The Perils of Publishing

I admire Dan Poynter who has been leading the charge for self-publishing for the last couple of decades. This weekend, he offered his new book, Writing Your Book,  for free on Amazon.

The email I got Saturday morning said it was free that day. But when I went to Amazon, it was $2.99. There was a pricing snafu, so Dan had to wait a day to change the price and resend the email.

When I downloaded the book and started reading it, I found a significant typo in the heading for Chapter One. I emailed Dan about the typo and he replied: “I don’t know how I missed that.”

I read a lot and I find typos and formatting issues in almost every book. And I’m not immune. In my most recent book, I thought I cut and pasted an entire paragraph when I’d actually copied and pasted the paragraph. Neither I nor my editor caught the duplicate paragraph even though they were on back-to-back pages. As we know from Lean Six Sigma, inspectors don’t usually catch errors because they expect the creator to do a good job and the creators expect the inspector to find what they’ve missed.

The good news with digital books, however, is that you can fix the typo quickly and reload it. In the old days, I’d print a couple thousand books to keep the cost per book down. Print-on-demand (POD) technologies are dramatically reducing the need to do so. Amazon or Lightning Source can print a single book in a matter of minutes. No more big printings, no more inventory storage, no more worry about missed typos, duplications, etc.

The publishing world, except for the “short tail” of bestsellers is going digital and Lean. Books printed when you want one, not in case you want one. This is going to save a lot of trees, but probably hurt some printers.

Why Healthcare Sucks!

(Hint: It’s not the people.)

I had to find an new primary care physician because my old one was never available and whenever I went in for the annual physical, she said she requested blood work, but when I showed up after fasting to have my blood tested, they had no record of a request. If I could just wait 1.5 hours until her office opened, they could get the test from her (one floor up).

Nonsense! I don’t have time to wait for a doctor’s office to open to get the lab test supposedly ordered via the internet.

The new doctor sent my prescription to my usual King Soopers pharmacy electronically. So, I checked the next day.

Nothing.

They put in a call. Next day…nothing.

Then I got a call, “You’re prescription is ready.”

When I went to pick it up, “I’m sorry, but we haven’t received a call from your doctor.”

I said: “This is my third trip about this prescription, it’s also my last.”

The flustered pharmacist asked for my phone number to look me up another way. Nothing. She asked me to wait while she took care of other people in line.

I waited until she cleared them. Then she asked for my phone number again. This time she found the prescription. It had been filled TWICE!

Somehow, they had filled it using my first name instead of my last name.

WTF!

What’s wrong with healthcare? They can’t even get a patient’s name correct: first name, last name. HOW HARD CAN IT BE TO GET IT CORRECT? It’s on every credit card and magnetic strip in my wallet. What is so difficult? Scan the freaking hard?

The imagined accuracy of electronic medical records is a farce! If you type things in from a form, people can and will screw it up! Forcing patients to jump through hoops to figure out what lunacy caused their problem.

The pharmacist asked me: “Could it be your wife’s prescription?” No, stupid, you put it under the wrong name!

No wonder we have so many wrong site or wrong patient surgeries. Admissions staff and pharmacists are still using manual entry methods to handle things that should be handled electronically.

And I’m not alone! I watched people in front of me deal with the same sorts of problems.

It’s crazy!

This is what makes patient crazy. Not the personal care; the insanity of everything else.

Wake up! Get the systems to talk to each other!

I called my wife to find out what pharmacy called that my prescription was ready. She left the phone off the hook after I called.

Our telephone service stopped working

I had to call about repair. I was led through endless menus that basically told me it was my fault that our phone service with CenturyLink wasn’t working.

Isn’t that what the pharmacist told me? It was my fault that my prescription wasn’t ready?

Wrong! Your systems have failed me, your customer.
Your systems suck! Fix them!

Confused about causation and correlation (from Seth Godin’s blog)

Have you noticed that in most cities, every time there are lots of umbrellas, it’s raining?

From this analysis, the obvious way to make it rain is to be sure that everyone has an umbrella, preferably a black one, since that seems to be the kind that’s most visible during big storms.

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/

Manufacturing Returns to the USA

In the March 2012 HBR, Jeffrey Immelt, CEO of GE, talks about bringing manufacturing back to America. “Today at GE we are outsourcing less and producing more in the U.S. We created more than 7,000 jobs in 2010 and 2011.”

GE, like many other companies, have found the offshoring manufacturing isn’t always the boon it was thought to be. In Choosing the United States, authors Michael E. Porter and Jan W. Rikin show that the initial costs of outsourcing are high and the expected benefit declines rapidly by year four. There are many “hidden costs” of offshoring including many indirect costs like the lessened ability to respond to shifts in demand and loss of intellectual property.

At GE, teams in Louisville, Kentucky took a  25-year-old dishwasher line and, using a Lean approach, achieved these amazing results:

• Improved labor efficiency by 30%
• Reduced inventory by 60%
• Reduced cycle time by 68%
• Reduced space required by 80%

Smaller factory + less inventory = faster manufacturing and lower costs. That’s a recipe for the successful return of manufacturing to the U.S.

GE is working to reduce cycle time on a refrigerator line from nine hours to less than half.

Immelt says: “We need to believe that we can design, develop and produce here in the United States; that we can do it effectively and efficiently; and that we can win. We need the confidence and the mind-set that we can outperform anyone.”

What jobs could you create by “onshoring” manufacturing using a Lean factory? What markets could you dominate by being better, faster and cheaper than anyone anywhere?

