Negligence

If not with the book – criminal psychology, I cannot find the subjective factors of negligence.  I list out the these factors as follows:

1. Attitude
• Actually, it is the habit of acting.  It can be subdivided into the following:
• Irresponsibility
• Confrontation
• Arrogance
• Selfishness
2. Thinking & Cognition
• Lack thinking of the right-doing & wrong-doing
• Insufficient cognition of the self which leads to insufficient self-understanding, over-appraisal, wrong interpretation, low self-control
• Illusion
3. Attention
• Involuntary attention
• No attention at all
• Voluntary attention
• Attention under the will power
• Post voluntary attention
• Habit of attention developed after repeating voluntary attention
4. Emotion
• stressful emotion can lead to impulsion which affect correct judgment
• adamant emotion will paralyze the individual fail to react to the environment
• anxious emotion leads to internal imbalance which causes individual losing the right reaction
5. Character & Temperament
• No vision, No mission means an individual missing passion, fortitude & responsibility
• Bad temper individual is self-centered and over-value oneself
6. Intelligence & Experience
• Low intelligence to interpret situation
• Insufficient experience to deal with situation
7. Memory
• Poor memory means an individual fail to retrospect and introspect
• Memory inhibition leads to inappropriate interpretation of situation
8. Unconsciousness factors
• Losing focus due to psychological factors or physical factors

Although it is analysis in criminal psychology, we can reference it to undue diligence of individual performing his duty in organization.

Excel: Unique Item function (a user-defined function example)

I don’t prefer using pivot table.  The major reason is the data resulted from the pivot table calculation cannot be referred.  Of course, I do not reject the usage of pivot table.  It does have its flexibility when viewing the data in different dimensions at real time.

Nevertheless, when building data matrix, it is not efficient to find out the unique item of a column by using command of “Remove Duplicate”  under “Data”.  To this end, I write a user-defined function to automatically sort out the unique item.

The source can be found in the following link:

http://www.box.net/shared/uip8x70ysx

The prototype is as follows:

=fUniqueItem(DataRange, UsedRange, SortOrder, CriteriaRange1, Criteria1, CriteriaRange2, Criteria2, CriteriaRange3, Criteria3)

DataRange – it is the data where unique item is to be sorted out

UsedRange – it is the range of unique item already been identified so as to avoid duplication

The following parameters are Optional

SortOrder – either true or false, default is true which is to list out the unique in ascending order for true, descending for false

CriteriaRange1 & criteria1 – the first criteria range & criteria for filtering unique item

………

Example 1 (no criteria range): To sort out the city out of cities (column A), please refer to the cell formula – J4

Example 2 (with criteria range): To sort out the type out of the types (column B) with city being CongQing, please refer to the cell formula – L14

There are also 3 data matrix for illustration.

Tolerance of not-fully-satisfied result

I am reading “Criminal Psychology” written by 2 Chinese psychologists (羅大華/何為民).  I try to pick up one concept from this book and reference to a situation of people management.  In this book, it is stated that the delinquent criminal has a common psyche – their tolerance of unfulfilled needs is very low so that whenever there is frustration of dissatisfaction, they cannot stay calm and will do something either drastically to meet their needs (commit crime) or become furious against any person who seems as barrier.  It is easy to understand this principles; however, when it happens in people management, the manager acts like a delinquent.

A manager insists best practice without considering the environmental limitation is just like a delinquent who cannot tolerate not-fully-satisfied result.  His reaction is to roar at the subordinates who could not work out the desired result.  Does it help?  In the above situation, it is easier to identify that the delinquent is to blame in public.  In business world, only the subordinates are to blame.  The manager, because of its superior position, can escape from any blame without being condemned for insufficient support in terms of resources, timeframe and improper structure.  I had ever been in that kind of situation.  Unfortunately, I was in the subordinate side.

Currently, I am working in a client company whose operation is no worse or no better than my previous company.  However, the project leader – an understanding American – from day 1 has diagnosed that the team is not going to provide best practice, rather, a “low hanging fruit” solution.  The best practice will only be considered once the staff can adept to new operation flow.  Bravo!  This project is deemed to success I strongly believe as I will be fully supporting with all I might.

