Suddenly, Deming is Relevant Again
Filed under: Career, Crisis Leadership, Current Affairs, Leadership, Leading Change, Management Education, Performance, Professional Growth, Quality Systems Management, Social Commentary, Your Professional Development "To Do" List
If you are a younger reader, the man that I am referencing in this post is W. Edwards Deming, the late and in my opinion, great management philosopher and consultant. Dr. Deming is certainly well known in quality circles (bad pun intended), but scour today’s current management books and if you’re lucky, you might find an occasional reference. Fascinating treatment of a man that inspired and guided the rebuilding of a country (Japan) and that spent his last years trying to “keep American companies from committing suicide.”
Through no fault of their own, my recent informal polling of some really sharp university students (undergraduate and graduate), I found through the “show of hands” method that very few had ever heard of Deming, and those that knew the name didn’t really know much about him.
I refuse to let a group of talented emerging professionals run through any management course of mine without spending some time with Deming, and introduced them via a 15-minute interview that he conducted in 1984, entitled “Management’s Five Deadly Diseases.” I encourage you to do the same. It’s fifteen minutes of pure Deming in his affected, slow and hard to understand speaking-pattern, filled with wisdom for managers that transcends time. I’ve added this and a few other readings to your homework list below.
Following my Tuesday night showing of this video, I caught up with one of my favorite management thinkers, Bret Simmons at his Positive Organizational Behavior blog in a great post, “Toyota’s Quality Mess: What Would Deming Say?” Bret and I exchanged some notes reinforcing the impact that Deming’s work has had on both of us in our careers.
Homework for Your Career:
If you are curious to learn more and improve your understanding of the role of a manager and perhaps improve your performance, consider this homework list:
- Read my post: “Sixty Years of Deming and American Managers Forgot to Pay Attention,” and Bret’s post on “What Would Deming Say?”
- Visit the Deming Institute and learn more about his “Theory of Profound Knowledge” and his “14 Points for Management.”
- Watch the interview above on “Management’s 5 Deadly Diseases.”
- And if you’re really into it, find a copy of “Out of the Crisis” and shudder at the parallels and still relevant lessons.
The Bottom Line for Now:
I’m most definitely in the camp that says that the science and art of management have not moved forward much in the past 100 years and that has to change. I’m also critically concerned about learning from the past and understanding the wisdom of those that came before us. We’ve not yet moved beyond the flaws and failings that Deming saw clearly in the management practices of the industrial revolution. And in fact, the only way that we will move forward is through conscious effort, or should I say, “constancy of purpose.”
You owe it to yourself, your career and your firm to understand and learn from this great man. I’ve outlined the homework. The test results will be visible at the end of your career.
Leadership Caffeine-Create Success by Managing Your Response to Failure
Filed under: Career, Crisis Leadership, Leadership, Leadership Caffeine, Leadership Skills, Management Education, Performance, Professional Growth, Talent Management, Your Professional Development "To Do" List
No one wants to fail. It’s not something that we typically seek out as part of our personal and organizational character building experience. However, from a distance, we tend to mythologize failure, especially in the context of achieving future success.
Run a web search on some phrases built around failure, and you’ll come up with quite a few reflecting a very true statement, “Failure is a teacher.” Our histories and leadership legends all benefit from the context of understanding the final outcome of the story, but the telling of the story doesn’t adequately capture the powerful emotional forces that occur at the moment of failure.
Certainly, the stories are right and the lessons instructional. They inspire us to persevere, but the failure-leading to-success legends don’t guide us how to respond and cope in the moment.
In my own experience (personal and as a leader supporting others), the moment of failure is filled with a swirl of emotions ranging from anger to frustration to a deep depression-like funk. In particular, for individuals that have experienced only success in life and career, and yes there are those that enjoy mostly charmed existences due to their skills and perhaps some good fortune, the moment of failure feels much like being transported to an alien landscape where suddenly everything is not as it should be.
