Tag Archives: reflection

Moving Beyond Profit: Support the WHY

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It’s amazing how sometimes, just a tiny TINY little stir-of-the-consciousness can yield amazing insights.

That’s what just happened to me a few minutes ago. While scanning this morning’s Twitter feed, I saw this one:

It reminded me of an article I posted in early 2011 titled “Is Profit Waste?” where I posed the question of whether profit was just one of many kinds of waste – that is, overproduction of revenue. When companies talk about a desire to grow, usually they mean they need to figure out a way to grow their revenue stream (and often this means growing the organization, expanding the scope, or adding to product lines and service offerings). In fact, one of the strongest drivers for pushing innovation is that desire to grow.

But WHY? Why do you want to grow? It’s that question that the tweet above answered for me in less than 140 characters.

Here’s a company that’s not trying to sell you on the WHAT that they do. It’s a new company, so obviously they’re trying to get started, but they’re immediately clear about WHY they want to grow… they want to get more women into technology! And the clear outward sign of successful growth will be getting more women into technology. And oh – by the way – in order for us to pursue our PURPOSE of getting women into technology, we need to make some money, and to do this we’ve written our first app. And won’t you please buy it… because if you do, you can help us work to get more women into technology!


I love this. I think more of us should approach our business stories this way! Don’t focus on business growth or profit growth, focus on WHY you’re working in the first place and WHAT you want more revenue to spend on. If we support your mission, we’re more likely to support your product, even if it doesn’t meet all our needs. Furthermore, we’re more likely to want to work with you to enhance the products, expand your reach, and collaborate to achieve higher levels of quality and serendipitous innovation.

Quality in 3 Words: EXCELLENCE IN BEING

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(Image Credit: Doug Buckley of http://hyperactive.to)

I stumbled across a LinkedIn discussion in the “Continuous Improvement, Six Sigma & Lean” group yesterday that, though posted 8 months ago, has just started to get revived traffic. The question was simple: What is Quality? The poster, though, specified that you’d have to answer the question in three words. (Turns out this was a problem for many people who posted paragraph-long descriptions.)

Describing quality in three words (or less) provides a pretty good exercise in critical thinking. After all, Juran did it (explaining that quality is “fitness for use”) and so did Crosby, sort of (“quality is free”).

Here are some of the submissions that actually (or almost) honored the three-word requirement:

  • Customer Satisfaction, Sustainability & Reliability
  • One word: Survival
  • Forever Satisfied Customer
  • Defined by Customer
  • Perceived by Customer
  • Exceeding Customer Expectations
  • Fitness for Use
  • Delivering Customers Expectations
  • Accurate Consistent Results
  • Perception of Value

But I’m not happy with any of these definitions. Just because customers are satisfied doesn’t mean they’re being satisfied by quality (think Wal-mart). “Survival” doesn’t imply quality at all (think of any elderly person you know who can’t walk, communicate or take care of themselves). “Perception of value” is nice, but it doesn’t really compel us to strive for excellence.

I was surprised by how many of the submissions included the word “customer”. But I don’t think you need a customer to define quality. I can easily assess quality without purchasing – or desiring to own – anything at all!

My “Quality in 3 Words” would have to be the EXCELLENCE OF BEING. As I mentioned in “Quality vs. Excellence” a while back, quality can result from adhering to standards or satisfying customers, but the fuel that drives quality is the pursuit of excellence – and this must be a value within each one of us.

Can Quality Professionals Help Others Get Happier?

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(Image Credit: Doug Buckley of http://hyperactive.to)

In his April post, ASQ CEO Paul Borawski asks “Are Quality Professionals Happy on the Job?” His question was motivated by a recent Forbes article that rated software quality professionals among the ten happiest in their careers.

However, I’d like to make his question a call to action for the quality community!

As improvement specialists, I suggest that as quality professionals, we are perfectly situated to use our skills to help everyone in an organization become happier… and thus more productive! Anecdotally, I’m sure few will argue that on the days you feel secure, balanced, and on top of the world – it’s easy to fly through tasks, collaborate effectively, and make amazing progress on pretty much anything.

