Fortune, 26 novembre 2007 - Paypal Mafia

Portrait de Fortune de la "Paypal Mafia".

YouTube, Yelp, The Founders Fund, Slide, LinkedIn, Sequoia Capital.

Gartner

Let's face it, we in the computing industry have the best excuse in the world to put off making decisions. It's called Gartner.

- David Taylor
Responding the challenge of choice
Agile Business Conference 2006

Lobbying

Canadian National, which lobbied Congress, the Surface Transportation Board and Transportation Department, spent nearly $1.3 million in the second half of 2007 to lobby the federal government, according to a disclosure form posted online Feb. 8 by the Senate's public records office.

The company spent $1 million in the first six months of 2007 to lobby on largely the same issues.

(canadianbusiness)

Railways scrambling to meet demand

Customers are clamouring for more space to move their goods on the rails, leaving the carriers scrambling to keep up.

"Right now we are not meeting our customer demands. The demand for our transportation services is very strong," James Foote, CN's executive vice-president of sales and marketing, said during an investment webcast.

CN, CPR and the four largest U.S. railways are expanding because they need to handle ever-increasing volumes of freight and reduce bottlenecks along their systems, notably at ports, transportation consultant Greg Gormick said. "Demand is growing, and networks are being stretched to the limit," he added.

(reportonbusiness)


Note to self : à quand la construction de nouvelles lignes ?

SSM

Soft Systems Methodology (SSM) is an approach to organisational process modelling and it can be used both for general problem solving and in the management of change.

Deming

L'homme derrière la révolution industrielle du Japon et le modèle Toyota.

System of Profound Knowledge
1- Appreciation of a system: understanding the overall processes involving suppliers, producers, and customers (or recipients) of goods and services (explained below);

2- Knowledge of variation: the range and causes of variation in quality, and use of statistical sampling in measurements;

3- Theory of knowledge: the concepts explaining knowledge and the limits of what can be known (see also: epistemology);

4- Knowledge of psychology: concepts of human nature.


Deming offered fourteen key principles for management for transforming business effectiveness. In summary :

1- Create constancy of purpose toward improvement of a product and service with a plan to become competitive and stay in business. Decide to whom top management is responsible.

2- Adopt the new philosophy. We are in a new economic age. We can no longer live with commonly accepted levels of delays, mistakes, defective materials, and defective workmanship.

3- Cease dependence on mass inspection. Require, instead, statistical evidence that quality is built in. (prevent defects instead of detect defects.)

4- End of the practice of awarding business on the basis of price tag. Instead, depend on meaningful measures of quality along with price. Eliminate suppliers that cannot qualify with statistical evidence of quality.

5- Find Problems. It is a management’s job to work continually on the system (design, incoming materials, composition of material, maintenance, improvement of machine, training, supervision, retraining)

6- Institute modern methods of training on the job

7- The responsibility of the foreman must be to change from sheer numbers to quality… [which] will automatically improve productivity. Management must prepare to take immediate action on reports from the foremen concerning barriers such as inherent defects, machines not maintained, poor tools, and fuzzy operational definitions.

8- Drive out fear, so that everyone may work effectively for the company.

9- Break down barriers between departments. People in research, design, sales and production must work as a team to foresee problems of production that may be encountered with various materials and specifications.

10- Eliminate numerical goals, posters, slogans for the workforce, asking for new levels of productivity without providing methods.

11- Eliminate work standards that prescribe numerical quotas.

12- Remove barriers that stand between the hourly worker and his right of pride of workmanship.

13- Institute a vigorous program of education and retraining.

14- Create a structure in top management that will push every day on the above 13pts.


Quotes :

There is no substitute for knowledge.

The most important things cannot be measured.

The problem is at the top; management is the problem.

To successfully respond to the myriad of changes that shake the world, transformation into a new style of management is required. The route to take is what I call profound knowledge—knowledge for leadership of transformation.

Knowledge-worker

SIX major factors determine knowledge-worker productivity.

1-What is the task ?

2- It demands that we impose the responsibility for their productivityon the individual knowledge workers themselves. Knowledge workers haveto manage themselves. They have to have autonomy.

3- Continuing innovation has to be part of the work, the task and theresponsibility of knowledge workers.

4- Knowledge work requires continuous learning on the part of theknowledge worker, but equally continuous teaching on the part of theknowledge worker.

5- Productivity of the knowledge worker is not - at least not primarily- a matter of the quantity of output. Quality is at least important.

6- Finally, knowledge worker productivity requires that the knowledgeworker is both seen and treated as an asset rather than a cost. It requires that knowledge workers want to work for the organization inpreference to all other opportunities. [...]

In most knowledge work, quality is not a minimum and a restraint, butis the essence of the output.Productivity therefore has to aim first at obtaining quality and notminimum quality but optimum if not maximum quality. Only then can one ask : What is the volume, the quantity of work ?

The main trouble is, however, not the difficulty of measuring quality. It is the difficulty - and more particularly the sharp disagreements -in defining what the task is and what it should be.

Management Challenges for the 21st Century (Peter F. Drucker)

NotchUp

Après LinkedIn, NotchUp.

Atlas Shrugged

Ayn Rand et la bulle immobilière.

Film recommandé

How to succeed in business without really trying