Category: General Management

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The DMAIC Solution Process

In last week’s Pocketblog, we took an overview of the Six Sigma approach to process improvement, and left readers with the statement: ‘it is time for the most interesting bit: the practical tools that non-experts can apply to making simple improvements from day to day.’

For all of the levels of certification that practitioners can acquire, most of us can simply understand and apply six sigma’s tools to day-to-day projects, problem-solving and improvements without training, just by understanding the basis and applying our own good sense and intuition.  I am not arguing against the value of full training and certification, but it is a huge investment if all you want to do is fix a small issue.

Indeed, many of Six Sigma’s tools have a life of their own outside the methodology and have simply been co-opted in to provide strength in depth for practitioners’ toolkits.  Next week, we’ll do a round-up of some of these.  This week, we’ll focus on the beating heart of the Six Sigma methodology, the DMAIC Process.

The Beating Heart: DMAIC

DMAICDMAIC can be viewed as a problem solving process, but I prefer to think of it as a ‘solution process’ because it starts with defining the solution you need to find.

Let’s break it down:

.

.

.

Define

Define the solution you need, in terms of: who it affects (customers, clients, colleagues, stakeholders), the process involved, and the extent of the process (whether it is the full process or a part of the process).  Choosing the right problem to solve is an important part of the Six Sigma process.  It means making best use of necessarily limited resources.  The Define stage ends with a team charter that sets out the scope and status of the project.

Measure

Six Sigma is nothing if not couched in mathematics and quantitative methods.  This gives it its robustness.  The second step in the DMAIC process is to measure the current performance level, to give a good baseline against which to evaluate improvement measures.  This is a good opportunity to talk about Six Sigma’s Xs and Ys.

A Y is a measure of output performance.  It is an effect of the process.  Motorola talked of Big Ys as the things that matter most to the business’s most critical  customers.  The Measure stage of DMAIC concerns itself with Ys.

An X is is a cause – a factor, variable or process element which can affect the outcome.  The Big Xs are the factor that have the greatest impact on Big Ys.

Analyse

Now it is time to find the cause of any failing in performance.  At the Measure stage, we understood the performance (or Ys) – now we find what factors affect that performance (the Xs).  Six Sigma has collated a host of quantitative and qualitative tools to gather data for the Measure stage and to interrogate it for the Analyse stage.

Improve

An effect Y is some function of one or more Xs so, in mathematical speak:

Y = f(X1, X2, X3, …)

If you can understand what Xs are important and how to change them to improve Y, then you can implement valuable changes.  Having a strong philosophy of quantitative, evidence-based interventions, Six Sigma practitioners will always look for opportunities to conduct limited (low risk) trials to test the validity of their evaluation before a full implementation.

Control

The final step is about evaluating and sustaining the improvements.  Practitioners will set up a regime to monitor and control the relevant X factors and monitor the resultant Ys.

… and one more step?

In the UK, the Six Sigma Group (training and consultancy) advocates an extended DMAICT process that I would wholly endorse.  Other organisations may, too.  The final step is…

Transfer

DMAICT

Transfer what you have learned and the principles you have used to the operational staff who can then use this knowledge to maintain and further improve the processes.  This is very much a step that is essential for external consultants to offer, if they want to avoid client-dependency.  Of course, some consultants relish such a dependency, but transferring learning is more respectful, more sustainable and, ultimately I believe, more reputation-enhancing.

Learn More: References on the Web

The best website I have found, by far, is iSixSigma.  It is a commercial site offering many related services, with free membership if you want additional information like newsletters.  It has a lot of valuable articles and a Six Sigma dictionary.

MoreSteam.com is an online Six Sigma training business that also has a lot of freely accessible resources on its website.  The link will take you to the Knowledge Center (US Site).

My third recommendation is DMAIC Tools – another site with a wide range of free resources to help you learn about aspects of Six Sigma.  As its name suggests, this has a big focus on the tools and especially has a good coverage of the statistical side of the methodology.