The notion has already entered the quality community – and my position is that this topic needs more exploration, both in research and in practice. For example, in the February 2012 issue of Quality Progress, Johnston & Beck’s article on “The Power of Positive” takes a first step towards proposing how the relatively new discipline of positive psychology can be leveraged by the quality profession to catalyze breakthrough improvement.

I strongly support this new direction in thinking, and here’s why. ISO 9000 p. 3.1.5 (formerly ISO 8402:1994) defines quality as “the totality of characteristics of an entity that bear upon its ability to satisfy stated and implied needs.” In industry, we usually think of a product or a process as the entity, and then we work on improving the product’s quality or improving the effectiveness or efficiency of the process. So why don’t we turn it inside out and think of our SELVES as the entities?

The question I’ve posed is… what if that ENTITY is YOU? That’s exactly what I wanted to accomplish by proposing the notion of quality consciousness, which asks the question: “What are the totality of characteristics of YOU that bear upon your ability to satisfy the stated and implied needs of yourself, your communities, and the organizations where you contribute your talent?”

The three aspects of quality consciousness are AWARENESS of what quality means in a particular context, ALIGNMENT of you and your talents with the problem to be solved and the environment in which the problem and its solution are embedded, and the ability to focus your ATTENTION on the problem or situation that needs to be improved.

In Garvin’s 1988 book Managing Quality, he characterizes five dimensions of quality: 1) quality as defined by the customer, 2) as conformance to manufacturing requirements, 3) as the presence or absence of product characteristics, 4) as the degree of excellence delivered compared to the cost (value-based), and 5) the transcendent dimension which says you “know quality when you see it.”

I also believe that you know quality when you can FEEL it – within yourself, and within your teams and organizations.

The Secret of (High Performance) Teams

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I confess, I wasn’t very enthusiastic when I first picked up this new book by Mark Miller, VP of Training and Development from Chick-Fil-A. The Secret of Teams: What Great Teams Know and Do was kind of thin and reminded me of Who Moved My Cheese? – at least by touch. I’ve read tons of books about cultivating successful teams, many of which were banal and uninspiring (in addition to saying the same things as all the other “yay team” books). Does the world really need one more?

After reading Mark’s 144-page parable, I think the answer is yes. Yes, the world did need one more book about high performance teams, and it’s this one. And I’m glad he took the time to share the story with the world.

The Secret of Teams is the story of Debbie, a manager who has a track record that includes turning one particularly less-than-stellar team into a powerhouse. Her reputation precedes her as she moves into a new position, where her team (although well intentioned) just isn’t coming together like she’d envisioned. Debbie carries a slight air of defeat as she struggles to recover her sense of self-worth. She convinces her boss that it might be helpful to go interview some high-performance teams, to extract some themes that could help improve her own management approach (as well as other team leaders in similar positions in her company) – and she sets off on her journey.

As you read through Mark’s book, you find yourself reflecting on your own personal experiences to uncover the drivers for great teams. It is the easy and natural way that his prose draws out self-reflection that, I think, is the greatest strength of this quick read.

To me, I realized that there are characteristics of individuals as well as characteristics of the collective that must be in place for a high-performance team to emerge. You can have high-performance people that work well alone, but just don’t gel while working together. Each of the team’s members must want to be there. They have to have the skills and capabilities to function within the team, and make a contribution that the other members value, rather than riding the coat tails and momentum of their teammates (and in general, dragging things down). Team members have to be approachable, willing to share information and support. There has to be a feeling of camaraderie and enjoyment for a team to truly be high-performance… because then they will seek out time and opportunities to do more with the work, catalyzing the productivity of inspiration.

Miller echoes many of these findings through the characters in his story. His “Top 3” drivers turn out to be Talent (intrinsic motivation/fit), Skills (capabilities that can be developed through experience and training), and Community (an “emotional grid” where the team’s members can at once be vulnerable to one another and fully supportive of one another). In fact, the only driver I might add to his list is Inspiration, because I’ve observed it in every truly awesome team I’ve had the privilege to observe. You’re going to have to read his book to get more context – but it’s an enjoyable and worthwhile read, one that would be excellent as the basis for a team to read together and discuss how to get on a track towards collective self-improvement.

