Aug 13 2012
Karen Martin’s The Outstanding Organization
I posted the following as a four-star review on Amazon:
Karen Martin has been a consultant on performance improvement in office, service and knowledge work environment for almost 20 years, with prior experience in health care management. She knows the subject of outstanding organizations in this domain, and her recommendations on it are worth reading. I did not find myself agreeing with all her prescriptions, but my own experience is primarily in the different field of Manufacturing. Yet I picked up several ideas from her book that I intend to use, from the basic clarity-focus-discipline-engagement framework to details like the percentage complete and accurate (%C&A) as a clerical equivalent of first-pass yield in Manufacturing, or the idea of pairing people on tasks.
The book’s central idea is that the key to removing the friction and chaos found in the daily operations of most organization is to (1) pursue clarity in internal communications, (2) focus on a small number of topics to reduce the time members spend switching between projects and give teams a chance to finish what they start, (3) have the discipline to keep practicing what makes it function better, and (4) engage members so that they identify their own goals with those of the organization.
That these four characteristics are necessary for an organization to be outstanding is without question, and it is also clear that most business organizations lack them, but are they sufficient? We need to keep in mind that they are about the how and not the what. Tom de Marco had imagined a service called the Astro-Pony Tout Sheet, to predict the performance of race horses from their astrological signs. It is a clear objective, and you could assemble a focused team, disciplined and engaged in the task of providing this service. But it wouldn’t work no matter what they did.
On clarity, I agree with the author that calling problems “opportunities” just creates confusion. I think it is just a case of a metaphor taken farther than it was intended. If you say “problems are opportunities,” it is just short for ”problems give you the opportunity to grow professionally by solving them.” It does not mean that you should substitute the word “opportunity” for every occurrence of the word “problem.”
On the other hand, I can’t follow the author when she equates solution with countermeasure. In manufacturing quality, for example, there is a sharp distinction between the two. If you discover that you have shipped a defective product, first you put in place a countermeasure to prevent further defectives from escaping, and then you identify the root cause. Removing the root cause solves the problem, and then you dismantle the countermeasure.
What she emphasizes the most on clarity is seeking and telling the unvarnished truth. In running an improvement program, it clearly beats trying to deceive the people you want to engage, but what about company secrets? I don’t think the author meant to suggest that all business strategies, product launch plans, and proprietary technology should be communicated freely and openly. Intel founder Andy Grove is famous for saying “Only the paranoid survive, ” and other successful companies, like Apple, are also secretive. In very company, there are lines to be drawn between information best shared openly and secrets, and employees do not always have a clear idea of where it is or should be. This is a topic that I feel the author should have addressed.
I also have a few minor quibbles with statements that are not essential to the book. For example, there is no need to say when Frederick Taylor was active, but, if you do, you can’t say that it was “in the early days of the industrial revolution” (p. 8). Taylor worked around the turn of the 20th century, more than 100 years after the industrial revolution, as the Brits reminded us in the opening ceremony of the London Olympics.
Also, martial artists cringe at the description of Kata as “choreographed patterns of movement” (p. 132), even if Wikipedia defines the word that way. Katas are simulated fights against multiple opponents, and the study of a Kata involves Bunkai, in which other students enact the attacks against which it responds.
It is also an exaggeration to describe the practice of PDCA/PDSA as “creating a community of scientists.” Most actual scientists have never heard of PDCA or PDSA, and the methods they use are substantially richer.
This being said, I enjoyed the book, learned from it, and think it is a worthwhile contribution to the literature on Lean.
Sep 24 2012
Ro Khanna’s Entrepreneurial Nation
The title misleads, because the book is not about entrepreneurship but about the state of manufacturing in the US. Fortunately, the subtitle is more descriptive: “Why manufacturing is still key to America’s future.” Thinking about entrepreneurship in 2012, the first companies that come to mind are Google, Facebook or Amazon, who do no manufacturing, or Apple, which subcontracts it. Several of the executives described are in fact entrepreneurs, but you also encounter regular managers and fifth generation heirs running family businesses. I don’t blame the author for this, as I suspect the title was chosen by marketers who thought that entrepreneurship would sell better than manufacturing.
The author’s bio on the book jacket describes him as “former deputy assistant secretary of commerce,” a title that leaves you wondering what he was actually doing. You have to look up his LinkedIn profile to find out that his primary function was to boost exports of manufactured goods. Until then, he was an intellectual property lawyer. To his credit, he makes no claim to having any particular knowledge of manufacturing before he started. But he clearly fell in love with the subject, and a passion for it shows through in his writings.
The book contains facts, interpretations of these facts, and policy recommendations. Crisscrossing the country for the commerce department enabled the author to visit many companies and meet outstanding leaders in steel making, aeronautics, mining machinery, defense, and other manufacturing industries. I had not heard about many of them and learned from the author’s account of these visits.
The author quotes many sources, and his position gave him the opportunity to be tutored by industry icons like Andy Grove. Nonetheless, I find his analysis of the situation lacking in depth and originality. I agree with his fundamental point that the Federal Government of the US should have a policy about Manufacturing, and that it makes no sense to have a cabinet-level Secretary of Agriculture and no Secretary of Manufacturing when Manufacturing is a much larger component of the economy.
His argument that government’s involvement in manufacturing is a long American tradition is based on a report by Alexander Hamilton as Treasury Secretary in 1791 arguing in favor of it. Khanna quotes it many times, but makes no reference to the role played by Thomas Jefferson in launching the multi-decade effort to make interchangeable parts, that the embryonic private sector of his day would not have undertaken, but that gave birth to the machine-tool industry and became key to the emergence of mass production in the 20th century. But his key point is valid that the government has a 200-year tradition of pitching in where the private sector can’t or won’t.
One argument that Bill Clinton makes but Khanna doesn’t is that none of the advanced economies in the world have developed on pure laissez-faire. The US hasn’t, and neither have Japan, Germany, the UK, France, Italy, or Canada. The visible hand of government plays some role everywhere. The question is what that role should be. Just because the government of another country intervenes in the economy in a particular way doesn’t mean we should do it too. Khanna appears to have yet to meet a government program he doesn’t like; to him, they are all underfunded and their budgets should be increased, and I have to disagree on some of them.
He asserts, for example, that the Manufacturing Extension Partnership (MEP) is a great program that does not “pick winners and losers.” Through this program, the federal government has been subsidizing consulting firms in all 50 states to provide services at reduced rates to small and medium-size enterprises (SMEs). In so doing , the government may not pick among the recipients but it certainly does among providers. And the MEP program is run by NIST, the agency in charge of standards for weights and measures. It is run by managers who have never worked in factories and you wonder how they can select consultants. It is, however, exactly what NIST does, and, thereby, creates unfair competition to other consultants.
Khanna also makes the common confusion between having a strong manufacturing sector in the economy and having a large proportion of the work force involved in manufacturing. Most manufacturing jobs in the US today are still the kind of repetitive assembly line work that no child dreams of doing as a grown-up. The future is in the current minority of jobs that involves programming and maintaining machines. It is a slow transition that has been underway for decades and has already seen, for example, the number of employees needed in a steel mill drop by a factor of 10 in forty years. It still has a long way to go but the direction is clear. It is a process that moves like a glacier, not a tsunami, with the consequence that it can and should be planned for. The strong manufacturing sector of the future employs a small number of highly skilled people. The jobs are more desirable that traditional manufacturing jobs, but in much smaller numbers.
The book paints China as an enemy, at war with US manufacturing. But the Chinese I know are focused on pulling >1 billion people out of poverty, not putting Ohio machine shops out of business. We will do better if every way if they succeed and become consumers than if they stumble and China reverts to the chaos of 40 years ago. In a truly emerging economy, labor costs rise with the skills of the work force. As local companies develop their own intellectual property, they also become more sensitive to others’ and counterfeiting declines. Finally, as incomes rise, so does the demand for imports.
While GE’s reshoring of appliance production in a happy ending for Louisville, KY, the story makes you wonder what the executives had been thinking when they outsourced in the first place. Why did they wait until they had actually moved production to Mexico and China and wrecked Louisville before assessing the full economic consequences of these decisions?
The book is about success stories. In a context where so many are writing off the US manufacturing sector, Khanna wants to show how it can be successful, and it is understandable that he would not dwell on failures. One that he could not avoid, however, is Solyndra, because it is a case in which the government made a mistake, even if the mistake was made by a department other than the one Khanna worked for. He talks about “the lessons of Solyndra” but does not say much about what these lessons are. You shouldn’t overinvest, but you already knew that.
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By Michel Baudin • Book reviews • 0 • Tags: Government, Manufacturing