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Old 04-21-2020, 04:48 PM   #21
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OMG!!! Six sigma, TQM, The Malcolm Baldridge Award, ISO 9000....I never want to see (or prepare) another PP slide that begins with “Our Journey”.

The only positive I recall is reading Atul Gawande’s book, The Checklist Manifesto which I actually did use to improve things on the manufacturing floor.
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Old 04-21-2020, 04:51 PM   #22
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Marita40 View Post
The politically correct "religion" in my workplace is DIVERSITY. Shoved down our throat in a million ways, preached to the supposedly "unwoke" until we are indoctrinated, yet largely only an undefined buzzword and little to no actual progress because it is all talk and little action. That's typical of this workplace as I have observed over more than 3 decades. SUSTAINABILITY is religion #2. Same talk with little action.

Hey--I am retiring this year!! Can't wait to get out. Will never look back.
Since we took Federal money (contracts) we had to become ever more diverse. My particular site was located in an unusually non-diverse area. It was in no way "red neck." The community grew from a farming community, adding a university for the state, it was a bit "in bread." SO, diversity could only be provided by "importing" more diverse people - even females! What happened? Folks arrived and didn't like the non-diverse community. So, every 2 years, we hired new rounds of "diverse" folks, retrained them and made side bets on when they would leave. I was there almost 4 decades and watched as many as 15 people rotate through a given position (average longevity of less than 2 years.) We FINALLY figured out what was wrong (non-diverse community) but never figured out how to retain folks (we lost some incredible - and a few non-incredible people.) Sad really. It was bad for the megacorp and bad for the folks we tried to keep employed. What is the expression? "The road to hell is paved with good intentions" but YMMV.
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Old 04-21-2020, 04:54 PM   #23
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Oh, I have one more:


"Benjamin, I have one word for you."

"Yes sir."

"BRANDING!"
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Old 04-21-2020, 05:04 PM   #24
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These posts brought to mind one of the TQM classes I took. We tore apart an actual process from our office for an entire afternoon and I thought by the end of the day we had come up with some real suggestions for improvement. Then the instructor erased the white board and said, “Class over!”
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Old 04-21-2020, 05:07 PM   #25
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If you really want a visual treat, scroll through an "Application Summary" from one of the winning companies. You don't need to read anything, just look at the amazing graphic depictions. Here is an example, only a short 30 pages in length.
I looked. I felt I glimpsed the Platonic ideal (or someone's idea) of institutional management I thought, every time, I had reached the ne plus ultra of graphics, and every next graphic surpassed it. But perhaps my favorite was Figure 3.1.S1, the Segmentation Process, with its incomprehensible output of "Final Segmentation."

You would have to be drinking to produce this, you really would.
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Old 04-21-2020, 05:16 PM   #26
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"On time, Correct, and under budget". I wish I had a dollar for every time the boss came out with those encouraging words to the staff.
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Old 04-21-2020, 06:20 PM   #27
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I left last year, after a full career of software development, and left behind Agile and Scrum...
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Old 04-21-2020, 07:00 PM   #28
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Quality Circles....Franklin Planners...a whole series about "The Customer". We did do some professional image public speaking stuff that was pretty good. I just has some flashbacks!
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Old 04-21-2020, 07:15 PM   #29
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I can see I wasn't one of the only people who choked back bile when one of these "initiatives" would be deployed. You had to play along until the bloom was off the rose and you could go back to your effective methods. But while it was rolling, oh, life was miserable. I wonder how many binders of consultant-generated crap I've handled over the years.

I still remember the one consultant's money phrase: "Carve out your breakthrough goal!" <puke>

Two big memories. One was the sweatshop company I worked for in my early 20's that was run by a lunatic owner. He would make the most insane decisions and if you dared question anything, well, you were branded as a moron and not a team player. One year he said we were going to go after the Baldridge award. The few of us who knew what it was were incredulous at the very notion. No processes. Everything done by reflex and intuition and rank decided everything. No collaboration. I bet a coworker $10 in 3 months we'd never hear another word about it, I won.

The other was when the Agile thing arrived at a different job. That company worked in world were it was mostly construction with a little software mixed in. A handful of Agile zealots were hired on to "fix" the software culture. They insisted you just sit down with the customer and figure out what you could do within the customer's budget. We collaborate! You give the customer little bits of software as you go. In real life, the customer would say, you agreed to this specification, go do it - we're not negotiating it again. And don't bother my people with little bits of software, I can't afford to keep retraining them all the time and when you have it all done, let me know. Well, the zealots didn't like that because it didn't fit their world. Eventually some got the boot and some left on their own because their one trick didn't work in that environment. But it was painful as heck while it lasted - the zealots telling upper management how beautiful the world was going to be, while all we heard from customers was "Make those people stop calling me to 'collaborate with my field team' because who has time for that. I'm running a business here."

