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indygadgetgeek:

Here’s a new way to keep those meetings from dragging on too long: “Bring TIM!” (Time is Money), a time management clock that clearly shows everybody how much money is slipping away as they…

Getting a lot of people to hate you is easy - all you have to do is become really successful at doing something you love.

- Hugh MacLeod

by CHRIS CURRAN on MARCH 30, 2010

You strive to create a transparent IT organization. What is spent on strategic and operational systems should be clearly visible and its value easily measured. Availability of data about spending, productivity, problems and successes should be available to all business leaders in the language they speak. Enter the CIO Dashboard.

#Visual Management #Dashboards

Stop Training and Start Controlling Part II

Part 2 of an ongoing training series. Part 1 is here.

Okay, here’s the scenario: The CEO just received a hand-written letter from a customer complaining about the poor customer service he or she received. The CEO sends the letter to the Customer Service Manager along with a hand-written note saying “Fix this now!” … What is the right answer?

Fire the employee who was responsible for creating this incident

Send an email to the customer service mailing list that explains the value of a lost customer (who tells 3 of their friends who then tell 3 more friends, etc.)

Work with Corporate Training to roll out a new customer service training program

None of the above

If you answered None of the above, you can give yourself a firm pat on the back (or get your boss to do it for you). Why, you say? This is a question of math.

In every process, customer satisfaction is usually the ultimate goal. Of course, customer satisfaction is a difficult idea to measure which is why we recognize that there are several levels of customer satisfaction:

Delighted

Happy

Indifferent

Unhappy

Offended

Depending on your business strategy, you may or may not be out to delight your customer but it’s probably unlikely that your goal is to make your customer unhappy. Using this rationale, you can use a chart to keep track of your customer satisfaction level over time. Even if you are Google or Apple, its unlikely that 100% of your customers will be happy with you 100% of the time. This ebb and flow of customer satisfaction can be easily charted using various statistical tools. Over time, you’ll find that your processes produce a relatively predictable (stable) level of customer satisfaction. Any small variations within this range can be attributed to common causes such as customer temperament, market conditions, telephone quality, etc.

Common cause variation is vitally important to corporate trainers because one of the only ways to reduce common cause variation is through process improvement which often requires training, job tools, and visual aids.

Special causes, on the other hand, are those things which exist outside of the normal process. For example, putting a poorly trained agent on the phone with an important customer is a special cause. Not being staffed properly is a special cause. Rude employees are (should be) a special cause. In all of these situations, a common knee-jerk response mechanism for managers is to demand more training. This has the dual advantage of giving the appearance that they are doing something while subtly shifting the blame for future incidents on the training department.

Of course, the problem is here that you can’t treat special causes as a common cause. If your satisfaction statistics show that your customers are generally happy with your performance, rolling out a customer satisfaction training program is simply a waste of money (at best) and could potentially result in a negative effect.

This isn’t to say that you shouldn’t investigate. A root cause analysis or other formal investigation program should be pursued and the results documented. If the analysis suggests that a training program is warranted, then by all means, fire it up. But, most likely, the investigation will show that this isolated incident is simply that: isolated. Remember, statistically speaking, this is an anomaly. Don't cut down a perfectly good tree because of one bad apple.

Next time you get that memo from the CEO, don’t roll out a training program.. just give him this response:

“Yes, Boss. I’m sorry to hear about this situation, I admit it’s pretty rare considering our recent track record but rest assured, I’ll look into it...”.

#Special Cause #Common Cause #Training

#5S

It used to be that companies would hire people based on their potential. They would find someone with intelligence, stamina, and enthusiasm, then train them to do jobs that took advantage of their strengths. Unfortunately, in our fast-food economy, workers have become commodities - disposable assets. Companies aren't hiring for long-term organizational value, they want short-term specific value. The scan resumes for skills and competencies rather than accomplishments and growth.

If our country is going to get out of its economic funk, I think we need to re-think our long-term personnel strategies; we need to start investing in our human resources rather than casting them off whenever a blip shows up on the balance sheet. This isn't just Utopian talk, it's the difference between eating a home-cooked meal versus eating McDonalds for dinner every night.

