Wednesday, August 8, 2012

Willy Shih on restoring American competitiveness at Discovery Summit

In their award-winning Harvard Business Review article “Restoring American Competitiveness,” Willy Shih and his co-author, Gary Pisano, note that “nearly every US brand of laptop and cell phone is not only manufactured but designed in Asia.” “Most Americans have no idea where the stuff they buy comes from and don’t [...]



by Jessica Marquardt via JMP Blog

Tuesday, August 7, 2012

JMP Student Edition: Help students master statistical concepts quickly

People are often surprised to learn that of all students taking college-level statistics courses, well over 90% are enrolled in introductory service-oriented statistics courses. This amounts to more than 1 million students every year in the US alone! While these are typically terminal courses that satisfy graduation requirements, they are [...]



by Curt Hinrichs via JMP Blog

Customer Focus by Everyone




There are many critical elements to a management system. One that is fundamental, yet still poorly executed far too often, is creating a system where all staff can focus on enhancing value to the customer every day.


If your enterprise does not focus on this, it should. If you think your enterprise does, my first, second and third suggestions are to think more critically about whether it really does. If the answer is yes, then you are lucky to work in such an organization.


Saying that customers are valued is easy. Actually designing systems to focus on providing value and continually improving to provide value more effectively is not. It really shouldn’t be obvious to a customer in 5 minutes of interacting with your organization that it is obvious customers are not very important.


It is very difficult to create a system with customer focus by all staff without several basic supports in place. Respect for people needs to be practiced – not just mentioned. If there isn’t time to work on improvements to the system, often meaning you have the equivalent of sickness management instead of a “health care system” that is a shame. The reality of most organizations seems to be to make it very annoying for customers to even bring an issue they are having to the attention of the organization and even then the gaol is to use the absolute least amount of effort for the band-aid that can be tolerated.


Staff have to be given authority to act in the interest of customers. But this can lead to chaos if a good system isn’t in place to steer this process. And without processes in place to capture (systemically) needed improvements there will be huge waste.




Given staff authority to act is good. But you don’t want staff just slapping on band-aid effectively thousands of times. Systems (documented processes, data collection, training…) have to be in place to let everyone improve systems to improve results. Staff need to not just provide customer value right away they need to determine if the actions they are taking could be better handled by changing the process.


It is very rare, in my experience, to see anything close to what management experts will suggest or leaders claim exists, actually working when the customer comes in contact with the organization.


Go to the gemba as a customer of your organization. I would be surprised if you can’t think of things that would make your experience better. Try to request those improvements and see what happens. If you get a great response that is awesome (but not something I believe will happen often). In some cases it might not work if you try yourself (smaller organizations where you would be recognized and not treated as a normal customer, if so just have a friend try it).


There are lots of details on what should be done to make this work well. But the state of most places I interact with as a customer are so missing in any effort at doing this well that the first steps needed are not tricky. Once you have a few things in place and things are starting to work, read some good ideas and encourage staff to do so and then just adopt ideas from Deming, Ohno, Ackoff, Scholtes… it isn’t hard to do hugely better than what is going on now.


Are your staff really focused on how to provide the most value to customers every day? Or are they just trying to survive the day? How are they encouraged to be thinking of providing customer value? How do managers know if they have created an environment that is encouraging that focus? How are senior executives focused on customers (not just spreadsheets actual customers)?


Often a real challenge to focusing on customers is the much great focus on minimizing costs. In many organization the cost minimization focus is so far ahead of anything else that it is not possible to imagine that it is sensible to value customers instead of seek to stop customers from contacting us in the first place and if they do then do the absolute least that can be done. Reducing costs that don’t provide customer value is good. The abandonment of customer service by most organizations in the name of saving money is lousy.


Related: Engage in Improving the Management SystemChange is not Improvement




by John Hunter via Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog

Monday, August 6, 2012

Constructing a custom design with 2 nested random blocking factors

My previous post demonstrated some advantages of designed experiments using random blocks rather than the more traditional fixed blocks. My main point was that random blocks can allow for more cost-effective experiments because they require fewer runs for a given set of factors and model specification. There is another advantage [...]



by Bradley Jones via JMP Blog

Saturday, August 4, 2012

Job posting: Analytics software tester at JMP

Good news! I have a JMP job listing to share with you. This time, it's a software testing job in JMP R&D. Here's the description of the job from the SAS Careers site (where all JMP jobs are posted): "As a JMP Analytics Software Tester, you will validate statistical features [...]



by Arati Korwar via JMP Blog

Friday, August 3, 2012

Data visualization of funding of 2012 Olympics

The Guardian, a London newspaper, recently published a blog post, "What's the Real Price of the Olympic Games?" that showed the sources of funding and use of those funds for the 2012 Olympics. The blog post included an interactive graph, shown below: A viewer could click on one of the [...]



by Charles Pirrello via JMP Blog

Thursday, August 2, 2012

My New Book: Management Matters




Image of the book cover of Management Matters by John Hunter

Management Matters by John Hunter is now available.



