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4月23日 龙翔 五月天,是小峰的最爱,准确地说她是喜欢乐团当中的怪兽。受峰的影响我也渐渐喜欢上这个乐团。刚刚看完怪兽在网上的文章,感觉他不论是生活还是工作都是非常努力用心,也许正是因为这个原因他们才会有现在的成绩。
在近我再做什么?我有像他们一样努力吗?昨天和老大哥吃饭时,提起来我们刚认识的情景。我们认识的那年是我刚回国的时候,算算已经三年了。三年的时间我都呆在北京,我再做什么,有什么成果吗?突然间觉得什么都没有,好像有虚度了三年,也好像做了很多事情。
2003年的夏天我回来北京,开始肆无忌惮的夜生活,每天都和不同的人出入酒吧开着车到处乱跑,本打算痛快的玩两个月然后回到加拿大,谁成想阴差阳错的留在了北京。2003年的秋天我完全失去方向,不知道自己到底应该做什么,我应该每天去哪里。那个秋天应该是最让我痛苦的,幸好当时有我的好朋友在我身边才让我从无聊中爬出来。冬天开始上学上班,开始我第一份工作。第一次知道原来工作这么无聊而且在无聊种累得要死。2004年换了一份工作,这个工作是为了龙翔而去。2005年竟然跑到杂志社工作。从三份工作上来看离我学的专业越来越远,远到根本就没关系。但是后两份工作都是在为龙翔打伏笔。2005年12月龙翔动漫开业。这个冬天是最冷的冬天,开业前的要看店面,装修,买家具,进货,终于知道“累”的真正含义。
现在的我再做什么呢,在继续为龙翔的发展努力。不知道我的努力能否换来龙翔的成就。呵呵,还是努力吧。怪兽不是也说过要“从不放弃”吗?! 5月10日 好辛苦啊好累了~今天写了一天企业战略的东西~真是好累~从上午11点一直到了现在的晚上十点才写完。真实的没事分析什么吉利汽车阿~真是让人烦,不过还是写完了~还看了两本书~写的都是企业战略~做一个好的企业真的是好难,制定一个战略更难。可是现在中国的企业里面战略都是老总自己制定了,下面的人根本就说不上话,不知道这些战略的课程学来世做什么用的。估计是让员工可以更好的指出上司的错误。呵呵~ 学习的感觉真好~虽然是很累,但是有种幸福的感觉~嘻嘻~ 写完这么多的作业感觉也很好~超级有成就感~哈哈~ 我喜欢我现在充实的生活~亲亲~ 4月28日 A Pragmatic Approach to Quality ImprovementA Pragmatic Approach to Quality Improvement
This is the story of a manager who made a huge contribution to supply chain effectiveness. Ed Pearson’s five-step approach to quality improvement applied equal measures of common sense and creativity. He encouraged his people to select the leadership and set the ground rules for the quality initiatives. At the same time, he made use of a valuable concept he calls "employee civic virtue"—incentives for everyone to act for the greater good of the organization. ADVERTISEMENT But TQM—along with Six Sigma, ISO 9000, Baldrige Awards, and other major quality-standard initiatives—has all but faded from the headlines. Despite demonstrated appeal, many managers found it wasn’t effective. They considered the cost too high and manager and employee commitment too low for formalized quality programs to reap strategic benefits. Although many quality disciplines are still being applied worldwide, managers who experienced TQM failures suggest that programs such as Six Sigma are just TQM with a new name. It has been easy to dismiss the "quality movement" as a management fad whose time has come and gone. In the context of supply chain management, most initiatives that have resulted in quality improvements have been dictated by senior management. In practice, they have worked to improve performance measures affecting inventory levels and turns, incoming component and materials quality, leadtime performance, and work-in-process levels, for example. But for the most part, quality was not considered the key strategic driver. Ed Pearson (not his real name) did not and does not think that way. Pearson believed that by continuously applying quality principles at the distribution center (DC) he ran, service performance would improve and supply chain managers would be more efficient and effective. The results bear him out.
