Lean strategy and Lean Operations ..

We have heard of Lean Operations and Lean Manufacturing. What is the exact difference between these two terms. 

While Lean Operations talks of generally actions that help to improve value, reduce waste and tools to track value additions and waste reduction, Lean strategy looks at the bigger picture of how value improvement and waste reduction actions can help optimise costs and actions and help align with the organisational objective of product, sectoral and market leadership.

While going through the article Lean Strategy (click here) in HBR March '16, by HBS faculty member David Collis, the distinction is made amply clear. Getting Lean Operations to align with organisational objhectives is pretty tough and requires careful understanding of organisational processes and optimisation efforts.

This is different from the environmental strategy an organisation may adopt. click here

Is Digital Transformation about technology or talent ?

This is a very interesting question that came up while having a discussion with my faculty colleagues on the necessity of including Digital transformation topics into an advanced MBA course curriculum, like we have at Alliance School of Business, Bangalore. I am sure Indian Institutes of Management in their different campuses and XLRI, Bajaj Institutes will get to learn a lot from our experiences as and when we share them with the public. 

The other day I was going through an HBR paper titled Digital transformation is about talent, not technology (click here) by Becky and Tomas in May '20 issue. It was really an eye opener.

Innovation is otherwise called Creative Destruction. Technological Innovation and people talent go hand in hand. One may have the best technological innovation, but if the right people are not available to deploy the technology, the technology is of no use. 

Which are the other areas to concentrate for a successful digital transformation ?

• As much as technology plays a big role in Digital Transformation, it is also about investing in training people. 
• Focus on the soft skills of people of offering sup[port and the right motivation to employees 
• As all the time, the chnage should get full support from the top management and in fact should be driven by the top management.
• Data Insights available from the analysis of data using algorithms should be acted upon to take advantage. Data is the new Oxygen for the industry.
• Digital transformations are not bound to be successful from the word go, it can fail, but fail fast, so that corrective actions can be resorted to. If failing fast is not possible, learn slow and succeed slowly should be the guiding principle.

The above points lead us to the conclusion that Digital Transformation is much as about developing the right talent, as it is about having the right technology.

George..

Intro case on SCM

This case from Business India on the challenges faced by the Indian dairy industry, by Mother Dairy in Delhi, is a good intro case to Supply chain management, taken from the text book on SCM written by Prof. B. Mahadevan from Production and Operations area of IIM Bangalore .

Even though it is more than six years old, this is an excellent case to explain to the students the need for Supply Chain Management, on the complexities faced by the Indian supply chains, especially how complicated is the dairy supply chain in India. The extent of uncertainties, the varied players, the transportation and storage complexities is really an eye opener for students. 

I circulate copies in the class and students respond wonderfully whenever I have taken this case to introduce SCM to the students.

A big thanks to Business India and Prof. Mahadevan from IIMB.

George

Story of Amazon - How Bezos' built one of the world's most valuable companies

 A phenomenon that is catching up with the millennials these days across the world is online shopping (B2C) and the one name that facilitates all these hue and cry in the online domain is nothing but Amazon.

I happened to listen to a HBR podcast (Nov '20 click here) on the same topic and which has also been put up as a Google podcast (click here) where HBR interviews Harvard Business School Professor Sunil Gupta.

Amazon (worth $1.6 trillion) Founder and CEO Jeff Bezos is worth $184.6 billion in 2020. How can a company be so successful and source of rage for youngsters and technologists the world over ?

Bezos' 3 strong points are given here

• Customer focus and the resultant data insights
• Logistics (Operational and Supply Chain) excellence and 
• Focus on technology

Amazon is a service oriented company. In services, we lay great emphasis on customer focus. What makes Amazon stand out from other service comp[anies that also focus on customers is the OBSESSION WITH CUSTOMERS.

We see our customers as invited guests to a party and we are the hosts. And it is our duty to make the customer experience a little bit better - Jeff Bezos

Leadership style

What is special about Bezos' leadership and communication styles ?

• Long term focus
• Customer focus
• Willing to experiment, fail, learn and innovate

His communication style is never messages or emails, it is writing 6 page long memos, distributed just minutes before the meeting, which everyone reads and discusses together. 

While most of the CEOs focus on the next quarter or the next, Bezos goes a step further, he is planning now what the company will be doing after 5 years. This long term focus is  helping him in getting the right acquisitions and product introduction like for instance the Kindle and Amazon echo series of AI based Personal Assistants. 

His very popular HR strategy has been to recruit and surround oneself with people smarted than one is. 

Issues :

Has Amazon given a ear to the packaging wastage and the resulting damage to the environment ?. Not yet. 

Amazon wants its employees to go out of the way to make the customer experience always the best, resulting in some compromises when it comes to treating employees. 

How is Amazon planning to integrate the mom and pop stores which they are replacing these days. Amazon does not have a clear answer to that too.

George..

During Covid times, has employee productivity declined ?

Has the Covid time brought about improvement in employee productivity as they are working from home or has it lowered the employee productivity ? This is an interesting aspect which we would be interested in knowing as almost everybody in the knowledge based industry has been working from home for almost eight months now.

In cutting edge research conducted by Professors from Harvard Business School and New York University it is reported that while the best corportations have reported improvement in productivity during the Covid times, the majority of organisations have reported fall in productivity.  We all were under the impression that Work from Home has reduced the stress employees undergo daily going to office / work (saved on an average 48.5 mins time for each employee) and hence the productivity would increase, but that has not been the case.

