by Gary Mintchell | Dec 6, 2012 | Operations Management
What gets you up and going to work in the morning? Fear of poverty? Love what you’re doing? I’ve been blessed for the past 10 years to get up and get moving because I love what I do. And I guess it shows.
A lot of the motivation is the opportunity to be creative, to satisfy my curiosity about many things and to share what I learn.
In this (one of the last) podcasts on IT Conversations, Pamela Rutledge, Co-Founder/Director, A Think Lab/Media Psychology Research Center, spells out why our intrinsic ability to get things done is really what gets us up in the morning. Hear in this talk what what drives creativity and innovation, what technology does with motivation, how this has implications at multiple levels, and how giving people more control over their lives increases commercial success.
This works for personal motivation, employee motivation, also in education for motivating kids to learn.
Among other ideas to consider ponder this one. When you develop technology for people, think on the different motivations. Consider operator control rooms in plants. Think of the effort engineers are devoting to providing better ways to communicate the status of a plant. Perhaps tapping into ideas around intrinsic motivation would encourage big improvements.
Food for thought. And thanks to Doug Kaye and Phil Windley for 10 years of IT Conversations. Not sure where I’ll go to replace all the ideas I’ve gleaned.
by Gary Mintchell | Dec 6, 2012 | Education
So I wrote earlier this week about how bad management can actually make unions seem an attractive alternative. Then I remembered this article from The New York Times about the American Airlines seat fiasco.
The union says that shoddy work from poorly trained contractors was to blame.
Let me take a look at two streams feeding today’s labor river. First, somewhere around 60 years ago companies for the most part ended apprenticeship programs. My grandfather quit school after the 10th grade and got a job at The Monarch Machine Co. as an apprentice machinist. He leveraged his growing skills into better jobs until he became a production superintendent at a General Motors plant. But companies transferred that training task to schools almost without warning. Schools were unprepared at the time.
Second, I know that some skilled trades unions provide some training for members. What if unions took on more of that task and then marketed themselves as providers of skilled workers? What if they became partners and team players? I know, it takes the other “side” to make a team. But stay with me here. I’m dreaming–or visualizing. What if? Of course, just like all of us, they’d have to continually prove that their training was good and continual. Otherwise it would be empty marketing rhetoric.
Maybe it’s a way for them to be more relevant–and solve a huge problem facing American manufacturing businesses.
by Gary Mintchell | Dec 4, 2012 | Operations Management
I should note that my little hiatus from writing here was mostly due to attending the SPS show last week in Nuremberg. My report will be at Automation World hopefully by tomorrow. Then I had a friend who had a critical situation over the weekend. Then I had to plan to replace someone on the magazine. By the way, the show was packed.
My longstanding belief about labor unions is that if management were any good, there would be no need for one. This belief was shaped initially by personal experience while I was still in college. It was solidified through study of Lean manufacturing and principles such as respect for people.
Most of my friends would react to the word “union” with a strongly emotional reaction. Some think in terms of lazy, wanting too much money, obstructing change. Others in terms of protection from tyrannical bosses. Some truth to both positions exists, I’m sure. I’ve been there.
I just read two articles that point out problems with the way things are, though. Henry Blodget has been writing about the growing income gap in the US. In his post, We May Need Labor Unions After All, he takes on the economic view.
I encourage you to read the entire article, but here are a few points.
First, the negative side of unions:
* They create an “us versus them” culture within companies, instead of putting everyone on the same team
* They create a culture of entitlement
* They restrict flexibility and hurt competitiveness
* They drive companies to move jobs out of the country, to places where there are no unions
* They often become career employment for their leaders, who pay themselves well (much better than the workers they’re representing)
* They maintain ludicrous compensation and benefit levels for jobs based purely on seniority (some bartenders in one of the New York hotel unions, for example, apparently make ~$200,000 a year)
* They force companies to treat all union employees equally, regardless of the relative skill and value of particular employees–thus reducing incentives for people to do a great job
* Etc.
Then he addresses the growing wage inequality:
Contributing to this inequality is a new religion of shareholder value that has come to be defined only by “today’s stock price” and not by many other less-visible attributes that build long-term economic value.
More to the point, Blodget says, “Great companies in a healthy and balanced economy don’t view employees as ‘inputs.’ They don’t view them as ‘costs.’ They don’t try to pay them ‘as little as they have to to keep them from quitting.’ They view their employees as the extremely valuable assets they are (or should be). Most importantly, they share their wealth with them.”
