Clarke Ching's Rocks and Snowballs

It's just a shame you can't get good people

Here's a thought.

The waterfall methodology is perfectly logical IF you believe that you can PREVENT CHANGE by getting things RIGHT up-front AND that any change that does happen is CAUSED BY your staffs SLOPPINESS OR INCOMPETENCE.

If you believe this AND you don't know any better way of doing things then the waterfall is perfect ...

it's just a shame that you can't get good people though isn't it

Hardware or Software: Computational Origami ?

Here's something I bet you've never heard of before today Computational Origami:

Robert Lang, a laser physicist and origami artist for more than 30 years, continues to be amazed at the potential applications of the centuries-old art of paper folding. "You would think that there is not much you can do with origami as an art form that has not been already figured out," he says.

But, Lang adds, origami artists continue to "demonstrate new structures and realize new levels of beauty," a statement well supported by his own origami renderings of subjects such as cows, fish, blue herons and owls.

Origami was purely a hobby for Lang until he decided to apply the kind of mathematical modeling he used in laser physics to paper folding.

... Today, while concentrating on his art, Lang also works as an industrial consultant, applying his computational origami expertise to the design of a range of products, including consumer electronics and medical equipment.

... EASi Engineering GmbH in Alzenau, Germany, asked Lang to help determine how to squeeze a very large object -- an automobile air bag -- into a tiny compartment inside a steering wheel. Lang had already developed algorithms to flatten a set of polygons, and he applied them to a computer simulation of how to flatten the 3-D polyhedron shape of an inflated air bag. This process saved time and eliminated the expensive requirement of crashing real cars to determine if an air-bag design would really work, Lang says.

According to Lang you can download software.  Only trouble is that it runs on Mac and it "can be mastered by a high school student" which rules me out on both counts.

Should ... but I won't ?

I've just glanced at the documentation that comes with my redundancy package. The letter finishes with "On behalf of the Company I should like to thank you ...". Should?

Should? Does that mean that the author is meant to thank me, but isn't? As in "I should go for a run each morning, but I don't".

Am I being too pedantic?

Good business and Flow

Johnnie Moore has an interesting blog entry about Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's Good Business Book

Here's a chunk that Johnnie says resonated with him. Me too.

Groups of people can be described as being more or less complex. A crowd is neither differentiated nor integrated; a bureaucracy is usually the latter but not the former. Is the typical department that is run along "command and control" lines a complex system? Probably not, because by not utilising the employees' unique skills it is not very differentiated. It may be well integrated in that everyone knows his duties and collaborates smoothly, but maintaining order in such a system is both costly and inefficient...

However a very laissez-faire organisation would not be complex, either. It may be differentiated, but its components would not fit well with one another or work together seamlessly... One of the key tasks of management is to create an organisation that stimulates the complexity of those who belong to it.

I suppose that's another book I'll have to buy then ...

As Mozart said - I'll be Bach

Schwarzenegger is, apparently, doing a good job.  Who would have thought?

Different planets.

Do you ever find that some people seem to be from an entirely different planet to yourself? 

Their planet isn't necessarily better or worse than your planet, just different.

For instance, my soon-to-be-ex-manager once asked our team, by email, for suggestions about how he could "Motivate and Inspire" us.  Different planets entirely.  If you're reading this then you're probably from my planet, but how, how, how can you explain to someone from this other strange planet that the first step would have been to NOT SEND OUT THE EMAIL? 

Closer to the family tree, my Dad is a very practical, kind, down-to-earth farmer type.  He recently got false teeth and I just happened to call him the day before he was to get the mold made.  After he'd told me all about his cows he mentioned his imminent dentist visit and I advised him to take my Mum because "you usually make a better impression when she's around".  My mum says he still hasn't got it even though she's explained it to him several times.

Actually I think he does get it but he just doesn't get why anyone would say it in the first place. 

Different planets.

From the Toyota Way to the Honda Way

Well well well.  Way back in 1990, in Managing on the Edge: How the Smartest Companies Use Conflict to Stay Ahead"  Richard T Pascale referred to Honda as possibly the worlds best company and talked about "The Honda Way".