The Myth of Brainstorming

In the January 30, 2012 issue of The New Yorker, author Jonah Lehrer examines one of the staples of Six Sigma–brainstorming. While widely taught as a way to identify problems and solutions, it turns out to be less than useful.

Tests of brainstorming over the last sixty years have shown that it produces fewer “feasible” and “effective” solutions than individuals working alone.

One of the rules of brainstorming is to not criticize or debate ideas. Research has shown, however, that debate and criticism are key to producing better ideas.

Stop Brainstorming! Start using data to pinpoint problems and then do root cause analysis to figure out why they are happening. When it comes to creating countermeasures, have individuals on the team work independently to generate solutions, then have the team discuss them. Allow debate and criticism. Better solutions will spring from the discussion.

http://www.dan-nelson.com/upload/brainstorming.pdf

Denver Blizzard Snow Shoveling Stupidity

Denver decided to plow the local streets during today’s storm. When I got up this morning, the snow was plowed up over my sidewalk (which I’m required by law to clear).

Some of my neighbors were busy shoveling the snow from their sidewalks back into the street instead of into their yard where it could benefit both their yard and local drivers. Does the phrase “waste and rework” come to mind?

I see this in lots of businesses as well. One group cleans up something on their “street” and another group shovels it back. All of this waste and rework eats profits and productivity that could be used elsewhere.

What are you shoveling and where are you shoveling it to?

Reducing Variation in Income

In the State of the Union address, President Obama spoke of the widening gap between the rich and the poor. Let’s call this by it’s Six Sigma name: variation.

When trying to improve the capability of any system, we think about the  specification limits. The American Dream is “the sky’s the limit”, so there is no upper specification limit.

President Obama wants the rich to do more, but if we want to reduce the variation in income, wouldn’t a better idea be raise the poor? Create a rising tide that lifts all of the boats?

When I was growing up, I don’t remember anyone teaching me how to make more money, invest the excess and grow wealth. It wasn’t until I was 35 that a couple of college friends recommended that I read The Richest Man in Babylon. The solution was so simple that most people wouldn’t even give it much value:

1. Invest 10% of your income.
2. Use 10% to pay down your debt.
3. Give away 10% of your income.
4. Live off the rest.

Sounds tough doesn’t it? But I put it to work and I went from broke to what President Obama would consider “rich” in 25 years.

Maybe we should teach poor people how not to be poor. Maybe we should address the limiting beliefs that plague Democrats and Republicans about the income gap. It’s not a problem to be solved by “fixing” the rich, but perhaps by educating the poor on how to become wealthy.

Why don’t we teach this in schools instead of geometry or algrebra. It would be a lot more helpful to everyone.

High School Dropouts are Defects

Denver Public Schools recently announced a graduation rate of 51.8% for 2009-2010 and a dropout rate of 6.4%. Somehow those numbers don’t add up. The total completion rate is 65.4%, which still means that 34.6% still don’t graduate.

Regardless, if you look at the dropout rate of 6.4% (about 3 sigma) or non-graduates (34.6% is about 1 sigma), the graduation rate is still dismal. In last night’s state of the union address, President Obama asked that we require students to graduate from high school. Maybe if today’s high school curriculum matched the needs of the students that would be possible. Or to periphrase Yogi Berra: “If they don’t want to come to school, how you going to stop them.”

Growing up in the 1950s, I felt like school was trying to prepare me to work on an assembly line. In this century, only a few people work on assembly lines or in agriculture. The rest are knowledge workers who have to think for a living.

Blaming students for dropping out isn’t the answer. If a business loses a customer, it’s because they stopped meeting the customer’s needs. Consider the idea that high school has stopped meetings the customer’s (i.e., student’s) needs.

If we think of students as customers and not inmates that we have to control, we’d realize that education needs to become more student-centric and less prepare-students-for-tests-that-ensure-next-year’s-funding oriented. If we think of families and society as customers, we might approach education quite differently.

Paul Simon’s lyrics still speak to the state of education: “When I think back on all the crap I learned in high school, it’s a wonder I can think at all.”

Let’s consider dropouts and non-graduates as “defects” produced by the education system and then do some root cause analysis on the why-why-why-why-why and then implement countermeasures to raise the graduation rate. Let’s not try to blame teachers or students or parents; it’s not their fault. As Deming would say: “It’s the system.”  It might be what students are learning or how it’s taught or cultural issues that vary from location to location, but the Five Whys will help figure it out and solve the problem locally and nationally.

It’s Six Sigma for K-12 schools. A little bit of analysis could go a long way.

Magazine in a Body Bag

The cover of my wife’s People magazine arrived in a “body bag” from the USPS. Nice cover, no magazine.

Did the USPS contact People magazine to order us another one? No, that’s our problem.

Are you creating more solutions or problems for your customers?

Why Retailers Lose Money

My wife ordered a set of monogrammed bath robes for our daughter and son-in-law from RedEnvelope. When they arrived, she checked them (unnecessaryinspection)…no monograms.

So she called (rework) and they told her to keep the two unmonogrammed ones (waste) and they would send two monogrammed ones.

A couple of days later, we did get two monogrammed bath robes (rework). The next day we got two more and the day after that we got two more (waste and rework). When we called (rework), they said, don’t return them because they’ve been monogrammed already.

So now, we have eight robes for the price of two. It probably cost RedEnvelope more than the order to replace them so many times.

This is what happens when the initial order goes wrong; sometimes the Fix-It Factory makes mistakes correcting the problem leading to more waste and rework.

Is your Fix-It Factory broken?