, so service opportunities are missed by the product folk, and product opportunities missed by the service folk.

Though not evident in Deming’s first point, he does elsewhere (in books and lectures) address the distinctions between improving and innovating, and between improving a product or service, versus improving (or innovating) the process that delivers the product or service.

Become Competitive, Stay in Business, Provide Jobs

Note that Deming links the three ideas of becoming competitive, staying in business, and providing jobs.  I believe he was very deliberate in connecting these ideas.  Many of our institutions today do not try to be competitive (think government or health care).  The notion of “too big to fail” gives new meaning to the idea of “staying in business” as a management driver.  And increasingly, people are treated as a commodity – ensuring jobs is no longer part of the management compact, with companies firing then rehiring workers according to monthly business cycles, and dot com start ups generating billions of dollars in share capital, without real products and only a handful of employees.

I further believe that the dreadful state of employee engagement – especially in the West and the US today is a sad reflection on leadership, and a leading indicator of more “trouble ahead” in the immortal words of Jerry Garcia!  My esteemed colleague Tammy Erickson defines employee engagement as the degree to which employees are willing to give of their discretionary effort.  According to a study by BlessingWhite:

Although North America has one of the highest proportions of engaged employees worldwide, fewer than 1 in 3 employees (29%) are fully engaged and 19% are actually disengaged.”

Gallup Organization cites:

Actively disengaged employees erode an organization’s bottom line while breaking the spirits of colleagues in the process. Within the U.S. workforce, Gallup estimates this cost to be more than $300 billion in lost productivity alone.”

So, what are you doing to achieve “constancy of purpose”?  What about employee engagement?  Is it an issue in your organization?  Is the issue recognized?  Talked about?  Addressed?  How can you apply Deming’s 1st point?

Image courtesy of INK08

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Deming’s 14 Points Revisited: Part 1


deming

I was at a speaker at an nGenera Executive Summit recently where one of my co-speakers, Jeffrey Pfeffer, Professor of Organizational Behavior at Stanford University cited Deming’s “Drive Out Fear” dictum, from his 14 Management Points.

This reminded me of the genius and timelessness behind Deming’s teachings, and inspired me to tackle a couple of posts examining his 14 Points in the context of today’s economy.  Dr. W. Edwards Deming was an interesting and key figure in the quality movement.  He taught statistical process control (SPC) techniques to World War II workers and applied these methods to help improve crop and food yield during the war.

Regrettably, in the post-war frenzy for American products, he was largely ignored (rejected, even) by American industry.  However, due to his early work on the US census, he was invited to help with the census in Japan.  As a result, his work became visible to Japanese industry, and was wholeheartedly embraced and built upon by the Japanese, whose cultural inclinations were very compatible with Deming’s teachings.  The rest, as they say, is history!

Out Of The Crisis

In 1982, Deming published Out of the Crisis, a classic text that resonates especially strongly today.  Deming posited that,

Long-term commitment to new learning and new philosophy is required of any management that seeks transformation. The timid and the fainthearted, and the people that expect quick results, are doomed to disappointment.”

As one who has been involved in dozens of organizational transformations over the years – both as a consultant and as a “victim”, I say, “right on!”  Out of the Crisis offered a theory of management based on Deming’s 14 Points.  I will list them below, then pick a few to examine in each subsequent post.  From the perspective of 2009, and our Twitter/Facebook culture, Deming’s language may seem heavy and stilted, but, please, don’t let that put you off!

Deming’s 14 Points

  1. Create constancy of purpose toward improvement of product and service, with the aim to become competitive and stay in business, and to provide jobs.
  2. Adopt the new philosophy. We are in a new economic age. Western management must awaken to the challenge, must learn their responsibilities, and take on leadership for change.
  3. Cease dependence on inspection to achieve quality. Eliminate the need for inspection on a mass basis by building quality into the product in the first place.
  4. End the practice of awarding business on the basis of price tag. Instead, minimize total cost. Move towards a single supplier for any one item, on a long-term relationship of loyalty and trust.
  5. Improve constantly and forever the system of production and service, to improve quality and productivity, and thus constantly decrease costs.
  6. Institute training on the job.
  7. Institute leadership. The aim of supervision should be to help people and machines and gadgets to do a better job. Supervision of management is in need of overhaul, as well as supervision of production workers.
  8. Drive out fear, so that everyone may work effectively for the company.
  9. Break down barriers between departments. People in research, design, sales, and production must work as a team, to foresee problems of production and in use that may be encountered with the product or service.
  10. Eliminate slogans, exhortations, and targets for the work force asking for zero defects and new levels of productivity. Such exhortations only create adversarial relationships, as the bulk of the causes of low quality and low productivity belong to the system and thus lie beyond the power of the work force.
  11. Eliminate work standards (quotas) on the factory floor. Substitute leadership.  Eliminate management by objective. Eliminate management by numbers, numerical goals. Substitute leadership.
  12. Remove barriers that rob the hourly worker of his right to pride of workmanship. The responsibility of supervisors must be changed from sheer numbers to quality.  Remove barriers that rob people in management and in engineering of their right to pride of workmanship. This means, inter alia,” abolishment of the annual or merit rating and of management by objective.
  13. Institute a vigorous program of education and self-improvement.
  14. Put everybody in the company to work to accomplish the transformation. The transformation is everybody’s job.