As a leader seeking to help team members through a dark point in time, or perhaps dealing personally with your own failure disorientation, here are a number of suggestions to help light the way.
Five Ideas to Help You and Your Team Members Cope with a Setback:
1. Speed is of the essence. The faster you can help everyone move from “what just happened?” to “what next?” the faster you pass through the cold, alien landscape of failure. Linger too long on an extended self-pity party and you might as well set up camp and become a permanent resident. Your goal must be to move through this phase or process in a hurry.
2. Don’t get caught up in blaming the world. Does it really help to blame everything and everyone else for the failure? Once again, attempt to move quickly to “what next?” or you risk an extended stay in the land where “yelling into and shaking your fist at the wind” is a national pastime. It might feel good for a moment, but eventually, it’s just dumb.
3. Beat yourself with a wet noodle and move on! If the failure is personal, resist the urge to blame your lack of ability. The destructive “I’m not smart enough/good enough” mentality likes to attach itself to your frontal lobe and take root, ensuring a growing problem with self-doubt. Instead, admit that you made mistakes, that you failed to exert enough effort to properly see or deal with the issue and once again, jump on the “OK, I won’t make those mistakes again…what next?” train.
4. Failures are often not performance problems. Don’t confuse the two Leader, please don’t make failure a punishable offense. Individual or team failures are different than performance problems and you should treat them as such. Too many leaders allow untreated performance issues to infect team environments, and then they attack the team, not the root cause of the underperformer. Don’t misdiagnose and mistreat here or the failure disease will spread.
5. Your time and asking the right questions will help your team members start moving forward. For individual failures, it is essential for you to create some one-on-one time and allow the failure/grieving process to unfold. Your role here is to listen and ask questions such as:
- What went wrong?
- What did you learn?
- How can you prevent this from recurring?
- What are your ideas for moving forward?
- How can I help?
Remember to set a follow-up discussion to ensure that the individual is back on track and focus on the challenges looking forward instead of the issues that are increasingly distant in the rear-view mirror.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
Dealing with adversity is one of the core challenges of the leader. Developing a coping strategy for yourself and your team is essential for success. The legends and myths of failure are right…they do provide critical learning opportunities and teachable moments. Nonetheless, the fact that you or your team members are benefitting from one of these “priceless” moments offers little help or comfort at the moment of failure. Understanding how to leverage the emotions and the energy of the situations will help you create your own legends and examples. It will also reduce the unhealthy fear of failure that stifles so much creativity.
You don’t have to embrace or smile at failure. Instead, kick it in the teeth and use the emotional energy to propel you and your team forward.
Avoiding Another Dumb Management Mania-The Disposable Worker
Filed under: Crisis Leadership, Current Affairs, Performance, Social Commentary
Note from Art: my rant is dedicated to helping keep what is in some circumstances a reasonable business tactic from becoming the latest value-destroying mania.
I wrote last week on “Thoughts on Leading and Managing in the Era of the Disposable Worker.” The post was prompted by an article in BusinessWeek, outlining this latest gem of management wisdom that has organizations of all types rethinking the need for employees and shifting to contract workers. Positions from the CEO suite to those types of roles that we’ve become accustomed to outsourcing, and everything in-between, are fair game.
I’m traditionally leery of fads of all sorts, as they tend to be driven by hysteria, causing normally sane and rational people to act in a manner that defies explanation. I’m fearful that we are on the brink of another horrendous, value-destroying mania as we embrace the short-term cost convenient fad of creating disposable workers.
A Few Examples of Manias Gone Horribly Wrong:
It wasn’t’ so long ago, that almost everyone wondered for just a moment whether the laws of economics had been suspended as the internet gold rush began. Those of us on the sidelines were left to wonder why we weren’t as smart as everyone else and still valued profits over clicks and eyeballs. For a short period of time, our world was one where gobs of money flowed to people with ideas that included losing all of it and then some, and market valuations for firms without a single customer exploded from here to Jupiter. Anyone that dared to question this environment ended up running away from a bunch of options-toting visionaries lest they be trampled in the stampede of outrage. How dare we not understand that clicks and eyeballs were the new replacement for profits and that anyone that could throw around the phrase “data aggregation” was worth funding.
