Fixing the Industry

Last week a friend and colleague of mine suggested the book "The Commercial Real Estate Revolution" by Rex Miller (et al).  It is a great book and I hope people within the construction industry put the ideas from the book into practice.  The bottom line of the book is that we need more partnering.

Construction has lagged behind nearly every industry when it come to productivity improvements.  This book lays out a system for reversing that trend.  The solution is pretty easy but change isn't.  For a summary of the book go to http://rexmiller.net/wp-content/downloads/ebook.pdf.

If the summary peaks your interest then i would suggest you get the book.

They aren't accidents they are injuries!!!

Like we have mentioned in previous articles we find workplace injuries to be extremely saddening.  But often times we do two things with regard to safety that send out the wrong message.

The first mistake that we make is we call our injuries, accidents.  Too often we say things like we had an accident at project WYZ.  Butch Mellom, our Safety director, doesn’t use the word accident.  We need to change our terminology and only use the word, injury.  Seldom are the injuries the results of an accident.  In nearly 100% of the cases we realize that we could have changed our behavior and avoid the injury.  By using the word injury we reinforce the point that a person was hurt or disabled.    I think we need to keep in mind the personal side of the equation.  Somebody got hurt and it was the result of our actions.  We can change our actions.

The second mistake that we make is we use statistic to describe how things are going with regard to safety.  Again the problem with this method is it implies that some level of injuries is OK.  That concerns me because I don’t want any individual to suffer an injury.  Thinking of the injuries as people rather than numbers helps us eliminate them.

Let me give you an example.  Which of the following two statements makes you want to make sure we have a safe workplace?

A.      In the year 2012 we will have only one recordable accident.

B.      The only recordable injury next year is going to be you losing a finger.

The first sentence might leave you thinking something along the lines of, while accidents happen but we had a good year.  If we think that way they injuries will continue to happen and odds are it is going to involve you soon or later. 

The second sentence should leave thinking, I like all my fingers (toes, my back, eyes, ears and don’t care to have any scares)!   If you are the one recordable injury you won’t be impressed with the statistic highlighted in sentence A.

If we all work with the idea that you aren’t going to get hurt while at work we can all consider ourselves blessed.   My goal for next year is that you have an injury free year.  It is a two-step process. 

1.       Stop thinking in terms of accidents and start thinking in terms of injuries.

2.       People aren’t statistics, stop thinking stats matter.

What do you think?  Do you want to go the entire year injury free? 

I wish life was easier

My daughter didn't want to go to the doctor but after a week of listen to her cough we took her in and she has walking pneumonia. 

I love sports and my team haven't been having good seasons. 

Work is slow and the project we do have aren't making money.

We made a lot of changes as work and although all of them seems to be for the better and people are doing well in their new roles but the time it takes to train people in their new roles takes a lot of energy. 

Willmar Electric had a guy hurt his hand over the weekend.  He needed 10 stitches. 

I serve and work on the board of 3 not for profits.  I understand that they are not for profits but two of them are spending more then they are taking in.  So that needs to be fixed.

I fill like I weight 250 pounds.

Are you enjoying my whining?  I didn't think so.  Maybe I could look on the bright side.

My kids reports cards came in last week.  They are doing extremely well.

The bank and bonding company seem to be a great help in getting Willmar Electric into a stronger position.

My parents have been married for 45 years and are going to take all of us to Florida for a week.

I have been married for 20 years and my wife is the greatest person in the world plus she looks 28.

The Lincoln Nebraska and Lawton Oklahoma markets seem to have bright near term futures and we will likely get at least our share of the work.

Nobody has won more games in the last 7 days then the Vikings and the Red Sox haven't lost in weeks.

Clear life isn't about making my life easy street.  I will have to work on being faithful, trusting God and being thankful for the things I have been blessed with.  (Even that doesn't sound easy but I can do it).

