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receiving inspection.
final inspection or outgoing quality inspection.
one should never let substandard material proceed when its defects could cause a complete failure—a reliability problem—for our customer.
one should approach the need to inspect recognizing that a balance exists between the desired result of the inspection, improved quality, and minimum disturbance to the production process itself.
trade-off here is not obvious, and any choice has to be made with a specific case in mind.
lean toward monitoring when experience shows we are not likely to encounter big problems.
variable inspections.
performing the work activities at a higher rate
His output per activity, and therefore his leverage, is high.
The software engineer using a programming language rather like English, later to be translated by a compiler, can solve many problems per hour of programming. His output and leverage are high.
work simplification.
first need to create a flow chart of the production process as it exists.
Second, count the number of steps in the flow chart so that you know how many you started with.
reasonably expect a 30 to 50 percent reduction.
what we actually do, and our output, which is what we achieve.
surgeon whose output is a cured patient spends his time scrubbing and cutting and suturing, and this hardly sounds very respectable either.
My day always ends when I’m tired and ready to go home, not when I’m done. I am never done.
he should move to the point where his leverage will be the greatest.
Reports are more a medium of self-discipline than a way to communicate information. Writing the report is important; reading it often is not.
the preparation of an annual plan is in itself the end, not the resulting bound volume.
Your information sources should complement one another, and also be redundant because that gives you a way to verify what you’ve learned.
There is an especially efficient way to get information, much neglected by most managers. That is to visit a particular place in the company and observe what’s going on there.
programmed visits meant to accomplish formal tasks, but which also set the stage for ad hoc mini-transactions.
a manager must also communicate his objectives, priorities, and preferences
the manager imparts these will his subordinates know how to make decisions themselves
information-gathering is the basis of all other managerial work,
role models
nothing leads as well as example.
A manager’s output is thus the sum of the result of individual activities having varying degrees of leverage.
Increasing the leverage
HIGH-LEVERAGE ACTIVITIES
many people are affected
a person’s activity or behavior over a long period of time is affected by a manager’s brief, well-focused set of words or actions.
a large group’s work is affected by an individual supplying a unique, key piece of ...
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DELEGATION AS LEVERAGE
Monitoring is not meddling, but means checking to make sure an activity is proceeding in line with expectations.
review rough drafts of reports that you have delegated;
you should increase or decrease your frequency depending on whether your subordinate is performing a newly delegated task or one that he has experience handling.
These time-management suggestions can be improved upon, I think, by applying our production principles.
what is the “egg” in our work?
batching similar tasks.
Set-up time
From my experience a large portion of managerial work can be forecasted.
Forecasting and planning your time around key events are literally like running an efficient factory.
What is the medium of a manager’s forecast? It is something very simple: his calendar.
say “no” at the outset to work beyond your capacity to handle.
allow slack—a bit of looseness in your scheduling.
manager should carry a raw material inventory in terms of projects.
inventory should consist of things you need to do but don’t need to finish right away—discretionary projects, the kind the manager can work on to increase his group’s productivity over the long term. Without such an inventory of projects, a manager will most probably use his free time meddling in his subordinates’ work.
we should continue to think critically about what we do and the approaches we use.
