Steven J. Spear, Chasing the rabbit, 2009 [ ]
pp.273-274
p.273
In preparing Dallis to be a Toyota manager, Mike Takahashi was applying the very process he was trying to instill in Dallis. For example, before Takahashi ever met Dallis, he had plenty of data--résumés, references, and anecdotes--concerning Dallis's career and accomplishments. But he had never seen Dallis in action. Just as he didn't want Dallis to speculate about what to do on a manufacturing process before seeing it in action, he was not prepared to “develop” Dallis until he had seen him in action. Therefore, following his own formula, he first observed Dallis at work in a fairly controlled situation (in West Virginia). It was a familiar technical setting (an engine plant), but on the simpler side of things (assembly, not machining). There were only 19 in Dallis's group and the experience itself was professionally safe. Dallis could make mistakes, be corrected, and be directed, but not in front of people he might later be leading in Georgetown, Kentucky.
pp.273-274
Takahashi had reduced the complexity of the situation so he could focus on how Dallis solved problems and how he involved the people with whom he was working. Because he was seeing Dallis in action frequently, he was able to adjust his coaching appropriately by seeing problems with the training process and quickly trying to changes rather than trying to think his way through a whole high-level training program in advance; in other words, there was the familiar emphasis on rapid discovery [learning by doing and testing things out] rather than planned design [figuring things out by reflection, thinking it through, using thought experiment]. It was the equivalent in Takahashi's own work of holding rather than taping rather than bolting rather than welding.
p.274
He might have thrown Dallis into an unfamiliar environment--paint rather than power train--or started in Japan with its attendant language and cultural differences, but that would have introduced too much novelty.
p.274
... the process of introducing novelty in small increments.
p.289, p.293
Gary Corvis
Mr. Higashi
He [Mr. Higashi] said this to me [Gary Corvis] during one of my earliest meetings with him:
“Everyone knows you're the boss. But I want you to manage as if you had no power over your subordinates.” He explained that I couldn't just mandate things. He wanted me to go out on the shop floor and sell my ideas. To do that, I had to get out of the office and down on the production line. That's the only way to understand the issues.
p.292
Put bluntly, the most senior manager is the most subordinate person. Everything is done in support of shipping product to customers.
p.166
He wanted to know not only how things were done successfully, but how people knew when things were NOT working well.
p.269
Despite the imposed pace, Takahashi insisted that Dallis not speculate but always ground alterations in observed data and always test against well-articulated expectations.
p.269
Dallis came to see the subtleties he had not appreciated before. For example, relocating a jig was not a matter of making a single change. Whether it was to the worker's left or right, how far away it was, and the angle at which the elbow and wrist had to be bent to grasp it all mattered. He also learned that the demand for speed and the insistence on discipline were not irreconcilable if he could construct high-speed, low-cost prototype to test an idea. As he [Mike Takahashi] explained to me, “If I had an idea to relocate something, Takahashi would challenge me.” If something required welding, was it possible to bolt it in place to test the idea? If it could be bolted, could time be saved with temporary taping? Instead of taping, could it be held in place to see the flaws in the idea with extreme speed? “Mike”, said Dallis, “was trying to get me to go quicker, quicker, quicker, making as little investment as possible in an idea so I could try it and discover its strengths and shortcomings first, before making more of a commitment. It was all about learning at maximum speed.” Dallis was learning how to minimize the trade-off between speed of testing and discipline of learning.
(Spear, Steven J.; Chasing the rabbit / by Steven J. Spear., 1. organizational effectiveness., 2. management., HD58.9.S676 2009, 658.4--dc22, 2009, )
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Russell L. Ackoff, Redesigning the future, 1974 [ ]
p.81
3. Some skills are best learned through demonstration and instruction by one who already has the skill. Examples are sports, surveying, drafting, fine arts, and use of laboratory equipment and computers, driving a car, and playing a musical instrument. In some cases a student may learn such skills more easily from another student than from a faculty member. He should have the freedom to select his instructor.
p.223
One cannot learn how to play a piano by watching others do so or listening to them talk about doing so. One can only learn by practice. If one practices then watching others and listening to them can help. Learning how to develop, like learning how to play the piano, requires trying, failing over and over again, and eventually succeeding. The role of the “teacher” should be that of giving others an opportunity to learn by practice, encouraging them to do so, supporting them during their failures, recognizing success when it is obtained, and serving throughout as a resource that the learner should learn how to use effectively and that should be available to him to use as he sees fit.
( Ackoff, Russell Lincoln, 1919-, Redesigning the future., 1. united states--social conditions--1960-., 2. social problems., 3. social change., 4. system theory., 1974, )
(Redesigning the future : a systems approach to societal problems, Russell L. Ackoff, University of Pennsylvania, 1974, )
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•
•
• it's much easier to copy a good idea once you've seen it working than to come up with it in the first place and get it to work the first time.
