這是英國專欄作者 他經常提到Deming博士
這一主題在去年的一次研習會中 署立醫院的最高主管表示過類似的意見
The rule is simple: be careful what you measure
Simon Caulkin, management editor
The Observer,
Sunday February 10 2008
Article history ·
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This article appeared in the Observer on Sunday February 10 2008 on p8 of the Business news & features section. It was last updated at 00:11 on February 10 2008.
If there's one management platitude that should have been throttled at birth, it's 'what gets measured gets managed'. It's not that it's not true - it is - but it is often misunderstood, with disastrous consequences.
The full proposition is: 'What gets measured gets managed - even when it's pointless to measure and manage it, and even if it harms the purpose of the organisation to do so.' In the truncated version, there are two lethal pitfalls. The first is the implication that management is only about measuring. Way back in 1956, the academic V F Ridgway famously noted the dysfunctional consequences of managers' tendency to reduce as many as possible of their concerns to numbers.
Quality guru W Edwards Deming went further, putting 'management by use only of visible figures, with little consideration of figures that are unknown or unknowable' at No 5 in his list of seven deadly management diseases. Henry Mintzberg, the sanest of management educators, proposed that starting 'from the premise that we can't measure what matters' gives managers the best chance of realistically facing up to their challenge.
In the past few years, of course, spurious measurement has proliferated beyond, well, measure. Although regulation comes into it, this is often the consequence of IT systems that can measure anything that moves - the number of telephone rings, how long calls take and cost and how many calls a person makes an hour, for instance. The figures can be on a manager's desk the same evening.
But just because you can measure it, doesn't mean you should. All the above, although standard in call centres, are generally pointless, because they only tell you about levels of activity, not about how well the call centre's purpose is being achieved. Thus, a call centre may boast high productivity and low costs per call but that's irrelevant if most of its activity is mopping up customer complaints about poor service. Activity measures prevent managers from seeing that cheaper calls aren't the answer: better to improve the service so that they don't need a call centre with all its associated costs in the first place.
It gets worse when activity measures form the basis of contracts with suppliers, as they often do in the hard-nosed-sounding guise of 'payment by results'. Payment by results, whether for calls answered, appointments made or patients seen, is actually 'payment by activity' - activity that doesn't necessarily advance and may actually obstruct the overall purpose. As in the call-centre example above, a contractor paid by 'results' (ie activity) has no incentive to improve service, which would reduce the number of calls, and hence payment, and every incentive to worsen it, by cutting the time spent on calls as they inexorably increase in number.
Here we encounter the second problem with the measurement-management equation. All too often in a kind of Gresham's law (which said bad money drives out good), the easy-to-measure drives out the hard, even when the latter is more important. Strategy writer Igor Ansoff said: 'Corporate managers start off trying to manage what they want, and finish up wanting what they can measure.'
What happens when bad measures drive out good is strikingly described in an article in the current Economic Journal. Investigating the effects of competition in the NHS, Carol Propper and her colleagues made an extraordinary discovery. Under competition, hospitals improved their patient waiting times. At the same time, the death-rate following emergency heart-attack admissions substantially increased. Why? As targets, waiting times were and are measured (and what gets measured gets managed, right?). Emergency heart-attack deaths were not tracked and therefore not managed. Even though no one would argue that the trade-off - shorter waiting times but more deaths - was anything but a travesty of NHS purpose, that's what the choice of measure produced.
As the paper observes: 'It seems unlikely that hospitals deliberately set out to decrease survival rates. What is more likely is that in response to competitive pressures on costs, hospitals cut services that affected [heart-attack] mortality rates, which were unobserved, in order to increase other activities which buyers could better observe.'
In other words, what gets measured, matters. Measures set up incentives that drive people's behaviour. And woe to the organisation when that behaviour is at odds with its purpose. Imagine the cost to NHS morale (one of Deming's unknown and unknowable figures) of the knowledge that managing to the measure resulted in more deaths - the grotesque opposite of its aims. Hospitals are the extreme example of a general case. As such, they allow us a definitive rephrasing of our least favourite management mantra. What gets measured gets managed - so be sure you have the right measures, because the wrong ones kill.
simon.caulkin@observer.co.uk
2008年2月10日 星期日
2008年2月5日 星期二
工會
比較英文人行道上 connumsrun 條
姑且不談本文作者認為"工會必須硬起來"的說法
它點出Deming在這些方面的想法
可以參考
February 5, 2008
What Do They Have to Lose?
