Management Articles by John Hunter

• Using Quality to Develop an Internet Resource   view details
  The article provides guidance to help those responsible for managing the application of internet technology to improve the performance of organizations.

• My Thoughts after 6 Sigma Conference   view details
  Review of thoughts prompted by attending a conference on six sigma practice focused on items of interest for those familar with Deming's philosophy.

• USA Spent Record $2.3 trillion ($7,681 Per Person) on Health Care in 2008   view details
  Health spending in the United States grew 4.4% in 2008, to $2.3 trillion or $7,681 per person... For comparison the total GDP per person in China is $5,970 (the closest total country per capita GDP, to the health care spending per capita in the USA, is Th

• What Could we do Better?   view details
  "To encourage useful feedback, specifically give the customer permission to mention something that could be improved. What one thing could we do better?"

• Ford and Managing the Supplier Relationship   view details
  "The difficulty is not in reducing the number of suppliers. The difficulty is that you must change the nature of your relationship with the suppliers. And that will require changing the nature of the management systems within Ford. The various factors inv

• Excessive Executive Pay   view details
  "As long as the pay packages were merely large, and didnt effect the ability of a company to prosper that could continue (slicing up the benefits between the stakeholders is not an exact science). The excesses recently have become so obscene as to become

• Toyota IT Overview   view details
  "Customize the code, to business processes: not the other way around. Yes. Yes. Yes. IT should support your processes not dictate them. I am a big fan of avoiding inflexible, proprietary (off the shelf) software. I am willing to spend money on in house de

• The Purpose of an Organization   view details
  "The aim proposed here for any organization is for everybody to gain - stockholders, employees, suppliers, customers, community, the environment - over the long term." Dr. W. Edwards Deming

• Write it Down   view details
  "In meetings writing down decisions (what is the issue, who is going to do what...) is very helpful. It is very easy for people to think people agree to some somewhat clear statements made in the meeting. Only later it becomes obvious several people have

• Deming Based Organizations   view details
  "Dr. Deming did not propose a cookbook to follow. Instead he proposed a theory that requires learning and application within a specific institution. I see Toyota as the best example of a Deming company. Toyota has created a management system that is based

• Manufacturing and the Economy   view details
  "The conventional wisdom was that the rest of the world would not be able to compete with the United States for high wage, high value jobs. It turns out the rest of the world is much more able to compete for that work than was expected. ... To achieve e

• Peter Scholtes   view details
  My father wrote about the First Street Garage project in W. Edwards Deming's Out of the Crisis (pages 245-247). Peter (who was working for the City of Madison at the time) and he became good friends working on that project together. Peter went to work for

• Bad Management Results in Layoffs   view details
  "Depending on the magnitude of problems it might be that other employees (including managers) would have to suffer (take less pay) just as stockholder might have to take reduced returns in the short term. These would not be easy trade-offs. And layoffs mi

• Lean Thinking and Management   view details
  "The biggest thing I think we need to learn from this is that improving management is not easy. The concepts may seem simple but most of us can look around and see much more Dilbert Boss behavior than lean thinking behavior. And the gap between those two types of behavior seems to rise as you go 'up' the organization chart."

• Dangers of Forgetting the Proxy Nature of Data   view details
  "We use data to act as a proxy for some results of the system. Often people forget that the desired end result is not for the number to be improved but for the situation to be improved. We hope, if the measure improves the situation will have improved..."

• Circle of Influence   view details
  "Prove yourself to be valuable and you will gain influence. Help people solve their problems. They will be inclined to listen to your ideas. Provide people useful management tools and help them apply them successfully... It isn't some secret sauce for qui

• Metrics and Software Development   view details
  "I find looking at outcome measures (to measure overall effectiveness) and process measures (for viewing specific parts of the system 'big picture') the most useful strategy. The reason for process measures is not to improve those results alone. But those process measures can be selected to measure key processes within the system..."

• Create a System That Lets People Take Pride in Their Work   view details
  "Using the term implies that it one person empowers another person. This is not the correct view. Instead we each play a role within a system. Yes there are constraints on your actions based on the role you are playing. Does a security guard empower the CEO to enter the building? ... You don't need to think about empowering people if you have a system that lets people take pride in what they do. If you think you need to empower staff, instead fix the system that requires you to think they are in need of empowerment."