Article Link:http://techcrunch.com/2010/03/27/why-america-needs-to-start-investing-in-its-workforce-again-2/

#TechCrunch,#Training #IBM

Stop Training and Start Controlling, Part I

Part 1 of an ongoing training series. Part 2 is here.

Let's admit this up front: As a ratio of compensation to value provided, corporate trainers are the worst compensated group in any organization. They work long hours and take few, if any, breaks. Even during lunch they are usually scrambling to get something prepared for the afternoon session. They tirelessly seek out ways to improve the organization and often function as a surrogate manager or supervisor when things are going the wrong way. Trainers are a vital part of the white space and an integral part of any company's competitive advantage. As a former trainer, I empathize with trainers everywhere (at least the good ones, anyway) and have great respect for their efforts...

If the corporation is like a living body, then corporate training is where you take its pulse.

The problem this article addresses is not the trainers - it's the training process I take exception to. Except in a small percentage of organizations, the corporate training department is often a loosely structured group of subject matter experts who have been "promoted" to trainer based on their productivity and skill levels alone in for the purpose of showing other people how to achieve a similar level of quality, productivity, or both. Rarely are these ad hoc trainers given any formal training on how to be a trainer. Some may rely on personal charisma while other read from a technical manual to a group of highly disengaged peers. In either case, a tremendous amount of waste is generated while very little value is created.

I don't mean to insinuate that there are no professional trainers with a background in adult education and teaching methods. Quite the contrary; there are several respectable college programs out there that provide high quality instruction in this area. These professional trainers are well educated in curriculum development, adult learning theory, assessment techniques, and business outcomes. Surprisingly, however, when asked about the value of training, the answers I get from the college graduates is rarely any better than what I get from the ad hoc trainers.

They all believe training is necessary.

Most believe that they can prove that training is beneficial.

Most believe that they have the ability to improve the business.

However, when pressed to quantify these metrics, most are unable to because most of them don't understand how their training affects the business process. If you can't measure it, how do you know you're doing it right? The problem here is that we are looking at it in the wrong way. We are trying to fit people into our processes rather than designing our processes for the people. In an ideal world, a well defined process should be so easy to implement that very little training is needed at all. Unfortunately, our corporate processes have become so convoluted and over-engineered that it takes a tremendous amount of training and knowledge to do even the simplest of tasks.

So, if you were to look at training as a process improvement activity rather than an action replication strategy, you start to look at it very differently. Most trainers begin with procedures: What are the steps necessary to achieve the outcome? The problem with this is that the goal shifts from quality to procedural compliance. This is important because it sets the bar for the learner and the manager. The other problem with this is that it often leads to the institutionalization of ineffective processes.

In the following articles, I'll discuss training effectiveness, value, and how Lean Six Sigma can be applied to dramatically increase importance of training in any type of organization.

#Training

Checking your ego at the door

I saw something amazing today. It was an advertisement for the Amazon Kindle – except it wasn’t for the Kindle hardware device. It was for the Kindle App on the iPad. It seems Amazon has come to the conclusion that Apple has built an irresistible book-reading experience with the iPad and it’s soon-to-be-released iBookstore. Amazon has two choices: fight the beast, or tame it.

For Amazon, this isn’t a time to be coy or analytical. Critical mass in this market can happen in only a few days. Miss the boat and it may be curtains. Palm learned this lesson the hard way with it’s Palm Pre. Before the iPhone came out, the Pre could have captured and cornered the market. But the iPhone did what nobody else did: it created a killer platform. The Apple App Store is to phones what Google is to browsers. The eBook reader is still in its infancy but growing very quickly. If Amazon loses this front, it’s destined to become the next eBay or Yahoo...

