Tag Archives: Knowledge

Is There a Disconnect Between Knowledge Workers and Business Leaders?

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The past two weeks I’ve read a number of articles about the End of Agile and subsequent rebuttals. Yesterday I read an excellent article asking “Whatever Happened to Six Sigma?” Both of these articles are fascinating. The rebuttals to the first are incredibly enlightening. I don’t think these are the last of these sorts of articles. I expect to read “The End of Lean” down the road as well.

I think there are a few reasons, one of them is common between Six Sigma and Agile. Snake Oil Salespeople. Basically, what has happened with all methodologies (except for PMI’s Waterfall approach – which I’ll get to) there reaches a point in time where it becomes impossible to determine the quality of credentials for a given certification. At that point, the certification is valueless even if the training, like you dear reader received, was actually the top of the top. Because there’s no actual way to determine if the quality is any good or not.

I experienced this first hand while I was teaching Lean Six Sigma at AMD. I had some fantastic mentors when I was working there, that lived and breathed Six Sigma for their entire careers. They knew this stuff inside and out. Which made me gain a much deeper appreciation for the methodology. However, there was another small company in Austin that also taught Six Sigma to their employees, Dell. Whenever we hired people from Dell with a certification in Six Sigma, a Green Belt or even a Black Belt, we essentially had to retrain them. Many of them, did not truly internalize what they were taught, or the material was less rigorous. This was likely a trade off the Six Sigma training team had to make to ensure their team remained relevant to Dell.

However, whenever you cannot trust the training from an organization like Dell, it makes it a lot more difficult to trust training for any other organization. You just don’t know the standards. Agile’s currently experiencing the exact same issue. There’s been a huge influx of organizations giving certifications. Not all of them have the same level of quality.

I think as a reaction to this, the software development industry has created DevOps and DevSecOps. Which doesn’t have a certification process, but a general set of ideas, such as Trunk development, rigorous testing, continuous integration, and on the extreme continuous deployment.

I think all this goes back to a basic premise though. Knowledge workers, like engineers and software developers look at problems very differently than business leaders. I first experienced this while I was in college. I was studying Industrial Engineering (which pulls in elements from Six Sigma, Lean, Network Theory, Simulation, Human Factors, etc…) while a good friend was studying Business. We had a few conversations about how businesses should be run and it was very obvious to me, that we were talking about two completely different views of how a firm should be run.

I was arguing against (in 2003) off-shoring, because it decreased the efficiency of engineering and collaboration between manufacturing and engineering. Both Agile and Lean argue against off-shoring due to these reasons. Given the change in the approach, the salary savings, overall, didn’t make the effort worth it, because of the reasons I listed. My friend thought lowering cost was the right thing to do.

This isn’t just an anecdotal thing though. If you read books about Agile, Theory of Constraints, or Innovation, they all make the same arguments. The ideas taught in business school are causing business leaders to make bad ideas. Theory of Constraints was popularized in the book The Goal by Eliyahu Goldratt and came out in 1984. The ideas he espoused in that book were considered counter intuitive. If you read the Phoenix Project by Gene Kim which came out in 2013, which is written to model The Goal, you’ll find the characters running into, literally, the exact same type of thinking by managers and other team members. To me, this means there are other cultural organizations that are pushing back against the approaches technical leaders find work best and what our business leaders find work best for their goals.

The two most obvious cases for this are Accounting (which The Goal sets up as something of an antagonist) and Executives. Accounting has the weight of Law on its side, which is problematic, because Accounting organizations has their own reason for maintaining a status quo. They have their own certification process to become a CPA. From the executives standpoint, in many cases these folks are presented as having an MBA and excellent business training.

Despite that, they are still making poor business decisions for the technical team, poor decisions about how to structure their organization, and poor decisions about how to run projects. Most projects are run using a Waterfall approach, because that is the defacto approach we’re all taught throughout school. We manage to dates and push to get things done. The Project Management Institute has managed to corner the market on this approach, because most people can “do waterfall” without needing a certification. You learn through osmosis, by doing. The certification certainly elevates some PMs in some organizations. However, I don’t really think that having a PMP matters to most hiring managers.

So, where does this leave us? It leaves us with Knowledge Workers using ideas like Six Sigma, Lean, DevOps, Agile, and more to dress up their structured problem solving approaches to add structure and credibility. They need structure to compete with the Date Managed Waterfall approach. They need credibility of a methodology to put their approach on the same level as a PMP certification. In the case of Six Sigma, I’d argue its biggest success was internalizing the cost saving analysis. This helped translated the output in terms of money, which executives understand.

Every other approach tries to create an alternative measure. Elimination of Waste or “Working Software is the Measure of Progress” are nice alternatives to reducing costs or meeting due dates.

However, most share holders don’t care about that. They only care about what’s going to make them more money. Ethics and approach be damned. Until that is resolved. We’ll continue to have more fads or business fashions, as Knowledge Workers push back against Business Leaders.

