Tag: politics

Harvard Business Review – Whitewashing business executives is their core business

In the latest edition of “Executive utilizes Harvard Business Review to whitewash their activities” we have Hubert Joly, CEO of Best Buy, who informs us that we should all

  • Making meaningful purpose a genuine priority of business operations
  • The “human magic” of empowered and self-directed employees
  • Admitting you don’t have all the answers is a sign of strong leadership.

Let’s see how Best Buy puts those practices in place.

It is hard to take the editors of HBR seriously when they discuss what a good company culture looks like when they whitewash corporate leaders with this sort of track record.

Probably Best Buy paid a lot of money for the reputation bump just before Christmas.

Hierarchy is not inevitable

I’m on the record in believing that Quality as a process is an inherently progressive one and that when we stray from those progressive roots we become exactly what we strive to avoid. One only has to look at the history of Six Sigma, TQM, and even Lean to see that.

I’m a big proponent of Humanocracy for that very reason.

One cannot read much of business writing without coming across the great leader (or even worse great man) hypothesis, which serves to naturalize power and existing forms of authority. One cannot even escape the continued hagiography of Jack Welch, even though he’s been discredited in many ways for his toxic legacy.

We cannot drive out fear unless we unmask power by revealing its contradictions, hypocrisies, and reliance on violence and coercion. The way we work is a result of human decisions, and thus capable of being remade.

We all have a long way to go here. I, for example, catch myself all the time speaking of leadership in hierarchical ways. One of the current things I am working on is exorcising the term ‘leadership team’ from my vocabulary. It doesn’t serve any real purpose and it fundamentally puts the idea of leadership as a hierarchical entity.

Another thing I am working on is to tackle the thorn of positional authority, the idea that the higher the rank in the organization the more decision-making authority you have. Which is absurd. In every organization, I’ve been in people have positions of authority that cover areas they do not have the education, experience, and training to make decisions in. This is why we need to have clear decision matrixes, establish empowered process owners and drive democratic leadership throughout the organization.

Toyota is a horrible exemplar

Just like the immense sins of Jack Welch and GE will always tarnish six Sigma it is past time to realize that the conservative, looking backwards to Toyota of much of Lean thinking is a mistake that limits adoption and more importantly innovation.

As a company there is much at Toyota that is just wrong. The 2020 recalls were significant, but frankly not the first year the company has been having major quality contorl issues.

But more important is the fact the company is a liar and a supporter of authoritarianism. As a promponent of the pillars of Lean thats just damn hypocritical. After the failed coup of Janaury 6th, Toyota pledged to no longer fund anyone who supported the attack against US democracy. As of June they are the top fundraiser to those Republicans, giving to nearly a quarter of the 147 GOP politicians who objected to certifying the election results.

Toyota is showing us who they are. A company that stands apart from the principles so important to the Quality profession.

Quality Profession Needs to Stand for Quality in Public Practices

The Quality profession either stays true to its’ principles and ideals, or it is useless. We either support transparency and driving out fear or we don’t. Then we become the shallow, and dangerous crutch of demagogues and tyrants. One of the reasons Six Sigma has immense problems it still has not successfully grappled stems from how it is centered on the tyranny of Jack Welch.

The ASQ’s Government Division has taken a great step recently by endorsing the adoption of ISO/TS 54001:2019 “Quality management systems — Particular requirements for the application of ISO 9001:2015 for electoral organizations at all levels of government”.

We should be demanding elections built on the foundations of good quality. This should be part of electoral reform requirements at the Federal level. We need to oppose attempts to restrict voting. We need to drive fear out of our electoral system.

The United States is a signatory of international standards of policing. And yet no state follows those standards. Federal law needs to respect our treaty obligations and impose these standards, and we need to hold states and localities accountable.

As a quality professional I spend the day figuring out how to truthfully measure results. Yet an entire party has gleefully adopted lies and disinformation. I strive to democratize leadership, to build a culture of psychological safety. And yet all around us we see demagoguery.

Our workplace cultures are influenced greatly by external factors. We cannot hope to drive lies and fraud out of our systems, to create cultures of safety, to build excellence when all around us is a disregard for those standards. For this reason the quality profession must be political. It must standard for truth, for fair standards applied equitably. For driving out fear.

A Quality Mindset leads to Abolishing the Police

As we watch the closing arguments of the Derek Chauvin trial, it is not difficult to see systemic problems with policing in America. One only need to look at stories like:

  • Patrick Rove, long-time police union president, accused of child abuse and with credible questions of how he was so thoroughly protected by the police hierarchy
  • Baltimore police planting toy guns on people they shot
  • The continued excuses of “human error” and “you need to walk in our shoes”, for example the recent killing of Daunte Wright

Read the Wikipedia entry on United States Police Brutality, which provides an excellent problem statement.

For root cause analysis, read the University of Chicago study that found that America’s biggest police forces lack legality, as they are not answerable to human rights compliant laws authorizing the use of lethal force.

It is impossible not to reach the conclusions that the culture is rotten, there are inherently bad actors, and institutional resistance to change is standing in way of improvement.

Given the continued failures in implementing change, it is time to shift the resistors out of police departments. The only way to effectively do that seems to radically restructure the police, breaking their responsibilities up and sending those responsibilities to organizations better suited for these duties.

This is why I stand for police abolition.