• Don't Treat People Like You Want to be Treated   view details
  "You should treat people how they want to be treated, not how you want to be treated. "

• Actionable Metrics   view details
  "Metrics are valuable when they are actionable. Think about what will be done if certain results are shown by the data. If you can't think of actions you would take, it may be that metric is not worth tracking."

• How Do We Know What We Know? - Deming's SoPK Part IV   view details
  "If we can break from such beliefs that are not useful in modern organizations, we can improve our decisions. Having a Deming-based theory of knowledge will help us break from those beliefs and it will help us be more thoughtful as we learn to question other management beliefs we hold (many of which simply are not useful - or cause harm). Understanding the theory of knowledge within the context of the Deming's System for Managing helps us more effectively and consistently learn and improve the processes and systems we work with. "

• How to Get a New Management Strategy, Tool or Concept Adopted   view details
  "Often when learning about Deming’s ideas on management, lean manufacturing, design of experiments, PDSA… people become excited. They discover new ideas that show great promise to alleviate the troubles they have in their workplace and lead them to better results. But how to actually get their organization to adopt the ideas often confounds them..."

• Maximize Test Coverage Efficiency And Minimize the Number of Tests Needed   view details
  "The steeper the slope the more efficient your test plan is. If you repeat the same tests of pairs and triples and… while not taking advantage of the chance to test, untested pairs and triples you will have to create and run far more test than if you intelligently create a test plan. With many interactions to test it is far too complex to manually derive an intelligent test plan. A

• Keys to the Effective Use of the PDSA Improvement Cycle   view details
  "The PDSA cycle is a learning cycle based on experiments. When using the PDSA cycle prediction of the results are important... The plan stage may well take 80% (or even more) of the effort on the first turn of the PDSA cycle in a new series. The Do stage may well take 80% of of the time - it usually doesn't take much effort (to just collect a bit of extra data) but it may take time for that data to be ready to collect."

• Manage Better by Managing Less   view details
  It can be tempting to cram your days full of activity to show how hard-working and vital you are. Finding time to think is hard enough; maxing out your capacity makes it next to impossible. Everyone agrees taking time to think is wise. But I have rarely seen managers make it a priority. Managers will say they value it, but they cram schedules so full that they can’t really spend time thinking.

• Special Cause Signal Isn’t Proof A Special Cause Exists   view details
  The control chart is a good way to keep us focused on common cause thinking for improvement. It is also very useful in flagging when it is time to immediately start using special cause thinking (since timing is key to effective special cause thinking)...

• Profit = Market Price - Actual Cost or Price = Cost + Desired Profit   view details
  "Apple would probably sell very few iPhones for $2,000 more than they cost today. How many they would sell at $100 more or $100 less may change significantly but they would still be huge sellers at either of those prices. So that "market sets the price" idea is not 100% accurate (I don't think anyway). ... Pricing decisions also have big long term versus short term considerations. Apple has started pricing many things in a way which makes it hard for competitors to undercut them. Apple, almost for sure could charge more for the laptops they sell and the iPad and iPhone. But if they did they make it easier for a competitor to compete on price. This pricing decision is an Apple decision not a market decision."

• The Art of Discovery   view details
  Quotes by George Box in the video: “The scientific method is how we increase the rate at which we find things out.” “I think the quality revolution is nothing more, or less, than the dramatic expansion of the of scientific problem solving using informed observation and directed experimentation to find out more about the process, the product and the customer.” “Tapping into resources: Every operating system generates information that can be used to improve it. Everyone has creativity. Designed experiments can greatly increase the efficiency of experimentation."

• Building a Great Software Development Team   view details
  "Passion for the right things, based on what we aimed to be, mattered a great deal. That took the form of being passionate about the user experience, being passionate about good software development practices, being passionate about good software itself, being passionate about treating each other with respect, being passionate about learning and improving. I think there were several other important factors, such as: the skill to turn a passion for good software into actual good software..."

• Visual Management and Mistake-Proofing for Prescription Pills   view details
  "To apply visual management requires giving a bit of thought to how to make visually obvious what is important for people to know. Mistake proofing is often really mistake-making-more-difficult (for some reason this term of mine hasn’t caught on)."