Why Office Surveillance? Are Employees Handling Loose Diamonds?

The drive for teamwork in business organizations that started in (or before) the 1980’s was based in the recognition that people are more productive and do better quality work when they feel like part of a team with shared over-arching goals.  Teamwork relies on a sense of trust.   Unfortunately, many people are not trusting by nature, and, even more unfortunately, some of them are managers.

When and Why Does Total Quality Management Work, and Why Isn’t It Still Prevalent?

Total Quality Management, or TQM, was prevalent in business thinking in the 1980s, and improved the work lives and productivity of many people as well as the fortunes of some major corporations in that era.  I won’t try to describe how to implement Total Quality Management here, as there are a great many publications on the topic. I will instead describe the most important and fundamental elements I believe an organization needs to achieve the full benefits of TQM, and discuss why I think it fell into disuse.

Do Zealous Recruiter’s Methods Expose a Business Fallacy?

An interesting blog item (and WSJ article) on a zealous recruiter gave me pause to think about some of the ways our business community regards the individual. Here’s an excerpt from the item:

You can run but you can’t hide when Perry’s on the prowl.

According to Sarah Needleman of The Wall Street Journal, David Perry is a rogue recruiter.
I can’t see why. Just last week, I spoke to Jennifer McClure, a Cincinatti recruiter who insists that she only approaches potential candidates via members of their trusted networks. But if your network isn’t all powerful and you want to find someone special, you have to do some detective work and make a direct approach.

The thing about David Perry is that he’s so ballsy — and wily, too.

The first time I met him he told me that he had once rented a coffee truck and sold donuts at an industrial park until he got the name of a target who worked inside.

The “rogue recruiter” illuminates a frequently occurring flaw in Western business thinking. Reading how David Perry operates, I have to think there’s an ethical (and possibly legal) line there somewhere, and it sounds like David Perry may be crossing it at times. That’s not good, but his business is also evidence of the mistaken idea that some people are so superior to others that they are worth expensive and extreme efforts to recruit.

Startup Company Operations: The Hummingbird or the Shrew

The hummingbird identifies and harvests food sources with great but regulated energy, while the shrew forages furiously in a constant battle for survival. For purposes of discussion I will consider only the grass-roots startup company, not spin-offs or startups sponsored by existing companies.  Companies, like the people they are made of, exist on a continuum. Nobody is at the extreme or exactly in the middle of any range, but I will address relative extremes here to illustrate my point that well-planned and disciplined operations work best for the startup as well as the established company. The hummingbird illustrates the company that maintains and evolves a plan, and works to make the plan happen, while the shrew illustrates the company that operates on inspiration and enthusiasm, and often seems to be always late and scrambling, or operating as if in an emergency.  How does the startup company’s style of operation affect its prospects for successful growth and future prosperity?

Good Quality Job Listings Save Time and Money, and Build a Better Organization

Recent experience reviewing job listings shows most have room for improvement. Having been laid off from my automotive industry assignment of the past ten years in mid-July, I have been spending a lot of time perusing the job listings at places like monster.com, indeed.com, careerbuilder.com, the state of Michigan’s Michigan Talent Bank website, and many other similar places. The first thing I noticed about a lot of what companies posted was the frequent mistakes in grammar, word usage, and just plain poor writing. That’s not bad, just careless and (sadly) commensurate with the increasing prevalence of poor English skills in the United States. Then I also noticed that there was often evidence of a certain clueless-ness about how to attract the best candidates and “sell” a position. Needless to say, looking clueless is not a good thing, so how can you avoid it?

What are the Characteristics of a Really Excellent Manager?

It occurred to me that, with decades of study of good (and bad) management behind me, I want to assemble a list of characteristics of really good managers I’ve known, worked for, or otherwise encountered. I don’t intend to discuss skills, experience, or education in particular, but rather the less tangible personal behaviors and traits that I believe are less well understood, but possibly of highest importance to good management. Many of these probably fall under the heading of “emotional intelligence”, but many also stem from introspection, self-awareness, and empathy for others. These managers blended the roles of manager and leader as needed to get great results and raise the performance of everyone associated with them. I will revise and refine the list over time, and welcome your suggestions for additions or changes. Please read further, and leave me a comment or otherwise contact me with your additions, ideas, questions, etc. Thanks in advance. The list follows. – Tim

Where Does Bad Corporate Culture Come From, and Can It Be Corrected?

Bad corporate culture arises naturally from human nature, lack of management savvy, and bad or clueless management behavior. Corporate culture is built from the combined experiences of the members of the organization, the quality of their interactions with each other and outsiders, the results of the organization’s efforts, and the psychological tone set by top management and every level of management beneath it. All of these factors are expressed in, and some are caused by, management behavior, and poor management behavior will always affect the culture negatively. The good news is that you can work to correct and improve the culture at your own level.

After Cost of Quality … Cost of Culture?

The “cost of quality” concept advanced management science, but what’s next? As the science of business management has progressed, cost measurement has long been a key endeavor, as it provides a lot of the information needed to know how the business is doing and to make decisions, solve problems, and make improvements. In the past few decades, areas of cost measurement such as cost of sales and cost of quality have provided helpful insights for management teams, and improved the competitiveness of companies that understood them. Famous business gurus have weighed in on cost measurement with great positive effect. W. Edwards Deming once said “The greatest costs in business are unknown and unknowable.” Finding ways to measure those unknown costs has produced significant gains in the understanding and effectiveness of business processes, and significant progress has been made in assessing increasingly tougher areas of business, but one area has always escaped effective measurement, though it has perhaps the biggest impact on business performance of any: the culture of the organization.

Dysfunctional Organizations Are Like Dysfunctional Families

Dysfunction causes organizations and families to fail to meet their goals.  I wish I had time to do actual digging (and research) on this, but other things like … making a living … make that impossible.  Still, I have my observations, and here they are:

The impact of dysfunctional relationships and behaviors is almost always negative.  When an organization is dysfunctional, such as when one part of it has inordinate power, it will be challenged to meet its goals.  Quality, timing, and cost will all usually be less favorable than planned.  Projects will be routinely delayed, costs will routinely be revised upward, quality will be at risk of being forgotten in the quest for profitability and timeliness, products will be at risk of many and/or severe defects, and customer satisfaction will lag behind more capable and less dysfunctional competitors.  Similarly, a dysfunctional family will have parallel problems with achieving its goals.

Failing to Fail Can Be the Worst Scenario

The worst companies are the ones that fail to fail: they never do especially well, and they never do badly enough to close or be bought out. Instead they muddle along, fortunes rising and falling, hiring and laying off in waves, providing lackluster returns to their owners/shareholders and poor quality products and services to their customers. They never get their act together, and generate far more human misery than an organization that fails or succeeds outright.