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Six Sigma: Belt up and Reduce Errors

There is nothing that is more likely to evoke an aura of ‘science’ than a Greek letter, judiciously applied.  Couple it with a number and our science antennae are twitching excitedly: Six Sigma.

Even I find myself seduced – and I grew up with Greek letters, numerals, and strange sub- and superscripts.  My PhD was liberally sprinkled with α’s, γ’s, Δ’s, θ’s, λ’s, ξ’s, τ’s, φ’s, χ’s, & ω’s.*

So it is little wonder that Motorola’s 1986 innovation in quality management has become a massive success and an industry in itself.  I am talking, of course, about Six Sigma or, to dress it in its seductively scientific clothes, 6σ.

So, what is Six Sigma?

Six Sigma has variously been described as:

    • a management philosophy
    • an improvement process
    • a business strategy
    • a statistical measurement
    • a culture transformation methodology
    • a development toolkit

And it is all of these things.  But, in particular, Six Sigma is a structured methodology to drive process improvement.

You get what you pay for…

The easy belief is that quality costs money – ‘you get what you pay for’.  The philosophy of Six Sigma – like other quality methodologies, like TQM (Total Quality Management) – is that the opposite is true; errors cost money: quality saves money.  If you can drive down the error rate, you also drive down costs.

Add to the mystique

To add to the mystique of the scientific-sounding statistical term ‘six sigma’, the developers have introduced a flavour of the orient, by labelling the levels of training Yellow Belt, Green Belt, Black Belt and, wait for it… Master Black Belt.  These echo the westernised grades in martial arts like judo, karate and aikido.

Yellow Belt
Typically one to two weeks’ training to learn to use the basic tools of Six Sigma.

YellowBelt

Green Belt
Typically two to three week’s additional training, to handle problem solving tasks, leading small teams.

GreenBelt

Black Belt
Typically an additional two to four weeks’ training, experience of two or more Six Sigma projects and passing a test, will bring you to black belt status, where you can lead your own project.

BlackBelt

Master Black Belt
With lots of experience and lots of training, you can train, mentor and advise black belts.  Eventually, Master black belts progress to a higher state of being where they can reconfigure whole production lines through thought alone.**

MasterBlackBelt

What does 6σ actually mean?

The lower case Greek letter s, or sigma is the standard symbol, used by statisticians for the ‘standard deviation’.  In a distribution, the standard deviation is a measure of the variation from the mean.  If there is a lot of variability, then the standard deviation will be high.  If most instances are close to the mean, the standard deviation will be small.  In a common distribution of values – called the ‘normal distribution’ – these two examples look like this, with the small standard deviation belonging to the narrower graph.

image

You can see the 1 and 4 standard deviations distances.  You can also see that there will be almost no instances at 6 standard deviations’ distance from the mean.  In fact, six sigma posits 3.4 defects per million instances.  This is pretty close to the ideal of ‘Zero Defects’.

(For technical reasons, this error rate is actually calculated from a 4.5σ deviation from a mean shifted 1.5σ from the desired mean.)

On to the interesting bit

Now you have had a whistle-stop tour of some aspects of Six Sigma, it is time for the most interesting bit: the practical tools that non-experts can apply to making simple improvements from day to day.  Except…

You will have to wait until next week for that, because we’re out of space for this week!

The next articles in the series are:

* No, those aren’t grocers’ apostrophes.
They are there to ease readability.

** This sentence is pure hyperbole.
Only Jedi Master Black Belts can do that!

 

A Management Pocketbook you might like

The Improving Efficiency Pocketbook, by Philip Holman & Derek Snee

The Improving Efficiency Pocketbook, by Philip Holman & Derek Snee

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On Competition: Internal Forces and the 7-S Model

Tom Peters is a maverick thinker with a provocative style and use of language.  We introduced his work in October 2011.  However, far earlier in his career, while he was still at international consulting firm McKinsey, he co-developed a tool that rapidly fell into the mainstream.

