2015年1月28日星期三

One spelling error costs Companies House up to £9 million after being sued for ruining business

A High Court ruling has found that Companies House was to blame after an engineering firm called Taylor & Sons, which was based in Cardiff and supplied military equipment during two world wars, was recorded as having been in liquidation.

In fact, Companies House had inserted a rogue "s" and the actual company that had been wound up six years ago was based 200 miles away in Manchester called Taylor and Son.

Philip Davison-Sebry sued Companies House for “false publication” after at least 250 people lost their jobs with the firm.

Companies House – an agency of the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills – and the chief registrar of the government body had denied liability for the mistake.

Lawyers for Taylor & Sons told Mr Justice Edis that the business suffered “devastating” consequences as all of their credit agencies and 3,000 suppliers had revoked their services after seeing the Companies House notice claiming the firm had folded.

The news broke to the former managing director of the company while he was celebrating his wife's 50th birthday in the Maldives. He got a call from one of their main clients demanding a meeting for the next day, Mr Davison-Sebry told WalesOnline.

Taylor & Sons had gone into administration two months after the error was made, the court also heard.

Mr Edis concluded after months of legal proceedings from November that the Registrar of Companies had a duty to take “reasonable care” to ensure that an order was not registered against the wrong firm.

Mr Davison-Sebry, 57, has claimed nearly £9 million in damages and a written ruling was published yesterday. The judge made no decisions on levels of compensation in the ruling however a damages assessment is expected at a later stage.

2015年1月20日星期二

日本製的信賴與迷思 (張維中)

張維中專欄：日本製的信賴與迷思

日幣貶值讓Made in Japan產品的市場占有率回升？然而，日本製象徵著高品質，近年來卻也產生了一些迷思，造成不少後遺症。如何善待「日本製」這個品牌的自我價值，也許是今後日本人要面對的課題。（圖片來源：Jun OHWADA@Flickr）

日幣貶值讓日本的出口貿易大有助益，但是日本有很多東西其實是仰賴國外進口的，特別是日常用品和食材原料。進口的成本增加以後，東西不得不漲價，使得薪水卻一毛未漲的民眾，漸漸感受到物價上揚的生活壓力。

不過，這一波日幣貶值，卻意外讓「日本製」的商品重回市場占有率。原因是海外的生產成本大幅增加，再加上海外工資連年提升，令開銷變得沈重，許多廠商決定將工廠線移回日本。

佳能（Canon）數位相機日前宣布，若以目前日幣匯率的情況來看，今後他們將會把在海外工廠生產的幾條線，移回日本國內工廠製造。除了數位相機以外，其他附加價值高的新產品，預計也將直接在日本國內生產。目前已知的具體計畫，是長崎縣和大分縣的工廠確定將投入增產。未來三年，國內生產的產品比率將從現在的四成提升到六成。

製造業工廠回歸日本

Panasonic在中國的工廠製造冷氣機和微波爐，Sharp則是空氣清淨機，這兩家大廠也在2015年初宣布，商品的部分生產線，目前正討論移回日本國內。至於日立和三菱則保持觀望態度。他們考量到工廠從海外移回日本的成本支出，以及未來日幣究竟是否還會維持低點，或者又將升值。許多的廠牌打的如意算盤是日本與海外兩地都保有工廠，隨匯率的變動而調整生產比重。

部分學者認為製造業工廠重回日本將創造內需，提供日本市場的工作需求。看似符合了安倍晉三首相的經濟政策，但事實上是這些工廠所提供的作業員工作，日本年輕人也許並不買帳。再加上機密儀器的產業，未來多以自動化的無人工廠為趨勢，即使回歸日本國內生產了，真正能確保多少勞動力也令人存疑。

