Quote of the Day

I always pass on good advice. It is the only thing to do with it. It is never of any use to oneself.



- Oscar Wilde

Toyota's Magic

Toyota moves down the field by means of short and steady gains. And so it rejects the idea that innovation is the province of an elect few; instead, it’s taken to be an everyday task for which everyone is responsible. According to Matthew E. May, the author of a book about the company called “The Elegant Solution,” Toyota implements a million new ideas a year, and most of them come from ordinary workers. (Japanese companies get a hundred times as many suggestions from their workers as U.S. companies do.) Most of these ideas are small—making parts on a shelf easier to reach, say—and not all of them work. But cumulatively, every day, Toyota knows a little more, and does things a little better, than it did the day before.


Read the rest of James Surowiecki on Toyota's approach.

Dear Disgruntled Employee

I've just started submitting what will be a post a week with the On Careers: Outside Voices section of U.S. News & World Report.

Here's a link to my first post on dealing with a silent resignation.

Eccentric Bosses and Colleagues

Get together with old acquaintances from a job and sooner or later the conversation will turn to eccentric colleagues or bosses. Some spark pleasant memories while others induce cringing but all are memorable. My own have included:

• A supervisor who used to hide from his employees. Weeks passed and few people reported having seen him. It was discovered that he'd created an office in another building and was working there. Management soon decided that he could locate his office even further away.



• A chief of staff who routinely declared that he was a "people person." If you worked with him long enough you realized he was a carnivorous people person.



• A department head who kept a huge jar of Rolaids on his desk. Over the months you could watch as it slowly diminished and then he'd fill it again.



• A director who was so full of ideas that he could reach brainlock trying to express them. Highly creative, he irritated a top executive and was soon exiled.



• A department head whose work, although meticulously and fully researched, was usually completed too late to have any relevance whatsoever.



• A profane and wild-looking executive who was used as a clean-up artist. Very capable but he had a short shelf-life in his assignments but a little dose of him went a long way.



• An oily, competent and thoroughly untrustworthy operator. Uriah Heep in a good suit. He went far. One of his secrets was revealed when people from outside the organization would gush about how they wished they could work with him because he is such a great guy.



• A thoroughly decent and competent executive. He also went far. His reputation was built on ethics and reliability.



• A manager who never discriminated because he treated everyone like dirt. One day, however, after a blunt conversation urging him to change his ways, he made a complete turnaround and became a human being.



• The professional who made a practice of praising people to the skies one month and then damning them to hell the next.



• The executive who always read her mail while staff reported to her.



• The executive who kept nothing personal, such as photos or awards, in his office and whose reason for doing so was he wanted to be able to walk away from the job at any time.

Quote of the Day

The enemy of life...is indifference.



- Elie Wiesel

City on Steroids

For a hint of what's going on in China, check out this video on a 12 million person city that is getting larger.

Much larger.

"Go Out and Make a Bunch of Money!"

Well, here you are at your college graduation. And I know what you're thinking: "Gimme the sheepskin and get me outta here!" But not so fast. First you have to listen to a commencement speech. Don't moan. I'm not going to "pass the wisdom of one generation down to the next."

I'm a member of the 1960s generation. We didn't have any wisdom.We were the moron generation. We were the generation that believed we could stop the Vietnam War by growing our hair long and dressing like circus clowns. We believed drugs would change everything -- which they did, for John Belushi. We believed in free love. Yes, the love was free, but we paid a high price for the sex.

The rest of P.J. O'Rourke's commencement address is here.

[HT: Andrew Sullivan ]

Films for Training

Here's the assignment. You are going to teach classes on some leadership/management-related subjects.

You are not permitted to have a textbook, but are required to discuss one - and only one - film (fiction, not documentary) with the students in order to illustrate key aspects of each subject.

Which films would you choose?

Leadership

Sales

Ethics

Management

Motivation

Team Building



[My choices: Leadership: Northwest Passage; Sales: Local Hero; Ethics: Groundhog Day; Management: Topsy-Turvy; Motivation: Chariots of Fire; Team Building: Master and Commander.]

People with Big Ideas

People weren’t finding dinosaur bones, and they assumed that it was because they were rare. But—and almost everything that Myhrvold has been up to during the past half decade follows from this fact—it was our fault. We didn’t look hard enough.

Myhrvold gave the skeleton to the Smithsonian. It’s called the N. rex. “Our expeditions have found more T. rex than anyone else in the world,” Myhrvold said. “From 1909 to 1999, the world found eighteen T. rex specimens. From 1999 until now, we’ve found nine more.” Myhrvold has the kind of laugh that scatters pigeons. “We have dominant T. rex market share.”

Read the rest of Malcolm Gladwell on people with big ideas .

Quote of the Day

Experience is the child of Thought, and Thought is the child of Action. We cannot learn men from books.



- Benjamin Disraeli