INTENSIVE EXERCISE

Is it very likely that team members show their strengths in such a similar way.  We are laughing at ourselves because our project has suffered in the same dimensions as our collective assessment.

On the way to Seattle.  Poor valley floor covered with segregated land uses.

TOYOTA ADAPTS TO THE OLDER WORKER

So, Toyota is the subject of so much in my life right now, that I have to just give in and become a champion as well. If only there were a place for everything and everything in its place in my life, I'm sure I would find about 30 minutes each day in discretionary time that I am now using looking for things. This weekend I cleaned my bathroom closet and one kitchen closet. I set up kanbans for dried fruit, cough medicine, lotion and hair ties. I'm excited by this homegrown PDCA that is relevant to both operations and management.

This from the NY Times piece this morning:

Workers on the plant floor used to choose the parts they needed to install on each vehicle from bins next to the assembly line. Now, a crew of workers upstairs loads the required parts into containers. The bins are placed inside the empty car bodies. Workers need only reach for the appropriate parts. After use, the bins are collected and sent upstairs to be refilled. The process will be part of the operation at Toyota’s new plant in Mississippi. It has cut Tsutsumi’s labor costs by 20 percent, said Osamu Ushio, general manager for the final assembly division, for two reasons.

First, cutting out the need to pick out parts shortened the training time for temporary workers, who make up one-third of the work force at Tsutsumi.

Second, older Japanese workers who are guaranteed lifetime employment by Toyota but can no longer handle the physical tasks of building cars can shift to loading containers.

The article can be found at http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/22/business/worldbusiness/22toyota.html?_r=1&th&emc=th&oref=slogin, which really is about Toyota's international training facility.

Another interesting link on the subject of Toyota's globalization:
http://blogs.iht.com/tribtalk/business/globalization/?p=659

Stewardship at Leadership Santa Barbara County (leadsb.org)

I'm going to muddle along with this a bit longer.  I chair the Board of a Leadership Training Non-Profit called Leadership Santa Barbara County.  The chair before me was a truly patriarchal leader.  He micromanaged decisions made by committee and refused to delegate work even when board members offered. 

When I took over the chairpersonship I felt as a matter of preserving the organization and myself that I needed to allow my team to make decisions for the good of the organization, and to allow them to grow their responsibility.  I chose partnership over patriarchy, I chose empowerment over dependency, and I chose service over self-interest.  I see a lot of "I"s in that sentence, and I'm sure you do too.  I let go of caretaking and control, deliberatively and openly.  I hoped my colleagues would feel empowered.  As you can imagine, these choices have been met by many board members choosing not to take responsibility.  And I still find myself central to the institution.  

We held a retreat last summer where the board envisioned on a common goal, and committed to act with purpose toward achieving that goal, even if they did not serve on the particular committee to which that task would usually fall, and even in a consensual group process (instead of the leadership choices I chose to make with full transparency) there has been reluctance by at least half of the board to lift a hand to help in a meaningful way.

I feel frustrated.  The people who took on service roles are tired and frustrated that their colleagues are "not stepping up."  Our governance committee is recruiting Board members.  I feel challenged to write the job announcement:  wanted, Leadership Alumni driven to accept accountability....  More thoughts welcome.    

Performance Measures at Work

I was part of a classic management level conversation at lunch the other day.

One of my colleagues described a need to have her work group meet their 30 day review target more often.  She (who by the way is retiring in September, three months into our new fiscal year) said, "I set up a new performance measure for next year for my staff.  It is, completing 85% of our reviews within 30 days."

I asked her what she was hitting now, and she replied, about 10%.  I then asked her why she would set a goal of 85% when she was only hitting 10% now.  

She said, "well they really need to hit this goal, their delay is really affecting everyone."

I wonder how this is going to play out.

Stewardship

Like many of my colleagues, I have been struggling with Block's text.  Perhaps we are so well indoctrinated into the post industrial management by results, that we can't even see we are bought into this system?  Could it be that even here at BGI, we see management as being about power and wealth instead of accountability and service.  I think so.  Since I am starting to supervise a small group that has been without direction for some time, this book is a challenge to me.  I could rush in and start telling them what to do (if only I knew what to do) or I could start some team building so as to create partnership and a balance of power.  I think if we develop a balance of power, we are likely to get better results and I might keep them in the shop a little longer.  Things generally are so bad at work, because we are set on managing by results.  But, I will try to take some of these stewardship elements to heart in an effort to make our little workgroup shine.  Accountability in both directions...

