Mostrar mensagens com a etiqueta Bruce Jenner. Mostrar todas as mensagens
Mostrar mensagens com a etiqueta Bruce Jenner. Mostrar todas as mensagens

sábado, junho 20, 2020

Beware of the invisible water in the tank

Seth Godin in a recent blog post, “The dominant culture”, wrote:

 “One of the great cartoons involves two goldfish in a tank talking to one another. One responds in surprise, “wait, there’s water?””

This remind me of a growing concern in my analysis of the business world. Too often we analyze information about certain cases, about certain solutions, about certain methodologies and approaches, without being aware of the assumptions on which they are based. Why? Because no one cared about the water in the tank. 

 

For example, for years and years I have heard comments and stories, I have read wonders about the Toyota Production System.

 

Is it spectacular? Yes!

 

However, it was only in 2017 that I read in an article something that nobody ever says, either because they are unaware or because it is the water in the tank ... - Toyota "freezes" production 8 weeks in advance.

 

How many companies can afford to do this? And how many companies cannot do it, but try in good faith to implement the Toyota Production System in their production?

 

Recently also, the Wall Street Journal published an interesting article, “The Surprising Way Companies Can Shore Up Their Financial Strength”:

“The Drucker Institute’s statistical model serves as the basis for the Management Top 250, an annual ranking produced in partnership with The Wall Street Journal.

In total, we examined 820 large, publicly traded companies last year through the lens of 34 indicators across five categories: customer satisfaction, employee engagement and development, innovation, social responsibility and financial strength.

To construct our ranking, corporations are compared in each of the five areas, as well as in their overall effectiveness, through standardized scores with a range of 0 to 100 and a mean of 50.

Our model reflects shareholder returns, along with a variety of metrics that capture how effectively a firm has deployed its capital, among other things.

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For companies in the health-care sector, we found over the course of the seven-year period a significant statistical relationship between financial strength and one other category: employee engagement and development. To be precise, a five-point gain in the latter produced a 0.79-point increase in the former.

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That may not look like a big deal on its face. But it would have been enough to vault a company from the 50th percentile in financial strength to the 56th in last year’s rankings—up 38 spots on the list.

Meanwhile, it is a whole other story for companies in the industrial sector, which includes the airlines. There, it is social responsibility that should command the most attention. A five-point rise in that category translated into a 0.49-point upturn in financial strength.

For example, a health-care company wanting to lift its customer-satisfaction score can expect to reap an extra 0.49 points in that category for every five-point advance in employee engagement and developmentBut an industrial company hoping to achieve a similar bump in customer satisfaction should shoot for a five-point improvement in another area: innovation.

While reading the article I thought about the water in the tank. Do these recommendations, do these relationships apply equally to all companies in the same economic sector?


I don't think so.

 

Some days ago, someone made the following comment to me:

 

“KPIs for production are simple: efficiency, low losses.”

 

When I heard that the picture of Bruce Jenner came to my mind.


Beware of the invisible water in the tank.