• Hans-Hermann Hoppe
• http://www.fourmilab.ch/fourmilog/archives/Monthly/2015/2015-05.html
•
•
• If your goal is to survive and prosper whatever the future may bring, it can ruin your whole plan if you kill yourself acquiring the skills you need to do so.
• http://www.fourmilab.ch/fourmilog/archives/Monthly/2015/2015-02.html
•
•
• if you can't imagine a single point failure in a system, this may be due to your own lack of imagination, not the system's robustness and fault tolerance.
• http://www.fourmilab.ch/fourmilog/archives/Monthly/2005/2005-06.html
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Russell L. Ackoff, Redesigning the future, 1974 [ ]
p.222
This ability cannot be given to others even by those who have it. It must be developed in and for oneself.
Development is not a state in which one has access to the products of a developed society.
( Ackoff, Russell Lincoln, 1919-, Redesigning the future., 1. united states--social conditions--1960-., 2. social problems., 3. social change., 4. system theory., 1974, )
(Redesigning the future : a systems approach to societal problems, Russell L. Ackoff, University of Pennsylvania, 1974, )
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By Karen Wilhelm on August 6, 2011
Format: Hardcover
In this book, originally titled "Chasing the Rabbit," Steven Spear's years of observing Toyota* and his studies of other companies, both successes and failures, have led him to distill a set of principles other organizations can use to be more successful. Spear indicates that great leaders seem to practice them instinctively, yet it is not easy for them to articulate exactly what they do. That makes it difficult for the rest of us to understand what makes them good leaders.
Spear says that simply copying what Toyota does, for example, is not going to replicate the thinking behind how Toyota manages its business. Do you have to be steeped in the culture of Toyota, as Spear was, in order to fully absorb the way it does things? That's an option that few people have.
Spear says that it is possible to discover patterns in Toyota's practices, to make explicit what is implicit knowledge at Toyota. When Spear and Hajime Ohba, general manager of Toyota's Supplier Support Center happened to go on some of the same factory tours in Japan in 1995, Spear paid close attention to what Mr. Ohba did. He saw that Mr. Ohba asked the same questions on every tour, and asked them of the people working as often as of the executive guiding the tour. Whenever possible, he asked to start the tour where the end product was being shipped to customers.
What was he looking for? Pathways, connections or handoffs, and what work was being performed. Mr. Ohba was looking at process and how processes combine to form systems. That's different from saying that the only way to learn how Mr. Ohba looked at a plant is to spend years accompanying him.
As a scientist, he observed what leaders at Toyota and at other organizations did until he could see patterns and derive a theory to explain the phenomena. From that theory, he extracts a view of complex processes and systems and an explanation for why organizations can't make them work effectively. Then he tells us of four capabilities he found in great leaders and great organizations.
The first thing he establishes in the book is the character of complex systems. Our typical experience is that some group of people will create a system that accomplishes some goal - basically, they will think it up. It's guaranteed that things will go wrong because no matter how much study these people do, they can't think of everything. Then they get the blame for producing a flawed process. In turn, they blame sponsors for not including everything in their specifications, or users for not following processes as they envisioned them.
Spear says, face it, there will be unanticipated problems in any system, so have a process for identifying them and responding. In the book, he shows us how Toyota, Alcoa, and the Navy Nuclear Power Propulsion Program approach that reality successfully, and how an unnamed hospital, NASA, and others ignore flaws in their systems with tragic consequences.
His other fundamental observation of most organizations is that they are divided functionally, while processes don't respect those boundaries. (This isn't news to lean thinkers, of course.) People in one silo don't know much about what happens in another or how their action may create problems for them. I spoke to Steve Spear a few weeks ago, and he offered a great illustration. In one hospital he visited, the carpeting in the administrative offices was a different color from that of the clinical departments. If you crossed the boundary, you were well aware that you were in someone else's territory.
Spear tells readers that if you want to improve processes, you have to fully appreciate that systems are complex and problems are normal. Because they span those functional silos, problems are difficult to solve unless you can bring people from different parts of the organization together and they learn good team problem solving methods.
Actions of separate departments can be integrated, but only if leaders at a level that includes them in their scope of authority don't sit back and leave problems to someone else. They have to own them and get involved in the problem-solving process.
Four capabilities
Spear tells us that high-velocity companies like Alcoa and Toyota accept that systems are complex so problems are normal, and, because processes cross boundaries, so must problem solving. He says these high-velocity organizations have four capabilities in common, and any organization can develop them through never-ending learning.
