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?

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.

Some Problems with “Command and Control” Management

What is “command and control” management? Many good articles have been written on this by smart folks like Joel Spolsky and Bruce Nussbaum. A good description is included in the Traditional Management Model page of www.1000ventures.com in the section (near the bottom of the page) labeled “25 Lessons from Jack Welch“. Much has been written decrying “command and control” management, but what makes it a bad thing?

Is a “People Whisperer” the Optimal Manager?

This morning NPR did a story on a woman writing a novel about a female horse trainer of the late 19th century, who used the “horse whispering” or “gentling” technique and was superior to the others in her profession.  The traditional method of breaking horses at the time (and still prevalent) was to have some big brute of a guy get on the horse and ride it, bucking and kicking, until it tired out and was “broken”.  Needless to say, horses trained in this way often developed personality disorders or other peculiarities that were occasional problems for the owner or rider.  I quickly began to see implications for the management of human organizations.