Like last week’s Five Forces Model, the McKinsey 7-S model is provocative in a conservative sort of a way: it can provoke deep insights into your organisation, but is far from revolutionary.  It is radical in the true* sense of the work, rather than in the ‘way out’ sense it has come to adopt.

* Radical, from radix, meaning root.  As in radish.

The Origins of the 7-S Model

The 7-S model was created by Tom Peters and Robert Waterman (and, I am sure I read once, somewhere, another colleague, un-credited in the book) and was published widely in their business best-seller, ‘In Search Of Excellence: Lessons from America’s Best-Run Companies’.  The authors do credit Anthony Athos and Richard Pascale for their help in developing the model.

They acknowledge its ‘obviousness’ but rightly, I think, assert its great utility.  In last week’s Pocketblog, I suggested that Porter’s Five Forces Model needed an additional element to account for the forces within a business.  I think this is a great model for that purpose.  It also serves very well for non-profit organisations in the public and charitable sectors.

The Seven Ss

Okay, the authors also recognise that, at times, they needed a shoe horn to force the model into Seven Ss, rather than, say 4 Ss and a few other letters.  But it works very well, and the alliterative nature makes it memorable and therefore more useful.

McKinsey7S

The fundamental tenet of the model is that, for an organisation to succeed, it must bring seven dimensions into good alignment.  Gaps and mis-alignments will be sources of failure or, at least, internal tensions and therefore performance challenges. Let’s illustrate this with an admired company.

Shared Values

At the heart of the model is the need for shared values.  Apple’s whole business is aligned around the values of design and user experience.

Style

Led by  Steve Jobs, the business had a style that combined ruthless attention to detail, with an entrepreneurial flair that encouraged ideas.  People have been free to innovate – as long as they met Jobs’ exacting standards.

Staff

Consequently, Apple is able to attract the very best staff, and is very demanding of them.

Skills

Staff come with passion and a lot of skills, but Apple invests massively to keep staff at the peak of product knowledge and technical excellence.

Structure

I can only speculate about the business structure, but I would expect it to echo the style – loose in the sense that alliances and collaborations are promoted in the development arena, but tight around the operational details, like supply chain and retail.

Systems

Apple’s procurement and supply chain systems have become legendary as they have built capacity for launching and supplying huge new market-dominating products.

Strategy

Under Jobs, the strategy was to focus on a small number of products and to make them innovative and excellent – enabling the business to capture a huge market share relative to its size, and build a loyal customer following.

The 7-s model is represented by seven inter-connected circles arranged with six spaced around the seventh (Shared Values) in the centre.  This networked ‘Atomium-like’ image illustrates well, the network nature of these dimensions and their inter-relatedness.  There is also a big © symbol attached to it so, notwithstanding the numerous reproductions in derivative books and websites, we’ll settle for our alternative representation and a picture of Brussels’ Atomium!

Atomium

The Atomium
by o palsson

Rights granted under Creative Commons Licence

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On Competition, again: Porter’s Five Forces

Back in the summer of 2011, we did a couple of blogs on the work of Michael Porter – one of the most serious-minded academic thinkers in the realm of corporate strategy.

In the first, ‘On Competition: Five Forces’, we surveyed his five forces model from a high vantage point and also introduced his three sources of competitive advantage.  We then, in ‘On Competition: The Far End of the Value Chain’ questioned whether there are not, in fact other sources of competitive advantage.

The Five Forces

I think it’s time to take a closer look at these five forces, and maybe question the adequacy of that model too.  So what are Porter’s Five Forces?

1. The Bargaining Power of Suppliers

If your business is dependent upon the supply of materials, assets, or people, then your suppliers have power over your business – which is increased as the market dominance of your supplier increases.  You need a strategy to keep your suppliers’ interests aligned with yours, by being as important to them as they are to you.  Dependence on a monopoly or near monopoly supplier is a route to doom.  Consider creating alternative supply sources, alternative inputs, or vertical integration to control your own supply source.

