Jul 5 2018
Managers Should Rethink Rational Decision-Making | Michael Ballé | McGrawHill BusinessBlog
“Managing is making decisions, right? Managing well is making rational decisions – or so we’re told. We’re so steeped in a culture of “rationality” that we’re no more aware of it than a goldfish is aware of the water in the bowl. Yet rationality is a made-up thing, a construct, invented in Germany in the XIXth (as opposed to “reason” or being reasonable, which has been around for a much longer time and is much harder to define). Rationality implies that our actions are in line with the outcomes we seek – the reasons for these actions – premised on the idea that our beliefs are in line with our reasons to believe….”
Source: McGraw-Hill Education Business Blog
Michel Baudin‘s comments: The title of the article appears to promote irrational decision making, which should be a hard sell. Michael Ballé seems to know what a goldfish is aware of, and I wonder how. According to Etymology OnLine, “rationality” actually is a 17th-century French word and, to this day, means the quality of being based on reason, not of being “aligned with a goal.” The German connection, perhaps, is Max Weber who described goal alignment as one of two subcategories of rationality in social behaviors (“Zweckrationalität”) in Economy and Society, a book published in 1922, after his death — that is, in the 20th century, not the 19th.
If you are a Lean expert, no one expects you to discuss German philosophy. If, however, you choose to go there, it helps if you start with a paragraph that withstands a 5-min fact check on Google. For an analysis of management decision making, I prefer to start with what Kaoru Ishikawa said in his book on TQC.
Jul 6 2018
A Rose By Any Other Name,… Don’t Even Try!
Whether you name a company, a product, a machine, a person, a role,… or serialize units in production, you create a key to which information about an entity can be attached and through which it can be retrieved. When you do it, you should think through the different ways the name will be used and, once you have made your choice, stick with it.
These are obvious principles, but not always respected in manufacturing organizations. It hadn’t occurred to me to post about this until I saw, in yesterday’s New York Times, an unintelligible tennis women champions’ board from Wimbledon, from photographer Duncan Grove, with annotations to decrypt it:
The simple, straightforward choice would have been to designate these winners by the full names under which they were referenced in the media and list multiple winners under the same name for all wins. The board maintainers at Wimbledon could also have asked the honorees what they wanted to be called. Their marital status is irrelevant and, if married, so are their obscure husbands’ last names and initials, particularly for the women who won both before and after marriage, or had several spouses. The key takeaway: when naming, forget obsolete traditions.
#Nomenclature
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By Michel Baudin • Press clippings • 0 • Tags: nomenclature