Pearson's initiative reaffirmed that quality-management disciplines are still important and relevant for supply chain managers. The experience also revealed something else that's every bit as important: "Employee civic virtue"—or behavior that demonstrates a true concern about the organization's well-being—plays a key role in the success of any change-management program. Ed's New Job Founded in 1940, GenFlow is one of North America's largest and most successful wholesalers of school and stationery products. The company grew rapidly, distributing products across the United States and into Mexico and Canada as well as occasionally exporting further afield. Gross revenue for 2003 grew to a respectable $1.45 billion. Today, GenFlow employs about 2,300 people in logistics and sales across 44 locations worldwide—40 in the United States and four overseas. GenFlow supplies its resellers with more than 30,000 different SKUs, including computer supplies, educational aids, furniture, janitorial products, office products, presentation products, and lounge/break-room supplies. GenFlow's DCs typically run on a 20-22 hour business cycle. Orders are transmitted via electronic data interchange (EDI) to 80 percent of its vendors over the course of the day. They are then picked, packed, loaded, and delivered before the reseller opens its doors the following day. Quality in order accuracy, fill rate, and on-time delivery is key to success as many of the retailers carry little to no inventory. The company's flat management structure and multitasking environment make the job of GenFlow leaders like Ed Pearson quite complicated. On any given day, Ed would be directly responsible for management of more than 100 employees, including a six-person sales force, 10 in the customer service department, a purchasing manager and two purchasing agents, three warehouse/operations managers and 48 to 56 warehouse personnel, and a fleet of 20-plus less-than-truckload (LTL) delivery vehicles. Here's how the five-step quality initiative played out in this environment. Step 1: Develop a Cross-Functional Steering Team In the summer of 2001, Ed took over the management of GenFlow's Dallas distribution center when the previous manager retired. The region had a number of untapped markets. The capable staff had already won two quality awards while posting modest sales gains. But as in many wholesale environments, the employees were strapped for time and were quite negative about their jobs. Despite GenFlow's reputation as one of the more generous businesses in the region in terms of employee compensation, the daily pressure and high expectations contributed to increasing employee turnover reaching as high as 17 percent a year. Ed started his first week with meetings to get to know the entire staff. He went over his own background and stated what he expected of the staff. He stressed the importance of service quality and told the group, "You folks know how to win quality awards—which is something you will have to teach me." With that, some employees shuffled their feet and others grunted; meanwhile, the warehouse managers looked anxious. Ed was concerned that he'd lost some respect from the employees for making this comment. But he was confident that he could change that in short order. Around 4 p.m. that day, the purchasing manager and operations manager came to Ed's office. They explained that the employees were concerned that he would want them to live up to expectations that were unattainable. The operations chief explained that the prior DC manager had tweaked the operations numbers every few months to prevent headquarters from giving him a hard time. So nobody was clear about what performance metrics made sense. Moreover, they did not want to be held accountable to new goals created out of goals they did not understand. Specifically, the employees were concerned that now they would not be able to meet Ed's criteria, especially considering the volume that the Dallas DC supplied on a given day. Ed realized that he had a major problem—one that was deeper than just tweaking some operational numbers. He had a management crisis in the making that could threaten the performance of the facility as well as the viability of GenFlow's customers and its relationships with them. The DC manager had been spending many nights reading about developing excellence in employees. Although he had managed staff before, he had never been responsible for an operation on the scale of the Dallas facility. Many of his readings were tied to the TQM concept. Authors like Deming, Juran, Tom Peters, and Ken Blanchard had many suggestions that seemed doable, but the sequence and value of each suggestion seemed questionable to Ed. One point on which all the authors agreed was the value of getting the people closest to the problem involved in solving the problem. With that in mind, Ed decided, in his first week at Dallas, to call a meeting of his management team to discuss quality improvement. The following week, Ed met in the break room with the three warehouse/operations managers, the purchasing manager, the customer service manager, and one of the sales representatives. The theme: "clearing the air." The participants were encouraged to reveal managerial practices that may have been considered questionable and to prepare to take steps towards setting things straight. The managers disclosed how inventory, returns, and service figures had been manipulated to improve the Dallas DC's standing. "The meeting was tense at first," Ed remembers. "But as one manager would reveal a problem, another would add something, and the list snowballed. I was left thinking, ‘How would I have ever found these things out?' The truth was, they had to tell me, or I would be in the dark forever. Best of all, it was a relief for them. We took the process back to square one and started looking at the real issues rather than trying to cover them up." Ed's next goal was to get the managers' buy-in and active involvement. He made a guarantee: "I told them I would always be there for them and that my door would always be open. I also promised them recognition and acknowledgement for their efforts in improving the process. But they had to promise me they would take ownership of the problem and get the employees behind a program to fix the process." They all agreed. Ed called the group the steering team. The meeting ended with a shortlist of employees from each area whom the steering team believed would be most helpful in gathering groups of the workers closest to the problems. Employees were identified in areas such as customer service, transportation, information systems, order selection, packaging and loading, purchasing, returns management, sales, and stocking/inventory management. Step 2: Formalize Cross-Functional Teams By the end of Ed Pearson's second week at the Dallas DC, his managers had explained the new direction to the employees. Meanwhile, Ed was working on how to develop the employee teams that would devise solutions for the problems they encountered. He figured he would need the steering team to handle the early issues and two pilot teams to navigate through the operational difficulties. He used a cross-functional approach, inviting one member from each of the areas listed above and having a sales rep or manager sit in the meeting to answer questions related to customer-specific issues. The customer aspect was crucial. Ed often told employees, "If a meeting goes on more than 15 minutes and no one mentions the customer, get up and leave!" The managers did not run the meetings. Ed knew from his quality management reading that the staff most involved in the jobs would know the answers. He knew, too, that if a manager directed their ideas, the employees would offer fewer suggestions and be less likely to attend meetings for fear of rejection or disapproval. The meetings were to last one hour and include a formal agenda, assignment of duties, and follow-up process check. By the end of the fourth week, the employee teams had formalized the following:
Early meetings were no walk in the park. Several employees were cynical about the weekly meetings, believing that branch management was simply following through on another of those morale-building campaigns from headquarters. Others, especially area supervisors, were concerned about losing productivity by having key people in a long meeting once a week. Those issues were complicated by the DC managers' new facilitator roles. Ed often had to remind the managers that they were not to take the lead—that they were there only to help the employees solve the problems their way. He didn't want the meeting to become a forum for managers to simply bounce their ideas off the employees. Ed understood that there would be resistance to change and that the DC personnel would just have to tough it out for several weeks before the teams could really gain momentum. From week eight to week 20, the teams accomplished the following:
The teams also made great strides across multiple areas of the facility. One major success was in order selection. The teams realized that item stocking and selection location could be made more specific. Rather than simply inventorying items by row, bar-coded tags were placed at the specific bin and shelf location. Some employees balked at a loss of flexibility resulting from having "specific" locations. Yet after the teams discussed the advantages of the new idea, the entire staff got behind it. Ed relates the details: "We actually had people volunteer to work overnight to label the shelves and stock the misplaced inventory. It was amazing. We completely re-inventoried the entire facility in under 24 hours!" The long-term results were impressive: improved selection speed and accuracy, a reduction in training hours for new employees, and a sizeable financial (inventory) gain when annual physical inventory was taken. The teams also developed a number of useful process forms. Most were developed to make sure employees didn't forget tasks not necessarily directly related to unit productivity. For instance, one form encouraged daily housekeeping. Having employees take a few minutes each day to think about this subject kept the facility in excellent condition. The approach also reduced injury claims, shrinkage, and lost paperwork. The true cross-functional