An Unorthodox Tip for Improving Productivity and Eliminating Writer’s Block: Listen to the Earworm

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(Image Credit: Doug Buckley of http://hyperactive.to)

The other day I read a news article or blog post (or something; I can’t remember) that explained one reason we get irritating songs stuck in our heads. The post was based on a research paper by Williamson et al. (2011) in the journal Psychology of Music. Usually, when we catch one of these “earworms” because we’ve heard a snippet of a catchy and familiar song, we’ll walk away or turn off the song in the beginning or the middle of it.

The tune, however, like a rapid flesh-eating organism invading our very soul, continues without compunction. Because we stopped the song in the middle, our unconscious becomes fixed on the task of finishing it. And so it continues, on and on, all day!

The solution, we’re told, is to listen to the annoying song until it’s over… our unconscious, at that point, will be content that the tune is complete and will be happy to move on to other topics.

I didn’t think too much of this piece of trivia until I was reading an interview with Erik Larson, author of the fantastic 2003 novel The Devil in the White City. His book provides an amazing account of the technology development and social context that went into organizing the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago – it’s a totally satisfying read. When asked about his discipline for writing, and for avoiding writer’s block, he described a method that might actually leverage the same hold on the unconscious that earworms grab:

And I try to write a couple of pages. I’m not firm. I don’t have a specific goal. But the one thing I always adhere to is that I stop while I’m ahead. If I’m going to take that break for breakfast, I may stop in the middle of the sentence or the middle of the paragraph. Something I know how to finish. Because as any writer knows, it’s — that’s what kills you is when you just don’t know what to do when you come back. And all the demons accumulate. And then you go out for a cappuccino, that kind of thing.

If you want to avoid writer’s block, leave your unconscious a hook – an easy way back in to your writing productivity!

If you want to avoid ramp-up time (or context switching time) to get your head back into a problem – which has been estimated, for software development at least, to be on average a full 15 minutes for every interruption – leave your unconscious an easy way back in to productivity! A half written module or subroutine… or a half written sentence on your notepad!

These are just hypotheses, but they’re definitely testable. I’m going to try testing this out in my own life immediately.

Management Improvement Carnival #161

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It’s been a long time! Although I haven’t served in this role since the spring of 2009, I am pleased once again to host ASQ Influential Voices blogger John Hunter’s Management Improvement Carnival, featuring some interesting or noteworthy articles that have been posted over the past couple weeks. Be sure to check out previous installations of the Carnival to get a broad sample of the most recent blog posts that are relevant to managers who are interested in quality, innovation and process improvement.

My top recommendation is Lotto Lai’s review of a recent symposium in Hong Kong, entitled “One Year After the Fukushima Nuclear Accident – the Way Forward with Safety and Risk Engineering.” (3/10/2012) This is a really fascinating and comprehensive look at the Fukushima disaster from the quality management perspective. I particularly like one of his slides about 60% of the way through the presentation that presents a 2×2 grid detailing probabilistic and deterministic approaches to the design that were intended to enhance plant safety. I really like this grid and will be thinking about ways to apply them to problems that I encounter in my job and my consulting (fortunately, none of which involve managing nuclear power plants).

On a lighter note, I also enjoyed “Coffee Shop Buzz is Good for Your Creativity” from Lifehacker. (3/6/2012) Have you ever thought that maybe the social pressure around you is what helps you get things done at the coffee shop? Hmmmm.

Oh, and we can’t forget St. Patrick’s Day! In preparation for the big weekend, Carly Barry at Minitab blogged about “The Odds of Finding a Four Leaf Clover” (3/16/2012). If you’ve ever struggled with odds ratios to compare the likelihood of two events, this article might give you the example to clear it up for good.

