Very interesting and compelling videos on the phenomenon of outsourcing from a FX series called "30 Days":
Part 1:
Part 2:
The site describes his situation pretty well:
Morgan Spurlock's volunteer, a successful computer programmer who lost his lucrative job to outsourcing, travels to India to try to get it back.
Will he discover the secret of India's success? Or that sending jobs overseas is an unstable gamble?
In the 1980s American corporations realised they could manufacture their goods cheaper in a foreign country and millions of American factory workers were left unemployed.
In the 1990s it was the turn of the white-collar worker, as the advent of the internet allowed companies to fire expensive American employees and hire foreign franchises to run key parts of their businesses. This is outsourcing.
With its well-educated, English-speaking workforce, India is fast becoming the destination of choice for outsourced jobs in technology and customer services.
Typically, one imagines sweatshop like environments and poor disheveled Indians toiling away in a third world country slaving away stealing jobs from America, but the video does a pretty good job of dispelling such a prejudicial notion, and giving a fair and compelling glimpse into the realities of the outsourcing of white collar jobs from the United States.
Found this very interesting link by Jeff Sutherland, famed Scrum co-founder and trainer who I took my certification class from, on a paper published by Harvard Business Review. The paper is titled “The Contradictions That Drive Toyota’s Success”. One of the paper’s authors is Hirotaka Takeuchi who co-wrote another famous paper in HBR that was the inspiration and impetus for the Scrum project management movement and which I wrote about before.
As the paper states:
Quite simply, TPS is a “hard” innovation that allows the company to keep improving the way it manufactures vehicles; in addition, Toyota has mastered a “soft” innovation that relates to corporate culture. The company succeeds, we believe, because it creates contradictions and paradoxes in many aspects of organizational life. Employees have to operate in a culture where they constantly grapple with challenges and problems and must come up with fresh ideas. That’s why Toyota constantly gets better. The hard and the soft innovations work in tandem. Like two wheels on a shaft that bear equal weight, together they move the company forward. Toyota’s culture of contradictions plays as important a role in its success as TPS does, but rivals and experts have so far overlooked it.
Toyota believes that efficiency alone cannot guarantee success. Make no mistake: No company practices Taylorism better than Toyota does. What’s different is that the company views employees not just as pairs of hands but as knowledge workers who accumulate chie—the wisdom of experience—on the company’s front lines. Toyota therefore invests heavily in people and organizational capabilities, and it garners ideas from everyone and everywhere: the shop floor, the office, the field.
At the same time, studies of human cognition show that when people grapple with opposing insights, they understand the different aspects of an issue and come up with effective solutions. So Toyota deliberately fosters contradictory viewpoints within the organization and challenges employees to find solutions by transcending differences rather than resorting to compromises. This culture of tensions generates innovative ideas that Toyota implements to pull ahead of competitors, both incrementally and radically.
I think much of Toyota’s ability to understand and overcome contradictions is due to the cultural roots of Eastern thinking, which really never viewed contradictions like the West did starting with the Greek thinkers like Aristotle. His legacy of the “Law of the Excluded Middle” permeated the whole of Western thinking and much of the reductionist, logical system on which the sciences and systematic process thinking that industry still drives on.
The Japanese on the other hand do not view contradictions as things to avoid, but rather like the Yin and Yang, as just different manifestations or phenomenon of the natural world which when viewed as a whole, is really just a unity of oppositions. Thus, this thought process would enable the company culture of Toyota to embrace, temper and balance opposing contradictory forces.
The paper found 6 ways Toyota unifies contradictory tendencies:
Toyota moves slowly, yet it takes big leaps.
Toyota grows steadily, yet it is a paranoid company.
Toyota’s operations are efficient, but it uses employees’ time in seemingly wasteful ways.
Toyota is frugal, but it splurges on key areas.
Toyota insists internal communications be simple, yet it builds complex social networks.
Toyota has a strict hierarchy, but it gives employees freedom to push back.
Traditional Western management practices would consider a company running under such an ideological platform as a badly managed company, but that's exactly why Toyota succeeds, because embracing and unifying such contradictory tendencies acknowledges first, that contradictions are a natural way of life (which it is), and that second, adopting such a mindset would allow a corporation to manage their organization in a more dynamic and fluid way. This will prevent complacency and continuously challenge an organization to push it self, whereas “most enterprises stop growing because they stick to processes and practices their past successes have generated.”
But one may mistake such a notion as giving a company license to dispense with all systematic and rigorous processes in favor of chaos, when on the contrary companies “must teach employees how to deal with problems rigorously and systematically, or they won’t be able to harness the power of contradictions”. Again, that’s to embrace, temper and manage the rigorous process and creative fluidity.