2. The Bargaining Power of Customers

It would be great to be a monopoly supplier of a commodity product.  Few are although, if you can differentiate your product sufficiently – for example, as Apple did with the launches of the iPhone and iPad – then you can simulate that position for a while.  Ultimately, the customer is king or queen: without them, you are doomed.

3. Competitive Rivalry

Existing players in your market will be jostling for customers’ attention and preferential deals for suppliers.  For most people, this is where their conception of competition ends.  Porter knew differently . . .

4. The Threat of New Entrants

When Sea and Atari were slugging it out for dominance of the games console market, who would have predicted the arrival of the Sony Playstation?  Answer: anyone familiar with this model.  They would not necessarily have known it would be Sony or that it would be successful, but the threat was there… As it was some years later, when, Atari gone, Microsoft entered the market to challenge Sega and Sony, with the X-Box.

5. The threat of Substitute Products

Somewhere in my stationery cupboard, I have a bottle of Tipp-Ex (probably set solid) and a pack of acetate sheets.  Is there a better supplier of correction fluid or a superior priced transparent paper?  Who knows?  Who cares?  I don’t use either: I print drafts from my PC and re-print when I’ve made corrections, and I project straight from my PC when I need slides.  I doubt many of my clients retain a working overhead projector (OHP).

Are there More Forces?

There you have it in a nutshell: five competitive forces that allow a business to evaluate its competitive strategy.  It is one of the most successful and widely used management models.

The last fifteen years have emphasised the rightful role of regulation as a competitive force or, rather, sometimes the failure of regulation to curb competitive behaviours (Enron, anybody?) I think we would now have to add regulatory forces to any complete analysis.

But I also have to ask, what about internal forces.  How do the social, cultural, political, operational, technological… forces within the business affect strategy.  To me, this is a big gap.

If only someone could plug it . . .

Happily, they can.
But you’ll have to wait until next week’s Pocketblog for that.

Management Pocketbooks you might Enjoy

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Tuckman Plus, Part 2: Transforming

Towards the end of 2011, we looked at how teams can get bored and suggested a useful extra phase to the familiar Tuckman Model of group development: forming, storming, norming and performing.

As we start a new year, it seems an opportune moment to introduce another phase: Transforming.

Transforming

Tuckman Transforming Phase

As teams reach maturity, it is increasingly common that they do not simply adjourn at the end of their project.  More frequently, the team re-tasked with a new role.  Some members may move on and new people may join, but just like Murphy’s apocryphal pickaxe*, it is still essentially the same team.

Yet it is different: it has changed.  I hypothesise a new phase: Transforming.

Tuckman Model extended to include Transforming Phase

When people leave, new people join, and the team has a new role, it is unlikely to easily remain in the Performing stage.

Perhaps a new member joins and people get their heads down, get on with their work, and figure out how to incorporate Mr or Ms Newbie into the team.  This feels a little like Norming.

Perhaps the new person has a significant role.  People may compete with one another to influence them.  Or maybe, someone significant leaves and two or three members of the team compete for a promotion to fill their place.  These feel a little like Storming.

Perhaps there is a big change in personnel or the role of the team shifts to a completely new project.  Most team members feel pretty uncertain about what’s expected of them and who their new colleagues are.  These feel a lot like Forming.

So Here is the Deal

When a change happens in your team, it is likely to transform.  Detect the extent of the change, and adapt your leadership style to accommodate the new dynamic.  If you continue to manage your team as if it were still in the Performing stage, then you will delay the team’s return to true performing status.

Happy New Year, and many
Prosperous Transformations,
from all of us here at
Management Pocketbooks

* Murphy’s Pickaxe

‘I’ve had this same pickaxe for 40 years,’ says Murphy; ‘it’s had seven handles and three heads, and I love it.’