Amazon did something today that I found both amazing and impressive. They chose the market. It couldn’t have been easy for Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon. He undoubtedly staked his personal fame (and possibly some of his fortune) to bring the Kindle to market. His move to put Kindle on the iPad signifies his ability to let his own product die so that the platform can live. The advertisement even hints at weakness in the Kindle such as “page turn animation replicates the look of turning a page in book”. It also features a rich graphical interface that makes the browsing for books experience as enjoyable as browsing one’s only library in their den or office – something the Kindle can’t even come close to matching.

In a world where corporate egos are as big as the retention bonuses they receive each year, it’s should not go unnoticed that Amazon is attached to making money first, ego building second. How easy could you give up a pet project that you’d been working on for half your life simply because someone else did it better? Would you sacrifice the product in order to ensure survivability of the platform?

#Amazon #Kindle #iPad #Apple

jasoncalacanis

Listing really specific problems in job ads. Yay or nay?

4sigma-blog

howardtharp:

Rather than describe the position at a relatively high-level, this job ad took the time/risk of listing the very specific problems this job has to solve.

(Many would be hesitant to list such specific responsibilities for competitive reasons.)

This style is definitely more fair to the prospective employee.

jasoncalacanis:

Mahalo Seeks VP of Community Development Mahalo is a top 200 website that received over 15M unique visitors in February 2010. Our mission is to create “the world’s largest content site with the largest and most active base of contributors.” You can think of us as 1/3rd Wikipedia/About.com, 1/3rd Yahoo Answers and 1/3rd Google Search/Delicious. We’re trying to take the three main modes of knowledge-gathering on the internet—Content, Q&A and Search—and combine them into one seamless product. No one has ever done this, and we’re only 50% of the way there ourselves. In the role of VP of Community Development, you would work directly with the CEO, Jason Calacanis, to develop strategies and best practices around contributor acquisition, writer education and community development. Here are some examples of problems we might ask you to solve: ============================ 1. How would you integrate our topic page on the iPad (http://www.mahalo.com/ipad) with our Answers community tag page for iPad (http://www.mahalo.com/answers/tag/ipad)? 2. How would you grow and inspire our team of Vertical Managers, who earn 15% of the revenue from the 3,000 pages they manage? 3. We’re currently producing over 250 How To Articles a week—how would you add a zero to that number? 4. We currently share revenue on our Mahalo Answers question threads—what are the pros and cons of doing this? 5. Our virtual currency is currently one of the three main motivators in our community—the other two being fun and recognition. How should a site like ours balance cash, recognition and fun as rewards? In what other way(s) would you motivate our community? 6. How should we evolve the design of our Topic and Answers pages? Who has the best topic pages on the internet today and why? Who has the best answer threads on the internet today and why? The ideal person we’re looking for has the following traits: ============================ a) They inspire the people around them to do great things. b) They love to debate, are opinionated and look forward to creatively solving problems. c) They are resilient and resourceful when facing challenges. d) They are hard-working, helpful to other team members and they are respected because they “bring it every day.” e) They are honest and introspective, with the ability to admit mistakes and move on quickly. f) They are transparent, humble and willing to share their ideas and skills with others. g) They are able to come up with multiple innovative solutions to problems. h) They are organized and able to lead a large, distributed work force. i) They are positive and go about their mission with a sense of joy and fun. j) They have demonstrated their ability to grow online communities in the past, and have worked well curating the unique, and sometimes quirky, attributes of freelance writers. Some additional details on Mahalo: ============================ — Mahalo offers solid compensation and (hopefully!) valuable stock options. — Mahalo has cool benefits, like a private chef who cooks a healthy, organic breakfasts, lunches and two afternoon snacks that are brought to your desk at three and five PM. We also do people’s laundry, wash their cars and provide personal fitness training in the backyard. You will get healthy working at this company! — Mahalo is a flat organization without politics. We aspire to be a pure meritocracy where people are given responsibilities based on performance—not their age, who they suck up to or where they went to school. — We wont insult or belittle you during our interview process by asking you questions like “why are manhole covers round?” — Our core product hit breakeven this year and we have many years of capital in the bank. We are fully funded and, with hard work and dedication, should be able to reach our goal of being a Top 25 Site in the USA within the next three years (hopefully with your help!). — We’re humbled by the list of amazing people who have invested in our company, including Elon Musk, Mark Cuban, Sequoia Capital, News Corporation, CBS, Fred Wilson, Mark Pincus, Matt Coffin, John Miller, Sandy Climan, Hubert Burda and many others. If you’re interested in this position, please send a cover letter with some of your thoughts on the six questions/problems we raised above (numbered one to six) as well as where you rank on the personal traits we bring up in the lettered section above (A through J). Write as much or as little as you like—we’ll read it all, and if you’re in line with our culture, we will have you in for coffee/tea. More Details: This is a full-time position in our office (Santa Monica) Salary based on experience (we’re hoping you have 3-10 years in community building) Send your responses, cover letter and resume to [email protected]

