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D. Mark Jackson

Site Maintenance

I’ve decided to upgrade the site, mostly to deal with behind the scenes issues which I’ll share later.

To do it in the cleanest way possible, I’ll be taking the site down for most of the weekend. There won’t be any new posts and you’ll likely encounter a placeholder page.

Thanks for your patience.

D. Mark Jackson

Respect For Teachers

The New York Times had an interesting article earlier this week about Diane Ravitch, an education historian and former official with the U.S. Department of Education.  She recently went public with dramatically changed views on standardized testing and charter schools. It’s a nice story about a person’s willingness to examine core opinions and basic assumptions in the face of adverse career and political consequences.

The article also raises the issue of Respect for People. This quote particularly caught my attention:

“Nations like Finland and Japan seek out the best college graduates for teaching positions, prepare them well, pay them well and treat them with respect,” she said. “They make sure that all their students study the arts, history, literature, geography, civics, foreign languages, the sciences and other subjects. They do this because this is the way to ensure good education. We’re on the wrong track.”

I think educators are highly respected for what they do, but our system doesn’t reflect it by providing good compensation, career opportunities, and autonomy. I wonder how many of the problems in our educational system can be traced back to this fundamental problem.

Would focusing on this single flaw — one that is highly interrelated to other elements in the system — make a big difference?

D. Mark Jackson

Law and Longevity

I have no idea how long lawyers live in comparison to other cohorts, though this study found that male Virginia lawyers live longer than the general population. So, these two stories caught my eye.

First, meet 102 year old Wesley Brown:

First appointed to the federal bench by President Kennedy in 1962, U.S. District Judge Wesley E. Brown bore witness to the tumultuous civil rights era. In his lifetime, he’s experienced the advent of radio, television and the Internet.

And he’s still going to work in Wichita, Kan., every day, even though he took senior status in 1979.

In a profile of Judge Brown that includes video interviews, the Wichita Eagle says that the judge credits his longevity to a strong work ethic and healthy curiosity.

“I’ve worked all my life,” Brown told the paper. “I wouldn’t know what else to do.”

Then, meet 90 year old Robert Morgenthau:

Robert Morgenthau may be retiring from his 35-year career as Manhattan district attorney, but that doesn’t mean he is giving up legal practice.

The 90-year-old Morgenthau is heading to the New York law firm Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, the Associated Press reported based on a firm press release (PDF). The Am Law Daily and the Wall Street Journal Law Blog noted the report. Morgenthau will be of counsel at Wachtell, the release states.

According to the Blue Zone study, longevity is associated with four attributes:

1. Movement – not necessarily exercise, but frequent natural physical activity such as gardening and walking
2. Good outlook – have purpose in life and keep things in perspective.
3. Eat wisely mostly a plant based diet and smaller portions
4. Connect – belong to a group and take care of people around you

Practicing law can giving you a purpose in life and provides the opportunity for making some amazing connections. Of course, it also requires a lot of sedentary time and can cause folks to lose perspective.

Here’s a great presentation about the Blue Zone study.

D. Mark Jackson

A Potent Cultural Cocktail

In today’s New York Times, David Brooks recounts the amazing story of Jan Baalsrud.  Baalsrud snuck back into Norway during World War II to help the anti-Nazi resistance, battling severe weather and terrain, only surviving because of his own outdoor skills and the help of strangers willing to risk their own lives.  I won’t attempt to summarize here further — you really should read the whole column.  Brooks concludes with this:

But there also is an interesting form of social capital on display. It’s a mixture of softness and hardness. Baalsrud was kept alive thanks to a serial outpouring of love and nurturing. At the same time, he and his rescuers displayed an unbelievable level of hardheaded toughness and resilience. That’s a cultural cocktail bound to produce achievement in many spheres.

This sounds like a good approach to most business endeavors. As Conan O’Brien recently said:  “Nobody in life gets exactly what they thought they were going to get. But if you work really hard and you’re kind, amazing things will happen.”

D. Mark Jackson

Serve It Up Precisely

Chuck Hollis thinks IT managers have paid too much attention to costs for hardware and software, and not enough attention to internal IT processes. He argues in favor of less precision and more speed, since the “time to serve” — the time infrastructure is requested to the time of deployment — determines the business advantage of implementing new IT infrastructure.

“Time to serve” is another way of describing lead time, which is, indeed, something we rarely hear about when evaluating IT initiatives. And in discussing IT costs, we rarely explore how much of these costs are the result of internal wasteful processes. Instead, the discussion focuses almost exclusively on costs for hardware, software, and training.

However, I disagree that “time to serve” is improved by reducing precision. In many projects, resources are spent fixing bugs, troubleshooting, training because of poorly designed systems, and modifying existing processes so they are compatible with the new infrastructure. Less precision just exacerbates these non-value added processes, or waste. On the other hand, waste — and therefore costs — are reduced the more an IT project fits an organization’s needs.

