Managerial Strategies Thread

[Brt00n]

Dear All,

I am currently a PhD student doing research in management, however, I am unsure whether I will go into Academia or Business, but I feel that this thread will help me either way and possibly some beginner managers reading this forum.

I am trying to create a list of managerial strategies for business success, in order to study and possibly use someday. My list thus far is as follows, but I kindly ask if any of the professional managers or management consultants reading this forum could help me make it longer:

- Scanning the periphery, by George S. Day and Paul J. H. Shoemaker, which proposes that we use Managerial Early Warning Systems to look for threats and opportunities on the market that are not obvious, but could possibly be very important for the success of an organization

- SWOT analysis, possibly by Albert Humphrey, which proposes that we look at the strengths and weaknesses of the internal state of the organization, while also looking at opportunities and threats externally on the market and elsewhere (this part is similar to scanning the periphery)

In a way, I'm hoping this thread will help me scan the periphery and find a weak signal, as I am having trouble doing this with Google.

Any help would be much obliged!

Best regards,

Brt00n

 

[Brt00n]

I forgot to mention one:

- SMART goal setting strategy, first known use by George T. Doran, where when one sets goals they have to be specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time-based.

 

[Mr D]

Morphological box.
http://www.swemorph.com/ma.html

 

[fisicx]

Stop reading strategies and start managing.

Doesn’t have to be anything big. All you need to do is manage a project, a bunch of volunteers, a club or anything else where leadership is required.

 

[Noah]

this thread will help me scan the periphery and find a weak signal

In my humble opinion, try to work out why you are [ab]using language like this; that exercise, undertaken diligently, should give you a useful insight to the realities of practical management as opposed to academic.

Or, if you prefer : KISS

 

[Brt00n]

Thanks to all for the replies!

 

[Brt00n]

In my humble opinion, try to work out why you are [ab]using language like this; that exercise, undertaken diligently, should give you a useful insight to the realities of practical management as opposed to academic.

Or, if you prefer : KISS

I didn't think I was abusing it. I just wanted to make a pun, perhaps made a bad one, but I guess I see your point. In management, clear communication is preferred, which I'm assuming you meant.

 

[Noah]

I didn't think I was abusing it. I just wanted to make a pun, perhaps made a bad one, but I guess I see your point. In management, clear communication is preferred, which I'm assuming you meant.

Fair enough if that was a play on words - maybe a little too subtle for this medium.

The point I was trying to make (maybe a little too subtly...) is that language used by academics and book-sellers often comes across as pretentious and always obscurantist, and I think this in turn is reflected in the difficulty of putting theory into practice - which might lead one to question the validity of the original theory.

For the record, the acronym I used is about the only piece of management-speak that ever made sense to me : Keep It Simple, Stupid (the gratuitous abuse is just a bonus).

 

[The Byre]

language used by academics and book-sellers often comes across as pretentious and always obscurantist, and I think this in turn is reflected in the difficulty of putting theory into practice - which might lead one to question the validity of the original theory.

Or as David Ogilvy put it, “Our business is infested with idiots who try to impress by using pretentious jargon.”

In the 80s, the great manufacturing fad was ‘outsourcing’ and every boss that ever there was, was looking at his production, to see which processes could be farmed out at a cheaper rate. There was of course nothing new about the idea of getting other people or companies to work for you and subcontract processes. But now the child had a fancy new name.

Then along came lean and just-in-time production and these policies were adopted all over the place and sometimes willy-nilly and by people who had only a sketchy grasp of what it was they were introducing. The danger is, that those introducing this new wonder tactic, end up chasing the fad, instead of chasing the one and only thing that they are being paid to chase - profit.

Again, nothing new had been invented.

I am sure that there was a stone-age flint knife and spear head maker, who asked others to make the shafts and the string and kept a minimum of finished product and the right amounts of string to bind the flint to the shaft. He and the shaft and string maker worked closely together to make ever better axes, knives, spears and arrows and always sought to find new things to make and kept a close eye on the quality as the work progressed.

So he and his colleagues were lean, just-in-time, outsourcing entrepreneurs, who formed a ‘Keiretsu’ with a clear policy of kaizen and a strategy for innovation, incorporating total quality management. Fortunately, nobody told them this, or they would have never got anything done!

Good business is mostly a matter of common sense.

It is common sense to improve as much as possible, keep stock down to a safe minimum, avoid needless bottlenecks and farm out tasks that others can do better and cheaper. We have been employing staff and reporting to more than one department, long before the invention of human resources and matrix management. We have been getting rid of useless layers of middle management long before it was called delayering and senior managers have walked through their factories (or in times gone by, across their feudal estates) and chatted to the staff to find out what was going on, long before this was called Management by Walking About!