Managing Drift: The danger of celebration

How many times have you seen a sports event take an unexpected twist at the last minute? This tends to happen in football a lot. The home team is up by two touchdowns and with only a minute to go in the game, the fans start celebrating. The bleachers begin empty out with people hoping to get a jump on traffic. And suddenly the worst happens. The home team also starts to celebrate. They start getting giddy and stop paying attention to the game. They've already mentally checked out. The visiting team senses this and it fires them up. 10 yards, 20 yards, long pass, touch down. It's now a one-score game. The visitors are playing on adrenaline now but the home team is playing on endorphins. (In case you were wondering, adrenaline beats endorphins every time.) Next thing you know, 60 seconds later, the home team loses the game - a game they thought they already won. A game they should have won.

I've seen this in business more times than I care to admit...

The CEO comes away from an inspiring off-site meeting with his executive line and announces a company-wide process improvement initiative. Countless numbers of hours, money, and opportunity costs are spent pursuing 5S, Lean, statistical control, and process improvements. The company is moving full speed ahead, achieves lots of milestones, and then does the worst possible thing: they celebrate.

Celebrating success is an important part of employee engagement. Unfortunately, it can send the wrong message. It can signify an end to what has been undoubtedly a long and tough campaign. It gives people a chance to take a breath and focus their efforts elsewhere. It gives people permission to drift.

The moral of this story is that process improvement is not an initiative. It's a new way of doing business. You wouldn't expect McDonalds to bring in a cake to celebrate their ability to cook meat to a proper temperature, would you? Of course not. Safe cooking practices are an essential part of the process. A celebration should be reserved for achieving success that is beyond the expectation - not simply meeting it.

To clarify, there is nothing wrong with celebration as long as it is sending the right message. Celebrate the journey, not the destination. Don't recognize people simply because of the amount of effort they have put forward; instead recognize people who have used the process methodology to make a measurable difference in the business. Reward results, recognize compliance, and reinforce behavior. Then eat cake.

#Drift #Celebration

The Mind of an Artist

I've been reading Seth Godin's latest work, "Linchpin". In it he describes the two basic types of people: workers and artisans. Workers are people who value their job. They get frustrated when you don't give them clear directions. They want to learn a skill, get really good at it, and get a nice reliable paycheck. They crave stability and social recognition...

"Some of the most wonderful people are the ones who don't fit into boxes."

-Tori Amos

Artisans, on the other hand, value their work. They don't need anyone to give them directions - only a sandbox and some basic tools. All you need to do is point them in the right direction and then step away and let them do their magic. They don't crave stability; in fact, they loathe it. Their craft is not something to be achieved but instead exists as a continous journey and a passion to learn and develop their skills. Artists don't necessarily have to be painters or writers; their interests can lead them anywhere: engineering, medicine, accounting, janitorial services, or the occasional cappuccino barista. As long as they have their art and they are allowed to pursue it with vigor, they are an unstoppable force....

