Intro

• Japanese onslaught of DRAM – Intel has to change product entirely
  • Globalization
• Email
  • Japanese office used to be efficient – ppl in same group in the same long table
  • Email means more efficiency
  • Also digitalization is another form is globalization
• Book is for middle-manager
  • “Know how manager” – even if they don’t manage ppl
• Three main idea
  • Output oriented approach to mgmt – ideas from manufacturing, every employee “produce something”
  • Manager’s output is the team under the manager’s influence – high managerial leverage tasks
    • One-on-one meetings
  • Managing your career
    • Manager as sole proprieter – (1) add value to process; (2) learning new things; (3) trying out new things; 

Breakfast Factory – Chap 1 Basics of Prod

• Breakfast example – 3 min egg, toast, coffee
  • Limiting Step – build the process around the limiting step
  • Trade-off between various factors – manpower, capacity and inventory
• Upgrade to high-volume factory
  • How to avoid breakdown – functional test – sample some egg and open
    • Prefer in process test than test that destroy a product
    • Raw Material / Input Inspection
• Each stage in pipeline is value adding, quality assurance / problem detection at lowest-value stage

Breakfast Factory – Chap 2 Managing Breakfast Factory – delivering a breakfast

• Indicators
  • What five indicators would you look at each day – first thing after arriving at office?
  • First rule – have measurement is better than not having measurement.
  • Effective indicator measure output instead of activity (closed deal from salesman instead of call he makes)
  • Second rule – measurement against countable things
  • Three usage (1) OKR of individual/group; (2) objective; (3) cross-group comparison of which ones are more effective – competitive spirit (sports analogy) more improvement in performance
• Black box
  • Leading Indicators – “window cut into the blackbox”
  • Example: machine downtime records, customer satisfaction ratings
  • Also curve of whether production spread evenly vs. most of production in last month
    • If most prod in last month – that indicates inefficiency, one minor breakdown in the end of month will be ruinous 
  • Stagger charts
    • Economic forecast vs. actual 
• Controlling future output
  • Build to order vs. Build to forecast – forecasting future demands
    • Inventory risk
  • Who do the forecasting – better to ask bother manufacturing & sales department to forecast, so that ppl responsible for performing against their our predictions
  • Inventory should be kept at “lowest value stage” – i.e. raw eggs
• Assure quality
  • increase quality vs. minimal disturbance to prod 
  • Gatelike vs. Monitoring
    • Gatelike hold upstream until it pass check, monitoring pass it downstream while doing the check, stop the line if too many checks fail
    • If empirically not likely big problem, then prefer monitoring type 
  • Variable inspection
    • More problem occur increase freq of inspection, and vice versa
• Productivity
  • Increase productivity by “work harder/faster” vs. “work smarter (what)”
    • i.e. Software Engineer using high-level programming language + compiler is faster than software engineer using low-level programming language
    • High leverage activity
  • Work Simplification

Management is a team game – Chap 3 Managerial Leverage

• Manager’s output = output of his org + output of neighboring orgs under influence
• Manager keep many balls in the air, he spends energy to where greatest leverage is.
• Manager as role model.
• High leverage activities
  •  Many people affected / people affected over long period / unique knowledge – key info
  • Positive vs. Negative leverage
• Delegation
  • Need monitoring: Delegation without follow-thru is abdication 
• Speed-up
  • Identify limiting step / bottleneck
  • Batching 
  • Factory use forecast – Manager’s calendar is the forecast
  • Allow slack – looseness in scheduling
  • Inventory principle 
• How many subordinate: 6~8 is optimal 
• 
• Interruptions 

Management is a team game – Chap 4 Meetings – The medium of managerial work

• Two types of meeting
  • Process Oriented: knowledge & info exchange
    • 1-on-1 – knowledge sharing
    • Staff Meetings
    • 
  • Mission Oriented: finish a proj 

Management is a team game – Chap 5 Decisions, Decisions

• Ideal decision making: Free Discussion / Clear Decision / Full Support
• Ppl afraid to speak out against peers (peer group syndrome) 