Summary of Toyota’s approach:
Three Forces of Expansion
Three forces of expansion lead the company to instigate change and improvement
Impossible goals
Local customization
Experimentation
Three Forces of Integration
Three forces of integration stabilize the company’s expansion and transformation
Found a very interesting YouTube video that does a good job of outlining the Critical Chain theory:
I mostly know Critical Chain from the perspective of Critical Chain Project Management (CCPM) or Critical Chain Method (CCM) which is typically considered the Betamax of traditional Critical Path Method (CPM) that is used as a project management methodology to build a schedule. CPM is a feature which allows a project manager to create predecessor and successor tasks to determine the longest path of his/her schedule, thus making it a "critical" path. Pretty much all the project scheduling software out there has this feature.
One of the big flaws of this approach is that it assumes you are able to apply as many resources to the path to keep your project on time, when in reality nearly all project managers work in a resource constrained environment. An alternative method created by Eliyahu M. Goldratt known as Critical Chain Method utilizes resource buffers, and monitors project progress and health by monitoring the consumption rate of the buffers rather than individual task performance of the schedule. This does not dispense with CPM, as if the assumption is that there are unlimited resources, CCM becomes perfectly aligned directly with CPM.
At the heart of this approach is the notion of "constraints" and is in fact a derivative of Goldratt's main management theory known as the "Theory of Constraints" (TOC) introduced in his very famous book The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement published in 1984. As this Wikipedia except explains, "according to TOC, every organization has - at any given point in time - at least one constraint which limits the system's performance relative to its goal (see Liebig's law of the minimum). These constraints can be broadly classified as either an internal constraint or a market constraint. In order to manage the performance of the system, the constraint must be identified and managed correctly (according to the Five Focusing Steps below). Over time the constraint may change (e.g., because the previous constraint was managed successfully, or because of a changing environment) and the analysis starts anew."
It is a very common sense approach to identifying the constraints which prohibit a business from achieving its goal. Nearly every business pursuit has constraints that have to be mitigated in order to reach its goal, but what Goldratt's TOC provides is the application of scientific principles, logical reasoning and a systems based approach which is needed by very large organizations with complex organizational interdependencies. TOC breaks down this approach to 5 fundamental principles:
0. (Step Zero) Articulate the goal of the organization. Frequently, this is something like, "Make money now and in the future."
1. Identify the constraint (the thing that prevents the organization from obtaining more of the goal)
2. Decide how to exploit the constraint (make sure the constraint is doing things that the constraint uniquely does, and not doing things that it should not do)
3. Subordinate all other processes to above decision (align all other processes to the decision made above)
4. Elevate the constraint (if required, permanently increase capacity of the constraint; "buy more")
5. If, as a result of these steps, the constraint has moved, return to Step 1. Don't let inertia become the constraint.
Though originally developed to streamline and optimize the operations of the manufacturing, project and supply chain industries, it has been utilized by service industries such as marketing, sales and finance. I need to study more on this topic, but my initial perspective is that this technique is more suited for environments with tangible outputs such as a manufacturing plant, but might be more harder to apply such reductionist rigor to a field such as marketing and sales, unless it was applied to measure a specific quantitative result such as for example, a marketing project to measure the conversion rate of a new campaign targeted to steal market share from competitor, and the constraints overcome to obtain that goal.
In any event, I definitely think this is a process improvement methodology that will profit from more study and investigation on my part.
This very interesting article on Gantthead.com talks about how to manage the short attention spans of what I like to call the "Twitter" crowd. Twitter.com is a popular social networking site that allows people to send quick text messages to people either by web or SMS messaging, IM, etc. In other words, twits sent by Twits.
As the article points out:
The articles we read tend to be shorter, the demands on our time greater and the digital content we are interested in is packaged, targeted and delivered to us in quickly consumable and easily digestible packets.
What does this mean to the manager today? With so much of our everyday lives tailored to the “I-want-what-I-want-when-I-want-it” mentality, we need to change our management approaches slightly to accommodate the culture-induced inattentiveness of our team members.
I like the articles advocation of using the "two-minute drill" metaphor from football, where your forced into making quick decisions which means having the quarter back huddle very quickly (and sometimes not at all) and dispensing the plays out quickly and succinctly.
In my profession, the project manager would be the quarter back and as the article states:
As an antidote to on-demand attention spans, the two-minute drill technique can be used with stunning results by project managers and managers alike.