Forgot to mention my functional role – I am the Excel programmer of production scheduling.  It is interesting I am not doing finance which I have been working for > 20 years.  I very enjoy this new job task as actually, I am rather a go-getter and I do not mind title as long as I can provide workable solution.  But the cost is I have already rejected 3 chances of permanent jobs of Finance/Accounting!!!

Identifying Orthodoxies

Actually, the reason why I read the book “Innovation to the core” is due to the suggestion by Amazon.com when I placed order for a book of TRIZ (thanks to Thomas Lee for the advise, I will write some review after digesting theory of resolving inventive problem – TRIZ).  I am not engineer, let alone scientist; but I can still do invention or re-invention in the subject area of daily jobs.  Interestingly, my new job is no longer in Finance/Accounting discipline, rather, it is in application programming.  To be honest, I do programming in every company I have ever worked for.  Not surprisingly, the reason I could do it because I maintain in low key when the action seems to challenge the orthodox – it is “the way” to rely on the ERP to perform calculation of large volume of data.  Rather, the way should be whenever the orthodoxies could not work, there is chance of innovation.  I like the book in its content of elaborating orthodoxies which also provides the way of identifying orthodoxies.  It is as follows:

1. Surfacing the dogmas (ask why commonalities exist)
2. Finding the absurdities (from the eye of customers)
3. Going to extremes (test the threshold and be bold to test the limit of possibility)
4. Searching for the “and” (be a contrarian)

By all means, to challenge is not for the sake of challenge.  We need to ask ourselves if the orthodoxies could resolve any issues that is bothering us.  If not, there should be something wrong with the orthodoxies which we should change instead of being changed a day.

Orthodoxies

I am reading a book – Innovation To The Core written by Peter Skarzynski & Rowan Gibson.

One of the way to innovation is challenging orthodoxies.  But before doing it, we need to know what orthodoxies are, why they are formed, what attributes the way of working to be orthodox and why they are not challenged or becoming sacred. 

“Orthodoxies are deeply held and broadly shared conventions about what drives success within a company or an industry.”  (Can it be regarded as part of organization culture?)

“Orthodoxies are about mind-sets – how we have conditioned ourselves to perceive, to filter, to respond.  They tend to become embedded in the way a company or industry does business, forming the dominant logic about the ‘right’ way to compete, price, organize, market, and develop products and services.  Orthodoxies are not by definition ‘bad’ or necessarily wrong.  In fact, they are often essential for creating a common understanding across a dispersed organization, allowing teams to work together smoothly and efficiently.  (However) The problem starts when their usefulness has eroded and they start to stifle rather than foster progress.  Orthodoxies are potentially limiting if a company can’t see beyond or around them.”

The critical is why their usefulness has eroded.  It is due to change in environment whereby the desired environment for breeding the orthodox is gone.  Overtly, if people are alerted that the environment has changed, I do not see the reason why people are stubborn to the orthodox.  The problem is people do not know what environment contribute to the success of the orthodox.  It is again a matter of communication.  Everybody knows the logic that if A exists, then B is triggered; If A does not exist, how comes B could still hold true.  The problem is whether or not people know the essence of A.

If it is embarrassingly obvious, it must be right!

I just finished the 6th book of Theory of Constraints – Isn’t it obvious?  Its theme is on retailing.  A forecast on a single store can be very fluctuating but the forecast for a region of stores can be less fluctuating than a single store.  It is basic statistics, inherently simple and embarrassing to the veterans if they are not aware.  In this book, there is a sparkling sentence as the subject of this entry – if it is embarrassingly obvious, it must be right.

I thought many of us have ever experienced with the situation that when we thought we are veteran, being sophisticated in a certain field, a youngster or an outsider points out an obvious mistake which has last for years without any revelation by the incumbents, we reflexively defend our standpoint because it is embarrassing to us – the veterans.  Are we too indulged with our own position?  Probably.

Let me quote an example.  ERP system is often restricted by the rigid presentation of data, says, the multi-level BOM.  It is commonly known that Excel spreadsheet is not reliable as user can modify the formulas and content.  ERP system usually prints the BOM in plain text without formula.  If the user needs to do sensitivity analysis, there will be so many task in the ERP system.  But when it is in Excel, simple.  Will I.T. propose to use Excel to present data, probably not.  It is embarrassing to divert the ERP system to Excel.  I have that kind of experience working with the I.T. guys.