（製造業工廠重回日本是否真能創造內需，提供日本市場的工作需求？圖片：張維中攝影）

日本製的正負影響

其實從前的日本，無論是店家、廠商或一般民眾，都不是非常清楚親日地域，像是台灣、香港和東南亞國家的民眾，對於日本製產品的「信賴感」到什麼樣的熱愛程度。當這些廠牌的製造工廠移往海外，所謂的日本商品逐漸只剩下品牌空殼時，海外人士對於日本製的高品質信賴感也陷入了窘境。當觀光客來到日本購物，特別指定只買日本製的東西時，才漸漸喚醒了不少日本人，原來，他們一直以來習以為常的日本產品，在外國人的眼中有如此強大的魅力。

曾經在無印良品的店家裡，遇見一群來自中國的觀光團，聽見他們一邊拿著各種產品一邊相互嚷嚷著說：「這個我們不買。」導遊問了為什麼，其中一個人理直氣壯地回答：「都是咱們國內製造的。」印象中總是討厭日本的中國人，到了日本也是要買日本製的商品的。於是，特別受到中國觀光客青睞的家電賣場，現在必定會特別設置「日本製」的特區，每樣產品都標有詳細的中文解釋。

（特別受中國觀光客青睞的家電賣場，必會特別設置「日本製」的特區，每樣產品都標有詳細的中文解釋。圖片：張維中攝影）

日本製象徵著高品質，卻也產生了一些迷思，造成不少後遺症。日本農林水產省日前公布一項從2009～2013年的調查報告，指出海外出現許多偽裝成日本生產的農產品。包括台灣、中國、香港和印尼等七地，約有九十種品牌都不是日本產，卻標上日本製的欺瞞行為。

同樣的狀況，在日本本地也屢見不鮮。許多明明是來自中國的食材，卻故意標上日本產，價格因此翻三倍，商人大賺黑心錢。即使不是偽裝，但卻利用「日本製」的迷思，藉以高價賺取外國人的日本人也不在少數。根據新聞調查，有些日本網友會把百圓商店買來的日本製雜貨，在海外的eBay上拍賣。對象是對日本產品信賴，但並不熟悉百圓商店產品的歐美人士。原本只要日幣一百圓的廉價商品，賣到二十倍價格的例子都有。

在日幣貶值讓生產線回流本土的動向中，對於日本製的信賴與迷思，成為了一樁看似並無直接關係，卻緊密左右著日本人今後要何以善用，並如何善待日本這個品牌的自我價值之課題。

What Peter Drucker Knew About 2020

作者是杜拉克學院的大筆。我已多年未讀他的報告了。

LEADERSHIP

What Peter Drucker Knew About 2020

Rick Wartzman

OCTOBER 16, 2014

When PwC released its annual survey of corporate chief executives for 2014, it was immediately obvious that change is on leaders’ brains: “As CEOs plan their strategies to take advantage of transformational shifts,” the consultancy reported, “they are also assessing their current capabilities – and finding that everything is fair game for reinvention.”

It’s no wonder why.

“Every few hundred years throughout Western history, a sharp transformation has occurred,” Peter Drucker observed in a 1992 essay for Harvard Business Review. “In a matter of decades, society altogether rearranges itself – its worldview, its basic values, its social and political structures, its arts, its key institutions. Fifty years later a new world exists. And the people born into that world cannot even imagine the world in which their grandparents lived and into which their own parents were born. Our age is such a period of transformation.”

For Drucker, the newest new world was marked, above all, by one dominant factor: “the shift to a knowledge society.”

Indeed, Drucker had been anticipating this monumental leap – to an age when people would generate value with their minds more than with their muscle – since at least 1959, when in Landmarks of Tomorrow he first described the rise of “knowledge work.” Three decades later, Drucker had become convinced that knowledge was a more crucial economic resource than land, labor, or financial assets, leading to what he called a “post-capitalist society.” And shortly thereafter (and not long before he died in 2005), Drucker declared that increasing the productivity of knowledge workers was “the most important contribution management needs to make in the 21st century.”