Interestingly, he concludes:

Over the last year, I’ve sketched out what I believe to be the dominant model for next-generation enterprise IT: the private cloud. What makes it a “cloud” is that it’s built differently, operated differently and consumed differently. What makes it “private” is that it’s under the control of the enterprise IT organization.

But new models require new metrics to judge their effectiveness, and drive continually improvements.

As cloud computing matures, and our assumptions about hardware and software change, will we see new focus on internal IT processes?

D. Mark Jackson

Ninja Email Laws

Time Management Ninja offers “9 Laws for Work Email.” They’re all worth checking out. My favorite is “Keep it Short,” with the suggestion that all emails be less than five lines long.

But I particularly like this insight:

Do not expect an immediate response – In our hyper connected world, email is the new snail mail. Once upon a time, email was considered fast. Wanted a quick response? Send an email. But it has since been demoted down the communication response priority list. If you need a more immediate response: call, text, or come see me. Many people check email only 2-3 times a day and are turning off their work email on breaks and weekends.

It’s just impossible for busy people to reply quickly anymore. Handhelds aren’t the solution, and by contributing to the volume of sent email, arguably they’re part of the problem. And constant checking and responding to emails is poor workflow. If you need an immediate response, better choose a different medium.

If you find these rules useful, be sure to visit Merlin Mann’s series of posts on email best practices.

D. Mark Jackson

Toyoda’s Testimony

Today, I watched some of the Congressional testimony of Akio Toyoda, President of Toyota, and Yoshimi Inaba, chief operating officer for North America.

First off, as to how to respond to the Toyota recall from a Lean perspective, I’m essentially in agreement with Mark Graban over at Lean Blog, who pithily says what needs to be said. Here’s his post regarding today’s testimony. And obviously, my sympathy goes out to those hurt in vehicle accidents and their families. But I trust our tort system will do a fair job of compensating any victims and punishing any wrongdoers. For purposes of assessing fault, these hearings seemed premature.

Instead, the most fascinating thing for me is the chance to see inside Toyota as an organization. If Toyota failed to get things right — and the executives seem to have admitted as much — we have the opportunity to learn why — really why, and not just hear spin from various factions or carefully crafted press releases.

Just given the incredibly public nature of this inquiry, we are likely to learn a lot. But more importantly, unlike many organizations, Toyota has clearly articulated standards, making deviations from the standard more apparent. With a solid basis for comparison — a theoretical ideal serving as a control — we stand to gain real insight.

D. Mark Jackson

Stephen Covey and Lean

Via Mark Graban at Lean Blog, here’s an interesting video introducing Steven Covey as a keynote speaker at this year’s Shingo Prize conference.

Like Mark, I see connections between Lean and some of Covey’s principles (e.g. Be Proactive,  Sharpen the Saw). My major criticism of Covey has been insufficient attention to good processes. Principles aren’t enough; the skeleton needs muscle to move. But I confess to having read only the The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, and not some of his later books.

And regardless, I’m glad to see these two worlds overlapping.

Checklists: Get Consensus and Follow Up

Matthew May just finished Atul Gawande’s The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right, a book high up on my own reading list. Matt discusses two criteria for checklists:

• Clarity. Assume an untrained eye will read it. Make it bullet-proof, specific, and complete, to capture the knowledge. Make it concrete and representative of the real world. Describe with precision the what, where, and how. That way, there’s no question of what constitutes a deviation or problem.
• Consensus. Everyone who will employ the standard must agree on it. That forces a shared investigation to ensure that the standard represents the best known method or practice at that specific point in time. The activity in turn facilitates understanding.

The consensus part is where most organizations fall short. This is resource intensive. But to get it right, managers must practice genchi genbutsu — that is, they need to go see for themselves how the work is being done. This takes time and may be perceived as a distraction from “real” work (like putting out fires started because of the lack of good standard processes!).

May suggests three basic steps for deploying a checklist:

1. Establish a Best Practice. Make sure it’s the best-known method. Get input and feedback from those doing the work. Get agreement on it.
2. Make it Visible. Accessibility is key. Hiding it in a drawer won’t work. Post it or publish it so everyone will constantly be aware of it.
3. Communicate. Inform everyone. Prepare and train people. Test it out. Monitor effectiveness and usage.

Step three also takes more time than some managers wish to invest. Training is expensive. It’s also difficult to summon the energy after training for follow up. Folks are happy just to be done.

But I’m a huge believer in the power of checklists for lawyers. My experience is that a good checklist pays for itself almost immediately in saved time and reduced errors, sometimes recouping its production costs the first time it is deployed.

D. Mark Jackson