Healthcare is not a free market

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From the obvious department, amIright? Yes, but not for the reasons you think. Healthcare cannot and never will be a free market. There are several reasons for this that I will elaborate on here.

Healthcare consists of micro-regulation in the form of the reimbursement structure. This is an artifact of two different systems combining to make things worse. First, because the Federal Government is big and has two different programs one for Federal Employees and one of those in need Medicare/Medicaid (I’m combining them here for simplicity), there’s also the VA, but that has much less influence on healthcare. These two programs set the terms on how the government will reimburse or even pay providers for care provided. These are based on Current Procedure Terminology (CPT Codes) and not based upon your diagnosis. Essentially the government sets a price they are willing to pay for a procedure. As one of the largest market players, this influences all of the other payers (IE insurance companies). Many insurance companies use Medicare payment rates to set their own, which drives down the cost of a procedure to the point, in many cases, where it’s below the cost of the actual care. This drive providers to select more expensive and more procedures in many cases to make up the short fall. This payment model also makes it hard for new procedure methodologies to be adopted as they may not be paid for.

Healthcare is a network economy – nearly all care happens close to home. This is why groups like the ACLU argue that driving more than an hour for an abortion is an unnecessary burden on women. Because of the proximity of the majority of care (10.2 miles) this creates a local network of care based on the original provider a patient sees. When you receive a referral, there are a few different routes this can go, best doctor the the referrer knows, another doctor in the same clinic, or in the same care network (such as UPMC in Pittsburgh or Kaiser Permanente in CA). This drives an incentive to send patients within the network leading to mutual referrals or money staying within that care network even if there are better doctors for that specific patient outside of that care network. In addition to the Doctor’s network there is, of course, your insurer’s network which may be in direct conflict with the professional network that your provider has.

Imbalances of knowledge – in typical free markets there’s an assumption that everyone has the same amount of knowledge. In Healthcare, it is abundantly clear that this isn’t true. Most patients have little to no understanding of their diseases when they are first diagnosed. On the other hand, both their insurer and provider has an extensive knowledge of the disease. This limits how well the patient is able to correctly make decisions about their healthcare. It also pushes reliance to the provider whenever there is a disagreement between insurer and provider. The member can’t effectively participate in those conversations about care. Furthermore, there maybe little penalty to the patient if they fail to follow the prescribed course of care until much later where neither the insurer or provider can enforce a change of behavior to reduce costs for the entire system now through treatment rather than later when there are more complications.

These are but three cases that highlight the lack of free market mechanisms in healthcare. Even in cases where a patient wants to seek the best care it’s typically the patient’s responsibility to pay for it if it’s not with in the insurer’s network. In many cases these clinics can reduce systemic costs through lower point of care and lower likelihood of readmission after care.

Over the course of the next few weeks I will discuss Exchanges and their potential, how healthcare can be made more affordable using process improvement tools and other mechanisms. I plan on writing weekly on healthcare. If you have any topics that interest you please comment and let me know!

Ex-Pat Entrepreneurs

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This morning on KUT I heard about a plan here in Austin to encourage Mexican Nationals to start companies based in Austin. This initiative is being pushed by the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce and Austin’s IC2, an incubator. I think this is a great idea. This will allow a great cross pollination of ideas between Mexico and the United States. Bringing together people with great ideas leads to more interesting ideas. This is something I really loved about my Master’s program. I was continually surrounded by people with big ideas, vision and energy.

I think that this idea also can help Americans see that people in other countries can have and do have, fantastic exciting ideas that can drive technology, the economy and employment. With our US-centric view of entrepreneurship and venture capital we tend to overlook this. It’s not fair and it short changes potential collaborators, because we assume that Americans have the best ideas.

This collaboration also shows that resources in America can be used to help develop entrepreneurship within a community of immigrants. We have seen some of this with Silicon Valley and the Indian and Chinese populations there, but we have not see it with another community in the US or with a Latin American culture. I think that this experiment will be useful in spreading knowledge and developing future entrepreneurs in Mexico to the south.  It will also likely lead to an increase in entrepreneurship within Mexico over time. It will not happen immediately, but a group of these entrepreneurs will eventually move back to Mexico and will start companies there or at least subsidiaries in their home country. This will produce more legitimate work for Mexicans in Mexico that could offer wages that can compete with the drug cartels and develop a larger business community.

This type of growth is important for Mexico, as it will increase the amount of resources for Mexicans to develop their own businesses. It will increase legitimate pressures on the government to fight corruption and make efforts to reduce the impact on organized crime on the government. It will provide employment for highly capable graduates from Mexican universities which will continue to drive improvement for the country.

Most of this is a decade or two in the future, but there will be a great deal of benefits for both Austin, the Hispanic community in the city and for Mexico. Austin will benefit, because it will continue to grow as entrepreneurs will bring more money in, more jobs and new ideas.

