Most Popular Posts on the Curious Cat Management Comments Blog

The most popular posts on this blog (10 May 2010 through today - the data I have doesn't let me just look at data for 2015):

1. Profit = Market Price - Actual Cost or Price = Cost + Desired Profit (2012)
2. Mistake Proofing and Mistake Making Less Easy (2013)
3. Performance without Appraisal (2005) - which was my 100th post
4. Cease Mass Inspection for Quality (2006)
5. 14 Plus Potentially 14 More Years for Copyrights Has Become 120 Years (2013)
6. Sustaining Management Improvement Through Personnel Changes (2014)
7. Causes of the Health Care Crisis (2011)
8. Global Manufacturing Data by Country (2006)
9. Data Must be Understood to Intelligently Use Evidence Based Thinking (2014)
10. Deming and Toyota (2006)
11. The Failure of Hero Worship Thinking at JC Penney (2013)
12. Customer Focus is Central to Lean Thinking (2012)

Breakdown of popular posts by year: 2014 - 2, 2013 - 3, 2012 - 2, 2011 - 1, 2006 - 3, 2005 - 1.

I started this blog over 10 years ago. After I figured out that I thought blogging would work for me I created a self hosted blog (the Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog) and moved the content to that blog. But I kept up the post here since web pages should live forever. For several years (about 2005 to 2011), I posted occasionally to this blog, sometimes the posts were comments made on other blogs.

In 2011 I started to use this blog a bit more consistently to collect the management and leadership related comments I made on other blogs here (when they seemed to say something useful or interesting that were worth posting on this blog - often things I wanted to be able to find later).

Related: Most Popular Posts on the Curious Cat Management Comments Blog (2014 edition) - 10 Most Popular Posts on the Curious Cat Management Blog in 2014 - 20 Most Popular Posts on the Curious Cat Management Blog in 2015 - 10 Most Popular Post on The W. Edwards Deming Institute Blog (2015)

The Importance of a Work Culture That Values and Supports Critical Thinking

Critical thinking is tremendously important. I have come to think it might be the most important precursor to management improvement (evidence based management, continual improvement...).

One of the big issues is for people to understand thinking critically about ideas isn't an insult to whoever came up with the idea being discussed. This isn't something I would have thought of as important until seeing so many cases where people are not comfortable discussing ideas (and weaknesses in those ideas) in the workplace.

Comments prompted by: thinking critically

Related: A Good Management Culture Encourages the Debate of Ideas - Respect for People Doesn’t Mean Avoiding Any Hint of Criticism - Dangers of Forgetting the Proxy Nature of Data

Quality Digest: How to Create a Culture of Continuous Improvement

Quality Digest published my article: How to Create a Culture of Continuous Improvement

Related: Change and the Management System - John Hunter online - Lowering Expectations Isn't Showing Respect

Root Cause - Addressing Systemic Causes Not Symptoms

Comment on Just Ask Why Five Times? Effective Problem Solving for #Lean or #LeanStartup Doesn’t Start or End There

> Would you agree that complex systems rarely have a single root cause?

Yes. And also "root cause" is a neat concept but in reality it is not usually "true" but an a sensible acceptance of a cause that is systemic enough and addressable enough to consider "root." It isn't that there is this "true root cause" that created the current problem. There is a way to look at the issue and find a deeper cause that will allow you to address it and improve the future performance of the system.

Depending on how you look at the problem there can be many different "root causes" that are sensible from their different perspectives. The important thing is by aiming to fix root/systemic problems you will not just treat the current symptom you are dealing with today but eliminate future problems from occurring. If you are doing that, you are doing well.

If you start noticing that you are addressing problems that could have been addressed in previous attempts to address root causes, you can exploring whether going further in each attempt makes sense. It isn't as simple as this but if you notice you addressed a systemic problem at the "branch" level effectively for example. So if you had 3 fixes that did stop future problems on each of the branches but on the fourth fix you looked and said hey all 4 of these connect to this larger branch (or tree trunk - which is connected to a real "root") I would say asking if you should have addressed the "next why" may well make sense.

Related: Root Cause, Interactions, Robustness and Design of Experiments - Address the Root Cause Instead of Finding the Person to Blame - Poor Results Should be Addressed by Improving the System Not Blaming Individuals - Firing Workers Isn’t Fixing Problems - Examine the System, Don't Look to Blame a Person - Why Do You Ask Why?

How Badly Are Companies Treating You?

Comment on: How well does your organization treat clients or customers?

Our reader poll today asks: How well does your organization treat clients or customers?