We will examine each of these in subsequent posts, and place them in the context of the current global economy.

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New York City Impressions – An Atlantan Brit Moves to the Big Apple!


Big appleHaving just moved to New York City for a 3 month stint, I thought it might be interesting to post a series of reflections on my experiences here.  For context, I was born and grew up in London, (North Kensington).  As a young teenager, I moved to the London suburbs, moving a little further out when I got married.  We then moved to the USA 30 years ago – first living in Boston, MA, then in the suburbs of Atlanta, GA, with a one year stint in Somerset, NJ about 6 years ago.

A “Townie” In The Big Apple

I’m living in a hotel suites facility in an area of Manhattan called Murray Hill – on 39th Street between 2nd and 3rd Avenue.  This location gives me about a 15 minute walk to my consulting client – a real pleasure in the current early fall weather, but I’m sure it will challenge my Atlanta-centric thinned blood by the time Christmas comes!

First Impressions Mattered!

Actually, my wife and I first visited NYC in the early 70′s as part of a grand tour of the USA, from coast to coast, and from North to South, making 39 flights in 3 weeks!  As a kid growing up with American TV programs (which dominated British TV), I felt like I knew the city.  Influenced by shows like Kojak, one of my first missions was to “grab me a pastrami on rye!” without any idea of what either “pastrami” or “rye” were.  (I satisfied that craving at the Stage deli on 7th Avenue, being presented by a sandwich at least 6 inches thick, with about 2 pounds of meat in it!  By contrast, the great British sandwich was typically 1/4 inch thick with one slice of meat!)

I found New York back then to be intoxicating but also intimidating!  People’s demeanor was generally rushed and had a hostile edge to it.  For example, I recall a couple of most unpleasant interactions with the front desk staff at the Americana Hotel on 7th Ave. One of these was with regard to the many mistakes the hotel had made on my final bill.  “Jeez, why are ya doin’ this ta me!” was the cry from a very grumpy desk agent when dealing with a host of hotel errors!  (Note: The Americana Hotel has long since gone!)  But it was not just the hotel – shop keepers, cabbies, everyone had a hostile and paranoid edge about them.

Since that first visit in the early 70′s and since moving to the USA in the late 70′s, I’ve visited NYC countless times – but usually as a business visitor, and occasionally as a tourist.  Now I’m hoping to experience it as a pseudo New Yorker! (Well, at least an approximation!)

But Second Impressions Also Count!

I have to say, New York City is a much more accessible and welcoming place today.  Like most big cities, it has some ugly parts, and some gorgeous – but I find them all to be clean – people always seem to be sweeping the area in front of their home or store. More importantly, I feel as safe in NY as I have in any big city.

The city has a constant “buzz” to it, though the specifics of that buzz vary by neighborhood and time of day.  I walked to Times Square over the weekend – which was recently partly turned into a pedestrian precinct.  It was crazy – a mass of shoppers and tourists, and all the kinds of shops and attractions designed to separate the tourist from her money!

The Power of Walking

Great to get in lots of walking, and the city is very walkable due to it’s general lack of hills and its logical layout with a strong North-South orientation.  It’s also nice to know that an efficient and reasonably priced public transportation in the form of subways and buses is available most of the time.  Finally, the excellent cab system is a great “safety net” for getting around.  Today, all cabs are equipped with credit card readers and flat panel TVs which can provide news, mini-features, weather, a moving GPS map so you can follow where you are/where you’re going, and even a way to finalize your payment (tip calculator included for the mathematically challenged.)

Food to Power the Walker

I’d say NYC is a heaven for the foodie.  No, it’s not France or Italy, but it does offer the widest array of cuisines from around the globe – with world class quality!  I’m sure you can get any ethnic type somewhere in the city, and if you have a particular lusting for one type or another, there’s probably a whole area of town devoted to it.  As a Brit, I love Indian food, and New York has plenty of that.  It even has the more obscure (and even more spicy) Indian-Chinese which I absolutely love and find hard to impossible to get elsewhere (Edison, NJ aside!)

Money to Power the Eater

I’m finding New York living expensive!  I don’t think its a particularly expensive town compared with the likes of London, Paris or Rome, but it is compared to the rest of the USA.  And there’s lots of goodies to spend money on, so the old wallet seems to have a way of draining itself!

Well, that’s the first post – I’ try to get one out every week or so, or if something very noteworthy happens.

Image courtesy of New York City Pop Warner Football League

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IT’s Top 10 Interests – Why the Perennial Oldies?


CIO IT's top tenI was perusing the September 15 issue of CIO Magazine (ok, I’d been on vacation for nearly 4 weeks, and was catching up on my massive reading pile!) when I noticed the chart recreated to the left.  (Note:  I could not find the chart in the electronic edition – only the paper magazine.  Also note, I added the bold red highlighting to 4 of the items.)