In a way, Spear leads the reader in probing deeper levels of each capability by giving them more complex names in successive chapters. After a first encounter with Capability One, in an introductory chapter, where it is described as "Specifying design to capture existing knowledge and build in tests to reveal problems," it is framed much more simply as Spear begins to develop his theme. The next time the reader finds Capability One, it is called, "Seeing problems as they occur." In a later chapter, its description has evolved into "Capturing the best collective knowledge, and making problems visible." When we get to the chapter that focuses solely on Capability One, it has become "System design and operation."
"Specifying design to capture existing knowledge and build in tests to reveal problems" <==> "Seeing problems as they occur." <==> "Capturing the best collective knowledge, and making problems visible." <==> "System design and operation."
This name changing has its positive and negative effects. It causes the reader some difficulty in recognizing the principle when it is phrased differently so often. On the other hand, it may develop that ever-deeper thinking needed to understand how organizations like Toyota continue to vault ahead of the competition.
Whatever the effect, there you are. The four capabilities (as described at their simplest in the chapter on Alcoa) are:
C1 - Seeing problems as they occur.
Noticing a problem seems like a given, but not all problems are easily seen. Some have been there so long that they seem like part of standard practice. The key is to look at processes and design them to show problems. From sophisticated instrumentation on complex equipment to mistake-proofing devices in simpler processes, mechanisms are necessary to make problems visible and surface them for attention.
C2 - Swarming and solving problems as they are seen.
No workarounds! Don't require someone to report a problem to be solved by somebody else at another time. For one thing, critical information is lost quickly--scrap or defective parts thrown away or commingled with others, containers or remnants of materials mistakenly used in the process, lost or discarded. Swarming means that if a process crosses boundaries, problem-solvers from each area have to be ready, able, and willing to get together and share their knowledge to find a solution or countermeasure. The problem is corrected, and prevented from recurring.
C3 - Spreading new knowledge.
A process improvement in one cell or one plant can be implemented in many, if the new knowledge is shared. Does the company have frequent training programs, networking or exchange opportunities, communication among leaders across functional areas? Constant attention to learning and sharing is required. It takes more than building a little-used database of best practices. Communication about them must be active. They should be tested for improvement constantly, and those new methods fed back into the loop.
C4 - Leading by developing Capabilities 1,2 and 3.
This one's interesting. It doesn't mean signing off on a training program. It means having leaders at the highest levels understand the work done by the organization in enough detail to communicate with the people doing that work.
Leaders need to be teachers themselves. They need to be coaches. It might be a regular Socratic exchange as Admiral Hyman Rickover was known for, or VPs teaching frontline workers about problem-solving and engaging with them in practicing what they've learned. It might be the way Paul O'Neill, as CEO of Alcoa, using a focus on safety to lead to all sorts of improvements. He was known to personally explain to visitors where to find emergency exits and what to do in case of an emergency.
From theory to practice
The test of theory is whether it works consistently when applied to different situations. That's going on through the Toyota Supplier Network (TSN) and Bluegrass Automobile Manufacturers Association (BAMA). The extended Toyota supply chain is learning about continuous improvement incorporating Spear's model.
One such company not described in the book is DTE Energy, a gas and electric utility based in Detroit. When I spoke to four senior leaders there in September, they were quick to rattle off the phrase, "C1 to C4." That "everyone knows what this means" assumption must have come from a constant repetition of those principles among peers and employees. When these leaders had spent a week learning about the four capabilities in classroom and shop floor training at Autoliv in Utah, they were excited enough to drop everything, to get out of their offices and into the field to institute a new approach to solving problems and improving processes. Many, many small incremental gains have been made. Sticking with the principles over the long haul will be the challenge for DTE, but executives are well aware of the risks involved in letting the process fall by the wayside.
Could the book have been improved?
What do I think could have been better in this book? I wish there was an appendix with more details about Spear's research methods and the data that led to his conclusions. The extensive endnotes are helpful and the list of references is superb. His reading has clearly been comprehensive. (I, for one, can't wait to read more about Admiral Rickover.) I take it on faith that Spear has done his homework, given his reputation, writing, and his work with the Toyota Supplier Network and Institute for Healthcare improvement.
Conclusions?
I agree with Paul O'Neill, former CEO of Alcoa. On the back of the book, he says, in essence, that everyone aged 15 and older should read it and apply the principles everywhere. I'd add that everyone should read it at least twice, and again as their experience with improvement grows.
Serious recognition and practice of the four capabilities have saved lives, money, and all sorts of waste, and there's a whole lot of improving to be done. Getting a handle on the nature of complex processes and the four capabilities of companies who consistently outperform others should be a priority for all lean champions and practitioners.
My greatest wish is that leaders in President-elect Obama's administration find the book, invite Steve Spear to advise them, and find a way to deliver on the perennial promise of improving government.