Eventually, the laws of physics and economics reasserted themselves, the dot come bubble burst and we spent a decade creating a new mania in the housing market. Once again, the rules of common sense and gravity won out, yet tens of millions of normally rational people succumbed to the mania and many have lost much more than paper options.
As a wise teacher once indicated, “There is no such thing as a money machine.”
Opinions, Thoughts and Irreverent Observations on this Potential Next Mania:
All of this brings me back to the latest rage of firing your employees and hiring contract workers to staff your business. For those of you new Management Messiahs that are leading the charge here, I have a few questions, observations and answers for you:
- Opinion: Turn core, value-creating roles into contract workers, and you will be selling your soul to pay the number crunchers and analysts.
- Opinion: You cannot sustain any form of business performance excellence with a transient workforce.
- Question: How will you replace that invisible but palpable thing called culture and how will you build a high performance culture around nameless, faceless drones?
- Observation: Once your competitors identify all of the talent that you’ve alienated, it will be open hunting season and you’re what’s for dinner.
- Observation: your global competitors are not foregoing their futures by emphasizing the numbers in the present. A short-term time orientation is a powerful dimension of U.S. business culture and thinking, and it is a weakness.
- Question and Name Calling: Why is this your BEST answer for competing? Is that all you’ve got?
- Double-Dog Dare: Study firms that have made a near religion out of valuing the employee. Start with SAS Institute. There is another way if you have the courage.
- You’ve Been Served: in case “maximizing shareholder value” is driving your decisions, consider Drucker’s rebuke of that modern rationalization for the organization: “the purpose of the firm is to acquire and keep customers.”
The Bottom-Line for Now:
The future of business and any company and perhaps of America is based on finding, cultivating and keeping the best talent. There are no circumstances that I can imagine where shifting core value creation roles to contract workforces will help you succeed in this increasingly complex world. Resist the urge to follow the herd and challenge yourself and your team to focus on solving vexing customer problems and building value in meaningful ways.
Thoughts on Leading and Managing in the Era of Disposable Workers
Filed under: Career, Crisis Leadership, Current Affairs, Innovation, Leadership, Project Management, Quality Systems Management, Social Commentary
Note from Art: this topic has me deep in thought. While the issue is generally a negative one, I do wonder whether it contains the seeds of significant management and leadership revolution. I would love your thoughts here.
In case you missed it, the article, “The Disposable Worker” in the January 7, 2010 issue of BusinessWeek offers a sobering look at the increasing trend for employers “to create just-in-time labor forces that can be turned on and off like a spigot.” And guess what folks, this trend is not just for those near the bottom rungs of the ladder, this current fashion extends all the way up into the CEO Suite.
While one might get the impression that this is a fairly modern “management innovation,” enabled by advances in technology and easy access to low cost labor around the globe, I’m reminded of the scenes in Upton Sinclair’s gruesome and powerful book, The Jungle, chronicling the early days of the meat-processing industry in Chicago.
I last read the book in high school, but the images of men (in this case, they were men) lining upside the gates of the stockyards and processers, and the foreman stepping out and indicating how many that he needed for the day, jumps to mind. If you were lucky enough to be picked on a given day, you were invited in to literally put life and limb on the line for a few cents. On other days, your family went hungry. If there was no work or you became injured, often, you died.
I’ll stop short of comparing the modern organization to those firms described in Sinclair’s pro-union classic, however, the picture painted in this article has that haunting specter of The Jungle hiding in the shadows.
My perspective here is not pro or con and don’t take my use of The Jungle or the union reference to mean anything other than highlighting a point in history and the message contained in this book. Organizations are striving and struggling to cut costs, compete and in some cases survive and desperate times call for desperate measures. The use of on-demand talent is well established in consulting and technology and in some cases it works well. However, I do think that the tasks of managing and leading and competing in an era of “workforce on demand” are about to change in ways that we might not yet fully understand.
