Seen, read, heard this week #1

A new column that will be weekly…or not. Will last..or not. Sometimes I read, hear, see things that are not worth a post but that I feel like sharing like I would do at the cofee machine, around a drink or a lunch…

Heard during a conversation

• “Since they are not provided with the tools they need, some of our employees use Facebook groups to share informations and documents. And when it’s about docs whose addressee is the CEO…”. Anonymous.

• “We dematerialized a 25 steps process. After eliminating from it people whose job was to pick up information and transmit it For Information only 2 steps remained.”. Anonymous.

• “Share value droped…but there are more terrible things in the world”. Franck Riboud (Danone’s CEO) at  Danone Explorers. Was he thinking about other companies that are in a more dangerous situation, or perhaps his thought were still in Bengladesh for this project he just talked about and enlighten Danone’s people face every time they mention it. Perhaps it’s the “dual project” effect that, when times are bad, makes people proud of the way they do business ?

• “managers don’t have time to make their team progress nor to network. Worse, as time passes by, they forget it’s a part of their job and they don’t bring the added value they were hired for”. A consultant / professor.

• “None of our High PotentiaIs want to work for our IT dept”. Anonymous. At first glance it may sound funny, but with a little distance it’s scaring.

• “Most of time, true entrepreneurs are very bad managers and good managers are very bad entrepreneurs. But it’s logical”. A friend.

Seen

Wikinomics will become a film. It’s called Us Now.

Read

• I’m reading Goldratt’s “The Goal” for the umpteenth time and I still find many precious things in. It also gave me an idea…something I want to explore under the form of a conversation in this blog. Wait and see..

To understand enterprise 2.0 companies should learn from theory of constraints

It’s funny to see how history seems to be endlessly repeating, how issues that have been fixed years ago are coming back to the surface.

Because the question of productivity, time management, ROI in an enterprise 2.0 or in a Service Oriented Organization remembers me of something that already took place years ago (and was fixed) in manufacturing industry and seems to be breaking out again in the knowledge and services industry.

It’s nothing more than a nth application of theory of constraints (TOC).

I first looked into this case when I was a student and was very interested in optimization issues (finally I didn’t change that much since I’m mainly blogging about optimizing organization in a knowledge economy context). At the end of a manufacturing management class, the outside contributer advised me to read “the goal”, from Eliyahu M. Goldratt.

First surprise, it was a novel. The proof of the power of storytelling because I’m not sure I would have been caught up in this if it had been writen in a more academic manner.

Second surprise : I was really slapped in the face to realize I had to unlearn many thing I thought being unbreakable truth. The young and inexperienced student I was at this time was convinced that everything was about productivity and outputs there was no sheet anchor. I learned, on the contrary, that it was sometimes efficient to have employees that don’t work and machines that don’t produce anything. It was not that idiot : if the final product needs many pieces to be assembled, it’s no use having a huge sock of “A” if “B” needs more time to be produced. Doing this drives stocks that cost lots of money, so it’s sometimes better to slow production down, even interupt it. And the employee that is, as a consequence, not working, helps you to make money because he’s not making you loose money by creating stocks.

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