Sadly, judging from the way most of our institutions are run, we are still struggling to catch up with the reality Drucker foresaw. How should managers alter their approaches to fit the times? Here are six aspects of running an enterprise that should now be front-and-center:

Figure out what information is needed. “It is information,” Drucker wrote, “that enables knowledge workers to do their job.” This is especially true for executives. The trouble is, even in a hyper-connected world where endless amounts of data are literally at our fingertips, many rely on the producers of the data – the bean counters, the sales force, the IT department – to serve up the numbers they believe are most relevant. And these folks don’t necessarily have a clue. A 2014 McKinsey & Co. survey found, for example, that fewer than 20% of IT professionals say they are effective at targeting where they can add the most value inside their organizations. “An adequate information system,” Drucker wrote, must lead executives “to ask the right questions, not just feed them the information they expect. That presupposes first that executives know what information they need.”

Actively prune what is past its prime. Virtually every executive is eager to see his or her organization innovate. Through our work at the Drucker Institute, however, it is clear that most are reluctant to take the necessary first step toward creating the new: continually winding down those products, services, programs, and procedures that are no longer making a real contribution. “Every organization will have to learn to innovate” on a constant basis, Drucker wrote. “And then, of course, one comes back to abandonment, and the process starts all over. Unless this is done, the knowledge-based organization will very soon find itself obsolescent, losing performance capacity and with it the ability to attract and hold the skilled and knowledgeable people on whom its performance depends.”

Embrace employee autonomy. Drucker urged executives to push decision-making and accountability all the way down through the organization as early as 1954, when he introduced the concept of Management by Objectives. And yet there is ample evidence that most organizations remain paragons of command-and-control. In a knowledge economy, top-down direction is particularly detrimental because employees are bound to know more than their supervisors do about the specialized fields in which they operate. They may also know more about the customer—his needs and desires. “Knowledge workers have to manage themselves,” Drucker advised. “They have to have autonomy.”

Build true learning organizations. “If knowledge isn’t challenged to grow, it disappears fast,” Drucker cautioned. “It’s infinitely more perishable than any other resource we have ever had.” To keep it fresh, John Hagel, co-chairman of Deloitte’s Center for the Edge, says that firms need “new architectures” designed to increase the flow of information and learning inside and outside the organization’s walls. Traditionally, the organizing principle for businesses was to achieve efficiencies of scale. Now, Hagel says, “scalable learning” must be the aim. Pursuing it begins withredesigning work environments to foster new knowledge creation – that is, to move beyond sharing what’s already known to helping workers make genuine discoveries more quickly by tackling performance challenges together. Unfortunately, there’s an awfully long way to go. Asked how many corporations have implemented this vision, Hagel says: “The answer is zero.”

Provide a much stronger sense of purpose. Survey after survey reveals that the vast majority of employees are not engaged in what they do. One big reason is the failure to connect people’s jobs with a larger sense of purpose. Too often, the organization seems to be an end in itself; no meaningful link has been forged between the daily tasks of the enterprise and how they serve the customer and better society. “What motivates – and especially what motivates knowledge workers – is what motivates volunteers,” Drucker wrote. Among other things, “they need to know the organization’s mission and to believe in it.” A paycheck, even a fat one, is not enough. No longer can organizations expect to inspire “by satisfying knowledge workers’ greed,” Drucker counseled. “It will have to be done by satisfying their values.”

Be more mindful of those left behind. Drucker worried a lot about a group that he characterized as “knowledge-worker cousins”: service workers. “Knowledge workers and service workers are not ‘classes’ in the traditional sense,” Drucker wrote. “But there is a danger that … society will become a class society unless service workers attain both income and dignity.” He added: “Anyone can acquire the ‘means of production’, i.e., the knowledge required for the job, but not everyone can win.” Again, Drucker’s words prove prescient as the gains in the knowledge economy are hardly being shared equitably. “Our basic grievance with today’s billionaires is that relatively little of the value they’ve created trickles down to the rest of us,” the University of Toronto’s Roger Martin asserts. He warns that this situation is unsustainable, and that top executives need to rein in their compensation. Surely, Drucker would have agreed. “A healthy business,” he wrote, “cannot exist in a sick society.”