Something Old, Something New

A couple of things struck me about this data.  First, I don’t know what the survey methodology was or the demographics behind it, but there’s not much of a spread between these “top 10 issues that technology decision makers are researching now.”  Also, I wonder how CIO Magazine differentiates between Collaboration Tools and Wikis, blogs, social networking?  Furthermore, I suspect that if statistical significance/margin of error were calculated, the data may have little meaning.  However, giving CIO Magazine the benefit of the statistical doubt, I am stuck by the fact that some of these issues have been around for 15 years or more.

I wonder, is it that business intelligence, business process management, enterprise architecture and content/document management are changing so much in 2009 that they’ve made it into the top ten technology research issues?  Or is it that IT leaders still have not made much real progress on these perennial challenges?  I suspect the latter.  I think there are just certain issues that IT leaders wrestle with that are always just on the periphery of their “big three” initiatives, and as such, never get wrestled to the ground.

Enterprise Architecture – Now You See It; Now You Don’t!

For example, most IT organizations I know are on their 3rd or 4th attempt to crack the Enterprise Architecture nut.  They’ve dabbled in this with a couple of people in the Chief Architect role that were subsequently reassigned, then formed large groups focused on this, but disbanded them after too much time with too little results, then reformed them as dispersed networks, and watched helplessly as these languished and eventually faded away.

Business Intelligence – Here We Go Again

Similarly for business intelligence (and associated data warehousing and related efforts).  Note also the connection between Enterprise Architecture and Business Intelligence – if you cannot crack the EA nut, you probably won’t get far with BI!

Content/Document Management – Why Can’t I “Google It”?

Ditto for Content/Document Management.  While Google manages to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”, IT professionals have a hard time helping their business users find an internal document that was created yesterday!  And note again the connection with the EA conundrum!

Business Process Management – What Happened?

This is the perennial issue I just don’t get.  In the 90′s everyone was reengineering business processes.  How come we no longer know how to do it?  Was it that the work was largely “outsourced” to management consultants, and IT organizations never learned how to do business process management?  I personally believe this is a major factor.  Just as many shops effectively outsourced their Enterprise Architectures to SAP and Oracle (See my old post on Did You Accidentally Outsource Your Enterprise Architecture)  so did they outsource their BPM efforts to Accenture, Deloitte, IBM and so on.

It will be interesting to look at CIO Magazine’s data on this 5 years from now!

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Quick Reflections on an Executive Summit


hyatt_tamayaI’ve had the privilege of being a speaker at one of nGenera‘s Executive Summit’s around the theme of “Restarting the Business Growth Engine.”  This is being held at the lovely Hyatt Regency Tamaya Resort at the Santa Anna Pueblo in New Mexico.

My topic was “Leveraging Web 2.0 to Discover and Exploit New Business Strategies.”  But more on that in subsequent posts – for now I want to capture some immediate reflections on some of the commentary and discussion.

“Spending Time On Facebook is Sapping Our Employee’s Productivity!”

This was a comment made by a very seasoned and successful CEO in the conference.  The comeback from another executive was, “But these people are working virtually 24×7 – at work and at home – they are far more productive than they were in the old days – before Web 2.0!”

Two contradicting perspectives – which one is right?  Does giving employees the freedom and trust to spend time on social networking sites during the work day detract from productivity? Or does it increase employee engagement (a sorely lacking characteristic according to data presented by a couple of the speakers!)  If employees abuse this trust, and spend significant time on non-work related activities, is that a performance management problem (or a reflection of an engagement problem?) that needs to be addressed in its own right, rather than revoking or preventing these external social networking privileges in the first place?   What has happened to trust in the workplace, and the good old “employee/employer” compact, and what does that loss of trust cost us in terms of productivity?  I suspect this issue is significantly more productivity draining than time spent on social networks.

By the way, this argument reminds me of a speech I head many, many years ago by IT guru Tom Demarco.  Early in his career (I think it was with Bell Labs), Tom was sitting at his desk, with his feet up, head back, gazing at the ceiling.  His boss was walking by the office, and noticed this relaxed posture.  “Tom, what are you doing?” asked the boss, Tom’s programming manager.  “Thinking!” replied Tom.  “Your not paid to think – get back to work!” was the bosses comeback.

“A Key Barrier to Collaboration in the Enterprise is Lack of Purpose!”

My highly value colleague Tammy Erickson, in her presentation on “Why Collaboration Is So Difficult” hit on the “If we build it, they don’t come!” theme.  Collaboration without a clear purpose is unlikely to take hold – no matter how good the platform and the IT support.

I’ve found this to be a true statement, but like all good rules there are exceptions.  I know one client where strong collaboration (in an inherently silo-ed culture) is taking place – and around SharePoint, of all platforms!  The IT organization provided the platform, and the business people climbed on in spades!  The take-up was so successful, IT had to re-architect the collaboration platform and services.

Image courtesy of Hyatt Regency Tamaya, NM

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