Waiting targets for accident and emergency to be scrapped

At last, some common sense in government. After years of persisting with the damaging philosophy of arbitrary targets micro managed from Whitehall our new government sweeps away Blair's foolishness at a stroke and hands control back to the managers. Well done Cameron, and thanks for listening.

Link to the Guardian article.

Foxconn factory ends condolence payments over suicides

One suicide note appears to have convinced Foxconn that their policy of compensating the families of suicide victims is motivating employees to take their own lives.

Foxconn factory ends condolence payments over suicides

This looks like an example of one of the two big mistakes which are commonly made when interpreting data. In this case they are treating a Special Cause of Variation as Common and reacting inappropriately. As Deming said, don't just do something - stand there.

The sin of believing your own publicity.

All of what we do, for our clients and for ourselves is based in systems thinking. As a result we've been more keenly interested than most at the unfolding story of the Toyota crisis. We've watched Toyota's growth both in reputation and sales over many a year now and always with admiration - until now. Over recent years there has also been a boom in Toyota based management books. Indeed it's hard to find a management book published in the last ten years that doesn't have either Toyota in its title or contain copious mentions of the company.

The story of the gaffes committed in not listening to their customer's complaints and pretending there was no problem, to accepting that there was a problem but not reacting quickly enough to it will no doubt produce many reprints of those books and spawn a whole new set in the categories of PR and disaster management.

The question in my head through all of this has been - did they begin to believe their own publicity, were their heads turned by so much praise? In fact I was reminded of the case of Sainsburys who were a client of ours through the 80s and 90s. They were at that time family led and quite simply believed that they were the best, which they had been without doubt, but they refused to believe that the runners coming up on the rails were a genuine threat. We were working with other retailers at the time and could see clearly that Sainsburys weren't as good as they thought they were in many areas and were clinging to what had worked well in the 70s. They just didn't listen to us and they were in for a terrible shock when Tesco, the upstart they disliked the most hit them very hard indeed.

Toyota appears to be the other side of that coin. The new kids on the worldwide block who overtook the old established front runners and forgot to carry on doing what they had done so well.

There's an excellent interview by John Shook on his Lean Enterprise web site with Takahiro Fujimoto, who thinks that Toyota did start to believe in their own infallibility which I would urge you to read.

PS. We have no control over the Google ads placed adjacent to these posts, one of which currently reads - Employee Rewards. Widest range of incentives to increase workplace motivation. - If you're tempted to click on that, please don't. Instead take a look at Alfie Kohn's book Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise and Other Bribes or listen to his podcast.

Canon FD 85mm f1.2L

I own a Canon F1. It's a professional 35mm camera from the days before digital and autofocus and I'm always on the lookout for more lenses for it. I have a saved search on eBay for Canon FD fit L series lenses and I've noticed something unusual that I would like explained.

L series lenses with the FD fitting are reasonably rare and you can normally expect search results to throw up five or six 'buy it now' and auction items. The lenses sell for £400 to £500 for the mid range lenses, while fisheyes and telephotos are much more expensive. There were well over 100 FD lenses in the range and I would guess that the L series would provide around 15% of the total range but a much lower percentage in terms of units sold due to their very high prices when new. They are immensely collectable today because of their exceptional build quality and optical excellence. Just like the modern autofocus L series in fact.

What surprises me and I think needs an explanation is how a lens like the Canon FD 85mm f1.2L which hasn't shown up on my searches at all before this week can provide six results out of seven for L series lenses in today's search with sellers from the UK, Japan, USA and Ireland. I've noticed recently how a rare lens like this one suddenly becomes available in disproportionately high numbers and then vanishes again. Recent lenses to behave like this are the FD 50mm f1.2L and the FD 24-35mm f3.5L. The sellers are usually from the USA, Ireland or the UK and the buying options vary between low start bid, to high start bid and high priced buy it now.

I'm sure it's not coincidence, though I can't see how it can be anything but. Try it yourself. Just search for "Canon FD L lens" on eBay. When you read this you might find that a different lens is having its day.

I wonder is there a covert production facility knocking out fake new/used L series FD lenses in small quantities in the Far East and distributing them through an international consortium of eBay sellers or is there another explanation. Answers please.

Carrot and Stick. Do incentives work in business?

Dan Pink says that incentives only appear to work when workers benefit financially for working faster or harder on simple tasks that require no thought. But when a wide peripheral thinking vision becomes necessary the wheels come off as incentives are introduced. So if you're a pieceworker on a bonus, the money is probably well spent on you, but if you're a banker on a bonus we're probably headed for a worldwide financial crisis.

If you happened to miss the last banker induced worldwide financial crisis and can't wait for the next one then watch the video and see how The Candle Problem illustrates all this very nicely.