Du management

Article du Harvard Business Review qui date d'octobre dernier, traitant de la profession de manager. Drucker en a parlé abondamment, mais il est encore temps de considérer ce travail comme une avenue en soi.

Les Chinois veulent nos ressources

Rien de nouveau, mais la Chine est toujours en mode acquisition en ce qui a trait aux ressources naturelles canadiennes et australiennes. Le dernier investissement en liste : la minière canadienne Teck.

La lecture selon Google

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Intéressante entrevue avec l'ancien CEO de Continental. Alan Mulally, CEO de Ford, semble suivre la même stratégie.

Q. What do you consider the keys to effective leadership?

A. The most important thing is that you treat everybody incredibly well and lead with a bit of humility. I’ve found that when I go into a company to lead it’s important to have a plan and to make that plan a simple one that everybody can understand. So even before I go into a company, or even if we’re looking at a business here at CCMP, I’m constantly asking the question, “What are the two or three levers that, if done right, if pulled correctly, will really turn this business?” Then what I do is take that and put it into a one-page plan.

I learned back in the days when I was consulting at Bain & Company — and before that when I was at Harvard Business School doing case studies — that they give you more information than you could possibly read. So you needed to quickly step back and say, “What are the two or three things that really matter?” And I find in the world that people don’t really do that often. They just dive into all this detail and start using acronyms and buzzwords and they don’t step back.

Quart-arrière vs. Professeur

Qu'ont en commun le recrutement d'un quart-arrière au football et l'embauche d'un professeur ? Malcolm Gladwell prétend que dans les deux cas, il est très difficile de faire une bonne évaluation permettant de savoir si on est en présence d'un cancre ou d'une vedette. De plus, le choix aura de grandes conséquences directes. Un championnat ou des années de misère dans le cas du football. Et un système d'éducation pour ce qui est du professeur :

Eric Hanushek, an economist at Stanford, estimates that the students of a very bad teacher will learn, on average, half a year’s worth of material in one school year. The students in the class of a very good teacher will learn a year and a half’s worth of material. That difference amounts to a year’s worth of learning in a single year. Teacher effects dwarf school effects: your child is actually better off in a “bad” school with an excellent teacher than in an excellent school with a bad teacher. Teacher effects are also much stronger than class-size effects. You’d have to cut the average class almost in half to get the same boost that you’d get if you switched from an average teacher to a teacher in the eighty-fifth percentile. And remember that a good teacher costs as much as an average one, whereas halving class size would require that you build twice as many classrooms and hire twice as many teachers.

Les Chinois et les trains

Sans contraintes régulatoires comme en Amérique du Nord et sans limites de budget, la Chine construit dans le domaine ferroviaire.

Construction on the 29.68-billion-yuan (US$4.34 billion) Shanghai-Hangzhou high-speed railway started yesterday at Fengjing area in Shanghai.

Construction started in July last year on the 300km Shanghai-Nanjing rail line at a cost of 39.46 billion yuan. A 251km rail link between Nangjing and Hangzhou is also under construction at a cost of 31.3 billion yuan.

BD voyage

Lu et même relu dernièrement, deux excellentes bandes dessinées à conseiller à tout amateur de voyage. Tout d'abord, Shenzhen de Guy Delisle qui dresse un portrait de la Chine. Puis, Le Photographe de Didier Lefevre, une histoire tout à fait invraisemblable qui se déroule en Afghanistan.

IBM et les infrastructures

IBM, comme plusieurs autres compagnies, s'intéresse aux infrastructures globales.

Palmisano knows IBM isn't alone in drooling over big infrastructure projects. In tech, Hewlett-Packard (HPQ, Fortune 500), Oracle (ORCL, Fortune 500), and SAP (SAP) all stand to benefit too. The same goes for the likes of GE (GE, Fortune 500).

"These are global issues and huge opportunities," Palmisano says. "Someone has to step out and take the lead. But we'll never do it by ourselves."

Green Abu Dhabi

Une ville complètement verte près d'Abu Dhabi. Ils y mettent le paquet.

Optimisation

La façon dont General Mills a réagi à la hausse du prix des céréales et à la récession : en optimisant les approvisionnements et les processus. Et ça fonctionne.

Margin management soon grew into a structured process at General Mills. Each division has a three-year savings goal, and virtually everyone meets once a week to focus on cuts. Ditching multicolored Yoplait lids, for example, saved $2 million a year. Factory-floor workers will point out when box sizes are inefficient for putting in trucks. And consumer researchers identify flavors that aren't selling.