Some Management Pocketbooks you Might Like

The Tuckman model and its variants are described in The Management Models Pocketbook.  You might also like:

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12 Blogs for Christmas

Holly&Ivy

This has been a great year for the Pocketblog, seeing reading figures rise substantially and reaching the milestone of our 100th blog posting.

So, with Christmas coming at the end of the week, let’s do a round-up of some personal favourites from among this year’s Pocketblogs.

Here is something for each of the twelve days.  Enjoy!

1. Start as you mean to go on: Happiness

After some New Year’s Resolutions to start the year off, we dived into the subject of Happiness, with ‘Happiness – as simple as ABC?’ about Albert Ellis’s Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy – the fore-runner of CBT.

2. … and Start Topical

We then moved into a subject that was much in the news in February; and still is.  With ‘Bankers’ Bonuses and Brain Biology’, we looked at recent neuroscience and how that relates to Adams’ Equity Theory.

3. Generations

In February too, I wrote two blogs about sociological ‘Generations X, Y & Z’ and ‘Generation Y at work’.  I followed this up by another about what comes ‘After Generation Y?’.

4. The Gemba

In May, inspiration waned for a week, so where did I go to find it?  ‘The Gemba’.  I got it back, and later that month, got idealistic in ‘Reciprocity and Expectation’ looking at the Pay it Forward ideal and the realities of Game Theory.

5. Why do we do what we do?

In the first of two blogs on how to predict human behaviour, I looked at ‘How to Understand your Toddler’ (mine actually) and Icek Ajzen’s Theory of Planned Behaviour.  Later in the year, in ‘Predicting Behaviour’, I looked at whether a simple equation (hypothesised by Kurt Lewin) could predict all behaviour.

6. One of the Best Business Books of the Year

… according to the Journal Strategy & Business is Richard Rumelt’s Good Strategy/Bad Strategy: The difference and why it matters.  In ‘What Makes a Good Business Strategy’ we looked at some of his ideas.

7. The Apprentice

This year, I have been a big fan of both series and have written my own episode by episode analysis of both The Apprentice and Young Apprentice.  I also did one blog on each for Pocketblog: ‘The Apprentice and Five Levels of Leadership’ and, for Young Apprentice, ‘Decision Failure’.

8. Drucker Triptych

Has any one individual been as influential in establishing management as a pragmatic academic discipline as Peter Drucker?  To recognise his various achievements, I wrote a triptych of blogs over the summer:

  1. The Man who Invented Management
  2. Management by Objectives
  3. R.I.P. Corporate Clone: Arise Insightful Executive

And one of Drucker’s direct contemporaries was W Edwards Deming, so I also took a look at ‘Demings’ System of Profound Knowledge’.

9. Crazy Times

Will history look on Tom Peters with the respect that it holds for Drucker and Deming?  Who knows?  But without a doubt, Peters has been influential, insightful and provocative for thirty years or more, and I am sure many of his ideas will survive.  In ‘Crazy Times Again’, I drew a line from FW Taylor (father of ‘Scientific Management’) to Peters.

10. The Circle Chart

In ‘Going Round in Circles’ I returned to management models and one of my all time favourites: Fisher and Ury’s Circle Chart. I applied it to problem solving rather than, as they did, to negotiation.

Fisher and Ury are experts on conflict resolution, as is Morton Deutsch. In ‘Conflict: As simple as AEIOU’, I looked at a fabulously simple conflict resolution model that originated in Deutsch’s International Centre for Cooperation and Conflict Resolution.

11. Two Notable Events

Two notable events made the autumn memorable for Pocketblog: one sad and one happy.