By crafting a focused, targeted and easily digestible plan, you are forcing yourself to edit out the fluff and become succinct. By limiting yourself to what can be communicated in two minutes, you are distilling your message to its salient points and removing the verbose filler that we all sometimes let creep in. You may love to hear yourself talk, but not everyone else does. The longer your talk, the more diluted your message becomes--and with that dilution goes its impact. Lost in a sea of disjointed ramblings is the point that was groping to be made.
Though I prefer speakers to dive into the details of particular topic especially if it interests me or if it is important, I have to confess to pontificating on topics that I happen to be leading a meeting on or conducting a training sessions on. But not everyone wants this level of detail, nor have similar interests, and given the short and ever shortening attention spans of people these days, I'll have to be mindful of adopting a more focused, sharp and succinct delivery of communications.
On the one hand, this is good since it keeps the topic focused and saves time, but on the other, there is the risk of glossing over important details and really, what time is being saved? Typically it is time that these Twitters waste surfing the web, talking on the phone and text messaging each other.
That's what scares me about this generation and having to manage them.
The following article on gantthead.com bemoans the gaps that occur when trying to roll out an Enterprise wide PPM solution, but could be applied to any ERP type roll out, whether SAP, Peoplesoft, etc. Basically, the gap is not properly preparing for and agreeing on the process and capabilities the tool is suppose to deliver:
But once push came to shove and the time came to actually use the software for the purpose that it was intended, what became very clear is that it didn’t support how projects were managed in the organization. Not that it couldn’t support how projects were managed…but how the software was implemented was not effective based upon where the organization was at the time.
The challenge here was that the organization didn’t really have a process of how it managed projects. There were experienced project managers with their own toolsets, approaches, processes and practices. There was some commonality in terms of template standards that were in place. But apart from compliance with the essential practices of the organization, how any one project was managed bore very little similarity to any other project. What was valued was that projects got done, not that a consistent approach was used in managing them. All well and good, and many might say that it’s the results that matter. However, when you are trying to manage multiple projects in a common information store in order to establish an integrated view of projects and resources, consistency counts for a lot...
Consistency may not be valued on a practical level, but when we expect everyone to use the same software and create any degree of value out of doing so, consistency is essential. If we’re not prepared to be consistent, implementing the software is likely a waste of time. And when we do implement the software, starting off with some basic capabilities and enhancing its use slowly is a far likelier pathway to success. As with so many other things in life, it’s not the size of the software that’s important, it’s how you use it.
This is the typical problem in all IT software roll outs, where you purchase a very fancy tool before you even really know what your going to use it for. It's an absurd logical fallacy, but for some reason, many if not all corporations follow this same illogical pattern.
For a simple example, its like a person purchasing an elaborate set of auto mechanic tools worth thousands of dollars, before even knowing what he/she is going to use the tools for: will they use it change the oil in their car periodically, or do they intend to rebuild classic cars for resale? For the former, it would be a complete waste of investment, and even for the latter, you'd probably want to make sure to what degree do you intend to rebuild classic cars? Do you think you will fix up and resell you old 84 Camero, or do you intend to pick something up from the junkyard and rebuild a car from the ground up?
These are the kinds of questions you'd want to ask yourself, yet curiously I don't really see these questions being asked prior to a company's decision to purchase or roll out a large scale enterprise software solution. Sometimes it just seems assumed you need one of these.
And from this article from InfoWorld, more enterprise PPM solutions seem like they are going to be purchased in the future, not less:
Data from Forrester Research shows that project-related investments consume about 18% of overall IT spending, and AMR Research reports more of its clients are inquiring about PPM and how it can help them avoid costs and improve project success rates. For instance, while 15% of some 230 clients asked the research firm about PPM directly, another 14% requested more information on ITIL and other best practice framework, which analysts say directly relates to PPM.
I'm leading and involved with a similar roll out, and though I may seem one sided and critical, the reality is that where we are at now, with increasingly fast pace of technological and business process innovations, an organization does not have the time to take all the considerations to be carefully deliberated on, and with the increasing ubiquity of technology in all our lives both business and personal, its hard not to want to immediately streamline your processes in a fancy toolset. In addition, with the increasing requirements of regulatory compliance, an organization typically needs all these data points captured in electronic form and in a database.
But stepping back and viewing our sometimes irrational decisions, is comical, disheartening and educational all at the same time.