It’s easy to forget how profound the emergence of the knowledge age really is. Ours is “the first society in which ‘honest work’ does not mean a callused hand,” Drucker noted. “This is far more than a social change. It is a change in the human condition.” But for all that, what it takes to manage effectively now is no mystery. We’ve been headed down this path for more than half a century.

In his HBR piece, Drucker suggested that our great transformation would be completed by 2010 or 2020. It is high time that management started acting like the clock is running out.

This post is part of a series leading up to the annual Global Drucker Forum, taking place November 13-14 2014 in Vienna, Austria. Read the rest of the series here.

2015年1月19日星期一

Dr. W. Edwards Deming And Innovation Effectiveness

無數篇的新管理14要點之省思之一。

Dr. W. Edwards Deming And Innovation Effectiveness

Jan 19, 2015

Dr. W. Edwards Deming was an engineer, statistician, professor, author, lecturer, and management consultant., credited for indirectly starting the Total Quality Management movement, as well as impacting manufacturing organizations around the world.

If we take some of Dr. Deming's key principles first presented in his book OUT OF CRISIS, what can we learn from his work that can be applied to Innovation programs?

Create constancy of purpose toward improvement of product and service, with the aim to become competitive and to stay in business, and to provide jobs.

If everyone in the company is focused on improving the products and services they produce, that could look differently to each person but should result in being innovative as a natural by-product. However, that's not typically the case and not because the individuals in a company don't want to drive greater revenues or reduce costs but because there isn't a "constancy of purpose" permeating the organization. Often times, you'll hear stories of start-ups and how founders are the most passionate drivers when it comes to a business but the enthusiasm leaves the room once the company goes public as it becomes all about efficiency and keeping the board happy. Consider what type of culture you're building, and how you can aim to focus more on purpose and less on outcomes to drive meaningful Innovation as a natural by-product of the work people are performing.

Adopt the new philosophy. We are in a new economic age. Western management must awaken to the challenge, must learn their responsibilities, and take on leadership for change.

Though this was written in a different time, we must take a step back and look at the bigger world we find ourselves in. Is it time to get rid of outdated management theory, or perhaps go from waterfall-driven project management to agile project management? From how you recruit, to how you do business, if you're not considering how to disrupt your business there's a start-up around the corner ready to put you out of business. Think about what "sacred cows" (i.e. business practices you refuse to replace) exist in your business, and what that's costing you to keep them around. Driving innovation depends on the willingness to shift and flex all parts of your business, if necessary.

Cease dependence on inspection to achieve quality. Eliminate the need for inspection on a mass basis by building quality into the product in the first place.

Iteration and rapid prototyping to build minimal viable products doesn't mean accepting functional issues along the way. Developing a process that ensures quality as it's being produced, even building a prototype, through ongoing and intermittent quality control means not waiting till it's on the desk of the project sponsor to diagnose issues. This will not only help show the viability of a product early on, thereby getting greater support and buy-off, but also help drive quality at each phase of the Innovative process. There's a difference between not including a function and capability early on, versus having what you built not work due to a poor level of quality.

Improve constantly and forever the system of production and service, to improve quality and productivity, and thus constantly decrease costs.

Innovation doesn't always mean invention, and continually refining or improving what's been previously built can be a far more effective way to innovate vs doing something all at once. Consider how ongoing improvement vs full on overhaul might drive innovation more rapidly, and with less upfront cost to benefit early on.

Institute training on the job.

Knowledge transfer is critical, expertise location is as well, not just having hard drives full of "how we do things", but meaningful mentorships that drive conversations across the company about how things are done along with what could be done differently. Young people, and people new to the company have a new set of eyes but people that have worked for a long period of time have something valuable to share as well. Consider how things like employee churn, and attrition can also be affected by employees feeling more connected, through relationships, at every level of the organization.