Passionate Help Wanted

The word "passion" is one of the most misunderstood phrases you'll see in the help-wanted ads. Everyone, it seems, wants passionate people - people who are passionate about customer service or accounting or garbage cans. The funny part of this is that most of these employers don't understand what passionate work looks like. You don't hire someone who's passionate about painting cars and then put them on an assembly line painting hub cabs. When you ask for passionate people, you are asking for an artist - someone who can't be controlled, only directed. You are asking for someone who has their own vision and earnestly wants to share and combine that vision with yours. Artists don't paint stop signs, they come up with new ways of communicating the idea. Sometimes the idea is better, sometimes it isn't. One thing that is certain, your failure to understand them has absolutely no impact on their ability to be creative.

Signs don't paint themselves - but then again, robots can do it cheaper.

All of this leads to the next question: should you hire artists or workers? Which is better? You could make a pretty good argument for either but I'm inclined to believe that you need both. Stop signs don't paint themselves and there's a huge chunk of population out there that will be quite content to do nothing but paint perfect red octagons for the rest of their life. The problem with workers, however, is that they get more expensive every day. There's always someone who's willing to paint a stop sign for less money (probably better at it, too). Your competitors will compete with you based on who can find the cheapest labor. Your profit margin will continue to drop until eventually, you are forced to buy out your competition or let your competition buy you out.

Spend money to lose money; Invest money to make money

Artisans, on the other hand, get more valuable over time. They are in a constant pursuit of growth and creative solutions. They are restless and unsatisfied with the status quo. Talent like this doesn't get cheaper because the barrier to entry is too high. The trick, if you're lucky, is to find one of these artists early in their career, nurture them and build a relationship based on trust and openness, and you'll earn dividends. Before long, the amount of salary you are paying them is pittance compared to the value they bring to your organization.

And that is the defining difference. Workers cost money. Artists are an investment.

What are you?

Mailbag: Process Effectiveness

Yesterday I received an email regarding process effectiveness.

Matthew,

I'm curious to get your opinion. We are struggling to determine how to measure our process effectiveness. We currently measure cost-per-transaction and cycle time but neither of these seem to tell us how well are processes are helping us to meet or company goals. Any ideas?

BPM Guy - Sierra Vista, AZ

BPM Guy, great question!

Process effectiveness can be a loaded term. It tends to suggest an equation where the function of x results in y; y being an expression of effectiveness. (If I do the following 3 things, my process will be effective). Unfortunately, effectiveness itself is not a direct measure. It is merely an expression of the relationship between several direct and indirect measures and their relationship to the goals of the organization...

In a manufacturing environment, you might observe a near flawless ball-bearing production process and the production manager might proudly boast that it is extremely effective because of its ability to produce high quality bearings at low cost with an extremely low number of defects. However, if those ball bearings are produced too quickly, they may end up rusting somewhere in a warehouse. If that happens, the perfect ball-bearing production process is actually counter-effective because it does not help the organization meet its goals. It is simply tying up capital and increasing waste through over production.

It begins with the mission statement

All processes should support the mission. Otherwise, there is no point and they should be discarded. To take the student loan industry as an example, you start with the mission of the customer: "To increase my standard of living potential through the acquisition of knowledge and accreditation from a University". Based on this, the student loan company attempts to help this customer achieve their mission and creates the corrolary: "To leverage our capital resources through the origination and collection of student loan debts". These missions can then be further defined by strategy, tactics, and processes.

Defining the Process Trifecta

Every process has three basic measures: capability, cost effectiveness, and satisfaction. If the process is cost effective but does not satisfy the customer, it is waste. It if satisfies the customer but does not support the organizational goals, it is a distraction. If it supports the organization but absorbs so much cash that it interferes with other processes, it can quickly become counter-effective. All three must be met in some capacity. The exact balance is where strategy comes in. How satisfied do the customer's need to be? Are you offering a white glove service or a bare-bones commodity service? Do you have a large cash reserve or will you be relying solely on profits from existing sales? Once you have the answers to these questions, you are ready to assess your process effectiveness.

Process Effectiveness Survey To determine how effective your processes are, you need to first understand the mission of your organization by asking the following questions: Capability: Compared with others in your industry how would you describe your company:

We are the leader. When you think (product or service), you probably think of us.

We are a strong competitor. We are trying to distinguish ourselves by providing better quality, lower cost, and/or higher customer satisfaction than others in our industry.

