Management

I’m reading Susans Blackmores book “The Meme Machine”. It starts where Richard Dawkins left off at the end of his seminal book “The Selfish Gene”. Dawkins of course talked mostly about the gene as the “thing” that evolution revolves around but towards the end of his book he speculated about Continue Reading

I often hear expressions such as “here we should define what we do, not how we do it”. While sometimes useful, these kinds of statements are often ill-defined. Let’s take an example from the quality management domain. Some level of process or method description may be said to describe “what” Continue Reading

A short segway into how poor we are at assessing risk, a topic that I find fascinating in itself. The table below shows how much saving one life-year of human life costs using various means [1]. Intervention Cost per life-year saved [MSEK] Reduction of radon in new houses 0.1 Improvement Continue Reading

Scholars believe that the first people came to Australia some 50000 years ago [1]. The indigenous Australian culture is thus probably the oldest surviving culture on the planet. Or at least it was until about 200 years ago. An interesting illustration of this continuity is described in [1]. The Aborigines Continue Reading

The cold spell over the Nordic countries was felt by all the delegates to the COP15 conference on global warming. The result of the summit was a lame document that despite its lameness wasn’t accepted by all countries [1]. Is there a connection between the cold weather and the outcome? Continue Reading

I watched the Nobel Peace Prize concert last night. The Norwegians know how to throw a party! I immediately fell in love with Esperanza Spalding’s music. And Natasha Beddingfield, who also performed, has been one of my personal favorites a long time. Anyway… The Peace Prize is about making change Continue Reading

In an earlier post I wrote about the pain that is often associated with changing the way we behave, the prerequisite for all improvement. I use the word “pain” here to mean all negative feelings that may be associated with the change such as uncertainty, lack of self-confidence, doubt, and Continue Reading

What is the purpose of that company training? Or that next presentation you are giving to your colleagues? Or this blog post for that matter? I’m an engineer by training and like many engineers, teachers and other professionals, I sometimes have this urge to tell people what I know. Perhaps Continue Reading

The exact string “high quality consulting services” renders over 100 000 hits on Google (without the quotes you get over 30 million). Having been in this business for some time, I always get a bit annoyed by such phrases. My platitude indicators are flashing red. What is meant by “high” Continue Reading

Poor organizational performance is often the result of a vicious circle. One example of such vicious circle in a product development organization is: poor product quality leads to a large effort spent on rework, customer support and bug fixes leads to lack of resources leads to poorly executed early phases Continue Reading