___________
*Spear is known to many students of lean for the insightful Harvard Business Review article he wrote with Kent Bowen, "Decoding the DNA of the Toyota Production System."
Posted by Karen Wilhelm
____________________________________
http://itrevolution.com/devops-book-review-the-high-velocity-edge-by-dr-steven-spear/
“The High Velocity Edge”
Dr. Spear's Model
Dr. Spear writes that high velocity organizations differ from other organizations in two areas: structure and dynamics.
Each are described below.
Structure: Managing the Functions as Parts of the Process
Dr. Spear writes:
There is a structural difference between the high-velocity organizations and those chasing them that creates potential for speed. While high-velocity organizations put great effort into developing the technical competency of various functions, they are equally and always concerned with the way the work of individuals, teams, and technologies will contribute to (or impede) the process of which they are part. The process orientation of high-velocity organizations is in contrast to the “siloization” of so many other organizations in which the departments may talk of integration but tend to operate more like sovereign states. In high-velocity organizations, functional integration is not just pretty talk, it is the nuts-and-bolts of management at all levels every day.
____________________________________
Manifesto for Agile Software Development
We are uncovering better ways of developing
software by doing it and helping others do it.
Through this work we have come to value:
INDIVIDUALS and INTERACTIONS over processes and tools
WORKING SOFTWARE over comprehensive documentation
CUSTOMER COLLABORATION over contract negotiation
RESPONDING to CHANGE over following a plan
That is, while there is value in the items on
the right, we value the items on the left more.
____________________________________
http://www.leanhealthcareexchange.com/?p=159
The Mysterious 4 Rules
by Dave Krebs | Nov 6, 2008 | Lean Transformation, Standard Work | 0 comments
When HPP is guiding our clients through their LEAN Healthcare transformation, none of the concepts is more important than learning to recognize the characteristics of an Ideal process. Once this recognition is attained and the ‘gaps’ identified between the current condition and the Ideal, our attention must shift to “How do we get there?”. Fortunately, we have some help available to develop a solid strategy. The history of Toyota’s winning culture can give us a clear ‘roadmap’ to follow!
Steve Spear and Kent Bowen in their infamous 1999 Harvard Business Review article ‘Decoding the DNA of the Toyota Production System’ articulated the difficulties in understanding the basics of the Toyota system. Fortunately, they also took on the challenge to describe how the Toyota’s system works. They did this through a description of the four principles or rules that Toyota uses to teach the scientific method to workers at every level of the organization. Spear and Bowen contend that these 4 rules form the essence of Toyota’s system and are fundamental to an improvement strategy that moves regular work toward the Ideal. Sometimes I think that there is a perception that these rules have a sense of ‘mystery’ attached to them. The reality is that they are quite straightforward!
Let’s take a closer look at the 4 Rules:
RULE #1: According to Rule #1, all work must be specified according to content, sequence, timing and outcome. At Toyota, it is clearly recognized that process variation can lead to potential quality concerns. Pre-specification of work helps to limit variation and just as importantly, will set a necessary ‘baseline’ for future improvement work. Through specification of the expected successful outcome, staff will easily be able to recognize both defect free and defective outcomes.
RULE #2: The second rule explains how the people involved in a work process should connect with one another. Simply put, Rule #2 states that every connection in the process must be direct and binary (yes/no responses). Direct connections also typically deliver significantly less customer frustration. This rule is particularly appropriate to the “request for service” processes so prevalent in healthcare.
RULE #3: This rule specifies that every service process must flow along a simple, specified path. The specified pathways should involve as few steps, people and delays as possible. This concept of ‘continuous flow’ is vital to approaching the goal of an Ideal process. Spear and Bowen also believe that by requiring that every pathway in a process is specified, this rule positions the organization to conduct an improvement ‘experiment’ each time the path is used!
RULE #4: Rule #4 stipulates that process improvement must be done based on the scientific method, under the guidance of a coach and by those doing the work closest to the problem. This implies that ‘frontline’ workers are empowered (and expected) to make improvements to their own jobs. Their supervisors are responsible to provide both direction and assistance to this effort as coaches.
You will recognize that Rules 1 through 3 are really ‘work and system design’ related, while Rule 4 truly ‘sets the stage’ for the continuous improvement effort that must exist to get the process closer to the Ideal! As you can see, there really is no ‘mystery’ here. Embrace these 4 rules and you, and your improvement team, will be moving closer to the Ideal!
This week’s blog was written by HPP consultant and engineer David Krebs. David, a Six Sigma certified engineer, oversees various HPP projects and Lean Healthcare transformations for clients throughout the USA. David is also a Licensed Professional Engineer in the state of Tennessee, with over 30 years of experience in a variety of process and systems intensive industries, as part of firms in the U.S, Germany, and France. David has achieved and maintained QS-9000 and ISO-14001 certification & received Nissans’ “Quality Master Award” on three occasions. He holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Detroit & an MBA from the University of Notre Dame.