And he concludes:
Healthy capitalism is not about “maximizing near-term profits.” It is about balancing the interests of several critical constituencies:
* Shareholders
* Customers
* Employees
* Society, and
* The Environment
It’s time more of our business leaders started to understand that.
Further irresponsibility
Then one of the Lean gurus I follow, Bill Waddell, wrote an analysis of some of the consequences of our lowest possible cost philosophy in Who are we kidding.
The occasion was the tragic fire in a garment factory in Bangladesh. As he says, “The similarities between the fire in Bangladesh last week and the fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist factory in New York in 1911 are striking. Locked doors, blocked exits, abusive management in a factory full of over-worked, grossly underpaid women doing garment work. Those practices were shamefully common in the Unites States a hundred years ago, but we don’t allow that sort of thing any more. We collectively examined our consciences and decided that, while we want the things we buy to be cheap, we don’t want to save money so badly that workers should suffer and even die in the process.”
He goes on to state, “That’s the way of it in democracies with functioning economies driven by free enterprise principles. We strike that balance, or attempt to anyway.”
Check out his entire analysis. I am with him in the conclusion that there is a dynamic tension that exists between regulation and free market. We in the west (U.S.) may be on the pendulum swing of too much regulation. But too little results in these disasters perpetrated by owners/managers who care too little about people and environment in the pursuit of the lowest possible cost.
Or as I always say, “You get what you pay for.”
by Gary Mintchell | Nov 26, 2012 | Operations Management
So, you think you know all about the poor, explited workers in the China sweat shops? We receive a few reports in the popular media when something spectacular occurrs. But do we really know the situation?
Reporter Leslie T. Chang went to China and lived among the young people working in factories in one of that countries industrial cities. She summarized her story and conclusions in a TED Talk that is worth a few minutes of your time to listen to.
Turns out that the conditions are far from that of the West Virginia coal miners of the early 20th Century. They are not locked into a company town where they have to buy from the company store that pushed them into a perpetual cycle of debt and enslavement. These workers have a better life than they had at home “back on the farm.” They are also dreaming of a better life still. Some are getting additional education, saving money.
It’s always worth treating all parties in a situation as human beings and understanding their stories. The general media gives us only the spectacular (“if it bleeds, it leads”) stories.
I think it’s just worth considering to not just jump to conclusions before you have sufficient information. Works in doing manufacturing, too.
by Gary Mintchell | Nov 21, 2012 | Operations Management
I’m a fan of Andrew Hargodon and his writing on innovation. He’s at the
UC Davis Child Institute for Innovation and Entrepreneurship. I had the opportunity to meet him once but didn’t really get to chat. Believe it or not, I can be quiet at times. Recently, he discussed the Think/Do cycle again.
Reviewing current literature on the subject, he notes that innovation thinking has moved somewhat from coming up with lots of new ideas to “popular advice is starting to emphasize words like doing, testing, experimentation, prototyping, and iterating. The challenge is finding the balance.”
I have known people who take both types to the extreme. There are some who believe in just coming up with lots of bright ideas. Then it’s sort of a “Ready. Fire. Aim.” non-strategy–except that they never seem to get around to the “Aim” part.
There are other people, often but not always in big, bureaucratic companies, who practice “paralysis by analysis.”
Hargadon continues, “It’s a classic goldilocks problem. There’s an escalating cost to both thinking and doing. In the long run, spending too much time doing without thinking is as dangerous as too much thinking without doing.”
A good part of my early career was in product development. You’ve got to have ideas there! What I’ve always found (and maybe it’s just my personality type) is that you absorb ideas from everywhere you can. If you’re building Airstream trailers, go to a campground. Ask questions. Listen. Watch. Same for whatever product you’re working on. Customers, colleagues, competitors all have ideas. Then watch for technologies from outside your market area that might disrupt things for you.
But it does no good unless you actually build and market a product. And to do that, some strategic thinking is essential in order to assure that you are focused.
Traps
But, says Hargadon, “Here’s one of the traps: getting caught thinking and doing at the same time. This happens when you’re so focused on your next pivot that you don’t invest enough in what you’re doing now. While thinking and doing average out, the experience is far more binary. On or off.”
I’ve always found that focus is a critical component of success. When you lose focus, your efforts are diluted and you’ll miss the target.
Check out his complete post. Think about it. Then go do something.