My newest “find” in the realm of quality and management improvement blogs is David Kanigan’s “Lead.Learn.Live” at davidkanigan.com. I so love the interconnected nature of blogs… a couple weeks ago, he “liked” something on my blog, and I decided to go check out his blog. And I really like his too! David intersperses original business-oriented posts with cited snippets of art and inspiration, and posts at least on a daily basis. Here are some of the most recent:

He calls attention to one of David Allen’s posts in “Gnawing Sense of Anxiety about Un-Captured Work” (3/10/2012) reiterates some of the themes I have been reading about in Baumeister’s excellent 2011 book on willpower. Apparently, our unconscious is totally restless when we have tasks on our to-do lists for which no plan exists to address. Once we set up a plan (e.g. “I’m going to schedule Saturday morning to download and look at that new data!”) our unconscious gets real happy, lets go of its silent panic, and we’re less overwhelmed and less distracted. Pretty cool!

In “The Process of Pivoting” (3/10/2012) David encourages us to move to a better feeling if we’re brought down by a problem, or a challenge, or some coworker’s crappy attitude at work. He doesn’t actually say any of those things, but you should be able to easily relate to the general scenario.

How can magical thinking be a solid tool for people who want to improve quality and performance – especially while managing teams? Find out in The Poison of Performance Appraisals (3/10/2012)… Deming would agree.

(And although this isn’t technically a blog, they do use a blogging infrastructure behind the scenes, so…) Hot off the presses we have “A Flash of Green Enhances Creativity” (3/20/2012)… did you know that temporary exposure to the color green can enhance inventiveness? Researchers reported in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin that experiments were conducted where people were asked to solve problems surrounded by either green or red borders. It didn’t matter whether you were male, female, short, tall, or Australian… everyone was a better problem solver “in the green”. This also brings a new meaning to “Green Flash” 🙂

How Do You “Sell” Quality?

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In his March 2012 question to the ASQ Influential Voices, CEO Paul Borawski presents a question that he deals with regularly – and that industry has been challenged with for several decades:

“How do I convince senior executives (often CEOs) and public officials that quality is important and an essential strategy for–pick your ending–performance excellence, competitiveness, growth, sustainability, survival, efficiency, effectiveness?”

In other words, how can you “sell” the value of quality to an organization and its top executives?

My response: You can’t. Quality is a core value that must be appreciated for it to be cultivated.

This point was made very clear to me in Malta. I had the opportunity to visit the country, a tiny island south of Sicily in the Mediterranean, early this year. (Isn’t that a great picture I took up above??) Speed and efficiency are not some of this country’s values… you can expect to wait for a bus forever, if you’re that patient, and there are a glut of Australian imports trying to sell you boat tours whenever you walk down the street – even when they’ve seen you every day, multiple times a day, and you’ve made it clear to them you’re not a tourist and you don’t want to hop on a sightseeing boat.

However, product quality and value in Malta – especially among the small, independent retailers – are highly esteemed. You aren’t going to get a bad cappuccino, even though you’ll only pay a Euro or two for it (even in a gas station or convenience store). You’re unlikely to get a lunch that’s made from highly overprocessed, bulk ingredients, or that tastes anything less than blissful and homemade. And no one would expect any less… because their reputations are on the line, and they are proud of their products, and proud of the personal excellence that those products represent.

So a better question is… not how do you sell quality… but how do you stimulate the appreciation of quality? Note that this is far more a question of how to impact society on a broad scale than one of how do we implement this in our companies.

(Here’s another way of saying it: How do you get the average Wal-Mart shopper to appreciate quality instead of just rolled-back prices? How do you get people to accept paying more for higher quality products and services, rather than being psychologically recalibrated to think those lower quality things are actually reasonable quality? How do you get people to purchase for longevity in a global era of planned obsolescence and rapidly changing tastes? I’m not sure. I think this may be a particularly nefarious cultural dilemma, grown in America but with the staunch support of Chinese manufacturers, with the potential to culture us all into “pink slime” politics. And we may have to distance ourselves from the notion that profit and growth are what we’re after in order to break this cycle.)

If an appreciation for quality is not ingrained into you by your culture from an early age, perhaps it can still be learned. The first idea I had here was that if art appreciation can be taught in schools, maybe we can do the same for quality. But I’m not an expert in art, nor in appreciation (beyond what I myself appreciate), nor how to teach appreciation.

How can we promote and stimulate the appreciation of higher quality throughout our society?

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