Thoughts and Issues on Managing and Leading In the Era of the Disposable Workforce:
-The challenge to choose the right tasks for “just in time” resources. While it might be tempting to broadly apply the “on/off” approach to the workforce, managers should carefully evaluate the impact on business execution, customer satisfaction and innovation of replacing formal employees in core areas with contract workers. The short-term cost savings might just cost the firm its future.
-The difficulty of acclimating the remaining workers to this new reality. One of the more laughable parts of this not so funny article was the example of a firm adopting this model and then bringing in a resource to train the remaining employees on positive thinking. I suspect that more than a few workers were pretty positive what they wanted the firm to do with this speaker! While those that remain will likely be happier with a job than without, there’s little chance they will be happy. And while work doesn’t have to be an endless group hug, there’s something to say for the ability of an engaged, motivated workforce to satisfy customers and fuel innovation.
-The pain of living through the destruction of a firm’s culture. Whatever the firm was before, it no longer is the same after retooling with temporary workers. Instead of something that had a history and stories and artifacts and all those tangible and intangible components of a culture, the organization’s new environment might best be characterized as one that lacks a culture. Thoughts of Dystopian environments and various science fiction novels are beginning to jump to mind here.
-The challenges of measuring and maintaining quality and identifying and implementing critical improvements will be more difficult in the on-demand environment. The dearth of individuals that understand how to get work done via the informal organization will challenge firms to create new systems for these issues.
-The role of the Project Manager and the field of project management take on a very, very high importance in this new style organization.
-The impact when the worm turns! If and when recovery occurs, watch out! Somewhere, some wise firm will catch on to the novel idea that they can compete more effectively with an engaged workforce and the “jumping ship” will happen so fast that the firm’s leadership will be checking the news for information on the tsunami that cleared out the buildings.
-The role of the leader will change significantly. Many of the core focal points that are written about daily in the leadership blogosphere and in shelves filled with books from name-brand authors will no longer be relevant. The leader as a transaction manager with accountability for output with no concern for development, coaching and well-being may disappear.
The Bottom Line for Now:
I recognize that I’ve taken a mostly dark look at this issue in this post. The beauty of writing these things is that they force the author as well as the readers to think through the issues at a deep level. Intellectually, I do wonder whether the current economic situation contains the seeds of a new approach to management…an evolution or as Gary Hamel describes it, management innovation, and that the real challenge and issue here is truly how to rethink management and leadership.
Hmmm. Back soon with some more thoughts. Meanwhile, I would love to hear yours.
Increase Your Team’s Global Awareness or Risk Being Run Over
Filed under: Crisis Leadership, Life and Business, Management Education, Social Commentary, Strategy, Your Professional Development "To Do" List
Note from Art: this post is written from the perspective of U.S. industry and business. For my many overseas readers, I suspect that you face similar issues with slightly different context. Also, I’ve endeavored to not stray too far into the political arena on this topic, although in my opinion, the politicians and their policies are at the root of many of the current problems. Of course, we as citizens hold the key to solving that issue. However, that’s another post for another day.
Consider this post as one of robust encouragement versus a scolding.
Too many of our businesses, business leaders, citizens and politicians fail to understand, pay attention to or even appreciate the impact of the ever-changing global business environment. Or, if they do appreciate the impact, many are caught like the proverbial “deer in the headlights,” staring as the global competitors approach at an accelerating rate.
We’ve all known for a long time that the world is flattening and the advance of global trade in large part through the elimination of historical trade barriers has created a rising tide effect. We also know that for some countries, the tide has risen and continues to rise faster than for others. Consider the emergence of South Korea, India and China as economic powers over the past two decades as three prime examples.
