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.
Maybe it's not quite poka-yoke, but. . .
John,
You raise a good point. I suppose whether or not it's "true" poka-yoke depends on whether the internal surveys and review are a routine and necessary part of the CEO's annual review. If, for example, he had to submit the feedback to the board of directors each year and list his action steps based on that feedback, that would get a whole lot closer to true poka-yoke.
But no, it doesn't actually prevent him from sucking, or treating his employees like dirt, or running the company into the ground. Given that humans have free will, my guess is that true human poka-yoke is impossible.
What do you think?