I have a new book in progress: Management Matters. It is now available in “pre-release format” via leanpub. The idea I am experimenting with (supported by leanpub) is pre-publishing the book online. The ebook is available for purchase now, and comes with free access to the updates.


My plan is to continue working on the book for the next few months and have it “release ready” by October, 2012. One of the advantages of this method is that I can incorporate ideas based on feedback from the early readers of the book.


There are several other interesting aspects to publishing in this way. Leanpub allows a suggested retail price, and a minimum price. So I can set a suggested price and a minimum price and the purchaser gets to decide what price to pay (they can even pay over suggested retail price – which does happen). The leanpub model provides nearly all the revenue to the author (unlike traditional models) – the author gets 90% of the price paid, less 50 cents per book (so $8.50 of a $10 purchase).


They provided the book in pdf, mobi (Kindle) and epub (iPad, Nook, etc.) formats. And the books do not have any Digital Rights Management (DRM) entanglements.


Management Matters covers topics familiar to those who have been reading this blog for years. It is an attempt to put in one place the overall management system that is most valuable (which as you know, based on the blog, is largely based upon Dr. Deming’s ideas – which means lean manufacturing are widely covered too).


I hope the book is now in a state where those who are interested would find it useful, but it is in what I consider draft format. I still have much editing to do and content to add.


Leanpub also provides a sample book (where a portion of the content can be downloaded to decide if you want to buy). If you are interested please give it a try and let me know your thoughts.




by John Hunter via Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog

Wednesday, August 1, 2012

Pair wins ASA Statistics in Chemistry Award



Scott Allen of Novomer and Bradley Jones of JMP have won the American Statistical Association's 2012 Statistics in Chemistry Award. Allen is co-founder and Vice President of Catalyst Development for Novomer, a Massachusetts-based sustainable chemistry company and JMP customer. Jones is Principal Research Fellow at JMP and a renowned expert [...]



by Arati Korwar via JMP Blog

Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog Carnival #174






The Curious Cat management blog carnival is published 3 times a month with hand picked recent management blog posts. I also collect management improvement articles for the Curious Cat Management Articles site; an RSS feed of new article additions is available.



  • How to Identify Your Team or Organization’s Purpose by Jesse Lyn Stoner – “What is the end-result that you offer? Look at your purpose from the viewpoint of the result, not the products or services you offer.”

  • What we can learn from Russell L. Ackoff by Aleksis Tulonen – “If you want to (dis)solve the problem you need to understand how (dis)solving the problem will affect the system and what the problem really is. Gathering the mental constructs of several people with different mindsets will gain you more understanding of what you are dealing with.”


  • photo of White House Rose Garden with Oval Office in the background

    White House Rose Garden, Washington DC. By John Hunter. See more photos from Washington DC.




  • Why smart managers do stupid things by John Stepper – “What You See Is All There Is. Over and over, he demonstrates how people systematically disregard basic probability and other facts in order to (quickly and easily) make up a story that fits with the things they see.”

  • Downtime Antipatterns for SaaS owners, ZipCar edition – “Use an automated system to point DNS entries to a ‘sorry, we’re down, please see http://status.zipcar.com’ page running on a commodity VPS in a completely different datacenter. Provide useful information to the customer RIGHT AWAY, and don’t leave them wondering why the page isn’t loading.”

  • Espoused Vs. In-Use by Anthony DaSilva – “From over 10,000 empirical cases collected over decades of study, Mr. Argyris has discovered that most people (at all levels in an org) espouse Model II guidance while their daily theory in-use is driven by Model I.”




  • MD Anderson Presentation: W. Edwards Deming: The Man and the Message by Mark Graban – “He could be hard on executives, but tended to be more patient with front-line workers. Deming told Doris, ‘They don’t pay me to sugar coat the truth’ (to the execs). But, one day was hard on a production worker for not understanding variation. That evening, Deming agonized over that and realized he shouldn’t have been hard on her for not understanding… he wrote multiple drafts of an apology letter for before sending it to the woman.”

  • Overfocus on tech skills could exclude the best candidates for jobs by Mike Loukides – “A number of articles recently have suggested that the problem with jobs isn’t the workforce, it’s the employers: companies that are only willing to hire people who will drop in perfectly to the position that’s open.”

  • Beginning to understand the power of coaching – seeing the connection to respect for people by Connor Shea – “Coaching is less focused on specific content then it is on the person, and the relationship’s ability to empower the coachee to find capabilities and a self sufficiency they didn’t fully believe in or know they have.”

  • Value Stream Mapping for Fun and Profit by Evan Durant – “During implementation the team was considering increasing batch size in order to smooth out some issues with the new kanban system. Rather than speculate as to the impact of such a change (as might have been the case in the past) the team returned to the future state map, changed the batch size, and recomputed the timeline.”



  • by John Hunter via Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog