Management

Dec 26 2013

What’s eating John Seddon?

I want you to cheatBack in 1992, Seddon published “I want you to cheat,” as a distillation of then seven years of consulting experience with service organizations in Britain. It contains some general principles, supported by examples. It is quite readable, and contains no personal attacks on anyone. While “I want you to cheat” does not reference any giant on whose shoulder the author sits, more recent publications from Seddon repeatedly acknowledge Deming and Ohno.

It was his comment that “This respect for people stuff is horseshit” at a conference in Iceland in 2012 that drew my attention to his work. While certainly aggressive, it was not a personal attack. The latest kerfuffle is about the following statements in his 11/2013 newsletter:

“Every time I have been to the jamboree they have had an American lean guru spouting nonsense and this is no exception. This time it’s the guru who claims lean fails because it is what he calls ‘fake lean’ and his lean is the way to go! His ‘real lean’ starts with ‘respect for people’. I can imagine ‘respect for people’ events and tee-shirts (he sells tee shirts) while there is no change to the system conditions that drive misery and other forms of sub-optimisation. Only in America; the home of the terrible diseases.

What would you call a profound idea in this guru’s head? A tourist!”

bob emiliani
Bob Emiliani

The target of this attack, although unnamed, recognized himself. It’s Bob Emiliani, and he posted a response on his blog, entitled Kudos to John Seddon.  Bill Waddell then chimed in with John Seddon – Where Ignorance and Arrogance Collide. To Bob, Seddon is like a student who did not understand the concept of “respect for people,” while Bill dismisses Seddon as a blowhard from a backward little country who has failed to understand the depth and the subtlety of the US version of Lean.

Bill Waddelll
Bill Waddell

There is a good reason while the etiquette of on-line discussion groups forbids personal attacks: they cause discussions to degenerate into trash talk and name calling. It may be briefly entertaining, but quickly turns off readers who don’t have a dog in these fights and just want to information. Besides insulting Bob Emiliani, Seddon has steamed up patriot Bill Waddell with derogatory comments about America. You reap what you sow.

I have, however, heard comments that were as strident as Seddon’s from other consultants, from Japan. They were equally dismissive of US Lean, of American management in general, and even the country as a whole. This was usually, but not always, in private communications rather than in publications. These “insultants,” however, often got away with it, with audiences looking past the invective for useful ideas, and I think it is the appropriate response. Ignore the rant and engage on substance. If some is offered, you will be better off for it.

It is also worth pondering why people feel compelled to act this way. For John Seddon, I don’t know; I am not privy to his thoughts, but I can guess. We should remember that, in the market of ideas, we in the US have a worldwide home court advantage. Ideas command more attention and are more credible simply because of the “Made in America” label.

Lean is the most ironic example. The Toyota Production System did not come out of the US, yet the worldwide internet chatter and consulting business about it is dominated by a US version known as “Lean,” which is as faithful to the original as Disney’s Aladdin and The Hunchback of Notre Dame are to Arabian Nights and Victor Hugo’s novel. Borrowing, metabolizing and even distorting ideas from other cultures is done everywhere, and is to be expected; what is special about the US is that the American version radiates back to the world and overwhelms the original.

Last year, the Olympics opening ceremony in London reminded the world where the industrial revolution began. For more than a century, the world looked to Britain as a model for politics, economics, and manufacturing, but these days are gone, and for an idea to come from Britain is now a handicap rather than a credibility enhancer.

John Seddon happens to be British. For 28 years, he has been making a living as a consultant to service organizations in the public and private sector and, as anyone with this kind of experience would, he has developed an approach to doing it. We may or may not agree with it, but it deserves a respectful hearing. What I read into Seddon’s current stridency is that he has not been getting it. I think he is turning up the volume to prevent his voice being drowned out in the Lean tsunami coming out of the US.

Seddon dismisses Lean consultants as “tool heads.” I like tools. I use tools all the time, both in private and professional life. But I don’t use them indiscriminately. Following are three questions about a tool, that I would not ask about a hammer or a phone, but would about, say, Kanban or SMED:

1.    Who invented this tool?
2.    What problem was he/she trying to solve?
3.    Do I have that problem?

They strike me as a reasonable way to decide whether to apply it or not. And where did I find these questions? On John Seddon’s website. I think I will use them with clients.

 

By • Deming, Management • 8 • Tags: , , , , , ,

Dec 6 2013

Confusion Over Standards: Limits or Basis for Innovation? | Industry Week Blogs | Jeffrey Liker

See on Scoop.it – lean manufacturing

“As an undergraduate engineering student I spent a term in the offices of a nuclear power company writing standards. I sat at a desk, with a typewriter, and nuclear engineers fed me information while I wrote the standards. Standard 300.47.3.1. I had never been to a nuclear power site and had no idea what I was writing about, and I am pretty certain nobody at the site had memorized the tens of thousands of standards. They were aimed at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission who audited the company so we could prove we were safe. To the best of my knowledge pieces of paper never prevented a nuclear crisis.”

Michel Baudin‘s insight:

Jeffrey Liker chimes in on the issue of standards. While efforts to clear up the confusion on this topic in the context of Lean are praiseworthy, I think the terminology of “Standardized Work,” and “Work Standards” itself is hopeless.

Every author uses them differently, there is no hope of achieving consistency, and the word “standard” comes with too much undesirable cultural baggage, as illustrated by Jeffrey’s anecdote quoted above. As a result, every discussion of this topic is Tower-of-Babel project review.

Just because Toyota in the US uses terms doesn’t mean we have to, as they often are mistranslations of its own, Japanese terms, which themselves are not necessarily clear.

That’s why I prefer to talk about “work combos” for specifying how different tasks performed at different stations are combined into an operator job that fills the takt time, and “work instructions” for the breakdown of each task into steps with key points.

Then we can reserve the word “standard” for external mandates and internally generated rules and protocols used, for example, in quality problem-solving with suppliers.

See on www.industryweek.com

By • Management • 0 • Tags: , , ,

Nov 6 2013

Standards and Opportunities for Deviation

“Every time you set a standard, you create possibilities for deviations, and the need to respond,” David Meier said. The setting was a presentation on problem-solving at a corporate in-house conference. It struck me as a concise statement of why managers should issue standards only where clearly and unquestionably useful.

Unnecessary standards were discussed in an earlier post, but the topic is worth revisiting in greater detail, first because there are so many of them in companies, making work life more complex than it has to be, and second, to elaborate on their impact on the organization.

Standards are rules set for others to follow, and rarely welcome, particularly when these others are thereby  required to change behaviors they consider rational and appropriate, and sometimes more advanced than the standard. If you don’t enforce your unnecessary standard, your hurt the credibility of all your standards, including the useful ones; if you do, you turn into Captain Queeg, as he “tried to run the ship properly, by the book.”

All pens different
All pens different
All standard pens
All standard pens

The reception desk in the lobby of the building where the conference took place had a holder  full of pens for visitors to sign in. No two pens were alike. A Captain Queeg would have had none of that; he would have mandated a model of pen and a color of ink, and set  up regular audits to monitor compliance.

Office 5SThe example David gave was of office 5S zealots in Germany who had marked a location for a computer mouse on an individual’s desk and written him up for not complying. Last year, Mark Graban had posted a similar example of “5S” at a desk in the UK, shown on the right.

It reminded me of my experience of working in a Japanese office in the 1980s. It was a room with about 30 gray metal desks arranged in facing rows without any partitions. Everywhere else I have worked, each desk had its own supplies of staplers, staple-removers, scissors, glue sticks, etc., but it was not so in that office. These were shared resources, stored in a transparent plastic chest in the center of the room,  with a label for each compartment.