____________________________________
Decoding DNA of TPS.pdf
Decoding the DNA of the Toyota Production System
by Steven Spear (and) H. Kent Bowen
harvard business review, September-October 1999
p.98
These rules guide the design, operation, and improvement of every activity, connection, and pathway for every product and service. The rules are as follows:
Rule 1: All work shall be highly specified as to content, sequence, timing, and outcome.
Rule 2: Every customer-supplier connection must be direct, and there must be an unambiguous yes-or-no way to send requests and responses.
Rule 3: The pathway for every product and service must be simple and direct.
Rule 4: Any improvement must be made in accordance with the scientific method, under the guidance of a teacher, at the lowest possible level in the organisation.
All the rules require that activities, connections, and flow paths have built-in tests to signal problems automatically. It is the continual response to problem that makes this seemingly rigid system so flexible and adaptable to changing circumstances.
p.99
How Toyota's workers learn the rules
If the rules of the Toyota Production System aren't explicit, how are they transmitted? Toyota's managers don't tell workers and supervisors specifically how to do their work. Rather, they use a teaching and learning approach that allows their workers to discover the rules as a consequence of solving problems. For example, the supervisor teaching a person the principles of the first rule will come to the work site and, while the person is doing his or her job, ask a series of questions:
• How do you do this work?
• How do you know you are doing this work correctly?
• How do you know that the outcome is free of defects?
• What do you do if you have a problem?
This continuing process gives the person increasingly deeper insights into his or her own specific work. From many experiences of this sort, the person gradually learns to generalize how to design all activities according to the principles embodied in rule 1.
All the rules are taught in a similar Socratic fashion of iterative questioning and problem solving. Although this method is particularly effective for teaching, it leads to knowledge that is implicit. Consequently, the Toyota Production System has so far been transferred successfully only when managers have been able and willing to engage in a similar process of questioning to facilitate learning by doing.
(all attribute-able text are copyright © by the original authors of the work.)
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pp.344-347
Toyota Production System (TPS)
Steven Spear
p.345
Spear asserts that all processes consist of four elements: activities, connections, pathways, and improvement. Activities are the “islands” of individual work in which each of the discrete steps needed to achieve a complete result are performed. Connections define how these individual activities must interface or fit with each other in time, space, and properties. Pathways describe the flow and sequence of activities: who does what, who when performs the next step, and so on. Improvements are the methods that change the activities, connections, and pathways to come ever closer to the ultimate target of producing perfect products at zero cost.
Spear concluded that there are five “rules-in-use” at Toyota governing how its managers and employees design and conduct the activities, connections, pathways, and improvement in all of Toyota's processes.19 Until Spear's work, these rules weren't written down anywhere. But it's as if these rules of process design are emblazoned everywhere at Toyota. Its managers behave as if these commandments were strapped like phylacteries to their foreheads. Spear and his associates have shown that following these rules has comparable impact on cost, quality, and safety in companies and industries as diverse as hospitals, semiconductor manufacturing, and aluminum processing.20 They are, in other words, generally applicable principles, not methods for making cars:
• Rule 1 (Activities). Each value-adding step in a process
must be completely specified, so that when a worker hands
off what he's done to the next worker, the part is perfectly
prepared for her to add the value that she has been assigned
to add. When this rule is followed, it eliminates the need
to ever rework something that the prior worker did imperfectly.
And it helps eliminate actions that do not add value to
the next step, because that is wasteful. There must be a clear
go/no-go verification at the conclusion of every activity, so
the worker performing the activity and the worker who will
perform the next activity in the process both know that they
have done exactly what needed to be done.
• Rule 2 (Connection). Never add value to a part that is
defective. That means you should never work on a part until
it is ready to be used in the next step. When you use the
output of the prior step immediately, it tests whether the
prior activity was perfectly done. This allows the worker to
improve whatever element of the activity was responsible
for the problem--so the activity isn't allowed to continue
producing inadequate results.
• Rule 3 (Pathway). The sequence of steps that a part takes
through the process must be completely specified as a series
of one-to-one handoffs--the same worker always gives what
he has done to the same worker to perform the next step.
Any-worker-to-any-worker handoffs are not allowed. This
creates unambiguous responsibility for doing it right, and
makes it easier to correct the cause of problems.
• Rule 4 (Improvement). Perform each step in your process
the same way every time--not to make the work mindless,
but to scientifically test whether doing it this way, to these
specifications, will result in perfection every time. It allows
workers to conduct controlled experiments to improve
toward the “true north” goal of making perfect products at
zero cost.