  1. In ‘A Bigger Bite’ we marked Steve Jobs’ passing
  2. With ‘Three ways to get it wrong’, we marked our hundredth blog, by looking at one of the towering social psychologists of today, Daniel Kahneman

12. And finally, our most popular topic

Tuckman’s model for group formation has proved to be our most popular topic by far this year.  We have returned to it three times, each time looking at a particular facet:

  1. ‘Swift Trust: Why some teams don’t Storm’
  2. ‘Team Performance Beyond Tuckman’
  3. ‘Tuckman Plus’ is the first of two posts.  It is the last topic post of 2011 and its companion (‘Part 2: Transforming’) will be the first of 2012

So here’s the deal

  • Have a very merry and peaceful Christmas.
  • Have a very happy and healthy New Year.
  • Be good, have fun, stay safe, and prosper.

From all at Management Pocketbooks,
our colleagues at Teacher’s Pocketbooks too,
and from me particularly.

Mike

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Tuckman Plus

The conclusions in Bruce Tuckman’s ‘Developmental sequence in small groups’ are among the best known management models.  In it, Tuckman proposed that groups go through four stages of development: forming, storming, norming and performing.

Later, he and Mary Ann Jensen wrote a follow-up article, ‘Stages of small group development revisited’, in which they proposed a fifth stage, adjourning.  We summarised these stages earlier this year, and looked at why teams don’t always go through the storming phase.

The Tuckman Group Development Lifecycle model: forming, storming, norming, performing and adjourning

Critical Review

Tuckman and Jensen’s critical review in 1977 was just the first re-analysis of Tuckman’s original 1965 paper.  As recently as 201, there was a wide review article: ‘40 years of storming: a historical review of Tuckman’s model of small group development’ by Denise Bonebright, a graduate student at the University of Minnesota.  In it, Ms Bonebright concludes that there are new theories that are ‘exponentially broader and deeper than Tuckman’s original model. They provide detailed discussion of many aspects of group dynamics from forming through adjourning.’

These theories examine a range of other factors, and yet they do not

‘provide the same breadth of application. HRD scholars and practitioners can learn something from a model that has proved valuable for almost 45 years. The utility of providing a simple, accessible starting point for conversations about key issues of group dynamics has not diminished.’

Can we extend Tuckman’s Model?

There are two principal extensions to Tuckman’s model that give valuable insights, yet do not add unnecessarily to its complexity.  We will look at the more sophisticated early in the new year, and tackle the simpler, commoner one here.

Yawning

Are you getting tired at the end of a long year?  Is your team getting stale and bored?

Tuckman Group Formation - Yawning Phase

A lot of management trainers add an extra phase beyond performing: ‘yawning’.  This recognises that a team, once formed and into performing stage, can become stale.  It is a teaching aid as much as an extension of the  model, to highlight the importance for a team leader to keep the team fresh and challenged – in both the task and relationships dimensions – if you are to maintain high performance.

It is also a reminder that, if your team slips from its high performance levels, this may be what is happening.

Tuckman Model of Group Formation - extended to include Yawning phase

Some Management Pocketbooks you Might Like

The Management Models Pocketbook, bt Mike Clayton

The Tuckman model and its variants are described in The Management Models Pocketbook.

You might also like:

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Manager to Leader: Warren Bennis (Part 2)

Last week we started to look at the work of leadership expert Warren Bennis.  Let’s look deeper.

Bennis had a career in Management

Not only did Bennis lead men in the second world war, but after his studies, he took on a succession of senior academic administration roles, between 1967 and 1979.  Here he tried to put the ideas of Douglas McGregor to good use, and here, he started thinking about the nature of leadership.

However, it was when he returned to academic research, that he started to become a true leader.  His keystone work is ‘Leaders: The Strategies for Taking Charge’ and I relish an irony at the core of this book.

Managers and Leaders

In response to a Harvard Business Review article by Abraham Zaleznik in 1977, Bennis articulated his famous set of comparisons between a manager and a leader:

Bennis-Manager_v_Leader

So it seems to me to be delicious that, in articulating the four common abilities of a leader, from their research into 90  US leaders from all areas of endeavour, Bennis and co-author Burt Nanus expressed them in terms of management.

