Five Frogs March 5, 2008
Posted by Lawrence Loucka in : Consulting, Reviews, Supply Chain , add a comment
Five Frogs are sitting on a log. Four decide to hop off. How many frogs are left?*
It doesn’t take much for good intentions to end up in disaster. It’s been my recent fate to be involved in two failed mergers, one a postmortem, the next a trainwreck-in-progress. Integrating distribution, logistics, information, management and financial systems; oh, and the people is a tough tough thing. The deal makers fall in love with the potential synergies and then all too often with out a plan or a process hope that magic will happen once the deal is done.
"Five Frogs on a Log: A CEO’s Field Guide to Accelerating the Transition in Mergers, Acquisitions, and Gut Wrenching Change” by Mark Feldman and Michael Spratt is a great guide, and not just for mergers and CEO’s but for any organizational change event and those who are caught up in the maelstrom of clashing cultures. A little light on methodology, this book will let you know what to expect from the merger/acquisition, encourage focusing on execution, the importance of communicating even when in the fog, it’s a virtual project plan for you and your leadership team.
Read it! Hopefully before, not after the chaos starts.
*Five. Because there’s a difference between deciding and doing. "Execution," the authors tell us, "is always more difficult than it seems."
Checklist December 21, 2007
Posted by Lawrence Loucka in : Lean, Quality, Reviews , add a comment
Check out Annals of Medicine: The Checklist by Atul Gawande in the Dec. 10. 2007 edition of The New Yorker for an insightful exploration of the medical application of one of the most basic of quality tools - the checklist. I was astounded to learn that checklists aren’t a common practice in one of the most complex industries, the emergency room. Setting up a machine, preparing for an audit, readiness reviews, planning a kaizen all have routine lists. Flying a plane, launching a rocket, preparing for battle all have checklists. Gawande describes how in 2001 Peter Pronovost, a critical-care specialist at Johns Hopkins, developed a simple five step checklist for inserting central line IV’s that dramatically reduced the odds of line infections, and the resistance he faced in implementing something so simple and yet so effective.
Hoshin Kanri July 4, 2007
Posted by Lawrence Loucka in : Definitions, Lean, Lean Sigma, Reviews , 2comments
At long last we now have a number of recent readable guides for understanding and implementing policy deployment in your organization. My introduction to policy deployment was as a middle management participant feeding data and ideas into the cascading Catch Ball sessions we would have as new policies and strategies came rolling down the mountain. Over the years I’ve been looking for good reference materials to offer to others as they struggle to comprehend the power and simplicity of the methodology.
First on my summer reading list was Hoshin Kanri for the Lean Enterprise by Thomas Jackson. Tom Jackson explains how you can implement, identify and manage the critical relationships among your markets, design characteristics, production systems, and personnel to satisfy your customers and give you a competitive advantage. Developed in Japan and practiced by Toyota, US companies like Bank of America, Acuity Brands, HP, divisions of Raytheon, Honeywell, Texas Instruments and others have institutionalized this robust tool set with dramatic results. Here. Here.
Jackson’s book is really a workbook with many examples, forms, checklists (on an accompanying CD), team exercises, road map, and a case study. This would be a perfect self study guide for a motivated leadership team ready to embrace policy deployment and change management.
The basic premise behind the hoshin plan is that the best way to obtain the desired result is to ensure that all employees in the organization understand the long-range direction and that they are working according to a linked plan to make the vision a reality. To accomplish this are a number of tools starting with the Shewhart Cycle (Plan Do Check Act), affinity (house of quality) diagrams, the X-matrix lean "balanced scorecard", and A3 presentation/communication style.
Also known as Policy Deployment, this methodology was first documented by Yoji Akao in the late 1960’s and first seen in the West in the mid ’70’s at Japanese subsidiaries of western companies such as YHP, a division of HP. Quality Function Deployment , QFD is a related tool set useful in group decision making in product and service design, brand and product management. QFD transforms customer critical requirements into engineering characteristics.
Getting the Right Things Done by Pascal Dennis is much the same as the two other works presented here but makes its approach at a slightly higher altitude. This book chronicles the journey of the company and its President, an experienced lean leader who was hired several years ago to steer Atlas in the right direction. While Atlas had already applied some basic lean principles, it had not really connected the people and business processes so that the company could dramatically improve. Being good at point solutions doesn’t make a lean transformation. Atlas’ challenge was to find a a way of focusing and aligning the efforts of good people, and the new delivery system, something that would direct the tools to the right places. Enter strategy deployment. The parable continues with the ins and outs of deploying Hoshin.
Jackson’s book is more tactical, Dennis’ perhaps more strategic, although both are implementation guides. Pick one and give it a go!
100 Bullshit Jobs … May 20, 2006
Posted by Lawrence Loucka in : Consulting, Reviews , add a comment
Stanley Bing has done it again with his latest treatise on corporate life with 100 Bullshit Jobs…And How to Get Them. The scholarly discipline of Bullshit Studies has blossomed in the last several years, fertilized by a number of critical works on the subject and the growing importance of the issue across a wide range of professions. Now, best-selling author and lifelong practitioner Stanley Bing enters the field with a comprehensive look at the many attractive jobs now available to those who are serious about their bullshit and prepared to dedicate their working life to it. What, Bing inquires, do a feng shui consultant, new media executive, wine steward, department store greeter, and Vice President of the United States have in common? What, too, are the actual duties performed by a McKinsey consultant? Other than sitting around making people nervous? Could that possibly be his core function? Likewise, what does an aromatherapist actually do, per se? Sniff things and rub them on people, for big fragrant bucks? Is that all? The answer in all cases is "Yes." They all have bullshit jobs. And you want one too! My favorite of the hundred, of course, is Consultant. Bing writes, "Duties: Chopper in. Get your orders. Receive validation from senior officer, one that allows you to push staff people around a little. Schedule meetings in which people are forced to talk about things they probably would rather not. "Capture" the "findings" in big pieces of paper you post on the walls during the meeting. "Drill Deep" into "process" with employees. Identify "challenges and opportunities" and "reach for new solutions." Go off. Have several glasses of malbec. Write "findings," telling your client a mixture of the things he needs to hear, the things he wants to hear, and the stuff you tell everybody. Go home. Feel good, having left the problems you solved and the problems you created behind you."
Fast Innovation March 5, 2006
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Fast Innovation : Achieving Superior Differentiation, Speed to Market, and Increased Profitability by Michael George, James Works, and Kimberly Watson-Hemphill is a great synthesis of current thinking on product and service development. Chapter 2 "How to Become Fast" isn’t about designing faster, rather it’s about how lead time and task variation cause delays in project schedules. Two "Laws" are introduced:
- Littles’ Law: Time-to-Market is inversely related to the number of projects in-process; the more projects you have, the longer all projects will take. The fewer projects you have, the faster the development process can flow.
- Law of Innovation Variation: Project task time varies and is related to percent utilization and number of cross trained resources. Delays stack up. Without slack time or off loading of critical resources projects will be late.