 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 : 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.
To me, some of the most valuable material is found in Chapter 4, "The Value of Thinking in Three Dimensions":
- product-service innovation
- market definition innovation
- process/business model innovation
I agree with them that although product and service innovation are the cornerstones of most innovation programs (e.g. Microsoft Windows and Voice-over-Internet-Protocol telephony), there are perhaps even greater opportunities in the other two dimensions, market definition innovation (which reflects the leverage possible from existing customer and supplier relationships) and process/business model innovation (which can create a competitive advantage that lasts longer than that from sustaining product or service innovations). The book isn’t a difficult read but will cause you to think, so if you don’t mind exercising your brain you might like picking this one up.
 by Yossi Sheffi was a gift from Rebecca Kane Dow of ConnStep to thank me for a Lean Six Sigma presentation Ken Branco, Bill Southward, and I made at the Connecticut Shingo Conference in Hartford on November 16th. Several days on the beach in Key West during Christmas week was enough to polish this one off. Sheffi’s view is that resilient companies have a corporate culture that pushes decision making to the periphery. In Toyota anybody on the production line can stop the line if they find a problem. This culture of responsiveness and responsibility runs from the top to the bottom. “People in resilient organizations know that when disruption is evident there is no time to go through the bureaucratic processes.”To develop an effective supply chain the author describes three major areas of management initiatives:First, focus carefully on understanding the company’s supply chain vulnerabilities. This includes analyzing the types of disruptions that can occur, assessing their likelihood, and estimating their probable effects. Managers need to know what the new states might look like before they can design techniques, processes, and systems to manage them. Second, create a concrete program to reduce the company’s vulnerability. Ways to do this range from reducing the likelihood of intentional disruptions, to intercompany and private-public collaboration for security, to systematic detection of disruptions, to resilience through redundancy. Third, vulnerability reduction is not enough; supply chain flexibility comes from process and structural changes achieved through interchangeability of parts and production facilities, through postponement, which customizes the product late in the production process, through flexible supply, and through customer relations management. These elements are critical because they allow a company to improve its resilience without simply adding costly inventory and capacity. Sheffi goes on to explain the importance of culture where he identifies six key cultural traits: (1) continuous communications among informed employees; (2) deference to expertise; (3) distributed power, which allows employees to take timely action; (4) knowledgeable, experienced management involved with the operations; (5) passionate employees who can be entrusted with the power to act; and (6) organizations conditioned to be innovative and flexible through frequent and continuous “small” challenges. Sheffi underscores the importance of company culture. “Company culture may be the real secret to the business success of the companies discussed in this book. . . . Day in and day out, this culture allows them to respond quickly and effectively to fluctuations in demand, small supply disruptions, and manufacturing woes.”
 With the Christmas holiday here I’ve managed to knock off another book; The World is Flat by Tom Friedman. The crux of the book is that over the Twentieth Century, the world began to go from a vertical, hierarchical structure to a horizontalization. Love that word, horizontalization. Things flattened out. As a meritocrat, I love this, because it means that instead of looking to solve a problem within a vertical silo, you look outward to who has the skills. So, it is becoming ever more possible for me to surround myself with complimentary people who do what I can’t.This flattening has 10 factors. The Berlin Wall falling (#1) broke down proverbial walls and opened eyes around the world. Netscape web browser going public (#2) and the software revolution in the 90’s (#3) connected software and connected people. It was this connecting that facilitated collaboration and factors #4-9 were collaborative extensions of that. (#4) Open Sourcing, (#5) Out Sourcing, (#6) Offshoring, (#7) Supply Chain, (#8) Insourcing, (#9) Informing (Google and the internet have put the world’s knowledge within grasp of all humanity). The “Steroids” (#10) of VOIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) and Wireless have just started, but have already changed the way we communicate. Flattenings #5-#8 have had significant impact on my life and career. Friedman helps put these developments into an interesting framework – distances geographical, political, social are disappearing.
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