4 x Management = Leadership

The four strategies that Bennis and Nanus articulated are each about superb management of themselves, in essential arenas of the leader’s domain.  They do not set this up as a prescriptive model of leadership, but as a descriptive model of how real, successful leaders act.

Strategy 1: Attention through Vision

Leaders can manage their attention and the attention of followers by articulating an engaging vision of the future state of their organisation.  They must also find a way of getting followers to start to treat that vision as their own.

Strategy 2: Meaning through Communication

Leaders manage the meaning of their message by using vivid imagery and salient metaphors to create deep understanding and resonance that leads to real hope and trust.

Strategy 3: Trust through Positioning

Building and managing trust requires effective action that aligns with the vision you have set out.  Leaders can position their organisation in any of four ways:

  1. Reacting to external changes
  2. Changing the organisation itself to lead external change
  3. Changing the organisation’s external environment to create change
  4. Create new links between the organisation and its environment
Strategy 4: The Deployment of Self

Constant learning and relationship building establishes permanent leadership traits within you, giving you the confidence and experience to take risks and to trust followers.  This enables you to manage your own self-confidence and emotional states, leading you to be seen as stable, adept, and reliable.

So here is the deal

Leadership and Management are deeply intertwined.  To understand and excel at one, we must equally understand the other.

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The Science of Leadership: Warren Bennis (Part 1)

Over the last year, Pocketblog has studied the work of many fine business thinkers.  It is time to turn our attention to Warren Bennis.

WarrenBennis

Bennis is not just an expert on leadership – which he undoubtedly is.  It was he who created the modern interest in the subject, with the book he co-wrote with Burt Nanus: ‘Leaders: The Strategies for Taking Charge’.

Bennis was greatly influenced by Douglas McGregor, who both taught and mentored him.  McGregor was influential, with his Theory X and Theory Y, in examining the ways we can manage colleagues at work, and influence their motivation.

The Story of Motivation in the Workplace

… is one of shifts towards and away from a prescriptive scientific perspective.  In a recent Pocketblog, I described how FW Taylor invoked ‘scientific management’ to create a repeatable process for optimising work-rates.  His follower, Elton Mayo then discovered that human factors can over-ride the simplistic approach to theoretically optimised efficiency levels.

It was Douglas McGregor who characterised these two approaches as Theory X (controlling, task-focused management) and Theory Y (more democratic, relationship-driven management).  McGregor argued powerfully in ‘The Human Side of the Enterprise’ and later books that Taylorism could not work sustainably in the modern world; Theory Y must dominate.

Enter Warren Bennis

Bennis followed McGregor in studying organisational development and looked to him as a mentor.  McGregor to a great extent shaped Bennis’s career and we will see more about that next week.

What Bennis contributed was a focus on the work of leaders, and what leadership means in an organisational context.  For all those of us who work in organisational development or leadership development, he has provided the foundations of modern thinking.

And for me, his principal contribution is the body of evidence he accumulated to show that leadership is open to everyone.  It is not a product of birth, of genes, or even of the type of school you went to.  It can be learned and developed like any other skill.

The Science of Leadership

There are two ways of doing science.  In my own discipline of physics, you can even study it formally in these two ways: experimental and theoretical.  Theoreticians dream up grand theories in response to limited experimental data, and then make predictions that experimentalists test.  It is only when the data prove the theorist wrong that science truly advances.  The smug feeling theoreticians get when the evidence supports their theory cannot mask the deeper knowledge that it can never constitute proof.  A theory is never more than one experiment away from falsification.

Experiments, on the other hand, are glorious.  They always yield knowledge.  Maybe it corroborates existing knowledge – which is comforting – or maybe it challenges it, from which progress arises – which is truly exciting.  Theorists know we are at the weak end of the process.

Bennis is a data gatherer.  He has not presented a grand theory of leadership.  Not for him: four leadership styles, six leadership roles or eight ways to lead.  Bennis and Nanus started their revolution in leadership thinking by surveying 90 leaders, from business, sports, the arts and exploration.