If senior leadership isn't a part of the conversation, then employees can just as easily turn away from the company if it's responding with a deaf ear, no matter how many years they've worked there. Toxicity is best avoided with transparency, so make sure every part of your company at every level is open to learning and teaching the best way to drive change and disrupt the industry you work within.

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

Fear has never been an effective tool to drive efficiency over a long period of time, and competition along with a media ripe to attack the faintest sign of weakness can mean an unstable and fearful workforce. Leading the charge and driving Innovation means maintaining a lead it's nearly impossible to catch up to, but it means fighting the corporate immune system and helping embrace risk vs efficiency & merely focusing on survival. Being pro-active vs reactive not only keeps you alive, but keeps you a couple steps ahead of the competitors, thereby exchanging fear and survival for growth and continual change.

Break down barriers between departments. People in research, design, sales, and production must work as a team, to foresee problems of production and in use that may be encountered with the product or service.

Silos exist in every company, sometimes it's necessary and most of the time it's not. Fiefdoms spring up from companies of every size, and those pockets can be toxic when trying to stay nimble and innovative. Regardless of your level in the organization, if you're reading this, it's your responsibility to help weed these silos out. Get a coffee with someone completely unrelated to your team or job, and keep promoting that mentality with everyone you encounter. You'd be surprised just how effective you are at helping fix that problem.

Eliminate slogans, exhortations, and targets for the work force asking for zero defects and new levels of productivity. Such exhortations only create adversarial relationships, as the bulk of the causes of low quality and low productivity belong to the system and thus lie beyond the power of the work force.

What do you talk about, when it comes to outcomes in your business? Is failure ok? Can someone launch a pilot, see it completely nose-dive, then get back up and say "ok, I learned something, and therefore there was value in doing it". Failing forward needs to be the mantra for every organization in your company, which means making sure that failure isn't something people are afraid of. If the metrics to success are too rigid, failure is avoided, and therefore people make the safe moves and quickly fall into survival mode. Consider what promoting failing forward could do in your company, vs being too rigid on outcomes and KPIs.

Remove barriers that rob the hourly worker of his right to pride of workmanship. The responsibility of supervisors must be changed from sheer numbers to quality.

Are people proud of the work they're doing, or are they just punching in and out each day? No one is going to put in the extra effort to think outside what they do, to try and do things better if they don't feel all that enthusiastic about the work they're doing. Innovative thinking starts with people caring about the job they have, and the company they work for, so consider how you can reinforce the good work people do can add to the type of work they perform. Efficiency is about sheer numbers of production, but Innovative new thinking that drives continued change is about the quality people put into the time they spend thinking and working on the tasks in front of them.

Put everybody in the company to work to accomplish the transformation. The transformation is everybody's job.

Everyone has the capability to drive Innovation, from the janitors to the CEO of a company, and whether it's cost reduction or revenue improvement, it's everyones job to make the company run better and drive more Innovative thinking. If you aren't empowering everyone that works with you and for you to think and work differently, then you'll suffer from Innovation atrophy and ultimately fall into survival mode.

What lessons can you take a way from this? Any lessons you have to add? Please leave your comments below, and let me know what you're thinking.

Principles taken from "THE FOURTEEN POINTS FOR MANAGEMENT", The W. Edwards Deming Institute, https://www.deming.org/theman/theories/fourteenpoints

Dan Maycock is the author of "Building The Expo", which shares best practices on leveraging #Innovation in meaningful ways and saving the concept from it's overused but underutilized past. The book has first hand stories, and best practices from Dan's years of experience working with Fortune 1000 companies dealing with emerging technology adoption in an increasingly dynamic business environment. You can purchase the book atAmazon.com or learn more about him at http://www.danmaycock.com