In my own career experience, embracing the creeping globalism and leveraging the powerful forces behind it to compete and profit have been and continue to be much like breathing. However, step outside of the walls of your global giant or innovative tech start-up and spend some time in one of thousands of little industrial parks around the country, and you are liable to find very different circumstances.
Much of my work now occurs inside smaller firms that sprouted from entrepreneurial seeds and specialized know-how. These firms lived and thrived for a time and many have grown considerably during the past twenty years. A good number of these firms are specialized manufacturers or packagers and instead of expanding and adding to the job rolls in their communities, many are on the brink of extinction as a result of failing to adapt to and embrace a global world.
Disturbingly, instead of searching for solutions, adapting their strategies or even taking on the tough task of reinventing their businesses, many of these firms and individuals are standing in the road staring at impending collision and death. Often, their first response is to reach out to the politicians for “protection,” but the reality is that artificial barriers do more damage than good.
In part, I believe a root cause of this seeming inability to move and adapt stems from a still very-much-alive global ignorance on the part of U.S. business owners and operators, as well as everyday citizens. Whether it is ignorance or arrogance or, as I suspect, a bit of both, many of us lack context for anything outside of our own culture and language. Some of my clients are puzzled at how quickly their businesses have declined and didn’t see it coming. Much of this stems from a “head in the sand” view of the world.
Wake up people! It’s a big, competitive, inter-connected world filled with firms that want to eat you for lunch and spit out the bones.
While there are no easy or quick cures for coping with global competitors or having to serve customers that demand the lowest prices, you can certainly improve your chances of survival by challenging yourself and your team to become citizens and competitors of the world, not just American business-people and firms. You need to consider the future of your business armed with the context of a much bigger picture than the one from your office window in the suburbs of Chicago or Detroit.
A Few Starting Suggestions for Improving Your Global Awareness:
- Instead of glossing over the World News sections of the Wall Street Journal, study it closely. Subscribe to publications like The Economist and The Financial Times, where much of the perspective comes from outside the U.S.
- Watch carefully and monitor as the new global economic battleground is increasingly shaped by countries other than the U.S.
- Support the global education of your team and hire talent with a global experience.
- Identify partners to help extend your reach or improve your ability to source and compete on the global stage.
- Seek out the many resources available from the U.S. Government, local Business Development Centers and of course, qualified consultants.
- Constantly rethink your business strategy from a global perspective.
- If you don’t have a strategy, it’s time to get one.
- Pay attention to the manipulations and machinations of our elected officials on global trade issues. That special interest they are protecting today might sew the seeds of your industry’s doom tomorrow.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
There are no easy answers or simple solutions to playing and competing successfully in this fast changing and very, very tough global world. However, you might start by jumping out of the way of that oncoming global competitor. It’s time to raise your game by raising your team’s global IQ and then doing something with this knowledge.
My Book
The desktop reference to leadership success whether you are starting out or starting over.
Art Petty
Welcome to Management Excellence where the focus is on building better leaders and creating high performance organizations.
Building Better Leaders
NEW: Art Petty's Building Better Leaders offers distance education PLUS personalized mentoring for motivated professionals. Executive-developed and delivered programs to fit your schedule and budget and boost your career.
- Considering the Move to Leadership - What to Expect & How to Prepare
- Succeeding as a First-Time Leader
Marketing Coaching
Art Petty helps small business and professional service owners implement lead generation systems.
Learn more about Art's Marketing Coaching.
Management Excellence Tools
Download the Management Excellence Guide to Trade Show Marketing in a Recession.
What's Your Strategy & Execution (STREX) Quotient? Download and use the survey to help you gauge your organization's Strategy & Execution effectiveness and identify areas for improvement.
New e-book! Leadership and the Project Manager - Developing the Skills that Fuel High Performance Download the pdf or go to the e-book pages on this site and contribute to the conversation
Blog Subscriptions
Connect With Me On
E-Newsletter Mailing List
Join my e-newsletter mailing list and receive the latest in best-practices content for leadership, sales & marketing and strategy.