nature of the teams proved advantageous in several areas. Order fill rate is one example. The team structure meant that staff from purchasing, receiving, and order selection were able to talk to each other about how to improve fill rate and reduce inventory exceptions. The purchasers made a deal with their counterparts in receiving: They committed to review all 30,000 SKUs on a 1.5-week cycle rather than on a monthly cycle to fill more of the gaps created by forecasting error. In return, receiving committed to stocking and posting all inbound inventory within 24 hours. The changes boosted the fill rate from 93 percent to more than 97 percent. Ed made sure that each team had a person designated to record progress. The teams would use an action register to track who was responsible for what task and when it was to be completed. Ed would follow up with management to make sure the teams were still effective. He had the teams fill out a process check each week to make sure the members still found the meetings effective. When a team got bogged down, he would close their meetings and start a new team. Ultimately, Ed became the chief facilitator. He reviewed the progress of the teams, praised and motivated them, but only got directly involved when a team wasn't making progress. Step 3: Formalize Specific Quality Standards
"The employees had gone quite some time without having to worry about quality," notes Pearson. "We wouldn't react to a problem until our customers complained. This was really the only accurate communication the employees would get about our performance. We had to re-establish a formal listing of quality indicators and goals." Ed's goal was for his teams to have developed the initial quality standards for the DC by the 50th week. One of the teams developed a comment card and box for "will call" customers. Most will-calls were salespeople making a delivery, so the will-call counter had become one of the major points for interacting with customers. Near that area, the teams also posted the mission and vision statements as well as the productivity numbers and employee awards. Ed Pearson commented, "Will-calls had always been considered a pain for warehouse employees. Customers would often wait forever for help. With the new focus on quality and specifically on the customer, we had great interaction. If a warehouse employee could not get the order, a customer service employee would run into the warehouse and get it. If neither could do it, then I would. We were becoming increasingly proud of our accomplishments, and the teaming was reaching its way across functions. Our one focus was truly on the customer." Step 4: Formalize a Reward and Feedback Structure Having the overall performance metrics in place is no guarantee that things will improve because the rewards programs may well be out of sync. In Ed Pearson's experience, a fair rewards program rates employees by using quantitative figures—but with some flexibility. He explains: "For instance, if someone spends all their time improving the truck-loading process or order-selection process, they may end up with lower production numbers in their general area. There has to be some flexibility, or nobody will do anything ‘special' or think about ways to improve our processes." In other words, there must be performance metrics for daily tasks so that those tasks are not to be marginalized. But there also have to be short-term and long-term rewards to encourage improvements in overall effectiveness. About 14 months after Ed Pearson's arrival in Dallas, the employee-level cross-functional teams were given the task of developing criteria for judging quality performance in what would be named "The Quality Employee of the Month Program." The teams defined five specific groups for competition:
There was heated debate about the program across functional lines despite the fact that the functional awards were for only $25 and the facility-wide prize was just $50. "The employees really seemed to be more driven by pride than by the money," comments Ed. "They wanted it to be fair, and they couldn't blame an unfair system on management because they created the system themselves. It took a while to fine-tune the measures, which were updated month after month, but it was worth every minute we put into it!" Finding a way to weight the various activities—lines pulled vs. phone orders entered vs. purchasing orders placed vs. skids stocked—was more of an art than a science. The teams debated fairness and brought different ideas from other employees in their departments. Even in like areas, it was difficult to rate one job vs. another. How could an order selector working in a bulk zone like furniture be compared to an order selector in an individual-unit zone like pens and pencils? "There was a reasonable amount of debate about the fairness of each metric," Ed recalls, "but the weights didn't have to be exact. They just had to be fair, and the only way I know how to tell if you are treating someone justly is to ask them if they think they're being treated justly!" With the employees developing and testing the metrics themselves, they gradually accepted the reward system.