I discovered this pretty interesting blog posting about the notion of being a creative generalist. He describes the notion that:
Nothing can substitute for depth of analysis, and there's proven value in specialization – it's what education, career paths, scientific research, and technological innovation are built on – but generalism is a secret talent. With so much complex information, fragmented in so many ways and developing faster and faster, it is increasingly important to have generalists around to make sense of it all, of the big picture. People who appreciate diversity, who are in the know about the wider world and who understand how things interact are invaluable observers, matchmakers, and pioneers of the intersectional ideas so vital for success in today’s knowledge economy, conceptual age, and global community.
But what exactly do generalists do? That’s the question most often asked of me and it’s not an easy one to answer. By definition, generalists tend not to focus (actually, they do focus but just not to the extent that specialists do), they don’t often travel in groups (lacking common associations, designations, and unions), and their shape-shifting versatility changes them frequently. But they are definable and there most certainly are essential traits and skills inherent to them.
It's a pretty long post, that's peppered with anecdotes and quotes from famous writers, thinkers, and business people both past and contemporary who have been known to exemplify broad generalist thinking that was done in a very creative manner. One particularly good example, was the inclusion of the writer Frans Johansson, who is the author of the famous book Medici Effect: What Elephants and Epidemics Can Teach Us About Innovation.
A great example from the book, was the French telecom engineer whose passion for entomology led to close observation of ants that suggested algorithms now widely used to route traffic around the Internet. This is certainly a prime example of creative, generalist epiphany at its finest. Though while I'm a believer and a strong advocate for adopting a creative generalist approach to solving business, as well as any problem, I feel there is the danger inherent to this type of thinking and that is if it is pursued unchecked and irrationally, it succumbs to triteness and banalities. Even worse, it can lead to sloppy thinking.
Here's my rationale:
The majority of people still do not adopt proper analytical and logical skills to problems. Its no secret that this country suffers from a lack of scientists and engineers, and is why so much of these functions are imported in from other countries or outsourced. But underlying this problems is not such much a shortage of technical skills and education, as bad as that has gotten, but really is a lack on educational institutions teaching of how to think critically, analytically and logically not only in science and technology, but in other disciplines as well. Having people adopt a more holistic, generalist view without proper rigorous analysis is dangerous. In addition, the whole idea of "creativity" if not defined properly become merely intellectual fluff.
Like those infamous "team-building" exercises that have become popular in corporate America, where you have employees engage in goofy exercises with each other, in order to spark creativity and teamwork that has now become a source of dread for most employees, the same could happen if you try to artificially induce creative generalist thinking. The example of the French telecom engineer from Johansson's book was no doubt a combination of years of study and passionate pursuit of different fields of study, that converged at some serendipitous point and lead that engineer to his extraordinary discovery. I think if you try to hard to artificially induce such discoveries, you run into the problems of making the process banal and even drudgery much like the team building exercises. Google is a prime example recently of company known for having a creative work environment, yet despite this has had an exodus of key employees recently due to boredom.
Again, like the example of the French telecom engineer just mentioned, it seems we get enthralled by what seems to be a spontaneous spark of creative genius that leads to such incredible discoveries, and forgot that many such individuals got to that point from years of research and study, and probably toiled for years with painful detail to data and analysis. Like Edison said, its "1% inspiration and 99% perspiration" and I think its important to emphasize the hard work, dedication and attention to details it takes to achieve such insights as well as being more creative and holistic in your thinking.
Nevertheless, the blog was an excellent read and I recommend the site and thought I wholeheartedly agree with the sentiments and pursuit of being a creative generalists, I do so with the above caveats in mind. I actually go further then the author and believe that in order to compete in today's competitive and intense global world, that you have to have subject matter expertise in a few areas AND the ability to generalize and think creatively through problems.
Its very interesting to see this company using YouTube to post a job ad, which allows you to get a much better sense of the type of work environment the job is in which you cannot always get in the more traditional job listings. A company would have to make sure though, that they use a high production level otherwise the videocast ad could cause more harm than good.
The ad was pretty good, and made me want to apply there!
Interesting HBS article I ran into about this new notion of "Human Sigma". Authors John H. Fleming and John Asplund, are publishing a book based on extensive studies from the Gallup organization, that makes the case that it's not good enough to have great employee engagement or great customer engagement. You need both. Their studies showed dramatic financial advantages in companies that have employeed both, no matter how good other organizations were at one or the other.
The book offers a metric for measuring your "Human Sigma," as well as guidelines for success. These metrics are a derivative of the very popular Six Sigma, which is a set of practices originally developed by Motorola to systematically improve processes by eliminating defects. A defect is defined as nonconformity of a product or service to its specifications. But whereas measuring the quality output of the manufacturing process to build out the next iPhone, how do you go about measuring, predicting and ensuring the consistency of the employee who sells that iPhone in an Apple store? In other words, Human Sigma attempts to apply practices used on the manufacturing process in Six Sigma to the employee to customer interaction and engagement.