Oh, and the off-site workshops that were just pie-in-the-sky dreaming of utopian bliss in a world where all the nagging problems of real life would not exist. As if you could just issue orders and the entire workforce would respond unfailingly and without error and nothing bad ever happened.
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Old 04-21-2020, 07:17 PM   #30
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I do not miss the forced march to social media (everyone on my organization had to have a twitter account), the forced retweeting of information (some managers and executives would literally send out 3-4 emails a day with instructions to "cut and paste the following information into a tweet"), and the expected "like-ing" of the executive tweets and LinkedIn posts, all in the name of "we need to build the Megacorp Brand and your our Brand".
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Old 04-21-2020, 07:21 PM   #31
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Thought of another: stretch goals

Not enough to meet the regular goal, must have stretch goals that corp mgmt can berate you for not meeting.

Edit to add, not really a philosophy but rather a source of many corporate failings - the all powerful "not invented here"
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Old 04-21-2020, 07:31 PM   #32
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In my state based workplace, the goal was to show that we valued diversity in the obvious way. Yet there was no tolerance for diversity of ideas. Sad, because most of our diversity hires did not stay long. Neither did independent thinkers. I stayed too long and am glad to be done.
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Old 04-21-2020, 07:53 PM   #33
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Every change in management brings a new "flavor of the month"

S.M.A.R.T goals
Lean Six Sigma
360 Evaluations

And the latest - a huge, time-sucking, company wide "workplace culture initiative" wherein we are all expected to share all our little feelings about each other constantly, in an attempt to "improve the culture" (what could possibly go wrong?); wherein we are expected to care deeply about everyone's little personal problems (newsflash: I DON'T care about your personal problems); wherein we have already spent two full days at offsite "retreats" playing games (I kid you not) to bring more "fun" into the culture. Next up was going to be spending time in little groups doing exercises to teach us how to "deeply trust each other" on a personal level.

Mercifully, it appears that the lockdown/quarantine/stay-at-home situation has put all of that on hold indefinitely.

Apparently they realize that expecting us to play these little games remotely, while also dealing with a pandemic on a daily basis, scrounging for groceries etc. might just be a bridge too far.

8 more months.....8 more months.....
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Old 04-21-2020, 08:06 PM   #34
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When I first started work as a young engineer in manufacturing, my megacorp would roll out some new stupid idea. Of course being new, I didn't know it was stupid. I'd talk to the old operators about this great new idea. Their response? "I've heard the wind blow before". Took me a few years and a move to corporate to really understand what they meant.
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Old 04-21-2020, 08:41 PM   #35
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When I first started work as a young engineer in manufacturing, my megacorp would roll out some new stupid idea. Of course being new, I didn't know it was stupid. I'd talk to the old operators about this great new idea. Their response? "I've heard the wind blow before". Took me a few years and a move to corporate to really understand what they meant.
Yup, the young'uns at w#rk have been throwing themselves into this whole "culture" thing 1000%. They'll learn in time.
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Old 04-22-2020, 07:15 AM   #36
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How about pendulum swings? We went back and forth between centralized control and empowering local business units. The latter was called "The 3M Model" at one time.

In my experience, empowering local control always lead to improvements, but the powers-that-be at the home office always won in the end, and pulled all the power back to their ivory tower. Then some executive would read a new book or attend a seminar, and we'd go off down the decentralizing path again, but this time with a new name.
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Old 04-22-2020, 07:23 AM   #37
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OK, related questions:
1) Do you think the consultants "delivering" these programs believed them? Or were they just as cynical over drinks after work as the seminar participants?

2) Did management believe these programs would deliver happier employees, customers, profits? Did anyone ever attend an "after-action" report on "what went wrong?" and "what lessons have we learned?"
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Old 04-22-2020, 08:05 AM   #38
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Quote:
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1) Do you think the consultants "delivering" these programs believed them? Or were they just as cynical over drinks after work as the seminar participants?
In my Baldrige example above there were no consultants. The CEO created a "department of excellence" and hired a VP and full-time staff to lead the company's effort to obtain the award. These employees believed in the program heart and soul.

Quote:
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2) Did management believe these programs would deliver happier employees, customers, profits?
Yes to all.

Quote:
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2)Did anyone ever attend an "after-action" report on "what went wrong?" and "what lessons have we learned?"
The company made at least two unsuccessful applications for the award and received substantial feedback on where we fell short. This led to major programs and sustained effort to revise and improve processes and behavior. A ton of work for several years.

I prefer to focus more on the big bash we had after the ceremony at the DC hotel when the Pres handed the award to the CEO. The following two or three weeks were some of the best days at work I can recall.

Then it was EOM again and we had to focus on making the numbers...
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Old 04-22-2020, 08:32 AM   #39
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For about 5 years at my megacorp, every big wig presentation had to include the words 'perception is reality', meaning the public's perception of the company was just as important (or more?) as the actual reality.
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Old 04-22-2020, 08:35 AM   #40
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Nightmare memories of management's latest motivational books. Purple cow, Who moved the cheese, Eat that frog....why all the weird animals?
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