Initial weights such as inventory zones would be scaled at 0.4, 0.5, 0.7, and 1.0 per line, depending on the size of the items (1.0 for furniture vs. 0.4 for small individual items). Those numbers could be compared to order lines taken by customer service (set at 0.25) and shortage deliveries found (set at 100). In all, over 50 metrics were set. Sixteen months after the program's launch, most of the employees were satisfied with the rewards program. Still, Ed and the steering team felt something was missing. One of the customer-service employees suggested including a "special consideration" metric to award those going "above and beyond the call of duty." Ed describes it as "employee civic virtue"—that is, behavior that indicates that a person responsibly participates in, or is concerned about the life of the organization. Examples of such behavior include providing constructive suggestions about how the team can improve its effectiveness and being willing to risk disapproval to express beliefs about what's best for the unit. Staffers demonstrating civic virtue could be given a bulk total of points by their peers for doing something out of the ordinary. The new metric became the answer Ed was looking for. "Eventually, my biggest problem was how to handle rewarding multiple people each month for doing special work that improved the lives of everyone," he says. Ed and the steering team were diligent about reporting the results of the previous day's performance the following morning. That way the employees knew where they were slipping and where they could focus to win awards. Step 5: Continually Fix the Process Early on in Ed's new role, the performance of the Dallas facility dipped as employees spent time in new meetings and in creating and implementing the new quality programs. Its performance fell to fifth out of six facilities in GenFlow's lowest performing Southwest region. But soon after, the facility's performance surged. Three months after Ed became general manager, Dallas tied for first in the region and then went on to win 15 consecutive company-wide awards. The reason for the consistency was a focus on improving quality by changing processes, not by attacking problems. For instance, when a route scheduled for 6 p.m. loading was consistently late, the employees didn't simply put other activities on hold. Instead they examined the process. They found that matching of orders was the bottleneck. They developed a gravity slide that would allow for easy mixing of orders between the light bulk zone and individual item zone. If, for example, a wrap-and-pack order was coming through EDI to the warehouse, up to four packing tickets (four zones) would print for the order selectors. Before the gravity slide was installed, the order selectors would pull the items from their zones and place them in totes on the floor in a designated area. Smaller items would be placed on the main conveyor with all the standard delivery items. Later, a packaging employee would spend quite a while matching all of the orders and running them through the shrink-wrap machine. But with the new gravity slide installed, all the like-item orders stayed together. The item would hit the first zone, the order selector would fill her part of the order, and then slide the order down to the next zone.