• Rule 5 (Improvement). Never allow the cause of a problem
to persist by working around it. We must change our
methods whenever a faulty result occurs so that it cannot
happen again.
p.347
This is a practice that Toyota would never tolerate, because it expects that students will efficiently hold that knowledge in “intellectual inventory,” to be used years later. Rather, Rule 2 suggests that students will learn better when they learn something and then immediately use it; learn something more, and then immediately use it. In other words, the science curriculum and the clerkships should be conducted in parallel, knit carefully together, rather than taught in series. This would help faculty to teach [what] the science students need to know when they need to know it. Students would be less prone to forget what they learned.
p.351
Spear next went to Toyota, and though he got assignd to the same spot on the line--installing the front passenger-side seat--he had a completely different experience. At his training session he was told, “There are seven total steps required to install this seat correctly. We will start with step one. We will not teach you step two until you have proven mastery of step one. This may take your 10 minutes. This may take two hours. Even if this takes an entire day, we will not give you the privilege of learning step two until step one is mastered. It simply does not make sense for us to teach you the subsequent steps if you can't do the prior steps correctly and efficiently.”
pp.351-352
Rather than an end-of-the-line inspection, testing and assessment were an integral part of the instruction process. As such, then Spear finally took his place on the line, he was able to install each seat correctly the first time and every time. Toyota had built into its process a mechanism to verify immediately that each step had been done correctly, resulting in products that did not need to be tested at the end of the production line. Because it wastes no time or money adding value to defective products, the company's reputation for quality is well-earned.
What a contrast between the two methods for training Steve Spear! At the American plant, the time to learn was fixed, but the result of training was variable and unpredictable. At Toyota, the training time was variable, but the result was certain--every person who went through the training could predictably do what he had been taught to do. Toyota follows that principle in all its training, for every activity in the company. The philosophy is rooted in Rule 1 and Rule 2: never add value to anything that isn't perfectly ready to receive the next set of value. We should advance students to the next stage of learning only when they've verifiably understood the material that will be required to succeed at the next stage.
p.362
Recall the four constructs that comprise every process: activities, connections, pathways, and methods of improvement.
( Christensen, Clayton M., 2009, The innovator's prescription : a disruptive solution for health care / by Clayton M. Christensen, Jerome H. Grossman, Jason Hwang., 1. Health services administration., 2. Public health administration.
3. Disruptive technologies., RA971.C56 2009, 362.1 Christen, )
____________________________________
([ strict process control for routine evolutions ]) ([ process ])
([ concurrently encourage challenges to this system ]) ([ innovation ])
Dave Oliver, Against the tide, 2014 [ ]
p.74
Of course, the people who appreciate the need to follow process may not be the same individuals who embrace innovation. A successful organization needs people with both personality types to coexist and excel. The critical management question is, How in the world should talent be parsed to accomplish both goals?
We have discussed how the nuclear-submarine forces approached this problem. They determined what was routine, established a process to control that action, assigned the routine processes to the junior personnel, and tasked senior managers (expected to be more capable) with innovation. But what happened when a bad process was inadvertently installed and accepted?
pp.121-122
Rickover lived his life by the measures he had publicly listed during his U.S. Naval Postgraduate School address in 1954, and one of those was that rules limit progress.10
By insisting on strict process control for routine evolutions yet concurrently encouraging individuals to challenge his system and his processes, Rickover was able to institute a scheme in which individuals did not have to choose between process and innovation.11
10.
11. His system had other subtle values. Those who brought up fraudulent challenges (i.e., their challenges were technically incorrect) to the system identified themselves as fools who needed more careful watching. At the same time, multiple challenges to the same processes, even if the challenges were flawed, indicated one of two issues. Either there was a misunderstanding of what the process was attempting to achieve, or there was a process flaw as yet uncovered. In any case, it indicated that a more flexible mind should reexamine the problem.
p.130
I thought it was noteworthy that no one ever discussed the key training differentiator. Good people are always harder to find than money.
p.137
In December 1989 off Malta, when President Bush met with President Gorbachev on board the Soviet flagship Gorki, Marshal Sergei F. Akhromeyev handed President Bush the Soviet military leader's own morning intelligence report pictorial, shown in map 1. His accompanying words were significant: “We have read every one of your submarine messages for ten years and have been unable to find or kill even one of them. We quit.”2
164n2
2. As mentioned previously, the Soviets were able to read our submarine correspondence as a result of the Walker-Whitworth spy ring, which had sold submarine communication code lists to the Soviet Union. This quotation was provided to me by Vice Adm. J. D. Williams, who also gave me a copy of the chart who was present that day in his role as commander, Sixth Fleet.
p.143
3. USS Thresher was lost on 10 April 1963. Thresher was the first class of nuclear submarines built by the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard under the laissez-faire concept then in vogue at the Bureau of Ships. All five previous classes of nuclear submarines, as well as the one-of-a-kind Nautilus and Seawolf, had been designed at Electric Boat in Groton (New London), Connecticut, a private shipyard operated much more in consonance with Rickover's technical guidance.
p.145
... [...] ...
