John Hunter blogs: managing, investing and engineering
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Portfolio - Professional Life - Management Blog - Engineering Blog - Investing Blog - Travel - Consulting - blog recognition
Selected Posts: October to December 2010
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- Building Adoption of Management Improvement Ideas in Your Organization - Favor efforts that will help you build organizational capacity to do more of what you want going forward (adopt lean thinking, use design of experiments, etc.). Some of this is about building expertise in the organization. It is also about building your circle of influence.
- Top Countries for Science and Math Education: Finland, Hong Kong and Korea - Results for the Science portion 1) Finland 2) Hong Kong 3) Japan 4) Korea 5) New Zealand...
- How to Get a New Management Strategy, Tool or Concept Adopted - I believe the way to encourage adoption of management improvement tools, methods and ideas is to solve people's problems (or give them new opportunities). Instead of trying to convince people by talking about why they need to adopt some new ideas, I think it is much better to show them that it works.
- Don't Treat People Like You Want to be Treated - You should treat people how they want to be treated, not how you want to be treated.
- No True Lean Thinking or Agile Software Development - The value depends on your operational definition. Once you operationalize management ideas in a real organization it necessarily should have differences from how it is operationalized elsewhere.
- Why work doesn't happen at work - When asked where do you go when you really need to get something done, almost no-one says: the office (unless it is early in the morning or late at night).
- Good Process Improvement Practices - Good process improvement practices include: 1) a standardized improvement process (pdsa...) 2) Going to the gemba - improvement is done where the work is done. You must go to the where the action is. Sitting in meeting rooms, or offices, reading reports and making decisions is not the way to improve effectively...
- Government Debt as Percentage of GDP 1990-2009: USA, Japan, Germany, China... - Gross debt is not the only important figure. Government debt held within the country is much less damaging than debt held by those outside the country. While Japan has by far the largest Debt to GDP ration, they also own much of the debt themselves.
- Science and Optical Illusions - Normally out brains do a fantastic job of guiding us through our day, but they have weaknesses that can lead us to mistaken conclusions.
- More Kiva Entrepreneur Loans: Kenya, Honduras, Armenia... - When looking for loans I give preference to loans that improve productivity and increasing capacity of the entrepreneur. If they use the proceeds of the loan to increase their capacity to produce they can pay off the loan and find themselves much better off.
- Helping People Take Joy in Work - Fundamentally it is about taking pride in what you do and eliminating the practices in so many organizations that dehumanize people.
- Create a System That Lets People Take Pride in Their Work - What managers need to do is eliminate de-motivation - not to motivate. Manager's don't need to "empower" employees they need to fix the system to treat employees with respect and allow them to do their jobs well.
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