Unions Need to Stop Being So Nice
By DAVID MACARAY
Should labor unions arbitrarily assume that any plan introduced by management will likely have a negative effect on the workers? Should organized labor quit playing ball with management? Should they stop cooperating? In a word, should unions just say No to everything?
As cynical and profoundly adversarial as these questions may seem, recent history more or less gives Yes as the answer.
Take, for example, the Democracy in the Workplace campaign of the 1980s. Using as its template the Japanese employer-employee relationship (the one reputed to be kicking our butts in the marketplace), American businesses urged unions to think "outside the box," to open themselves up to a whole new philosophy regarding the way we do business.
Dr. W. Edwards Deming, the statistician and ergonomics expert credited with having "invented" the postwar Japanese business model, traveled the United States conducting seminars and hawking his book ("Out of the Crisis") on how to save the American economy. Japan was clearly on the ascendancy, and we were rapidly falling behind.
Management gushed over Deming's innovative 14-point program for improving efficiency, and unions were quick to buy in to his refreshingly pro-labor stance, where workers on the floor were given an opportunity to participate in the decision-making process, share in the profits, and be treated as "equals."
Of course, what happened was hideous and predictable. Management degraded Deming's philosophy by implementing only those parts of it that benefited them in the short-term, and rejecting anything that cost money or resembled "joint-ownership" of the workplace. Because they'd always feared and resented unions, they hoped that "going Japanese" would be an opportunity to neutralize them.
Democracy in the Workplace turned out to be more hype than substance. It took the form of grassroots employee committees which, predictably (and with the company's urging), ignored or sidestepped the elected union leadership. Not that there's anything wrong with employee involvement; in fact, having a majority of the workers genuinely involved in day-to-day activities is a positive force.
But in many cases these ad hoc committees were free-for-alls, with management offering rewards to the weakest, most pliant workers on the floor as payment for supporting company initiatives. This was "democracy" in its least attractive form. Ironically, when it came time for some really serious decision-making to be done, even these company stooges were brushed aside, particularly when their suggestions conflicted with management's master plan.
The mid-1980s and early 1990s turned out to be a period of huge layoffs. Because cutting the workforce was now a priority, Deming's subtle managerial philosophy had been clumsily reduced to an aggressive, unremitting drive to lower head counts. By the time the smoke cleared, and the Democracy in the Workplace movement had petered out, employee rolls had been slashed, unions had been weakened, and company profits had soared.
And then, quite suddenly, the so-called "Japanese Miracle" was relegated to yesterday's news. As other emerging Asian markets arrived on the scene and began competing with Japan, the vaunted Japanese model lost a bit of its luster. Today, if you suggest emulating Japanese techniques, you'll elicit yawns. China is the world's new economic hero. Fortunately, its bizarre mixture of bureaucratic Communism and rapacious turbo-capitalism isn't available for export.
Another example of a bad idea was NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement). This treaty has been with us now for 14 years, and it's obvious that the wildly optimistic predictions were mistaken. NAFTA was supposed to create jobs for American workers; instead, nearly 3 million manufacturing jobs have been lost.
Additionally, NAFTA was supposed to help the Mexican economy to such an extent-create so many new jobs in Mexico-that immigration into the U.S. would be reduced to a trickle. Instead, not only has immigration to the U.S. increased, but Mexican farmers have been devastated by U.S. government subsidies to agribusiness, and workers at the maquiladoras (border factories) have been laid off or had their wages drastically cut.
So who profited from NAFTA? No big surprise. It was the most powerful business groups in the three countries privy to the arrangement: Canada, Mexico and the U.S. President Clinton's chief economic advisor, Robert Rubin (formerly of the financial giant Goldman Sachs), was a personal friend of Carlos Salinas, the wealthy former president of Mexico. NAFTA was a classic "inside job," shoved through Congress by a bipartisan coalition of Republicans and Democrats.
But the best (worst) example of a management enterprise that hurt unions was the swapping of priorities in contract negotiations, which began in earnest during the 1990s and continues today. In order to hang on to their precious health care and pension benefits, unions were persuaded to put off (or even give back) wage increases. With benefits in jeopardy, unions were willing to sign contracts that swapped short-term purchasing power for long-term security.
The central flaw in this strategy was that it had no brakes. Once the unions agreed to forego wage increases in return for maintaining their benefits, management's next move was swift and predictable: they came after the benefits. The unions' voluntary waiver of wage increases served no purpose; health care and pension benefits continued to be eaten away. In the end, unions wound up losing both wages and benefits.