Employee productivity depends on three important factors, 

• time
• talent (human resources) and 
• energy
  

The time each employee dedicates to productive work, the talent he displays while engaged in his work and finally the discretionary energy the employee is willing to give to the company while carrying out his work.

The amount of talent and energy an employee spends at work also brings in another aspect of work, the engagement.

As per research conducted by Eric Garton and Micheal Mankins and reported in HBR of December 2020 (click here) 

• an engaged employee is found to be 40% more productive than a normal employee (satisfied worker) and
• an inspired employee is found to be 55% more productive than an engaged employee. 

In the best organisations, Covid time has resulted in improvement of productivity by almost 20%. Because of virtual attendance, talented employees are able to be part of multiple teams across geographies enabling their contribution at different places at the same time, resulting in better attainment of organisational objectives and hence improvement in productivity.  

But most of the organisations have reported drop in productivity as the organisations have lost talent and have not been able to inspire their employees due to many reasons, mainly due to family pressure, medical emergencies at home, the caution and care at home against catching Covid infection may have dampened the eagerness of employees to give their best.

Sagging energy levels of the employees have been found the biggest cause for drop in productivity and efforts by organisations to improve the energy levels have not had great effort except in some organisations like Adobe. Adobe has been able to tap into the discretionary energy of the employees evident by a high employee engagement score by giving the employees a no-layoff pledge, an extra day off in a month and by updating them with frequent updates on Covid and their business. 

Final Outcome: 

While the best organisations have experienced an improvement in productivity of 5-8%, other organisations have experienced a drop in productivity of 3-6% due to wasteful ways of working, inefficient collaboration and decreased levels of employee engagement.

The important learning we get from the above study is that employee engagement has suffered badly during these Covid times. We look forward to better employee engagement measures by organisations to improve employee morale and productivity in future.

George..

How can one do effective Decision Making ?

 All managers are day in and day out making decisions, decisions that have great impact on the running of the organisations. It is said that Jeff Bezoz makes only 4-5 decisions a day, the rest he leaves it to his subordinates. It is because , taking only 4-5 decisions will help Jeff to take the right decision and not be clouded by the pressures of decision making. Prioritisation is thus a very important point of Decision making.

While researching more into decision making I( came acros this very recent article in Harvard Business Review , Dec 2020, How to avoid rushing to solutions when problem solving, (click here) by Daniel Markovitz. 

The author cites 4 points

1. practicing going to the problem site and realising the problem. The Japanese call it Genchi Genbutsu.

2. Frame the problem properly. It is said that Einstein once said, if you have 1 hour to solve a problem, he would spend the first 55 minutes trying to frame the problem well and the last 5 minutes trying to solve it. The more time we spend trying to understand the problem from different perspectives, as given in the top pictorial, the better it is, as it will help pinpoint the exact problem and help with use of the right tools to solve it.

3. Think backwards (or find the root cause) one of the best and most effective tools is the Ishikawa daigram (fishbone diagram)

4. Ask Why many times, (5 Whys) to arrive at the root cause of the problem. More often than not, we address the symptoms than the actual problems. When we ask Why many times we move from the sphere of symptoms to the sphere of causes and finally the root cause. Some problems may get solved in two or three whys, while some others may take us to 5 or 6 Whys.

The Japanese after arriving at the root problem, take the right decisions to see that the issue or problem does not recur and IS SOLVED ONCE AND FOR EVER. 

So the next time, we come across serious decision making, try to follow these steps which will help us take effective decisions to solve the problem.

George

Daily build release of Ubuntu 21.04 ..

The opening screen of the daily build release of Ubuntu Linux 21.04 Hirsute Hippo slated for final release on 22 April 2021. This is a non - Long term support OS, ie. it will be supported only for 5 months from its release with official updates.

My experience with this futuristic OS is excellent. I would rate it as **** (4 star).

 

After using for almost 4 hours this afternoon with Youtube video and audio, newspaper sites for colour reproduction, google sites, colourful websites to assess coiour reproduction, I can only say that this Ubuntu 21.04 is an excellent futuristic OS. 

The office suite is Libre office, though it is a bit slow on older computers, it is very efficient and powerful omn my machine. 

 

Negative points : (only one I could note)

 

1. The release does not have a wide collection of software, no VLC player, no GIMP ...

The OS comes with a small set of software, was sized at 3.1 GB, and I am using it as a Linux OS on USB system on my new ADATA (Taiwan make) USB, that I ordered at Amazon this morning and got delivered by 3 PM.

 

I have been trying different versions of Linux Mint, Ubuntu, Manjaro, Lubuntu, Debian, Fedora, Suse and what not, this OS beats them all. It is so very fast. My system is a HP (2012 make) laptop HP 430, has 4 GB RAM, 500 GB HDD, Intel i3 processor ...

What I can briefly tell about this OS, which is at the testing phase and not yet released, (to be released on April 22, 2021) is that this is a cool, fast. no problems OS. This is sure to beat all other Linux OS which will get released soon. 

Since I have this on my new ADATA nUSB drive, I shall be checking on my office system tomorrow. 

 

These are the different steps involved in the final relase stated in April 2021. (click here)

George..