– Extremely well — we take great care of them: 35.17%
– Very well — we treat them better than most other companies: 34.88%
– Well — we do a decent job but could improve a bit: 25%
– Not well — we could treat them much better: 3.49%
– Poorly — I’m surprised we even still have customers: 1.45%
...
Do you agree

No I don't agree; maybe I just have the lousy sample of companies I interact with. Truthfully I don't deal with companies that treat me poorly unless I don't have a choice - but that is not uncommon at at (ISP, airlines, electric company, mortgage company...).

The survey results don't surprise me, given how out of touch executives and managers are about what their customers must put up with.

I intentionally pick companies that are good, but for example with a mortgage it is then sold and I am forced to deal with a bad company...

I am thrilled when a company treats me well (because my expectations have been so beaten down that just not being treated as a huge bother is a rare), but it is rare. Trader Joe's does consistently. My credit union does. In general restaurants do.

What I have found is that if the executives are paid more than $1,000,000 the company probably treats me very poorly. I don't think is a cause, but I do think it is correlated. The executives seem to always have room to pay themselves huge salaries but are loath to provide the customers someone that answers the phone or email without wasting tons of the customers time.

Upon my return to the USA after 4 years overseas the biggest annoyance has been dealing with these companies I am forced to deal with that treat me with complete distain. They see no problem wasting my time or forcing me to follow some idiotic processes that make life easy for them.

Related: Customers Get Dissed and Tell (2008) - Is Poor Service the Industry Standard (HP in 2006)? - Don’t Ignore Customer Complaints (2014) - Customer Service is Important (2006)

Spend More Time Doing What You Do Well

Comment on: Is it Better to Work on Strengths or Weaknesses?

As you say to the extent your weaknesses are things you have to do spending time improving them usually makes sense. I think often the most productive thing is to spend time working on the system to maximize the use of people's strengths and minimize the use of their weaknesses. This often has a big impact without much effort.

And when you do that it is often the magnitude of strengths that makes a big difference. So you can avoid dealing with much of the weaknesses in the team and focus most effort on the strengths. And when you do that my getting even better at x allows the improvement not to just be x * 1.1 but (x * 1.1) + (y * 1.3) + (z * 1.4) - (if say I am now 30% "better" than y at the task and 40% better than z. Obviously it doesn't work so cleanly in the real world but that concept that you can get way more improvement normally by adjusting the way work is done than just by having everyone get less bad at the stuff they really should avoid doing most of the time.

You do also have to pay attention to the long term, so if someone wants to move into supervision but has some weaknesses they need to address and strengths to improve working on that makes sense.

Related: Take Advantage of the Strengths Each Person Brings to Work - Helping Employees Improve
- Many Good Employees Want to Continue to Do Their Current Job Well - Lessons for Managers from Wisconsin and Duke Basketball

Change and the Management System

comments on: Better Change Leadership as a Countermeasure to “Resistance to Lean”

I agree, the problem isn't change but the process for change. There are many smart things to do to help the process work better.

The most important thing though is the entire management culture. Tactics can help change efforts be more successful. But if the culture is hostile to continual improvement (fear based, performance appraisal based, target based, blame based, imposing from on high...) the tactics are working in a difficult situation. Still a good idea, but no matter what tactics are used it will be a challenge.

When the culture has the right environment (PDSA, seek to continually improve the system, respect for people, support for innovation, understanding of variation in results, seek process weakness to improve not people to blame, provide training...) change is set in a system where resistance is much lower (and in very highly functioning systems it is encouraged not resisted).

Change tactics are still sensible but often they are baked into how things are done. As you grow more toward becoming such an organization change tactics fade into the normal process and the resistance fades too.

Related: Communicating Change - People Take Time to Believe Claims of Changed Management Practices - Encourage Improvement Action by Everyone

Pretending to Listen to Customers Rather Than Actually Doing So

Comment on Are You Really Listening to Your Customer or Just Going Through the Motions?

I find myself very frustrated at how incredible poor and superficial "listening to our customers" is at nearly all companies I have to deal with. It is atrocious, often beyond the superficialness of any concern is creating hoops to waste customers time who even deign to raise an issue of persistent failures by the company (I have had this with Amazon for the last 2 months - it is amazing how they expect you to repeatedly jump through hopes while they ignore you over and over). I would have dumped them for this horrible service but I can't get them to refund my sizable balance because it isn't their "policy" to bother to refund money in your balance.

A method to get useful feedback I learned maybe 20 years ago at a quality conference, it is really simple, why nearly no companies do it is a sign how little they actually care about customer service and improvement. Just ask "customers, what one thing could we do to improve?"

Then you also need systems in place to use what you learn to improve, of course.

Related: Delighting Customers - Simple Customer Care: Communicate - Poor Customer Service: Discover Card - What Job Does Your Product Do?