There is, of course, nothing wrong with using a fancy new name or a bit of jargon to give some established business practice a name. And when somebody has written the inevitable book on the subject, that helps us to get a clear idea of what that bit of jargon should mean.

But just because we have a new word for some process and that word is the buzzword of today, the latest business fashion, does not mean that it is right for your business. It is merely an idea and is almost certainly as old as mankind. Most importantly, it is just a means to an end and is never the end itself.

Yet I have seen a complete factory brought to a near standstill by the introduction of total quality management. In that particular case, it was the triumph of process over production. The factory was not so much learning a new way of doing things, as being hijacked by a gang. Quality engineers from an outside consultancy insisted on processes that had little to do with quality, but a great deal to do with creating work for themselves by holding up production.

 

[Mr D]

Many years ago my office building shut down the reprographic department and provided big photocopiers capable of doing thousands of pages an hour to each room. Big rooms with a hundred plus staff, big long windows, lots of computers. Big rooms that could get very hot in the summer.
To get a page copied you had to go to the big copier, switch it on, wait at it 5 minutes while it warmed up (or else staff right by it would switch it off to avoid the heat it produced), copy the document then switch off. Sending to repro took 10 seconds, doing a single sheet was over 5 minutes.

The fad of staff doing their own copying was followed not the efficient process.

 

[Brt00n]

Thank you all very much! This is all gold I'm reading right here! Food for thought without a doubt!

 

[fisicx]

This is all gold I'm reading right here!

Indeed, and all done by not reading management advice books.

Do you know the best way to discover how to do something efficiently?

Answer: ask the bloke doing the job. No need to set up a working group, be agile or any of that other guff. People will adapt the processes they follow to make it as simple as possible. They don't need a suit to tell them to hold the widget in their left hand and bang it with a hammer in their right.

The British Army changed how they do warfighting years ago. Instead of the top brass dictating every fine detail, they now just pass it down the chain to the man with the gun and say: 'your objective is to capture that flag' and leave it to the platoon/section to sort out rations, water, transport, ammo, equipment, squad size, route and do on.

If you want to learn how to manage, the best way is to do some managing.

 

[GraemeL]

- SWOT analysis, possibly by Albert Humphrey, which proposes that we look at the strengths and weaknesses of the internal state of the organization, while also looking at opportunities and threats externally on the market and elsewhere (this part is similar to scanning the periphery)

SWOT is one of if not the most over rated and misused and misleading 'tool' that you can use. It depends on knowing exactly who is the competition and I defy anyone to accurately know who their competition is, that is unless they make a huge list - making the analysis pointless.

I would suggest that understanding human nature and behaviour through Maslows' Heirachy of Needs is essential. It applies to people of any country, at work or home.

 

[GraemeL]

And I am a firm believer that academics can show how to do things better. I have been here https://www.cardiff.ac.uk/research/explore/research-units/lean-enterprise-research-centre and carried out some practical work an production and assembly. First doing it using 'the blokes doing the job' and then under academic guidance. The increase in output was astounding.

Academia doesn't always work though!

 

[Mr D]

Indeed, and all done by not reading management advice books.

Do you know the best way to discover how to do something efficiently?

Answer: ask the bloke doing the job. No need to set up a working group, be agile or any of that other guff. People will adapt the processes they follow to make it as simple as possible. They don't need a suit to tell them to hold the widget in their left hand and bang it with a hammer in their right.

The British Army changed how they do warfighting years ago. Instead of the top brass dictating every fine detail, they now just pass it down the chain to the man with the gun and say: 'your objective is to capture that flag' and leave it to the platoon/section to sort out rations, water, transport, ammo, equipment, squad size, route and do on.

If you want to learn how to manage, the best way is to do some managing.

Sometimes it does take someone not in the middle of the wood to see the forest not the trees.
While not a huge fan of consultants they can suggest different ways of working that may not have been looked at.
If they get given the right information in the first place.

Takes receptive management and ability to accept improvements. Plenty of times have come across a board unable to change or unable to contemplate the need for things to be different.
Even when what they were currently doing was costing them money and wasting time.

 

[fisicx]

Totally agree. But you need to get out onto the shop floor and see what's happening and not just sit in the office applying what you read in some Guru's latest tome.

I worked in a smart factory for a while where the crane operator made sure everybody had the right stuff at the right time. He was forever moving cages and materials so the machinists and welders could do their job. One day the crane was out of operation and the whole system shut down. The just in time processes management had introduced didn't have any slack in them and the backup was a bloke with a pallet truck.

Developing processes needs everyone to be involved. Unfortunately there are still a lot of managers who believe they know best.

 

[Mr D]

Totally agree. But you need to get out onto the shop floor and see what's happening and not just sit in the office applying what you read in some Guru's latest tome.