Some Ideas 

Bennis is perhaps best known for his tabulation of the differences between leaders and managers – which we mentioned a year ago.  The phrase ‘managers do things right: leaders do the right thing’ has become a commonplace – even turning up with very little adaptation, in a speech by Nick Clegg over the summer.

But many other ideas that we accept as commonplace were first articulated in their modern form by Warren Bennis:

Leaders learn from failure.
Adverse circumstances and a series of failures is a more valuable learning route than early and continued success.

Leaders create empathy
Leaders must bring people alongside their own views and they can only do this by empathising with their followers.

Leaders create great groups
Bennis and Nanus argued that great results emanate from great groups and it is the role of a leader to bring them together and and create the opportunities for them to thrive.

So here is the deal

Leadership can be learned and it was Warren Bennis who did more than any other thinker to put these ideas to us.

More in Part 2, next week.

Some Management Pocketbooks you might enjoy

The Leadership Pocketbook
As you would expect, a lot of Bennis’s ideas suffuse this volume.

The Management Models Pocketbook
Looks at models of leadership that are often informed by Bennis’s thinking.

The Emotional Intelligence Pocketbook
Bennis has often stressed emotional intelligence as a vital leadership skill.

The Empowerment Pocketbook
Empowerment is what a leader should be about.

The Self Managed Development Pocketbook, and
The Learner’s Pocketbook
Bennis argued that leaders need to be learners.

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Three ways to get it wrong

imageIn last week’s post we discussed some of the decision-making traps that board members–or, indeed, any decision-making group–can fall into.

At the heart of our understanding of these biases is the work of Daniel Kahneman.  He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics for his work in this area, with co-worker Amos Tversky. in 2002.  Sadly Tversky died in 1996 and was ineligible for the prize, under Nobel rules.

Behavioural Economics

Daniel KahnemanKahneman is perhaps the leading psychologist in the field of behavioural economics – very much a field du jour.  His research was carried out with many collaborators including Paul Slovic, an expert in the field of perception of risk, and Richard Thaler, most notable for his use of the term “nudge” to describe how we can use perceptions to shift behaviour.

The classic paper that Kahneman and Tversky wrote was ‘Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases’, published in the Journal Science in September 1974.

Heuristic: A rule of thumb or simple procedure for reaching a decision or solving a problem.

In this article, they introduced three important heuristics, which guide many of our decisions – and frequently let us down.

Representativeness

We tend to believe a possible event is more likely when we can recognise it as a part of a familiar pattern.  It is as if we like to create stories about our world that follow standard arcs or plots (see for example Christopher Booker’s wonderfully argued The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories.  If a potential event slips easily into one of these plots, we rate it as more likely than if the plot seems to need adjusting.

Availability

Recent salient examples render a possible event more likely in our minds than other events that do not trigger such easy recall.  Immediately after a rail accident, people fear rail travel more than normal and take to their cars.  The resulting spike in road deaths usually exceeds the immediate effects of the road accident.

Anchoring

We make estimates and decisions from a starting point and the point we choose can bias our estimate or decision.  Surprisingly, even an unrelated figure presented randomly can skew a later numerical estimate.

Kahneman won’t stand still

In 2007, Kahneman received the American Psychological Association’s Award for Outstanding Lifetime Contributions to Psychology and this year, he was included in Bloomberg 50 most influential people in global finance.  He says that all he knows about economics, he learned from co-workers like Richard Thaler.  He is a much sought-after speaker and commentator in the business arena, and you can find recent work documented on TED (see below), in an extended interview, and in two excellent articles on the websites of prominent global strategy consulting firms,McKinsey and Booz & Company:

Daniel Kahneman: The riddle of experience vs. memory

Using examples from vacations to colonoscopies, Kahneman reveals how our “experiencing selves” and our “remembering selves” perceive happiness, and why experience does not influence decisions, in this 2010 TED talk.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XgRlrBl-7Yg]
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