This arrangement sounds right out of a Staples commercial, but that was the way it was. What struck me about it,  however, was that the sharing created the need for labeled locations and for the discipline to return the items to assigned locations after use. This approach might make sense in offices used in hotelling mode. Everywhere else, however,  each office worker has a dedicated desk that comes with a set of  tools, that the employee organizes as he or she sees fit.

In the 21st century, the tidiness of desks does not have much to do with the performance of an office. What really makes a difference is the way information is organized on its computer network, and that is not visible when you walk through the office. But effective ways to do this are a whole other discussion. In factories, 5S in the offices is sometimes justified “to show solidarity with the shop floor.” It has been suggested to me that a better way to show solidarity might be to make the offices as hot, smelly and grimy as the shop floor.

Sometimes, the consulting companies that guide 5S implementation in client offices do not practice it in their own. In one particular firm, as consultants were in the field most of the time, they had no permanent desk, and grabbed an available one when they happened to be in town. With such a system, you might have expected the rooms to be numbered, and to have a magnetic board at the entrance with token for each present consultant to mark on a map of the facility where he or she could be found, but the managers felt that such a board would have been “ugly.” They never told me why they didn’t number the rooms. To locate a consultant you had to call his or her cell phone, and then follow instructions like “go left at the top of the stairs and it’s the third door to the right.”

Besides the size of steel balls at the end of motorcycle brake handles and company email addresses listed in my earlier post, there are many other things that are better off not standardized, and prominent ones include the analytical tools used in problem-solving.

The institutions of the quality profession in the US still promote as a standard the 80-year old tools of SPC, as if the art of collecting and analyzing data had not evolved since 1930. These tools are obsolete, but it would be a mistake to replace them with another set as a new standard.

There should be no standard. The professionals who work on improving quality should learn to use a broad variety of tools, and should be free to use whichever they think may help in their current circumstances. And they should always be on the lookout for new approaches and new technology.

Likewise, Value Stream Mapping (VSM) has, in the past 15 years, been elevated in the US to the position of a standard that all Lean practitioners are mandated to use. The need to map flows of materials and information in a manufacturing supply chain is often real, but there is no need for it to be done in a specific format with a specific set of symbols.

In fact, what happens in both situations is that formal compliance with the standard rapidly becomes the only criterion against which the outputs of quality or flow improvement teams are reviewed. The tools, their appropriate use, and their range of applicability are understood neither by the teams mandated to use them nor by the auditors who make sure they do, and the result is wallpaper.

 

By • Management • 2 • Tags: , , , , ,

Oct 22 2013

Employees are Colleagues, Not Assets | Eric Bigelow | IndustryWeek

See on Scoop.it – lean manufacturing

“A lot of organizations claim that employees are their greatest assets. To many this seems like a very profound way to view the employees. I disagree. I think that this terminology can be very harmful to organizational culture.

The word asset means ‘anything tangible or intangible that is capable of being owned or controlled to produce value.'”

Michel Baudin‘s insight:

This is a point I have grown tired of making in vain. Assets are things you own and, unless they are slaves, you don’t own the people who work for you. Saying “People are our greatest assets,” is not only inaccurate and distasteful, it also suggests that you want to have as many assets as you can.

In private life, it may be true: the more you own, presumably, the better off you are. Business, however,  is different: you want to generate income with as few assets as you can get away with. That’s why you monitor ratios like “Return on Assets.”

Assets and liabilities are mistakenly viewed as positives and negatives. They are in fact technical terms from accounting to designate respectively what you own and what you  owe. Whether you like it or not, you own excess inventory, and it is an asset you would rather not have. A 0% long-term loan, on the other hand, is a liability you are happy to have.

In and of themselves,  employees are neither assets nor liabilities. On the balance sheet, what the company owes them in benefits appears in the Liabilities column. So does the shareholders’ equity. There should be no value judgement attached to terms like Asset or Liability.

See on www.industryweek.com

By • Management • 1 • Tags: , ,

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