The same applied to the two-tier wage format. Reluctantly, unions agreed to sign contracts that included two-tier wage structures (a configuration where new hires are locked into a permanently lower wage schedule than senior workers) in return for hanging on to their medical and pension coverage. A case of ideological integrity being sacrificed for long-term stability.
This "selling out" of future employees was an extremely tough call for the unions, a trade-off they agonized over. To their credit, many locals refused to go along, even though they were under enormous pressure to do so. For those who did agree, as soon as management had that two-tier wage provision under their belt (and despite assurances that it wouldn't happen), they began cutting into the very medical and pension benefits the union had sold its soul to preserve. It was ugly.
So what's the answer? If going the extra mile, meeting management more than halfway and expecting them to do the right thing, isn't the solution, then what is? One suggestion might be that labor needs to move in the opposite direction. Instead of détente and mutual cooperation, a harsher, more "primitive" approach may be what's needed.
If accommodating management has lead to treachery and deceit, maybe resorting to strikes, more strikes, lawsuits, and calling management's bluff at every turn would be the more effective tactic. Something needs to be done to back them off. Even if that means going to war. Given all the bitter medicine unions have been forced to swallow over the last 25 years, what have they got to lose?
David Macaray, a Los Angeles playwright and writer, was president and chief contract negotiator of the Assn. of Western Pulp and Paper Workers, Local 672, from 1989 to 2000. He can be reached at dmacaray@earthlink.net
姑且不談本文作者認為"工會必須硬起來"的說法
它點出Deming在這些方面的想法
可以參考
February 5, 2008
What Do They Have to Lose?
Unions Need to Stop Being So Nice
By DAVID MACARAY
Should labor unions arbitrarily assume that any plan introduced by management will likely have a negative effect on the workers? Should organized labor quit playing ball with management? Should they stop cooperating? In a word, should unions just say No to everything?
As cynical and profoundly adversarial as these questions may seem, recent history more or less gives Yes as the answer.
Take, for example, the Democracy in the Workplace campaign of the 1980s. Using as its template the Japanese employer-employee relationship (the one reputed to be kicking our butts in the marketplace), American businesses urged unions to think "outside the box," to open themselves up to a whole new philosophy regarding the way we do business.
Dr. W. Edwards Deming, the statistician and ergonomics expert credited with having "invented" the postwar Japanese business model, traveled the United States conducting seminars and hawking his book ("Out of the Crisis") on how to save the American economy. Japan was clearly on the ascendancy, and we were rapidly falling behind.
Management gushed over Deming's innovative 14-point program for improving efficiency, and unions were quick to buy in to his refreshingly pro-labor stance, where workers on the floor were given an opportunity to participate in the decision-making process, share in the profits, and be treated as "equals."
Of course, what happened was hideous and predictable. Management degraded Deming's philosophy by implementing only those parts of it that benefited them in the short-term, and rejecting anything that cost money or resembled "joint-ownership" of the workplace. Because they'd always feared and resented unions, they hoped that "going Japanese" would be an opportunity to neutralize them.
Democracy in the Workplace turned out to be more hype than substance. It took the form of grassroots employee committees which, predictably (and with the company's urging), ignored or sidestepped the elected union leadership. Not that there's anything wrong with employee involvement; in fact, having a majority of the workers genuinely involved in day-to-day activities is a positive force.
But in many cases these ad hoc committees were free-for-alls, with management offering rewards to the weakest, most pliant workers on the floor as payment for supporting company initiatives. This was "democracy" in its least attractive form. Ironically, when it came time for some really serious decision-making to be done, even these company stooges were brushed aside, particularly when their suggestions conflicted with management's master plan.
The mid-1980s and early 1990s turned out to be a period of huge layoffs. Because cutting the workforce was now a priority, Deming's subtle managerial philosophy had been clumsily reduced to an aggressive, unremitting drive to lower head counts. By the time the smoke cleared, and the Democracy in the Workplace movement had petered out, employee rolls had been slashed, unions had been weakened, and company profits had soared.
And then, quite suddenly, the so-called "Japanese Miracle" was relegated to yesterday's news. As other emerging Asian markets arrived on the scene and began competing with Japan, the vaunted Japanese model lost a bit of its luster. Today, if you suggest emulating Japanese techniques, you'll elicit yawns. China is the world's new economic hero. Fortunately, its bizarre mixture of bureaucratic Communism and rapacious turbo-capitalism isn't available for export.