Finally, late one evening in the early seventies, while cursing and reading through the many volumes of the Bureau of Ships manual, I discovered an interesting paragraph. While I could not myself make any alteration to the ship without the Bureau of Ships approval, in an emergency I could make “an alteration in lieu of a repair” to the ship. All I had to do to make this legal was to promptly notify the bureau via the chain of command.
I remember rereading the paragraph several times. The wording did not define the level of emergency. I also remember leaning back in my chair and looking at the list of current engineering problems taped above my desk. A rational person would surely accept that on Nautilus I was dealing with an emergency each and every day. In fact, at that very moment I had nearly thirty (30) unresolved requests to the bureau for nonnuclear alterations, and not one bureaucrat had yet seen fit to even say boo in reply. The one that irritated me the most was a four-hundred-cycle (400-cycle) electrical generator located underneath a lithium bromide air-conditioning drain. With great care and a lot of work, we could get the electrical machine working for only a couple of days before something happened and the motor was once again drenched with seawater. The remainder of the time, the electrical unit was either on fire or bagged in plastic, waiting to be removed and repaired.
The next day I declared an emergency and moved the generator forty feet aft to a dry location above the main shaft. I filled out, signed, and mailed away all the neccessary paper, positive the silent bureau would never respond. Soon we had accomplished most of the other changes for which we had previously requested approval.
I will not pretend that no displeasure was expressed during the next annual review of my records, performed by five members of the staff for the Atlantic commander in chief (the same fleet commander who I believed had been less than diligent in answering my mail). And I won't pretend we passed that inspection. However, ultimately, none of my people died--and the chain of command started paying attention to what I wanted to change.
(Against the tide : Rickover's leadership principles and the rise of the nuclear Navy / Rear Admiral Dave Oliver, USN (Ret.)., 1. Rickover, Hyman George., 2. admirals--united states--biography., 3. united states. navy--officers--biography., 4. nuclear submarines--united states--history--20th century., 5. nuclear warships--united states--safety measures--history., 6. marine nuclear reactor plants--united states--safety measures--history., 7. united states. navy--management., 8. leadership--united states., 2014, )
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George Stalk, Jr. (and) Thomas M. Hout., Competing against time, 2009 [ ]
MITSUBISHI
Table 4-1 shows the development history of Mitsubishi's three-horse power heat pump between 1976 and 1988. The analysis benchmarks the three-horsepower heat pump because it is the mainstream product in the United States. In Japan the mainstream product is the one horsepower heat pump. However, the comparison is still valid, since anything that Mitsubishi did to its three-horsepower heat pump has also been done to its smaller units.
From 1975 to 1979, Mitsubishi did not develop this product significantly. They changed the sheet metal work, partly to improve efficiencies but mostly to reduce material costs. At this time, a U.S. company led the industry in the mechanical design of heat pumps. Then, in 1980, Misubishi Electric introduced a product that used integrated circuit to control the heat pump cycle. These circuits improved the EER, or the energy efficiency ratio. By 1986, the U.S. company still did not use integrated circuit in any of its residential products.
In 1981, ...
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In 1984, Mitsubishi introduced a version of the product that contained an inverter, which made possible an even higher EER. An inverter converts an alternating current into a direct current and then reconverts the current into a new alternating current with a new wave form. Because the device allows almost infinite control over the speed of an electric motor, the efficiency of an appliance can be improved dramatically. The inverter, however, does require additional electronics for control, thereby requiring another redesign of the unit's electronics.
... [...] ...
In 1986 and 1987, more electronics were employed to improve the products. First, optic sensors were added. Using these sensors, the electronics of the unit can determine if it is day or night and adjust its cycle for greater efficiency. Second, a personal controller was developed. This is a hand-held, remote control device that enables the consumer to set the temperature and humidity for his or her location. The 1988 model uses learning circuitry. With these circuits, the heat pump can learn when to defrost itself. The unit can also follow the patterns of increasing and decreasing temperatures throughout the day, which are unique to each consumer's environment, and mimic these. Finally, in 1989, Mitsubishi added electronic air purifiers to its top-of-the-line products.