It must be Toyota's turn this decade.

JAPAN vs WESTERN WORLD

I like this quote from the 1990 book Managing on the Edge: How the Smartest Companies Use Conflict to Stay Ahead" by Richard T Pascale (which is no longer being published but today you can pick it up 2nd hand for 39 cents from Amazon.com):

We are going to win and the industrial west is going to lose out: There's nothing much you can do about it, because the reasons for your failure are within yourselves.Your firms are built on the Taylor model; even worse, so are your heads. With your bosses doing the thinking while the workers yield the screwdrivers, you're convinced deep down that this is the right way to run a business.

For you, the essence of management is getting the ideas out of the heads of the bosses into the hands of labor.

We are beyond the Taylor model; business, we know, is now so complex and difficult, the survival of firms so hazardous in an environment increasingly unpredictable, competitive and fraught with danger, that their continued existence depends on the day-to-day mobilization of every ounce of intelligence.

For us, the core of management is precisely the art of mobilizing and pulling together the intellectual resources of all employees in the service of the firm. Only by drawing on the combined brainpower of all its employees can a firm face up to the turbulence and constraints of today's environment.

This is why our large companies give their employees three to four times more training than yours, this is why they foster within the firm such intensive exchange and communication. This is why they seek constantly everybody's suggestions and why they demand from the educational system increasing numbers of graduates as well as bright and well-educated generalists, because these people are the lifeblood of industry.Your socially minded bosses, often full of good intentions, believe their duty is to protect the people in their firms. We, on the other hand, are realists and consider it our duty to get our people to defend their firms which will pay them back a hundredfold for their education. By doing this we end up being more social than you.

Mr. Konsonuke Matsushita, Executive Director Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd.

 

Toyota

When I was growing up Japanese cars were referred to as "Jap Crap". 

But now-a-days the Japanese are renowned for making not only the best cars and the best electronics but also the best sushi in the world.  We Westerners spent the 80's and 90's playing catch-up: learning how to lean this and quality that, how to kaizan these and kaban those - despite parental warnings that we will go blind from doing such things.  

But the thick plottens:  it turns out that not all Japanese companies are so amazing after all.  In fact, Toyota stands head and shoulders above the rest and - what's worse - they don't actually do many of the Japanese things that my MBA courses told me the Japanese do (e.g. they don't do QFD).  And, it turns out that most Japanese companies don't do things the way that Toyota does.

So what does Toyota do differently?  Well until recently there's been bugger all written about how or why Toyota works.  But lucky for us, in the last few months two excellent books have been released.

• The Toyota Way by Jeffrey Liker is excellent.  Liker takes his time to explain the philosophy and rationale behind the "Toyota Way" before focusing on the practices.  Every few pages I have another little "ah ha!" moment and I suddenly understand agile practices a little better than I did before.  My only disappointment with Liker's book is that while he tells us lots about how Toyota builds cars, he doesn't say much about how they design them. 
• Luckily Mike Kennedy has just written Product Development for the Lean Enterprise: Why Toyota's System Is Four Times More Productive and How You Can Implement It which does just that.  This book, written as a novel, tells the story of a once-formidable company that's started faltering and how it turns around it's new product development process by adopting Toyota's set-based development approach.  [To be honest, I'm only half way through it so I assume they adopt Toyota's approach ... it would be a bit of an anti-climax if they didn't].

Both of these books are excellent and should be compulsory reading If you're interested in Agile software development or TOC.  You'll learn good stuff from both.

 

What on earth is a Potemkin village!

Dictionary.com's word of the day on Thursday last week was Potemkin village

An impressive facade or display that hides an undesirable fact or state; a false front.
... Potemkin village is so called after Grigori Aleksandrovich Potemkin, who had elaborate fake villages built in order to impress Catherine the Great on her tours of the Ukraine and the Crimea in the 18th century. 

Kinda like a Microsoft project plan with every task showing at 90% complete, perhaps? 

Or the demo we did recently where everything went well ... but no one saw the chaos during the day-and-a-half prior to the demo.

[speaking of word's ... here's a favourite: try using callipygous in a sentence tomorrow!]