I worked in a smart factory for a while where the crane operator made sure everybody had the right stuff at the right time. He was forever moving cages and materials so the machinists and welders could do their job. One day the crane was out of operation and the whole system shut down. The just in time processes management had introduced didn't have any slack in them and the backup was a bloke with a pallet truck.

Developing processes needs everyone to be involved. Unfortunately there are still a lot of managers who believe they know best.

True.
Management may have good ideas, they may well have quite a bit of knowledge. They may not know the job they are managing well enough to suggest decent improvements. Or worse, make changes that add problems.

Some great managers in the past who have done the job I was doing then ended up getting temporary or permanent promotion. They knew the job and they learnt to manage - something not every promoted worker manages to learn.

Probably one of the worst managers I had (though a nice bloke) was promoted because he was no good at his job and it got him away from the work.
Sadly he managed his team no better than he managed his work and made mistakes. In his case race was an issue and nothing could be done about him. Except work around him best we could.
You come across anyone who is a born leader, who people will trust and respond to no matter the job?
This guy was the opposite.

Knew enough to be dangerous, knew enough to mess up other people's work. Didn't know or would not accept that he was the problem slowing others down.

A good team with a good manager / leader can be great. A good team with a bad manager....

 

[fisicx]

We used to have a saying in the Army: 'Lieutenant Smith is so useless even the other officers are starting to notice'.

 

[Caledonian TV]

I am trying to create a list of managerial strategies for business success, in order to study and possibly use someday.

And there's the first sign of the rot setting in...

One of the great cancers that makes many (particularly large) bodies unfit for purpose is the propensity to attempt to manage by rote, and employ 'magic bean' methods to try and so so. This is one reason why (for example) we can look at something like the NHS and still see the 'lions lead by donkeys' scenario we know was first observed the sharp end of 200 years ago!

Of course, by 'fit for purpose' I mean able to get the job done, as opposed to simply extract cash from the system...

It's rather like winning the lottery and having the 'Snap-On' man deliver every tool in their catalogue to your luxury garden shed;labouring under the illusion that this will make you the world's greatest car restorer. - It won't. In fact sharp tools are dangerous things in the hands of people who just don't know what the hell they're for! And even the most precisely-made socket will only serve to snap nuts off like carrots if wielded with brute force and ignorance.

The classic example of this idiocy at work is the obsession with statistics and targets held so dear by the dishonest, self-serving and just plain useless; such as politicos...

Peter Ustenov used to have a nice anecdote that illustrated this well;

In the days of the old USSR, at a meeting of a sub-committee of the Supreme Soviet, one of the Arctic Soviets (i.e. councils) reported that their people were freezing to death for want of warm boots and coats, which couldn't be had for love nor money! - This puzzled the Moscow-based manufacturers, for they were well beyond their targets, and in fact had a glut of excellent boots and coats!

Clearly the issue was transport! So an order was made that every coat and pair of boots should carry an individual docket that was ticked every time an item travelled 100 rail miles. - The data from this would be gathered and analysed and there could be no doubt that this 'managerial strategy' would ensure the necessary goods were delivered the required distance!

A year later the sub-committee of the Supreme Soviet reconvened and again one of the Arctic Soviets reported that their people were freezing to death for want of warm boots and coats, which still couldn't be had for love nor money! - In fact supply was even shorter! The Moscow factories were aghast! they were producing in even greater numbers than before, and the records showed that the rail-mile targets had been not only met, but exceeded by 50%! So, clearly, that had been a success!

A resolution was made to double the targets!

Six months later an emergency meeting of the sub-committee of the Supreme Soviet was called to discuss two most pressing issues...

People in the Arctic regions were now dying in the streets due to the lack of winter clothing... And the rail network around Moscow was completely gridlocked with freight trains either going round and round in circles or sitting around in shunting yards whilst the operational staff (drivers, guards, porters etc) completed paperwork.

Consequently, a resolution was made to treble the rail-mile targets for winter clothing and set a new series of targets in place in the respect of the time trains were allowed to sit in the goods yards; this was to be halved from the current average - and to ensure it was, the operational staff would be keeping a new set of records and producing more statistics which would be further analysed by the sub-committee of the Supreme Soviet...

Happy with their obvious success as managers, the members of the sub-committee of the Supreme Soviet disbanded, got back into their Chauffeur-driven Zils, and headed off for the special executive lounge at the airport... The chap from the Arctic Soviet pausing only to pick up some nice new boots and coats for his wife and kiddies!

...I find the notion that 'management' can be learned as a stand-alone science; such that an individual can be 'trained to manage anything', really rather an insult to my intelligence. I suspect I'm not alone.