Another example of a bad idea was NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement). This treaty has been with us now for 14 years, and it's obvious that the wildly optimistic predictions were mistaken. NAFTA was supposed to create jobs for American workers; instead, nearly 3 million manufacturing jobs have been lost.
Additionally, NAFTA was supposed to help the Mexican economy to such an extent-create so many new jobs in Mexico-that immigration into the U.S. would be reduced to a trickle. Instead, not only has immigration to the U.S. increased, but Mexican farmers have been devastated by U.S. government subsidies to agribusiness, and workers at the maquiladoras (border factories) have been laid off or had their wages drastically cut.
So who profited from NAFTA? No big surprise. It was the most powerful business groups in the three countries privy to the arrangement: Canada, Mexico and the U.S. President Clinton's chief economic advisor, Robert Rubin (formerly of the financial giant Goldman Sachs), was a personal friend of Carlos Salinas, the wealthy former president of Mexico. NAFTA was a classic "inside job," shoved through Congress by a bipartisan coalition of Republicans and Democrats.
But the best (worst) example of a management enterprise that hurt unions was the swapping of priorities in contract negotiations, which began in earnest during the 1990s and continues today. In order to hang on to their precious health care and pension benefits, unions were persuaded to put off (or even give back) wage increases. With benefits in jeopardy, unions were willing to sign contracts that swapped short-term purchasing power for long-term security.
The central flaw in this strategy was that it had no brakes. Once the unions agreed to forego wage increases in return for maintaining their benefits, management's next move was swift and predictable: they came after the benefits. The unions' voluntary waiver of wage increases served no purpose; health care and pension benefits continued to be eaten away. In the end, unions wound up losing both wages and benefits.
The same applied to the two-tier wage format. Reluctantly, unions agreed to sign contracts that included two-tier wage structures (a configuration where new hires are locked into a permanently lower wage schedule than senior workers) in return for hanging on to their medical and pension coverage. A case of ideological integrity being sacrificed for long-term stability.
This "selling out" of future employees was an extremely tough call for the unions, a trade-off they agonized over. To their credit, many locals refused to go along, even though they were under enormous pressure to do so. For those who did agree, as soon as management had that two-tier wage provision under their belt (and despite assurances that it wouldn't happen), they began cutting into the very medical and pension benefits the union had sold its soul to preserve. It was ugly.
So what's the answer? If going the extra mile, meeting management more than halfway and expecting them to do the right thing, isn't the solution, then what is? One suggestion might be that labor needs to move in the opposite direction. Instead of détente and mutual cooperation, a harsher, more "primitive" approach may be what's needed.
If accommodating management has lead to treachery and deceit, maybe resorting to strikes, more strikes, lawsuits, and calling management's bluff at every turn would be the more effective tactic. Something needs to be done to back them off. Even if that means going to war. Given all the bitter medicine unions have been forced to swallow over the last 25 years, what have they got to lose?
David Macaray, a Los Angeles playwright and writer, was president and chief contract negotiator of the Assn. of Western Pulp and Paper Workers, Local 672, from 1989 to 2000. He can be reached at dmacaray@earthlink.net
除夕前紀事
關於 "十四要點" 我再向寬仁師 說明這是 Wilson肇始的用法的"傳統表述"
"一戰後期由諸強權所硬湊成的「國際聯盟」(SDN, La société desnations)，在其創始盟約中便知道應該體現康得【德】(Immanuel Kant【1724-1804】)所闡述的"永久和平理想"【參考其論文，有中文翻譯】，威爾遜(T. X. Xilson)【英文：Woodrow Wilson 1856-1924】總統最起碼在三大計畫上都戕害了多樣性的理想。"
昨天赴 Kevin Lin 之約時想起 或許今年的 Deming 紀念會 請Bill 來參加 作場 Free Keynote Speech
我和林先生解釋今年希望弄出"品質三部曲"和 Bill的書之再版
"一戰後期由諸強權所硬湊成的「國際聯盟」(SDN, La société desnations)，在其創始盟約中便知道應該體現康得【德】(Immanuel Kant【1724-1804】)所闡述的"永久和平理想"【參考其論文，有中文翻譯】，威爾遜(T. X. Xilson)【英文：Woodrow Wilson 1856-1924】總統最起碼在三大計畫上都戕害了多樣性的理想。"
昨天赴 Kevin Lin 之約時想起 或許今年的 Deming 紀念會 請Bill 來參加 作場 Free Keynote Speech
我和林先生解釋今年希望弄出"品質三部曲"和 Bill的書之再版
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