The book's website offers this summary of its main principles:
RULE #1: E Pluribus Unum. Employee and customer experiences must be managed together - not as separate entities.
RULE #2: Feelings Are Facts. Emotions drive and shape the employee-customer encounter.
RULE #3: Think Globally, Measure and Act Locally. The employee-customer encounter must be measured and managed at the local level.
RULE #4: There Is One Number You Need to Know. Employee and customer engagement interact to drive enhanced financial performance. And this interaction can be quantified and summarized with a single performance metric.
RULE #5: If You Pray for Potatoes, You Better Grab a Hoe. This means that good intentions alone do not constitute a plan of action. Sustainable improvement in the employee-customer encounter requires disciplined local action coupled with a companywide commitment to changing how employees are recruited, positioned in roles, rewarded and recognized, and importantly, how they are managed.
I'm always skeptical of a process that tries to apply a rigorous, quantitative process such as Six Sigma to human endeavors such as employee to customer engagements. But much of the success of a business is its ability to perform predictively and to ensure such performance is done with high quality, so any attempt such as Human Sigma warrents further investigation and support.
Saw this article on CIO Magazine about the concerns companies should have about the future workforce, because as it states:
Chris Scalet first realized that the next generation of workers will require drastically different IT tools and policies when he recently watched his 20-year-old daughter studying for her college classes.
Scalet, senior vice president and CIO of Merck & Co., noticed that as his daughter studied, she simultaneously listened to her iPod, sent text messages and browsed through pages of the Facebook social network.
"How she will work in the future will be very different from how we work today," Scalet said. "She is going to expect [collaboration] tools ... to be able to work. What scared me is that we don't think that way today as corporations. We think as baby boomers [about] this very traditional, structured, formal [work environment]."
Scalet is among a growing number of IT executives who are in the early stages of planning on how to prepare their companies to adequately meet the needs of the 80 million children of baby boomers who are now or will soon enter the workforce.
All I can say is: Oh please, give me a break! I'm a Gen X'er and during the 80's and early 90's, I and my friends were doing the exact same kind of multi-tasking, short attention span activities, but instead of the internet and iPods, we were watching TV, listening to records/CDs (or the Sony "Walkman"), talking on the phone (this was when we used the old and reliable land lines), and doing homework and our parents complained we were doing too much and really not much of anything.
The only difference between now and then, is that the technology has become more ubiquitous, available, portable, and on-demand then my and previous generations and has made young people more distracted whether good or bad.
They quote internet guru and pundit Don Tapscott:
Businesses to create and manage what Tapscott describes as "the next-generation enterprise," they will have to find a way to adapt to new types of technologies that younger workers are increasingly demanding.
"If you have generation that is coming into the workforce that has grown up using new collaboration models, business ought to care," Tapscott said. "[The collaboration models] are going to dominate the 21st century marketplace. If you don't understand that, you're going to fail economically."
If anything, this will be great for consultants like Tapscott to sell their services on how to accommodate these rising workforce brats. A 60 Minute segment aired on November 11, 2007 on this very topic and "as correspondent Morley Safer reports, corporate America is so unnerved by all this that companies like Merrill Lynch, Ernst & Young, Disney and scores of others are hiring consultants to teach them how to deal with this generation that only takes 'yes' for an answer".
I think the notion of having to constantly accommodate a generation of workers just because they expect something is a bad thing, as the expectations if constantly met just because you ask or demand for them, sets a precedence wherein they are no longer looked upon as privileges and incentives, but rather as required accommodations that lose their original motivating factors.
I got referred to this interesting article originally published in the Harvard Business Review about the problems with financial incentives, typically assessed and granted during work performance reviews.
The main contention of the article is that monetary rewards do not motivate employees, and that though it can be a short term motivator, it can never really motivate employees to perform their best over the long term. Of course I work to earn a paycheck and if I can earn a bonus for doing good work, I'd gladly take it!
But the article does have a point in that if a bonus is used like bribe, or worse, used to cover the fact that management is so bad that an incentive is used in absence of this then yes, it definitely can run counter to its original purpose.
In any event, I don' t think it is good management to wait till a performance review to assess an employees performance and work ethic, but is something that should be done regularly. And this should be for both the good and the bad. This would allow more open and regular communication. In addition, instead of bonuses the most optimal solution would be where employees feel a genuine ownership of their work, such as profit sharing or ownership of company stock.
published in 1984. As this 
.