EclecticLip

The Corporate Lattice was chosen as the book club’s thirtieth book, in recognition of the fact that the “corporate ladder” is a poor metaphor for a companies of relatively stable size.  The situation is different for rapidly growing companies, who might need an ever-enlarging cadre of managers or directors to oversee burgeoning work teams. 

It was also recommended by a colleague who found the book useful on her return from maternity leave on a part-time basis.  Her limited availability meant she had to find a role which didn’t build directly on her career to that point, so the lattice metaphor may have helped in showing that a career move couldn’t just be “up” or “down” but sideways as well.

As a soon-to-be-father, it was surprising to find that the authors’ research found more men reporting work-life conflict than women — perhaps because companies have come to accomodate mothers’ scheduling needs, but have not yet come to appreciate the impacts of children on fathers’ availability.  Some of the book’s conclusions seemed to overreach as well, as captured in the “side notes” at the end of each chapter summary. 

As always, if you enjoyed the summary, please consider supporting the authors by purchasing a copy of the book. 

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The Corporate Lattice (summary)

Given the overriding importance of data presentation (read graphing skills) to the effectiveness of the modern “knowledge worker” it was decided that the book club would cover a book on that very subject.

Stephen Few’s Show Me The Numbers was chosen after a review of reviews (a meta-review?) on Amazon, which seemed to suggest that Edward Tufte (the giant of the field) might not be the best read for business-centric readers tied to Microsoft Excel.  Key points that stood out from the rest of the text included the “4 chunk rule” (describing the maximum limit of themes or aggregations of data people can process at a time) and the fact that when it comes to graphs, it’s the shape of the data that counts.  Not the particular values.  (If the values are critical… the data should be presented as a table!)

This review is the first (thus far at least) to be summarized in two files — a Word document and a PowerPoint slide deck — due to the benefit not just of explaining what the text was saying, but showing it visually as well.

As always, if you find the review to be useful, please consider supporting the author by purchasing the book. 

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Show Me The Numbers (summary)

Show Me The Numbers (PPT)

(originally written Jan 25)

I’m in training pretty much the whole week — which fact one of my horoscopes must’ve predicted.  I mean, there are so many of them floating out there, that one of them must’ve been right!

 

The past couple days covered FMEA, an engineering topic so obscure I’ll give the unabbreviated name (Failure Modes and Effects Analysis) and immediately move the story forward.  We were fortunate to have had a great teacher — a grizzled veteran of industry who tossed out great one-liners such as:

 

"an FMEA without action [items] is called Charmin — because if you print it on softer paper, THEN it has a function"

         (Charmin is a brand of what polite butlers would refer to as ‘bathroom tissue’)

 

"product development is a failure factory"

 

          ….as well as the sentence clause,

" — not that it ever happens here — "

 

delivered each time he described a wince-worthy product development process which had indeed, never happened here. 

 

He also described how a good FMEA meeting ideally comprises the design engineer, a reliability engineer, a facilitator, and a fourth engineer playing the role of "The Opposer".  (Or as they say in the Biblical Hebrew, "Satan".    )

 

 

It turns out this fellow was a co-op student at Ford when FMEA’s were brought there in the 1970’s, due to the tendency of the Ford Pinto to explode in rear-end collisions, as a $4-per-vehicle fix was deemed too expensive.  Though to be fair, that doesn’t account for inflation; according to an unverified internet source, such a fix would cost a whopping $20 today.  That totally changed your perspective, didn’t it? 

 

In crisis, Ford brought in experts from NASA — which had regrettably extensive experience with exploding products — who brought in this FMEA technique.  So, as our teacher wryly noted, FMEA’s are actually rocket science, ported over from the Space Program which invented them.  The very Space Program which employed a colleague on an unsuccessful Mars Lander.  (Not the one which missed the planet; the other one, which stopped phoning home.)

 

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Come to think of it, it’s turning out to be quite the lesson week for me.  At the weekend gold show — bereft of decent freebies, apart from some USB drives — the busiest company booth was from some no-name junior exploration company (read "investing lottery-ticket") which had set up a big-screen TV, broadcasting the big Packers-Bears NFL game.  During commercial breaks, the marketing rep would mute the screen and begin a spiel about how "today’s game is brought to you by XYZ Resources; we have millions in cash flow, hot properties, and you need to buy our stock" — though better-finessed than my paraphrase.  They even had a functioning popcorn-maker to feed the crowd.  Pure genius.  Pity his company has a snowball’s chance in hell.  

 

Then there was the fellow I bumped into, wearing a suit; made of brown corduroy.  See, lessons all around! 

A long-time proponent of the “A3″ reporting format (which aims to summarize a problem and its solution in a roughly 11″ x17″ sheet of paper) it was a delight to cover Understanding A3 Thinking in the book club. 

Having authored some epic reports and PowerPoint slide decks in my time, the prospect of condensing findings into a single – albeit large – sheet of paper, immediately piqued my interest.  It also brought to mind the quotation by Antoine de Saint-Exupery:

Perfection is achieved, not when there is noting more to add, but when there is nothing more to take away.
 

Consider that it’s standard form to report out insights in essay format, with complete sentences; this is as inefficient as incandescent lighting.  In Edison’s invention, only a few percent of the energy output is light (the rest is waste heat).  In a technical report I’d be surprised if more than 20% of the words relate to the discoveries; I’d bet most of the words are “filler” required to make the communication of information, conform to grammatical rules. 

While Understanding A3 Thinking did cover the guidelines Toyota uses for A3 reports (e.g. emphasizing visual methods, instead of verbal methods, for explanation) it suggested the overarching value was to ingrain rigorous problem-solving discipline in the employees.  Over the course of the problem-solving, engineers submit A3’s to their supervisors and other senior staff, who provide guidance and suggestions, both on problem-solving approach and data presentation. 

