Do stuff that your customer will be grateful for
Sell the things that your customer will be proud to own
Make things that you can be proud of
This book was recommended to me to help my understanding of quality improvement. It is an unusual book for managers in that it is written as a novel. It has a clearly stated theme but, like a good novel, it leads you into unexpected places with a good deal of guile and persuasion. Whether you accept the author’s Theory of Constraints, which I don’t altogether, it clearly demonstrates the necessity for management to get down to the shop floor to understand the business from end to end. The book is also a model for how a consultant’s knowledge can be exploited by an engaged and motivated client. The latter topic is explained in terms of Socrates’ methods for enabling people to arrive at a better view of the world through debate. As a bonus, the author describes how a better understanding of the world leads to a more relaxed, less contentious existence with a better work-life balance. Highly recommended – Go Read!
This week has been excellent with the WLB in a good state of repair. The bread machine is ticking away making a granary loaf. Netgear have restored their reputaion in my eyes. Another deal has been completed on eBay to everyone’s satisfaction.
Why do these things matter? Making time to succeed in one’s personal life seems to be important. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy is the old saying. This time last year the WLB was in a sorry state of deficit. I had a blackberry, I was able to access my work email 24/7 and this allowed no time for reflection, no time for quality thinking and resulted in a work performance that was unappreciated and a private life that was miserable.
The bread machine represents a concrete stand against the intrusion of work into my non-work life. I appreciate being able to set aside a quarter of an hour to gather the ingredients and set the machine up. I appreciate being able to eat fresh bread that I have made myself. I appreciate the smell of freshly baked bread in the house.
Netgear have honoured their psychological contract with me. Technically they had no obligation as the item in question was out of warranty. The WG602 access point that I had bought in 2003 turned out to work well enough for me to browse the internet but not well enough to carry traffic to copy files, perform printing and other tasks which are presumably less fault tolerant than web browsing. This turned into a battle as I struggled to explain the problem to their support guys in India. The difficulty of describing a network topology in brief text messages combined with the fact that they are working in a foreigh language resulted in a level of frustration that had me swearing that I would never buy a piece of their kit again. I expressed this frustration, in a reply to their latest support thread response, with what I thought was my last word on the issue. This invective triggered a recovery process that resulted in the box being replaced with the current hardware version. The replacement box was up and running in 10 minutes, it performs perfectly and the symptoms that I had previously observed have gone. Thank you to Netgear but their reputation suffered a near terminal dip in the weeks when I was dealing with their on-line support crew who, as far as I can see, added no value to the process at all.
An interesting book! JW ran GE with great success and has written down the things that he thought crucial.
A lot of it lines up with Porter’s ideas on separating yourself from competition by picking your own spot. Welch avoided taking on the Japanese at their own game by exiting businesses where they seemed to be winning. Sun Tzu’s strategy masterpiece Art of War has similar advice, on fighting downhill and avoiding annihilation whenever possible, and predates Jack by a couple of millennia.
He advises continuous improvement (see Kaizen) to keep ahead and lays a huge emphasis on getting the people right. Getting hold of the right people, and getting rid of the wrong people, comes up again and again. Training and development are portrayed as key motivational tools that people appreciate. A motivated and skilled workforce differentiated his businesses from his competitors.
I don’t agree with his distinction between the business world producing wealth and the public sector as overhead. His companies wouldn’t do so well without public services schooling his workers, taking care of their health and preserving the peace in which his companies can operate. The public services are part of the value chain and deserve more respect than he admits.
With the candor that he advocates from the start, he reveals that his career outweighed his family life. Partly he puts this down to the era and his background. He discusses work-life balance and declares it to be a personal choice. With the benefit of experiencing some of the consequences of that era we can now make different choices and try to recognise when we have the balance wrong and when we are encouraging others to make iniquitous choices.
He doesn’t claim that his is a unique formula for success and is very clear about the merit of doing rather than analysing.