By getting the right people involved and by focusing on the process, Ed and his staff were able to improve many of the problems that were driving down quality. As the employees learned to look past simple symptoms to root causes, improvements were possible on multiple levels, often in several functional areas at once. Ed points to a focus on continuous improvement as one of the key success factors. "Many of our initial solutions were suboptimal," he says. "Some were failures, but we never quit on any one improvement. After we put an idea in place, someone would come up with an adjustment or improvement. To this day those changes continue. We add new members to our teams monthly and encourage them to develop new ideas and express them regardless of how crazy they might seem. It will continue; it's part of our culture." A Model for Others But by developing a formalized quality program that fostered a sense of "civic virtue" among employees and by focusing firmly on root causes of problems and the processes to fix them, Ed Pearson was able to transform the Dallas facility in a fairly short time. The accomplishments of Ed and his teams over the 18-month period resulted in a 15-percent reduction in turnover and a series of record sales months accompanied by a three-point improvement in profits. The facility regularly exceeds the goals expressed in its vision statement. And when it falls short, the quality teams continue to address the reasons why and to set corrective action plans in motion for the long term. Today, several other GenFlow DCs have adopted this formal, customized approach to quality management and are now experiencing similar results. Clearly, Ed did not adhere to every principle or every practice cited in the works of leading quality authors such as Deming and Juran. Nor did he strive for Baldrige Award or ISO 9000 plaques. Instead, he excerpted five basic quality-implementation steps—infused with the notion of civic virtue—to customize an approach for his facility's challenges, constraints, and resources. His successes show what is possible for many other managers without the explicit oversight of the company's most senior executives. 管理自己认识你自己",两千多年前,古希腊的哲人说。古希腊人比较形而上,没有说清楚怎么认识你自己。"管理你自己",一九九九年,管理大师杜拉克发表文章说。杜拉克深刻而务实,终于向经理人说清楚了怎么认识你自己,而且把"认识"上升到了"管理"的高度。怎么管理你自己?杜拉克说,你要问自己五个问题。 第一个问题是:我的长处是什么?很少人真正知道正确答案。你应该向周围的人寻求反馈并加以分析,发现自己真正的长处,然后努力完善自己的长处。同时,找到那些妨碍了自己发挥长处的地方(比如轻视自己专业领域之外的某种重要的技能、或者在人际交往中缺乏应有的礼貌),把它们改掉。 第二个问题是:我做事的方式是什么?就像人的长处各有不同,做事方式也各有不同。比如你是"读者"(reader)还是"听者"(listener)?"读者"喜欢看书面资料,"听者"习惯听口头汇报。又比如,你用什么方式学习?最常见的是"听"和"读",但是也有许多人的主要学习方式是"写"或"说"。 在做事方式这个大问题下,要问的小问题还很多。比如,你是擅长团队合作,还是习惯单打独斗? 第三个问题是:我的价值观是什么?人和企业都有自己的经营价值观,如果二者冲突,你就难以发挥绩效。比如,如果你信仰内部培养人才而企业喜欢空降外援,你追求长期业绩而企业追求短期结果,你倡导突破性创新而企业愿意持续改善,就是价值观的冲突,而不是谁对谁错的问题。 回答前三个问题后,你才能回答第四个问题:我该去哪里工作?或者,你至少知道你不该去哪里工作。知道该对什么样的工作机会说不,知道自己将以怎样的方式做一项新工作,并要求相应的预期和配合。 这时该回答第五个问题了:我该贡献什么?要考虑到三方面的因素:一是形势的要求,二是基于自己的长处、做事方式和价值观,怎样能做出最大贡献,三是什么样的结果影响深远。 认识你自己之后,要付诸相应的行动,才是管理你自己。鸡年到了,让我们闻鸡起舞、行动起来。这是我的新年祝愿,也是与广大读者的共勉。 4月25日 好累最近的课程很紧张,身体和脑力透支。但是发现上课很有乐趣,人要是一生都在课堂上就好了~ 昨天经历了三个半小时的考试,好累啊,写字写得手都累了。有什么什么学校是指上课不考试的啊?考试制度真是破坏了上学的完美。 4月13日 企业决策很想自己建造起来一个很成功的企业,而且是世界知名的。现在做起来真的和想像中的不一样。人要做事情就必须从艰难的路上走过才可以,我现在就在这条艰难的路上走着,但是我很快乐,我相信我会再走过这条路以后就看到我希望的憧憬。我相信不惧挑战,勇士面前无险路。 领先的制造企业技术创新的水平很高。创新不仅要求企业对无意识错误的高度包容,还要求它具备强烈的冒险精神。只有当经理人及时了解发生的错误、人们不把错误当成无法挽回的灾难时,冒险精神才能发挥作用。强权型领导手下的员工极力避开风险、力图少犯错误,而合作型和参与型的领导则鼓励员工去冒险 领先的制造企业拥有强大的企业文化,其核心是深入人心的价值观。在规范员工谨慎对待昂贵设备、报告可能造成的危害差错,以及在监控夜班生产工人行为时,这些价值观能够发挥重要作用。强权型领导借助员工的惧怕心理来约束行为,合作型和参与型的领导人则通过企业文化来影响行为。 领先的制造企业鼓励员工自由沟通,因为沟通是团队协作和绩效管理的基石。不过,强权型领导不会去推动自由的沟通,合作型和参与型的领导人则需要开放式的沟通来发挥这种领导风格的功效。
牢牢占据消费者心智的品牌只有几个,在品牌战中,赢家总是极少数。如果要玩品牌的游戏,就得打造独特的“品牌个性”,这样才有可能脱颖而出。 战略定位有五个条件。第一,必须要有一个独到的价值观,这个价值观有别于你的竞争对手;第二,你要有一个不同的价值链;第三,找到好的战略平衡点;第四,好的战略特点可以使价值链之间互相促进,各种工作流程之间完美结合;第五,指标具有连续性,即在一定的时间内以一定的方式做某件事情。
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