Management is a team game – Chap 6 Planning: Today’s actions for tomorrow’s output

• Planning Process
  • Step-1 env demand
  • Step-2 present status
  • Step-3 what to do to close the gap
• Output of planning – future events
• MBO – management by objectives
  • Columbus story retold 
  • OKR need clear objective and clear deadline 

Team of Teams – Chap 7 The breakfast factory goes national

• When a chain goes national, there’s issue of global vs. local (i.e. marketing)

Team of Teams – Chap 8 Hybrid Org

• Mission oriented vs. Functional Org
  • Mission oriented – decentralized
• Good Org is hybrid of two
  • Trade-off between responsiveness & leverage
  • Front mission-oriented (battle group), back functional (functional)
  • Advantage of centralized functional group
    • Advantage 1: Economics of scale (centralized info sys, centralized manufacturing, know-how experts) – good things applied to entire company, big leverage
    • Disadvantage – centralized functional group make business units waste energy negotiating for resources
  • Advantage of business unit – fast to response 
  • Example of non-responsiveness : Soviet-Union’s Central Planning Commitee
    • Middle Mgr is important – has leverage & close to problem

Team of Teams – Chap 9 Dual Reporting

• Matrix Mgmt 
• Dual reporting
  • Example: who should the security of manufacturing plant report to
    • Head of security? (Expert on security, but not local, low responsiveness)
    • Head of plant? (Expert on the plant, not expert on security)
    • Dual reporting!
• Too centralized – no grasp on current state of affair, too decentralized – fragmented and inefficient

Team of Teams – Chap 10 Modes of Control

• Our behavior controlled by three forces:
  • Free market forces – i.e. buy a car
  • Contractual obligations – i.e. tax system 
  • Culture values
• CUA factor – Complexity, Uncertainty, Ambuguity
• 
• New hire example – new to company (high self-interest) give him a task with low CUA factor; once more comfortable (more group interest) – task with higher CUA factor
  • Company with strong culture tend to promote from within 

The Players – Chap 11 The sports Analogy

• Can do vs. Will do
  • Training vs. Motivation
  • Motivated people learn faster
• Maslow’s levels of needs + drives
  • Social Need – is important
  • Esteem/Recog
  • Self Actualization
    • Competence-driven vs. Achievement-driven
      • Competence : Violinist for example 
      • Achievement: more abstract
    • Gambler vs. Conservative vs. Achiever
      • Achiever test their ability
    • To cultivate achievement-driven motivation, need to create env that values emphasize output
• Sportify / Gamify the work-place

The Players – Chap 12 Task-relevant Maturity

• DONE

The Players – Chap 13 Performance Appraisal – Manager as Judge & Jury

• Assessing Perf
  • Time offset between activity and output
  • Org vs. Manager
• Delivering the assessment
• The blast – big perf issue
• Reviewing the Ace

The Players – Chap 14 Two difficult tasks

• Interviewing
  • Interviewee should do 80% of talking
  • Four dimensions of assessment
    • Tech Domain Skill
    • What he/she achieved with the knowledge
    • Discrepancies
      • Lessons learned 
      • Current problems
    • Operational values 
  • How:
    • Ask candidate to handle hypothetical situation
      • Example: Author know nothing about finance, and the candidate Harvard MBA know nothing about semi-conductor
      • Go thru the factory, answer any questions, and ask him what’s the cost for finished product
    • Ask candidate what they’d like to know about you / company / job
    • Reference – you may not get “real info”
• “I Quit”
  • Try every avenue to keep the employee to the firm – even internal transfer
  • When employee has accepted another job somewhere else – really asking two favors
    • Using familiarity (work together daily) as a weapon

The Players – Chap 15 Compensation as task-relevant feedback

• Time-based vs. Merit-based
  • 

The Players – Chap 16 Why training is the boss’s job

• Insufficiently trained employee is bad
• Either increase (1) motivation or increase (2) capability
• Training is the very high leveraged activity
• Training new employees vs. training new ideas/skills

One more thing