As such, by the time an A3 report is finished, it will have gone through extensive “peer review” (or “superiors’ review”) which helps improve the quality of the findings, the presentation, and the problem-solving skills of the author — who may in turn pass these best practises to future junior employees.
As always, if you enjoy the book summary, please consider supporting the authors by purchasing a copy. 

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Understanding A3 Thinking - summary

Hmm… life’s busy-ness sure didn’t return to normal, there…

Anyways, here’s the 27th book we covered in the work business book club: Financial Intelligence.  It was chosen because of the feeling that a little financial literacy could probably go a long way for engineers and other technical types.  The fact that the question “what’s EBITDA?” recurs in all of our business-update meetings also played a role. 

One of the books requiring a longer summary (which clocks in at 12 pages!) the biggest takeaway for the reviewer was that accounting is an exact science… based on rough assumptions.  I didn’t appreciate the challenges involved in trying to represent a company’s financial situation, when any number of line items may need:

• to be amortized / depreciated (e.g. capital costs for equipment, where you might need to estimate how long equipment will last before obsolescence)
• to be matched with corresponding revenues or expenses  (e.g. travelling and other costs for salespeople should be reported only when a sale is actually made, or the customer definitely spurns you)

As always, if you find the summary useful, please consider supporting the authors by purchasing the book. 

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Financial Intelligence - summary

Hmm… missed out a few weeks there.  Life’s busy-ness has only now returned to normalcy. 

Getting to Yes was chosen as the book club’s 26th volume because it deals with negotiations, which, like it or not, play a pivotal role in business.  It was expected that book club members’ careers would benefit from knowing a bit about negotiating, whether they were arranging supplier pricing, defining multi-firm partnerships, or in particular, agitating for higher pay & benefits. 

The book’s emphatic message that negotiators should focus on interests instead of positions, was probably the main takeaway — the one-sentence summary.  One book club member did offer that the BATNA concept was most pivotal in their own supplier dealings.  In short, he found it difficult working with suppliers who had a strong BATNA (Best Alternative To Negotiated Agreement)… because the status quo worked well enough for them; they had no driving incentive to negotiate a new arrangement.

As always, if you enjoy the book summary, please consider supporting the authors by purchasing a copy of the book. 

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Getting to Yes (summary)

Steven Sharp’s book The High Velocity Edge (previously titled Chasing The Rabbit) was chosen as the book club’s 24th book, on the recommendation of a university professor.  In some ways a complementary volume to The Toyota Way, the book proved an extraordinarily valuable read.  And happily, while the book is somewhat Toyota-centric, other successful organizations also received chapters of their own.

The author is a multiple Shingo Prize winner, and its premise is that success at Toyota and similar “high velocity” organizations comes not from the tools deployed at the firms… but rather, by the culture that invents those tools.  More bluntly, the use of “lean manufacturing” tools (5S, value stream mapping and so forth) does not correlate with corporate success.  The creation of a corporate culture with the discipline to remain dissatisifed with the status quo, is far more important.

As always, if you enjoy the book summary, please consider supporting the author by purchasing the book. 

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The High Velocity Edge (summary)

To a classical studies aficionado, one-time richest man in the world Bill Gates triggers thoughts of Alexander the Great.  Both men straddled the world with then-unparalleled might.  And both are arguably less accomplished than their parents.

Philip of Macedon came out of nowhere to make Macedon the leading power of Greece.  Sure, Alexander took things to the next level — but he had the advantage of all the legwork dad Philip had done, to put his son in such an enviable position.

Bill Gates III, software baron, was the son of Bill Gates*, corporate lawyer, whose hard work made it possible for Bill III to attend an exclusive prep school which was privileged enough to have a chunk of time on a GE computer.  He was able to capitalize on that head start in life, to great effect — and good for him.  But his accomplishment might pale in comparison to what his father (and other forebears) made of less-privileged beginnings.
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* in one of those stranger than fiction scenarios, Bill Gates (the lawyer) was the son of Bill Gates II.  But since the lawyer didn’t use the affectation “III”, this passed to his son (the software baron).  As such, Bill Gates III is the son of Bill Gates, the son of Bill Gates II.  So weird, it could come out of The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy…

I’d written previously about how blitzkrieg tactics were devised around Europe after World War I, but only implemented in Germany (because the Allies won — so innovators were ignored).

W. Edwards Deming — the father of Japanese quality — would be another case of an innovator being ignored at home, only to have their ideas flourish elsewhere.  American manufacturing was so strong, it created a crippling strength in North American business culture — an overconfidence which made it complacent enough that it largely stopped improving.

(image source: here)

Douglas McGregor’s monumental volume, The Human Side of Enterprise, was the book club’s 22nd selection.  Penetratively insightful even for today’s readers (who have the added benefit of the recent “empowerment” fad) it must’ve been an astonishing read to his contemporaries.  One of them — W.L. Gore — famously ingrained this thinking into his company’s culture.  Even the name W.L. Gore & Associates (the firm’s employees all have the nominal title “Associate”) reflects McGregor’s advice to eschew titles.

Striking in McGregor’s tome is its implied criticism of Taylorism (or at least its excesses) — which tended to separate a workforce into “brains” (management) and “brawn” (labour).  While Taylor’s (followers’) dualism would have made Descartes proud, it prevented most of the workforce from reaching its potential.  Besides, power corrupts, and the concentration of power in management probably didn’t do the company much good.

The Starfish And The Spider (book 9) is a particularly complementary book club selection.

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The Human Side of Enterprise - summary