Results tagged “management”

I've done enough traveling on business to appreciate the value of a good hotel room. A good night's sleep really does help you be more functional the following day. Comfortable rooms in major cities aren't cheap, so I don't cringe (much) when it costs three times more to attend Semicon West than to visit my family.

But then I look at the travel budget for officials at the Smithsonian, and I wonder what planet they're living on. Remember, these are government employees, traveling at taxpayer expense while keeping both hands out for donations. Thousand-dollar hotels for the head of a museum paid for by children's lunch money. Sheesh.

People who work in life critical situations generally take a zero tolerance approach to mistakes. Whether you're landing airplanes, performing surgery, or handling nuclear missiles, it's important to get it right every single time.

Error management is a discipline unto itself, and far too broad a topic to explain here. The interesting part, though, is the balance between rigorous attention to detail and non-punitive management (PDF file) of the people actually doing the work. On the one hand, it's important to have and follow detailed procedures. On the other, if you fire everyone who makes a mistake, people will just hide their mistakes and you won't know where the problems in the organization actually are.

That's at the organizational level. Unfortunately, errors that come to the attention of people outside the organization are likely to become evidence in a lawsuit. (This is especially an issue with medical errors.) There's that punitive culture again. Can doctors learn from their mistakes if they are punished for admitting they made them? (Along these lines, I've mentioned Atul Gawande's excellent book Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance before. It's worth a look for a doctor's perspective.)

Motorola made two simultaneous announcements the other week.

They announced a focus on product development, to create a steady stream of innovative new cellphones rather than one-hit wonders like the Razr.

And they announced a 15% cut in R&D spending.

What's wrong with this picture?

The claim is that the spending cuts will make R&D spending more efficient. Where have we heard that before?

One of the biggest advantages any brand has is the perception of quality. Brand owners spend huge amounts of money to convince consumers that their products are made better, designed better, and backed by a better customer service organization than lower priced, generically branded competition.

That's why the reports of quality issues associated with Chinese manufacturers should horrify any brand owner. One distributor spiked wheat gluten with plastic to increase the measured protein level, and killed who knows how many cats. Another replaced glycerin sweetener with diethylene glycol, also known as antifreeze. And now it turns out that the gum strip that helps prevent tread separation was simply left out of imported tires. All of these problems have in common a willingness to cut dangerous corners in order to cut costs, precisely the attitude that brand owners imply is rampant in off-brand products, and the attitude that consumer protection laws were written to punish.

The hard lesson is that government is not going to be much help. The US government has no jurisdiction. Foreign governments have no interest in slowing the flood of US capital, and often have inadequate consumer protection laws anyway. If you care about the quality of the products that carry your brand, you're going to have to monitor that quality yourself. Otherwise, you're only an unethical supplier on the other side of the world away from watching all your hard-earned brand equity go down the drain.

USA Today has a thorough discussion of failures in generalship during both Vietnam and the current Iraq War. One of the author's most important points is that moral courage is essential to generalship: having the courage to present unpleasant truths to civilian policymakers, and to the public if necessary, is just as important as courage under fire. In a democracy, generals owe their allegiance to the nation, not to a particular President or Defense Secretary.

Peter Drucker emphasized the importance of moral courage in corporate leadership as well. In the long run, dishonest accounting and other dicey business practices cause damage far beyond whatever short term benefit they achieve. Too often, though, the participants in corporate scandals float to earth under golden parachutes while shareholders and ordinary employees struggle with the mess they left behind.

I've been reading Atul Gawande's new book, Better, about medical performance and ways to improve it. One of his most important points is that positive deviants -- people who lie at the upper end of the bell curve -- exist everywhere, and consistently achieve above average outcomes. They range from mothers in Third World villages who raise well-nourished children in spite of overwhelming poverty, to doctors in India who achieve some of the best ulcer surgery results in the world under conditions that would terrify most Western doctors and patients, to cystic fibrosis clinics whose patients live more than ten years longer than those at average clinics. Superior performance in these cases does not come from better technology, but from better science: seeing which interventions make things better, applying them consistently, and never being satisfied that something is "good enough."

Medicine makes the contrast between good and merely average performance especially stark-- patients who get better care generally live longer -- but the bell curve exists in every field. It's the difference between the Hall of Fame baseball player with a lifetime batting average above .300, and a weak hitter with an average of only .250 or so. (For non-baseball fans, that's a difference of only 50 hits per thousand at-bats.) In semiconductor manufacturing, the difference is measured in percentage points of yield, or weeks of production ramp, and it adds up to millions of dollars.

Technology certainly helps -- those doctors in India could do even better with better facilities and adequate supplies -- but it is only a tool. Performance is a process.