Two Great Leaders

I was send the following message and thought that it was good advice.  As you can tell from the name on the bottom it is from the Minnesota Quality Council. A Message From the President: The Legacy of Two Great Leaders: Steve Jobs and Bob Galvin

This month, the business world lost two giants: Bob Galvin (former CEO of Motorola) and Steve Jobs (co-founder and recently retired CEO of Apple).  Both were highly successful businessmen; both founded and/or led high performing organizations; both literally created one (or more) industries; and both left legacies that will sustain for quite awhile.  One (Jobs) was highly visible if not somewhat immortalized; the other (Galvin) was a quieter giant – his obituary didn’t even hit the front business page in many US newspapers – but without his contributions, there may not be iPhones today.  One single-handedly created the cell phone industry (that was Galvin); one single-handedly revolutionized that industry by creating smarter-phones, “pod” and “pad” technology, the digital music industry, and a new way of watching animated movies (Pixar).  Both of them left us with dozens of best practices and many insights for advancing organizational excellence.  I’ll give you eight… Sell the benefits of your product or service, not just its features and attributes.  Think about the ads that Apple has run the last few years.  Yes, they show the products themselves, but more importantly, they also capture emotions and show the benefits that come from the using the products.  The commercials show people playing games and having fun, dancing in the streets while listening to music, kids reading and learning from educational applications.  They show customers doing simple daily tasks (like checking in for a flight or booking a reservation at a restaurant for that evening) – only completing the tasks with more ease by using Apple products.  They create a FEELING not just from the products themselves, but by what the products can enable people to do. Know what customers want before they do.  Both Motorola in the 80s and Apple more recently have developed a keen sense of what the market needs, even before customers could articulate those needs.  I guess you could say that both companies have had premonitions of the “voice of the customer!”  People didn’t know that they needed cell phones before Galvin’s company created them; customers didn’t know that they needed a place to store music digitally instead of on the hundreds of CDs we all owned, but Jobs did; customers didn’t know they needed smart devices that can do 500,000 things (that’s how many applications are currently in the Apple AppStore), but Jobs envisioned a way to integrate the phone with personal computing, with music and video, with GPS and the Internet, and with personal applications that can do specialized and helpful things.  Galvin and Jobs had visions of these solutions before customers did, finding ways to solve problems that customers didn’t even know they had.  Stated by Jobs in a 1998 Business Week interview: “It’s really hard to design products by focus groups.  A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.” Make things simple.  This was a quote from Jobs in that same Business Week article: “Simple can be harder than complex: you have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple.  But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.”  Think about how everything at Apple is simple – from product design itself (the simple curves and first-of-its-kind keyless technology of the iPhone and iPad), the simple website (Apple’s site is white, clean, and uncluttered), the simple advertising (“If you don’t have an iPhone, well, you don’t have an iPhone.”).  In today’s complex, fast-paced world, less is oftentimes more. Take risks and never be satisfied with status quo.  Galvin once said: “One of our main thrusts was that our company was always going to be preparing for the next adventure – the next thing.  I [Galvin] was always asking the question, ‘What’s the next thing we could be adding, multiplying; what would be good for our future lineup of products?’”  Galvin knew that not all products would be successful, but he demanded at Motorola that employees always try to find the next big thing.  He insisted on a strong R&D function, and he launched Motorola Labs, a leading contributor to cellular, digital and semiconductor technologies. Be creative and innovate.  Both Galvin and Jobs were highly innovative: they solved problems by applying proven technologies in new applications.  Steve Wozniak, who co-founded Apple with Jobs in a garage in 1976, said Jobs “had the ability to think out new ways of doing things…to do it in a totally different way that the world would swing toward.”  Part of Jobs’ genius was in finding new ways to use existing technologies.  According to Jobs in a 1996 interview in Wired: “Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something…”  He goes onto say that “Picasso had a saying: ‘Good artists copy; great artists steal.’  We have always been shameless about stealing great ideas…”  Galvin had a similar philosophy about innovation and change.  