Four requirements of partnership (Funny Block titles it this way, but describes five requirements in this section):

1. Exchange of purpose, we are all responsible for defining vision and values 
2. Right to say no without fear of recrimination
3. Taking personal accountability so as to achieve joint accountability (I think my parents used to call this group responsibility, and the phrase often emerged when we started tattling on each other)
4. Absolute honesty is achieved in an atmosphere where there is redistributive power and less vulnerability
5. Maintain contact without control, not abdication

pps. 29-31.

PBM: Introduction

"Waste appears as excessive operating costs in the short run and excessive losses caused by market instability in the long run."

We have a really hard time working toward customer needs in our office because our mandate is to work in the public's interest to provide smooth and safe operations.  It is sometimes hard to argue the public's good in the heat of the moment from a single citizen calling with a private concern.  It is easy to get caught up with an angry single person and become disconnected from the true customer, the public.  I am going to try to think about this more when I answer the phone (which is always a bit stressful).  Operational costs are increased because the work and the customer are disconnected.  It is true for us in government, not only manufacturing.  We have had to set up ornate complaint management systems, and have people assigning complaints and tracking them on outlook, when in the past, we just took care of them with a call or letter.  We too have people whose jobs are to patch up mistakes that slip through the cracks because workers and customers are not connected, but I would start to argue that this is because we have forgotten who our true customers are. 

The Introduction also introduces the argument (which by several chapters later now I have taken to heart) that "human economic system and business organizations evolved out of efforts to apply thought to the problem of transcending the limits of what nature alone provides us for survival."  In order for our own long term survival and prosperity, business practices need to be transformed.  Human economic activity needs to be balanced and synchronized with nature's economic activity.  Riding the train down the coast, watching the persistent, powerful, and rhythmic waves rolling toward the land somehow made me wonder how we could have ever thought anything else.  

"Management by means now proposes a way to organize work that is slower, quiteter, and more likely to insure human survival in (note, my thinking is so post industrial revolution that I first wrote "on") Earth's ecosystem, while being sufficiently profitable to insure the long-term survival of companies."

Profit Beyond Measure

Many of the Operations readings have been influencing my thoughts about management.  I will document some of my notes here for future reference.

Senge writes, in the foreward to Profit Beyond Measure, that Managerial Accounting has lost its way.  This was a difficult thing for me to read, as managerial accounting was the only part of last year's Finance class that I really understood.  Senge argues that managerial accounting (a method to describe an organization's status) was co-opted as a management tool that caused us to lose touch with the processes responsible for creating profitability.  Transforming management can not be accomplished simply by instituting a system of measures.

I have been arguing this in my own workplace for a couple of years.  Our Performance Measures were instituted. ostensibly, as a means of improving performance, and providing better customer service.  Instead they became a number to be worked to, just like teachers need to teach to the test.  Managers' reviews were based on the accomplishment of their staff's performance measures.  So at the end of every quarter, we were busy doing busy work so we could say we met our goal.  This quote (Deming's) seemed particularly relevant to our work.  "If management sets quantitative targets and makes people's jobs depend on meeting them, 'they will likely meet the targets- even if they have to destroy the enterprise to do it.'"  That's exactly how we feel at my office.  We wonder what happened to the culture of support and fun that existed before the P3 program began.  Our web of relationships seems to have been destroyed, which hurt our character, capabilities and capacity to learn and grow.  In my own staff I have noticed a persistent anxiousness around how we are doing, and it is only in the last 6 months that I myself have been able to take mindful instead of shallow breaths.  The more I read, the more I like this book, and I am only in the foreward (but again, I remind myself that Senge is a kind of hero to me, his writings always resonate. 

He concludes.  Elements of deep change allowing us to live as part of nature:

1. Knowledge creation and diffusion is the root of competitive advantage
2. all organizations are embedded and interdependent with larger natural and social systems
3. how work is organized must be guided by principles of living systems.

I looked forward to reading on with a goal of living and working in flow.

Learning to Lead

While I am sick to death of reading and hearing about the Toyota Way every single time I turn around, I feel there are a few things to be said to cement my key learnings.

