It’s up to you to set aside the necessary time to learn.
— Read on hbr.org/2018/07/take-control-of-your-learning-at-work
Spot on In many ways. I would advocate that is is a key part of any knowledge management system to set up the appropriate to ensure continual learning is a fact of life.
Adam J. Gustein and John Sviokla explore a topic that is probably on many people’s minds in the Harvard Business Review in the article “7 Skills That Aren’t About to Be Automated.”
In this article seven skills are set out seven skills that make you employable no matter what: communication, content, context, emotional competence, teaching, connections, and an ethical compass.
It is a good, broad, skill set and also demonstrates exactly what every quality professional should have. And points out a great direction for growth.
I am a big fan of the seven basic quality tools, but the day is quickly coming when four of them will be fully automated (Control charts, Histogram, Pareto chart, and Scatter diagram). Most big companies already have pilots in place as part of their big digital transformations.
A fun example of just why this skill set matters can be seen from playing with a semantic network like ConceptNet. Look a look at the word quality, and you see pretty easy why several of the above skills make a difference and will continue to do so.
Quality professionals are well placed on many of these skills. As automation continues the life of a quality professional will change. This change brings us a great many opportunities, and isn’t that one of quality’s core competencies?
Jason Kottke is spot on “Open offices result in less collaboration among employees”
In the past few weeks I’ve had more and more upset conversations with co-workers who have moved to open office work locations. And the Royal Society study that Jason references is a good read for anyone contemplating open spaces.
Being here in Boston, and having done my share of hanging out at MIT, I’ve seen some good open space concepts. But what the best ones actually do is create modular areas of privacy and areas for scalable interactions. And this is what the application of open offices I’m seeing in the corporate world are missing.
I’m hoping to ride this trend out. Or at least until the open office concept has been improved to a more scalable modularized office. I know it is currently one of my criteria for considering moving jobs and I’ve turned down an offer because of the location’s open office.
How folks work contributes to the culture. We should be driving interaction, collaboration (another problematic concept according to some studies) and problem-solving. Folks sitting with headsets on as they wait to get a Skype call does none of that. As the research shows, and anecdotal evidence supports, open spaces drive down productivity and make folks more likely to tune out and move on to a new job.
Dr. Zeynep Tufekci, a professor who writes about the social impact of technology, wrote and excellent Op-Ed in the New York Times this past weekend titled “What Elon Musk Should Learn From the Thailand Cave Rescue.” In this she takes to task silicon valley, stresses the importance of hard-earned expertise and the “safety culture” model. A topic near-and-dear to my heart as a quality professional, as she stresses the importance of deep expertise, lengthy training and the ability to learn from experience (and to incorporate the lessons of those experiences into future practices) as a valuable form of ingenuity.
Safety culture = quality culture. It has been said many times that the only real difference is that of the question asked (patient safety vs employee safety), but lets all agree that the tools used are pretty equivalent.
What this article really reminds me of is an article from A Lean Journey back in February titled “Lean Culture: Do You Want Firemen or Farmers in Your Organization.”
I see this a lot in Lean, especially early in the transformation process. An idea that any expert is equivalent, that quick, fast wins are the best. Which is sometimes relevant, often not good for the long run. Its interesting that we are, what, 30-40 years into Lean as a management methodology in this country (my entire adult life I have been involved in Lean projects of one sort or another) and it still feels new in most places.
I think that the trends Dr Tufekci and Mr McMahon are discussing are very similar. Stem from similar causes, and probably lead to why a lot of long-term transformations don’t get the benefits we intend.
By-and-large the last few decades have been solid ones for the pharmaceutical industry. The public has largely trusted that what we make is safe, efficacious and in general a quality product. That is, after all, what the regulations are designed to do. And we, as quality professionals, together with our peers, have demonstrated a real passion for the patient.
But as the recent St Louis verdict against Johnson & Johnson shows, the industry has a growing issue with the public’s perception that pharmaceutical corporations need to stop placing profits over safety.
As the New York Times says:
Johnson & Johnson and its peers were once lauded as a collective of hero-innovators and credited with bringing an avalanche of lifesaving, world-changing technology from lab bench to patient bedside. Today they are more readily associated with rampant price gouging, the worst drug overdose epidemic in modern history and a steady beat of cases similar to the talc-cancer one, in which profitable products caused real harm.
We also have the FDA catering to industry, the revolving door between the FDA and industry, and a growth of scary pseudo-science that continues to erode trust (vaccine deniers are fairly highly placed in the current government).
As quality professionals, it is our responsibility to “Hold paramount the safety, health, and welfare of individuals, the public, and the environment.” Whether it’s in our companies, our professional associations, or our connections with the community we need to be striving to be the voice of science, of quality and of integrity.