He said “the absolutely distinguishing quality of a leader is that a leader takes us elsewhere.”  That’s visionary leadership. Strive for perfection.  When you think of Six Sigma, you may think of Jack Welch, former CEO of GE.  But it was Bob Galvin who first launched Six Sigma nearly a decade earlier in Motorola: January 1987.  Building off the work of two Motorola employees (Baldrige National Quality Award in 1988, partially because of their superior product quality.  Steve Jobs, too, demanded perfection.  iPhones just don’t crash (well, not frequently).  And it’s Apple’s reputation for nearly flawless manufacturing, along with its sophisticated engineering, that allows it to make premium pricing look like a value purchase.  While much of Apple’s and Motorola’s success can be attributed to innovation, a great deal of credit has to also go to its high quality production. Build an environment for employees to succeed and for the organization to achieve high performance.  “The most important thing that Bob [Galvin] did was create an environment that gave people the freedom and stimulus to do great things,” says Martin Cooper in Quality Digest, former Motorola vice president and division manager, who during the 1970s led the team that developed the handheld mobile phone. “He also set the tone from the top—no compromise on ethics—and emphasized objectivity in decision making by taking the personal issues out of the discussion and deciding based on doing what was right. His skills were not technological, but no one could pick and motivate people better than he could. He also made sure everyone in the company has the same tools and incentives to excel.”  Galvin was so tuned into the needs of his employees that he created Motorola University, an in-house training and development center that still stands today, some 25 years later.  Be passionate about what you do.  Both Galvin and Jobs were driven.  They both had a vision for not only what was possible, but for what would change the world.  Even after Job’s illness in 2004, he kept driving the company forward because he believed what he was doing was important work.  According to Jobs in the Wall Street Journal: “Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn’t matter to me. …Going to bed at night saying we’ve done something wonderful…that’s what matters to me.” Those eight tips could help us all improve our careers, our leadership effectiveness, and our organizations’ performance.  But I’ll add a ninth that may have less to do with business than it does with life itself.  Jobs, in a very powerful commencement address at Stanford University in 2005 (a year after he was diagnosed with cancer) said: “No one wants to die.  Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there.  And yet death is the destination we all share.  No one has ever escaped it.  And that is as it should be because death is very likely the single best invention of life.  It is life’s change agent.  It clears out the old to make way for the new. …Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.  Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking.  Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice.”  In other words, be your own person.  Live life to its fullest and be true to yourself.  If you live life with passion, with purpose, with creativity…if you take risks and continue to learn…if you maintain ethics and respect people, you’ll not only be successful in your life and in your career, but you may just leave a legacy.  Thanks for your contributions, Bob Galvin and Steve Jobs. Want to participate in a discussion on this topic??  Visit our new blog to post a comment! Yours in Improvement, Brian S. Lassiter President, Minnesota Council for Quality www.councilforquality.org

Pygmalion Effect

I recent was given an article about the Pygmalion Effect (or Self-fulfilling Effect).  The article pointed out to people often live up to (or down to) the labels we put on them.

It really made me think.  First I wish my family and friends would have nicknamed me slim when I was young.  It also caused me to think if I was building people up or bring them down by how I talked to them. 

I can't attach the article but I suggest giving the topic "the google" to learn more. One summary I found was at http://humanresources.about.com/od/managementtips/a/mgmtsecret.htm.

Confrontation

Confrontation is tough for most.  I found the attached article to be very helpful.  It deals with the issue of late payment of a vendor but may also apply to processing change orders, meeting deadlines or several other accountablitiy issue we face everyday.

http://www.crucialskills.com/

Sports can bring you down.

The Vikings are 0-4.  I took the time to drive to Kansas City to watch them lose on Sunday.  But I enjoyed the time with Mike and our friends.

The Red Sox blew a huge lead in September but I don't regret the time spent watching them during the summer.  Especially the time spent with my children (mostly my daughters) sitting by my side. 

But there is light at the end of the tunnel.  The Rays just got eliminated. 

Go Cards.