The Mexican nationals will fuel increase knowledge sharing between the US and Mexico and will act as de facto ambassadors for their home country. They will educate people on the real Mexico and show Austines that Mexico has a great deal to offer besides amazing food.

Unintended consequences of knowledge management regimes

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There are several consequences of the differences between the US (and the west) and China (and other autocracies). First, with one of the major assumptions of neoclassical economics out the window, it calls into question basing economic policy on neoclassical economics. Second, with a monopoly structure for intellectual property several different economic incentives have been created. Finally, the differences in IP management between the countries creates tensions at several different levels. I’ll discuss each of these points in more detail.

First, if one of the major assumptions for economic policy includes non-rival, non-exclusive knowledge, it’s difficult to understand why there isn’t more competition in many markets. However, as we know it’s not really possible for any firm to pick up any sort of technology and start to produce a given product. Because of this difficulty regions and areas tend to become experts at specific types of technologies. However, even in the case of China the freedom of access to IP makes it easier for firms to produce specific products. The problem still lies in the fact that you still need tacit knowledge to actually make the product. A patent is supposed to give you the information you need to produce the technology. However, the actual patents are difficult to read and not likely to be possible

Second, with a monopoly structure in place for intellectual property it gives very different incentives for owners of intellectual property. First, for people who actually produce a product, attacking products that are similar for infringement can be a very lucrative proposition. It prevents other companies from becoming competition. Apple is currently using this tactic to go after Android through Samsung and HTC. With a full monopoly technological progress can actually come to a standstill. An example of this is with Xerox copiers. With the monopoly in place Xerox did not innovate and kept prices extremely high. As soon as their patent ran out the competition came in and almost took all of the market share from Xerox. They introduced lower priced products and a wider more personal product range. Without the monopoly in place other companies could try to move into the market space earlier and drive innovation from the beginning of the market.  Finally, with reduced ownership of IP there will be less patent trolls like Intellectual Ventures.

Third, the IP management is causing issues between firms and the Chinese government. The firms do not want to give up their IP because it’s how they are able to make their money. Some of these technologies are so easy to copy it’s impossible to make a profit without protection. In theory pharmaceuticals should be perfectly copyable based on the chemical properties of the drug. If the pharmaceutical companies didn’t have a chance to recoup the investment on a drug (500 million – 1 billion per drug) there would be no innovation. The differences present problems for trade and agreements between countries. The US and China have had serious disagreements over how IP should be managed.

Basically, the differences in how IP is understood impacts a countries policies economically and in trade. It is important to understand exactly what’s going on with these issues. Our governments are pushing for different levels of control over IP both in patents and other forms of copyright. As some one interested in policy, it’s important to understand what types of policies we should be pushing for. I don’t think there’s any true right answer for the IP problem. In different situations policies should be adjusted. We cannot have a stagnant IP regime when technologies are evolving as fast as they are.

Are democracies or autocracies better with technology Management?

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According to neoclassical economics knowledge is a non-rival (I can use it without preventing you from using it) and non-exclusive (available to everyone) resource. This has two impacts on their economic theory. First, the actual impact of research and development is excluded from economic growth and is ignored. Second, that any company should be able to pick up and produce any technology. Both of these points are relatively ridiculous. For two reasons. First, we know that research leads to the formation of new companies. Second we know that most companies cannot produce any product and many companies that produce products outside their expertise fail at it.

From a neoclassical perspective democracies are terrible at sharing knowledge and technologies. Democracies have a slew of laws that regulate access to technology form monopolies for specific technologies if they have something called a patent. Additionally, there are other contracts that can get in the way of sharing of knowledge in a way that is neoclassical. Non-disclosure agreements and non-compete clauses. If you aren’t allowed to discuss a specific technology with other people, it prevents knowledge from spreading and being shared to other companies. If you aren’t allowed to compete within the same industry after you leave a company, it prevents you from using that knowledge in a positive way at another firm.

These laws have been put into place in our democracies to ensure proper protection of technologies for firms. It’s designed to prevent the spreading of tacit knowledge from company A to company B. As a company this is incredibly desirable. Without these protections some research would be worthless to conduct. Knowledge spill-overs would cause prices to fall to cost or lower as firms compete for market share. It’s great for consumers, but bad for firms.

So what happens in China? Well according to Make it in America, China requires many firms to hand over their Intellectual Property to the Chinese state. What ends up happening after this is that the Chinese government sells the information or gives the information to one or more Chinese company. These companies tend to be made up of former employees at the company that made the product before. This allows tacit knowledge transfer to the firm and a fast ramp to compete directly with the inventor of the technology. The knowledge is freer in China than it is in the US because of this. This increases competition and may be impacting the cost of goods like solar panels.

In a way this type of behavior forces companies to compete based on the actual costs of the technology. This is what is expected in the neoclassical theory. All prices will eventually drop to the marginal cost of a product with near zero profits for the producing company. In a perverse way, this is a “freer” market than ours because it comes closer to the non-rival non-exclusive knowledge base.

In my next blog, I’ll discuss this topic more.