About Dan Markovitz
Dan Markovitz is the founder and president of TimeBack Management. Prior to founding his own firm, Mr. Markovitz held management positions at Sierra Designs, Adidas, CNET and Asics Tiger. Learn More...
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Leveling; smoothing out the flow; e.g., doing two performance evaluations a day for 3 weeks, rather than ten a day for three days -- and then needing to take a vacation because you're so burned out.
Overburdening people, process, or equipment; e.g., people working 100 hour weeks for months on end -- come to think of it, like most lawyers and accountants.
Uneveness or variability; e.g., leaving work at the normal time on Thursday, but having to stay at the office till midnight on Friday because the boss finally got around to giving you that project...at 4:30pm.
Waste; activities that your customer doesn't value and doesn't want to pay for; e.g., billing your customer for the really expensive 10am FedEx delivery because you didn't finish the document on time.
Good strategy but is it Poka-yoke?
I agree CEO's need to work to keep real feedback available to them. Getting trapped in the center of a bunch of yes-men (especially if the organization "doesn't want to hear problems just solutions...). But is it poka-yoke? It doesn't really mistake proof I don't think. It provides some additional information that can be used wisely to avoid mistakes.
That would seem closer to explaining to workers that a USB cable must be plugged in with the side that says top on the top. Which is not the same as designing the USB cable to only plug in if you have the top in the right orientation.
Granted this distinction might not be that great. I have just thought about the idea of applying mistake proofing thinking to problems (but not actually implementing counter-measures, other than awareness) that prevent mistakes. To me this seems like something less than actual poka-yoke.