Dec 14, 2010 | Leadership, Lean, Management, Operations
Measuring productivity involves a combination of hard and soft measures, the soft ones being both the critical ones and the ones that have most impact.
In 15 years of consulting across a range of businesses and industries, I have come to the conclusion that there are three factors that at a macro level positively influence the capacity of an enterprise to build productivity in a continuous manner.
- They are cross functional
- They are decentralised, with a loose/tight management culture
- They are connected to customers in a range of ways not associated with the immediacy of the next sale.
None of these are easy to achieve individually, but they seem to be mutually supporting, so setting out to support the evolution of all three over time pays dividends. To do so takes confident and inclusive leadership, and a long term view of the purpose of the organisation.
Nov 7, 2010 | Collaboration, Leadership, Operations
What a nice term to describe the process of improvement that can occur in a voluntary manner, where the reward is not monetary, but the recognition of peers that you made a contribution to a worthwhile outcome. The value of “I did that”!!
Linux and Wikipedia are both examples of peer production that have changed the way the world works, but there are many others. The core of successful continuous improvement is the willingness of people to take individual responsibility and do something better than it was done yesterday, not because they have been told to do so, or paid to do so, but because it is worth doing.
In operational situations management often tries to encourage the evolution of these systems, but most fail, simply because they are “managed” rather than led.
Leading means facilitating the culture that nurtures the undirected and common accountability necessary, rather than thinking they can direct the processes and outcomes.
Nov 4, 2010 | Change, Operations, Personal Rant
Last week talking to a colleague, we agreed that a skill that seems to have been lost in the rush to electronic aids is being able to look at a bunch of numbers and know if it is approximately right or wrong. It seems that many over 50 just “know” if the column is OK, whereas a youngster who has all the electronic skills has no idea.
There seemed to us to be something cognitive at work that we did not have a grasp of, then I came across this article on the impact on learning of writing, and realised that the same phenomenon is possibly at work with numbers.
As kids at school, we worked with numbers, wrote down all the exercises, before we worked them, I can even remember not being allowed to bring a calculator into exams because they just gave an answer when understanding the process of arriving at an answer was as important as getting the right answer, so we had to show the workings to demonstrate understanding.
When involved in improvement projects in factories, I often find the default position is to buy some software, when time and time again the best outcome is achieved with simple visual recording and labeling. Now I understand a bit better why that is.
Oct 20, 2010 | Management, Operations, Personal Rant
If you ever needed a lesson in the pitfalls of negotiating under pressure, take a look at the mess created by the agreement of the terms of the revised Mining Resources Rent Tax between the large miners, and the Federal government . If it wasn’t so serious, it would be funny.
In simple terms, the deal which set MRRT rates was with the Federal government, but the states own the resources, and already do, and will continue to levy, a royalty payment on tonnes extracted.
The miners thought the MRRT rate was inclusive of any increase by the states in Royalties, so they had a reliable ceiling on the total tax paid, the Feds say no such condition was agreed, and the states are cash strapped, and looking for revenue, where better than the miners in a boom.
All parties stuffed up royally by making assumptions in a pressure cooker negotiation, and not articulating them in the discussions, and written agreement.
This is easy to do under pressure, but these guys are supposed to be experts, so it is unbelievable that such a basic oversight occurred. The lesson is that whatever you do, take some time away from the scramble and pressure of “completing” a negotiation before an agreement is executed to ensure all the bases are covered.
Oct 17, 2010 | Innovation, Operations
Usually discussion about innovation focuses on the new stuff, the things that have, or need to change to deliver a changed outcome.
During a discussion recently about “green electricity” in Australia, specifically solar power, it struck me that the costs of the Photo Voltaic panels was dropping rapidly, and is the focus of most of the activity, and certainly all the publicity. By contrast, all the surrounding elements of the value chain necessary to deliver the innovative technology, the processes to source parts, deliver, maintain and install the cells, and link them to the existing grid, were all going up in price, more than offsetting the benefits of the drop in price of the core technology.
Innovation is only of any value when it is delivered, when the benefits flow, and usually the “delivery” is a forgotten element of the whole process during the hype.
Oct 4, 2010 | Alliance management, Collaboration, Operations, Social Media
Somehow, there is an evolutionally phenomenon at work that kicks in when a group gets larger than 150-200, the number that social research has repeatedly identified as the number of people that any individual can have a relationship with, first postulated by anthropologist Robin Dunbar, and now commonly known as “Dunbar’s number.“
As humans evolved, they did so in groups of 200 maximum, and there was little serious conflict inside the group, but there was constant conflict with the similar sized groups in the vicinity, even though they were to all intents and purposes, identical, apart from their group membership.
We now have social media seemingly rewriting the rules, or is Facebook and similar networks the electronic equivalent of a genetic mutation?
In a situation where you have many more than the genetic 200 having a sort of a relationship facilitated by the net, what implications does this mutation, if that is what is, have on the way we should be thinking about using, and regulating access to these sites, and what are the implications in the management of conflict?.
These are very big questions for the next 20 years thay deserve more than a passing, and ideaology driven response.