Now I"m a scientist, but I have a hard time applying the scientific method to manufacturing work, as Spear does in Leading the Way, which is perhaps why I am not a management scientist. Let's see, I hypothesize that the nut will be sufficiently tight after 3 turns. I take approximately 300 random samples of nuts turned three times and determine that 20% of the nuts aren't sufficiently tight. I reject the hypothesis and conclude: Three turns are not enough! With this knowledge in hand I know I have to stop being a scientist and start being an advocate for one of two changes: have the nut turners turn the nut more times (and hypothesize how many times, so I can test it again) or change the process.

It is a bit of a leap for me that continuous improvement is actually a variant of the scientific method. But that doesn't mean that I think continuous improvement isn't an absolutely wonderful concept. It just means that I believe testing work as it is being done is a great way to ensure that work meets a standard, and bad work doesn't make it to the next customer. Exploring the gap between what is expected and what occurs doesn't require an experiment. Continuous learning and improvement is more than understanding the gap.

I think by now we all understand that there is something special at Toyota that allows their tools and processes to flourish. Spears calls out their Principles. Others use terms like culture. Most describe the angst Americans hear when they are told that this "way" flourishes, in part, through the immediate outing of problems, rather than their swift sweep under the rug.

I am in the midst of training a new hire in my office. I have never had the opportunity to do this before. Meeting on Monday to discuss plans and expectations, and then meeting again on Friday to compare actual outcomes with plans is a very appealing idea. However, charging my new employee to make a specific number of changes sounds very much like asking for a research paper of particular length to be delivered, quality and content be damned. Also, picking the right metric for documenting the effects of the changes is a daily challenge already. 

I also like the challenge of figuring out how to improve our visual management of the work so it is easy to see what is going well, what is going wrong, and what needs to be done.

The new hire, Dallis, had an initial objective of reducing "overburden" on the worker. Spears emphasizes the effect of this language. Focusing on overburden emphasizes the impact of the work design on the person. By contrast, focusing on "waste" suggests that the person is the problem.

Despite my skepticism about the application of the scientific method, and experimentation, I want to document here the presentation format as described in Spears' article.

In all the presentations, the group leaders explained the problems they were addressing, the processes they used to develop countermeasures, and the effect these countermeasures had on performance. All work and improvements are structured as experiments.

Fundamental Principles Underlying the system:

1) There's no substitute for direct observation
2) Porposed changes should always be structured as experiments
3) Workers and managers should experiment as frequently as possible
4) Managers should coach, not fix

What a Day

This morning I got up at 5 to head down to Canoga Park to take the first half of a two day class from Bill Bellows at Rocketdyne on Enterprise Thinking.  An hour of the class was a vidoetaped lecture by my hero Peter Senge.  And fifteen minutes ago I got home from a lecture by Mohammad Yunus.   

What were the common themes of the day?

• We are not born into this world to be money making machines;
• We are born into this world with the capacity to learn;
• We are born with unlimited potential, but society has not allowed millions to unwrap this gift.  They die unexplored and unknown;
• The post industrial machine, the system of profit maximization, is a theory that real people are trying to imitate, when it is theory that should be imitating life;
• Poverty is not caused by the poor, poor performance is not caused by the person who measures it, grades are not caused by your performance... all of this is caused by systems of institutions, policies and concepts that are artificially imposed;
• A learning organization changes the system, but conventional systems are slow or reluctant to change.
• And from Toyota Way: Lean is about developing principles that are right for your organization and diligently practicing them to achieve high performance that continues to add value to customers and society.  This of course, means being competitive and profitable.

I have spent quite a bit of time thinking today about measurements.  We are in the midst of developing performance metrics for next year.  First, I have learned that there is no need to pull goals out of thin air, that we actually have the data to help us create our goals, with a statistical understanding of how we are performing today being possible.  But are we measuring the right thing?  If we want to provide excellent bicycle parking, does it make sense only to measure the number of hitching posts we put out?  

As long as we are driven to measure success as the maximization of profit, it will be difficult for our mainstream to support social business, where we measure success toward the dividends that are returned toward our goal.  I loved the idea Yunus promoted which is this:  the business can set its goal, for example, health, or the end of malnutrition.  The business can choose to return its dividends back toward meeting that goal.  Then the bottom line is not profit, but rather we can measure our success by the number of people we reach.  He advocated businesses that sell health insurance and bank accounts to the poor, as a viable business prospect that could help us peel off the systems that keep people in poverty.

Yunus was very cooly received by our Santa Barbara crowd.  I was disappointed.  I had heard warming receptions for any number of local bands.  Is it just too much for us to wrap our minds around?