We are up and coming. We pride ourselves on being nimble and creative. Our focus right now is in niche markets.

Cost Effective: How would you describe your revenue model:

Our revenue stream is fairly mature and complex. Our focus is on incremental revenue growth.

Our revenue stream is being eroded by new technologies, competitors, regulations, and/or suppliers. We are looking for new ways of adding revenue to our existing workstreams.

We rely primarily on income from sales. We don't have a large cash reserve and often rely on the credit market for business improvements or expansions.

Customer Satisfaction: What does your customer expect from you?

Customer satisfaction is our number one key business driver. We are a premium product or service and our customers are willing to pay extra for it. Given the choice between shareholder value and customer satisfaction, we would try to satisfy the customer even if it meant losing money on the deal.

Our customer's respect us for our reputation for quality and competitive prices. Although there are several competitors in our market providing similar levels of quality and service, our customers prefer to do business with a brand they recognize and trust.

We are a no-frills low-cost provider. Quality is important primarily because it keeps our costs low. Our customers are delighted because they get good quality products or services at a low cost. If an increase in quality created an increase in price, our customers would not necessarily be happy about it.

Now look at your processes. How well do they match up with each of the characteristics of capability, cost effectiveness, and customer satisfaction. Are your process metrics tuned into each of these characteristics? If you are a niche company focusing on lowering your costs, your processes will not be effective. Similarly, if you are a low-cost company, investing in white-glove services are going to drive your prices up.

How do you measure cost-effectiveness? Any ideas you'd like to suggest? Send your questions or suggestions and we'll try to help.

#Mailbag #Process Effectiveness

I used to be somebody but now I am somebody else Who'm might be tomorrow is anybody's guess

- Stephen Bruton: Somebody Else

What are you hiding from?

There's nothing like the experience of a bad flu to make you pay attention to the labeling practices of over-the-counter pharmaceutical companies. I don't take medication often so it's been a while since I've had to look at a medicine bottle. In my memory, the three most important things on every medicine bottle is: product name, active ingredients, and dosage instructions. However, I've realized that of those three things, only one - product name - is featured prominently on the carton. More surprisingly, however, is how much work these companies have gone to in order to hide the dosage instructions...

If you can read these instructions, you aren't really sick.

On my Theraflu bottle, for example, I had to search through a 3-page sticky manual for the instructions. Sure, I had a cup with some markings on it but it said nothing about how often I could or should take it. I found this both disturbing and perplexing. I checked other medicine bottles and packages for other brands and found the same thing. Why on earth would a pharmaceutical company hide the dosage instructions for the product?

I asked a pharmacist friend of mine and received a startling answer: kids. You see, a few years back, the FDA banned the practice of selling certain types of medication as "child" formulas. Because a child's body does not metabolize medication in the same way an adult's body will, research has discovered that many cold and fever treatments are ineffective at best, dangerous at worst. So they banned the "promotion" of these products. Children's medicine is a multi-billion dollar industry. As parents have become busier, fewer and fewer have health coverage, a cheap over-the-counter medication is increasingly the first response to a child's sniffles.

Here's the conjecture part. The pharmaceutical companies were dejected - terrified of turning away billions of dollars in worried-parent revenue. So, the solution became clear: If you can't promote children's dosages, then the next best strategy is to hide the fact that children shouldn't receive any at all. If you make someone flip through a three page manual that has been glued to the back of the bottle before learning that the medication is not recommended for children, chances are, they'll just give half a dose of the adult medication to their child.

As reprehensible as this is, it's not that unusual. Companies spend millions of dollars every year trying to hide things from their customers. Do you think a hot dog company would take out an advertisement that demonstrates the manufacturing process and ingredients list? No; instead they show you pictures of happy children with happy parents having a happy day with nary the slightest hint that this happy child could suddenly choke to death on their product.

If they'll hide this, what else are they hiding?