This is a lot of change in 13 years. In every year, the product has been improved. Moreover, this pattern is not unique in Japan to Mitsubishi. Matsushita, Toshiba, Sharp, and Hitachi have similar products. They have had to continually upgrade their products to maintain a competitive position in Japan. Note that there have been no great breakthrough inventions. Each change was an application of an existing technology——technologies commonly used in some form or another in other industries. Shepherding new technologies to the marketplace is the hallmark of true innovation. The changes have been accomplished incrementally rather than episodically. But, cummulatively, these changes give Mitsubishi and its Japanese competitors the position of technological leadership among the world's manufacturers of residential air conditioning units.
(Stalk, George, HD69.T54S73 1990, 658.5'6——dc20, copyright © 2009)
( Competing against time : how time-based competition is reshaping gloabl markets / George Stalk, Jr. (and) Thomas M. Hout., 1. time management., 2. delivery of goods., 3. competition, international., 4. comparative advantage (international trade)., )
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George Stalk, Jr. (and) Thomas M. Hout., Competing against time, 2009 [ ]
pp.184-186
Naturally, small teams work better than large ones because large groups create communication problems of their own. It's best to include only essential functions and to exclude people whose job is peripheral to the deliverable. For example, the bank loan team excludes accounting and records people. However, teams have to be self-managing and empowered to act because referring decisions back up the line wastes time and often leads to poor decisions. So the team includes a bank officer because if the officer were not on the team, he or she would be prone to second-guess the group's decisions. It's better if all the questions are asked and answers are exchanged just once.
As we've said, closed-loop teams handle variety better than open-loop teams because they can create new information and flexibility. For example, one manufacturer of custom-designed jet engine parts realized that its order entry process was taking anywhere from two to ten weeks. The order-processing task is basically to record the order, to make sure it is properly specified, to order necessary materials from suppliers, and to schedule the order. Because this order entry process was the first stage in the company's main sequence, the wide variance in time required to complete it was creating problems downstream in scheduling and in setting a promise date to the customer. The company's order flow contained a variety of low- and high-complexity orders. So the company wanted to narrow this time range and make order entry more reliable.
To core problems caused the time variance. One was that each of the six departments the order passed through had a queue of other work besides order entry waiting to be done. Order entry was a small part of each department's work so a new order would sometimes get last priority in the queue, especially when other, complex orders came through that took a lot of the department's time. In addition, the length of the queues varied depending on the function of the department and its current workload. No one could predict, therefore, how long a new order would take to clear these six queues in succession. The second problem was that departments often had different product codes, so that information form one department was not always directly intelligible to the next; codes had to be translated as each order made its way through the departments. And this process took even longer on the more complex orders.
It was clear that the solution to shortening the order-processing and reducing its variance would involve avoiding departmental queues and creating comparable codes across te departments. A closed-loop team of six individuals——one from each department——was established. Their first job was to unify the product codes, which took three months. Incidentally, this job had been sitting in the data systems department for year and had died there, because the department had no strong cross-functional sponsorship. Now, a group of knowledgeable, empowered people, were in charge and could actively work on the problem, so it got done.
The next step was to set aside a portion of each team member's time twice a week to perform all the order entry work for his or her department. Capacity was not taken out of the departments but effectively dedicated, and the team could function as a stable unit. To solve the variety problem, the jet engine supplier revised the procedure for processing complex orders to balance the amount of work each department did on each other; before, a complex order would typically burden some departments more than others. Also, the team tried to even the mix of complex and simple orders every time it worked on order entry. These two changes balanced the work load associated with complex orders. They no longer choked the system when they came through.
Once this system had been established and fine-tuned with one team, each team member trained two others in his or her department. Now, order entry can be done in this more managed, focused way by several different people in each department. If total orders surge, they can still be processed without delay. The overall result is that all orders are now processed in 1 to 2 weeks, instead of from 1 to 10 weeks. This has helped downstream scheduling and makes the company's promised ship dates more reliable. Ultimately, the total amount of labour time devoted to order entry across the six departments has declined because of unified coding and because of the even flow of complex and simple orders.
([
[p.91]
"The answer to the problem lies within the problem it self."
——Lynda Resnick
(Tell to win, Peter Guber, 2011, p.91)
])
The interesting point about this is that the company had been trying to solve the order entry problem for years. It had tried hand-carrying orders around. It had tried a PC-based software to keep track of them. It had tried brute force. None of these methods worked because the problem was more complex than ordinary management tools applied from OUTSIDE the problem could address. The problem had to be broken down and reassembled by a multifunctional team empowered WITHIN the departments. The key was to keep all the information and the operations inside the team so they could work out the way to get flexibility.
To close the loop.
(Stalk, George, HD69.T54S73 1990, 658.5'6——dc20, copyright © 2009)
( Competing against time : how time-based competition is reshaping gloabl markets / George Stalk, Jr. (and) Thomas M. Hout., 1. time management., 2. delivery of goods., 3. competition, international., 4. comparative advantage (international trade)., pp.184-186)
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