News Bites
Information of
interest from other publications and organizations
related to people and quality
Executives Value Quality, but Don’t
Share a Common Definition of It
More
than 600 American executives from four industry
segments—manufacturing, services (including
government), healthcare, and education—provided
their perspectives on the value that quality brings
to their organizations. A vast majority of the
respondents (90%) said that they believed quality
contributes to the bottom line, and 92% believe that
an organization-wide, coordinated effort to use
quality techniques provides a positive return.
Defining quality did not elicit such uniform
agreement. When asked to define quality, a majority
of respondents equated quality to “customer
satisfaction.” Only 64% believed that quality
is a management tool, while the remaining 36% viewed
quality as being built into a product and service
(without necessarily being a management tool).
Auditing Styles Rated
In
its March 2004 issue, Inside Standards, an
e-newsletter published by Quality Digest,
surveyed its readers on their auditors’ styles.
The responses are shown below:
Firm but fair 68.3%
Laid back 15.3%
Iron hand in velvet glove 6.5%
Clueless 2.7%
Robotic 2.4%
Benevolent dictator 2.2%
Disinterested 1.3%
Tyrannical 1.3%
More? See
http://view.exacttarget.com/?fec8177271630678-fe6a1d717667067c7516
Research Indicates That Teams Make Better
Decisions
Good managers know that the
proverbial “yes man” isn’t much of
an asset. But when it comes time to build work teams,
many business managers, either by design or through
inattention, staff them with people who are prone to
think alike. In effect, they’ve built
“yes teams.” As a result, those teams
fail to make the best decisions possible—and
the organization suffers.
Recent research by Deborah Gruenfeld of
Stanford’s Graduate School of Business suggests
that teams encompassing at least two separate points
of view on a particular question make better
decisions because the pressure of the minority forces
the majority to think more complexly and consider
diverse evidence. Gruenfeld gained some of her
evidence by analyzing decisions made by the U.S.
Supreme Court.
More? See
www.gsb.stanford.edu/news/research/ob_teamdecisionmaking.shtml
Bush’s Job Training Initiatives
Signal Positive Trends for the Learning and
Performance Community
For
professionals in the learning and performance
community, President Bush’s plans to double the
number of workers who complete federal training each
year and to consolidate additional employment and
training programs under the Workforce Investment Act
of 1998 to provide states with more flexibility to
deliver training, means an increased focus on
effective workplace learning and performance.
The Workforce Investment Act (WIA) of 1998, a
federally-funded job training and employment system
that grants significant authority to states and local
governments to guide public sector education and
training programs, is up for reauthorization this
year.
More? See http://www.astd.org/NR/rdonlyres/EF1C66A7-3750-4670-800E-3058FA407CDF/0/PresidentBushJobTrainingInitiativespressrelease.pdf
Failure Is Key to Understanding
Success
If you want to learn the
secrets of success, it seems perfectly reasonable to
study successful people and organizations. The
research of Jerker Denrell, an assistant professor of
organizational behavior at the Stanford Graduate
School of Business, however, suggests that studying
successes without also looking at failures tends to
create a misleading—if not entirely
wrong—picture of what it takes to succeed.
Case in point: The well-known advice to focus on a
single core business. Authors of popular business
books identify many successful companies that have
focused on one key product and argue that this focus
caused their success, but look at Kodak and Xerox,
says Denrell, explaining that some companies that are
focused on one product tend to have very poor
performance over time. In focusing excessively on
successes, we overlook the important fact that
failing companies do many of the same things as
companies that succeed.
More? See
www.gsb.stanford.edu/news/research/ob_successfulfailures.shtml
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