Apr 24 2011
Recruiting and Lean Human Resource Management
Some companies subject job applicants to hands-on tests of the skills required for a position. This says that they appear more interested in filling a capacity gap for a skill set than in recruiting people for careers. The most extreme cases are the “coding interviews” given at Silicon Valley software companies, during which candidates are asked to solve programming problems. This has spawned a whole sub-industry of coaches and books to help cram for such interviews. The problems are typically the kind of textbook exercises given in college that experienced programmers have long forgotten and are irrelevant to their actual work. College students, for example, learn various ways of sorting records, while professional application programmers just use built-in Sort functions. Software developers with, say, 20 years of experience with databases perceive these interviews as silly and demeaning, raising the question of whether they are intended to bias the hiring process in favor of recent college graduates.
This is the opposite of the Lean approach. During a career at a company, a person would have to acquire many technical and managerial skills. With that in mind, the willingness and ability to learn are more important than what the person knows walking in. When Honda set up its Marysville facility, they deliberately hired people with no prior experience in car manufacturing, to train them from scratch in the Honda way. As an employee, the background knowledge you need is supposed to have been provided at school. Whether in the US or Japan, however, schools never work perfectly, and companies end up providing remedial training they feel they shouldn’t have to. However, if all you need today is a technical skill set, you are probably better off hiring a contractor than an employee.
Jun 14 2011
Management Whack-a-Mole and the Value of Lean
On 5/24/2011, NWLEAN moderator Bill Kluck launched the richest, most vigorous debate in the 13-year history of that forum by asking members whether they were cost cutters or capacity enhancers. Over the following three weeks, 29 authors posted 68 spirited, yet courteous messages accessible from NWLEAN to anyone with a Yahoo! ID. The contributors included several well-known authors and some of my favorite sparring partners. In alphabetical order, they were Dan Barch, William Bowman, Robert Byrd, Abhijit Deshpande, Mark Graban, Jim Harrington, Jonathan Harrison, Rob Herhold, Blair Hogg, Gangadhar Joshi, Bill Kluck, Joachim Knuf, Ed Larmore, Paul Layton, Ted Mayeshiba, Jim McKechnie, Larry Miller, Joe Murli, John Nelson, Stephen P. O’Brien, Anthony Reardon, Tom Robinson, Sunita Sangra, Dale Savage, Patrick D. Smith, Tom Stogsdill, Mike Thelen, Chuck Woods, plus a few others who did not use their real names.
The message that started the thread was as follows:
Although I didn’t participate initially, it was clear to me that the effect of a successful Lean implementation was limited neither to cost cutting nor to capacity enhancement. Instead, I see Lean as the pursuit of concurrent improvement in all dimensions of manufacturing performance, but I had already shared my thoughts on this matter in Lean as the End of Management Whack-a-Mole. Management Whack-a-Mole is the game illustrated in Figure 1, in which managers boost performance in one dimension at the expense of the others, shifting focus every few months without ever achieving a genuine overall improvement.
Several of the early posts, however, prompted me to jump into the fray and respond on a variety of topics, initially as follows:
This caused further exchanges with Robert Byrd, who wrote: “…The most basic concept is Profit = Price – Cost. The market dictates price, so we have the best leverage for maximizing profit through controlling our cost structure…” My response:
He also wrote: “…Which is best accomplished through the elimination of waste and problem solving…” My response:
In his second response, he added: “However, what was their business objective once they focused on improvement? I would venture to guess that it was focused on cost reduction.” My response:
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By Michel Baudin • Management • 10 • Tags: Continuous improvement, Lean manufacturing, Management, Strategy