This is just advertising, you say? Think about something closer to home. Think about the last time you hired someone. Did you "sell" them on the company, the job, and you - their potential boss? Did you leave out any important details about the downside to the job - the fact that the last three people you hired for the position failed miserably, the fact that their new supervisor is facing possible termination for low performance, the fact that 25% of the people in your office have complained about air pollution and are planning to stage a protest in the cafeteria next week? Probably not.

Buyer's remorse has become common in nearly ever aspect of our lives but that's no excuse for us to add to the disaffection. Whenever we engage our customers, employees, financial resources, or processes, it's too easy to sweep our dust under the rug rather than facing the harsh reality for what it is. Unfortunately, reality always settles and a lot of the time, it happens at the worst possible moments. I'll end with examples from the 4 Sigma model.

Hiding from your finances: What are you not spending your money on? It's easy to run down a budget and see where the money has gone; what's not so easy is to see where it hasn't gone. Are you passing up opportunities to create lasting value in exchange for a short term gain? Are so focused on saving money that you are crippling your most creative people and preventing them from innovating? No business ever found success by saving money. Success means investment and it takes discipline and vision to learn where to invest and when to cut back.

Hiding from your customers: This may be a side effect of hiding from your finances but can also exist on its own. Hiding from your customers is ignoring their needs in order to satisfy your desire for stability and increasing aversion to risk. Customer's needs change and if you are spending more time trying to fit them into your product rather than fit your product to them, they'll eventually find something else that suits them better.

Hiding from your processes: This is the one that spins people for a loop but it is the simplest one to correct. Hiding from your processes means confronting those clunky, ghastly processes rather than simply ignoring them. The temptation is to ignore the lower cost processes and instead focus on the big-bang processes that have bigger payback. Problem is, your value stream is only as robust as your least efficient process. These ugly ducklings can pack a whallop despite their low cost per cycle. Focus on the big things but don't stop paying attention to the little things. People don't trip over mountains, they trip over small pebbles.

Hiding from your employees: Your mama said "honesty is the best policy" and this couldn't be more true than the relationship with your employees. We live in a social world. If you think for a moment that your employees don't know what's going on with you, your company, or your competitors, you are in for a world of shock. There are no secrets anymore and the more you try to keep one, the less your staff will trust you. The worst part of this is while you might be able to hide something from your employees for a short time, in the end the only person you are hiding from is yourself.

That's it. What are you hiding? I'd love to hear about it. Send your story and you might be our next guest editor.

#Hiding #Honesty #Theraflu #4Sigma

The Balanced Scorecard

The key feature of 4 Sigma is its emphasis on striking the right balance. The balanced scorecard concept has been around for decades and has even grown into a full set of management philosophies and strategies. The Balanced Scorecard Institute has adapted this philosophy and produced a model that focuses on 4 major perspectives:

Financial

Customer

Internal Business Processes

Learning and Growth

Where I differ from BSI (with the greatest of respect) is the Learning and Growth perspective. Learning and growth cannot be dictated by management just as artistic expression can not be added as a line item in a job description. The best any management strategy can accomplish is to provide an environment where learning and growth can develop without the fear of negative consequences...

In today’s business environment, I find it more productive to replace the term scorecard, an arbitrary retrospective measurement tool, with the more forward thinking term engagement:

Financial Engagement: How engaged are our financial resources? Are only we looking to build profit or are we trying to invest in long-term value?

Process Engagement: How well are our processes tuned into the business strategy? Are we aligned? Do we have our priorities in the right order?

Customer Engagement: What level of engagement do we have with our customers? Do they see us as a commodity or as a partner? Are we reaching out to them as often as they are reaching out to us?

Employee Engagement: What kind of environment do we provide for our employees? Are they motivated? Passionate? Engaged? What effect do our policies and management strategies have on productivity?

In subsequent articles, I’ll be dealing with each of these in greater detail.

#Balanced Scorecard #4Sigma #Model

In just over a year, Alan Mulally has transformed Ford from a has-been to a leader in the automotive space. In this video, he talks about the new Ford vision, auto bailouts, and perceptions of quality. Great video.

#Ford #Quality #Time

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