Top Conference Salutes The Scientific Leader

The Scientific Leader is pleased to announce that three submissions to the 2009 Society for Industrial-Organizational Psychology (SIOP) conference have been accepted.

The Society for Industrial-Organizational Psychology (SIOP) is the premier professional association for scientists and practitioners of human behavior in the workplace.  Each year, they hold a popular conference with peer-reviewed articles and symposia.  The number of proposed sessions always far outstrips the number of available places, and so the standards for acceptance are relatively steep by the peer-review group who decides on placement.

Three submissions were accepted for presentation at the next conference, to be held in New Orleans

1.  Enhancing Utility Analysis: Introducing the Cue See Model

I’m particularly proud of this paper, as it represents a new approach to asset valuation, both tangible and intangible.  While traditional I/O Psychology has its’ own tradition to quantify the value of human performance called Utility Analysis, it largely does not include any of the other organizational sciences’ ideas.  My paper tries to synthesize finance, psychology, industrial/systems engineering, computational organizational theory, and computer science ideas into the “Cue See Model”.  The hope is that the approach can be useful to managers and theoreticians by helping to specificy how a company creates profit across levels.  Once understood, then the Cue See Model can be used to track it, objectively, without relying on subjective human ratings.  My hope is that future studies will empirically demonstrate the models’ efficacy, and help avoid the fields traditional problem of measuring and monetizing outcomes.

2.  Succession Planning: Beyond Manager Nomitations

Led by our parent company, Human Capital Growth’s Dr. Shreya Sarkar-Barney, this panel discussion will include experts on leadership discussing the use of psychometric assessment instruments and other science-based practice methods for succession.  Panelists include:

Shreya Sarkar-Barney, Human Capital Growth, Chair
Matt Barney, Infosys, Panelist
Eric Braverman, Merck, Panelist
Lori Homer, Microsoft, Paelist
Jennifer Irwin, Proctor & Gamble Company, Panelist
Kevin Veit, Gabbard and Co, Panelist

3. The Role of IO Psychology in Resolving the Healthcare Crisis

I was asked to be the discussant – a senior leader with expertise in the area to comment on all the papers in the session ,as I was the Chief Learning Officer & VP for Sutter Health previously.  It will focus on interventions
targeted at improving outcomes related to quality of patient care. The
interventions to be covered focus on selection, leadership and culture, team
training, safety, and others. The session will represent research on various
levels of the organization, including management, nurses, and frontline staff.

Kristin Charles, Kronos Talent Management, Co-Chair
David Scarborough, Kronos Talent Management/Black Hills State U., Co-Chair
Justin Rossini, DDI, Inc., Author
Sallie Weaver, Univsersity of Central Florida and MedAxiom, Author
David Hofmann, Univ of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Author
Matt Barney, Infosys, Discussant

The papers I’ll be reviewing in this session include:
Defining quality of care: Behavioral competency models across nursing
departments: Kristin Charles, Autumn Krauss
Addressing Care Quality, Engagement, and Retention Likelihood: a Selection
Perspective: Justin Rossini
Can Team Training Improve Operating Room Quality of Care?: Sallie
Weaver, Michael Rosen, Deborah DiazGranados, Rebecca Lyons, Elizabeth Lazzara,
Andrea Barnhard, Eduardo Salas
Leadership Levers to Motivate Error Management: David Hofmann, Adam
Grant

I hope some of the readers of this blog are able to attend this excellent conference, and if you are, please comment below or send me a note (matt at scientificleader.com) so I’ll get to meet you.

Marriott Brand Equity Overcomes Hiccups

I’ve been fond of Marriott Hotels for many years.  Marriott properties are consistently clean, affordable, and the restaurants are good.  I especially liked the J.D. Marriott in Hong Kong – their Dim Sum breakfast was amazingly good.  Because I’ve had such a good experience, I strongly prefer Marriott to other brands.

Recently, my family took a vacation to the Marriott Timber Lodge.  They offered us a special deal, as “Marriott Rewards” members with tens of thousands of “points” from prior visits, and we got a great bargain.  But after we reserved our room, my wife noticed some bad reviews on tripadvisor.com about this particular property.  They claimed that lackadaisical European students took jobs there to ski, but didn’t give good service and that the rooms weren’t clean.  Worried, but skeptical, we called customer service.  The representative politely reassured us that we had numerous sources of recourse if we were less than satisfied, so we went ahead and checked out the hotel ourselves.

While it wasn’t a flawless stay, the hotel was absolutely beautiful, clean and organized for lots of complimentary fun.  The location is excellent – nearby many nice Lake Tahoe activities and restaurants – right on the Nevada-California boarder.   Our reservation included a sofa bed for our two boys, and when we noticed our room didn’t have one, we were pleased to get a much better and bigger room with a better view.  Kevin, the housekeeping supervisor, gave one of our already discounted nights for free to compensate for our trouble.  The rest of the stay was just great.  We had a wonderful time.

Marriott’s excellent brand is a good example of what Industrial Engineers and Lean Six Sigma practitioners would consider variance reducing mechanism.  These are the sorts of advanced topics The Scientific Leader enjoys teaching to advanced practitioners, called “Black Belts” and “Master Black Belts.  Brand equity is created because companies like Marriott consistently deliver the value they promise.  Consistently good performance causes people to associate all services of Marriott as valuable and consistently good.  Consistent performance is possible because firms like Marriott systematically manage their processes, both inputs such as high quality employees, training and high quality furnishings; and they combine these together so consistently well that it makes customers happy.

Customers return the favor by being willing to give more business, telling their friends and paying premiums beyond those without such a good reputation.  In my case, the brand also overcame some small negative feedback on a Web 2.0 social network.  Because I already had such a good impression of Marriott, I discounted heavily the negative feedback on tripadvisor.com; and now that I’ve experienced Marriott’s Timber Lodge myself, I can completely ignore the negative feedback as we had a great time.

Could Marriott have improved their process and not had the hiccups I experienced, or those of the customers who wrote on tripadvisor.com?  Sure, they can and should.  Lean Six Sigma methods can help.  But Brand involves the complete set of memories I’ve had of all the value I’ve gotten from them.  One “delighter” was that every time I called the front desk, they answered, “How may I serve the Barney family today”?  That’s not happened to me before.  Little touches like this are pleasant surprises, and because my total experience was great, I’m still very loyal and will continue to differentially frequent Marriott whenever I can.  What brands make you loyal?  Have you noticed that superior brands lower the cost of sales and reduce sales variability?  Are you making investments in your company or personal brand? Do you consider your Brand management as part of your Enterprise Risk Management process – to mitigate customer and marketplace risks?

Management, Business, Brand, Customer, Delight, Variation, Risk

Six Sigma Use Growing

Instantis, released the results of their study suggesting that inspite of the current economic environment, 64% of organizations are expanding their Six Sigma and Operational Excellence programs.  Only 31% were maintaining the same size of their existing program and just 5% were shrinking.  The study also reported that 68% of respondents indicated that “establishing and sustaining executive leadership and support is the single biggest threat to the continued success of the process improvement movement.

Their study left me unclear, however, as to whether the respondents were referring only to the classic Six Sigma, that improves one small set of outcomes (e.g. quality, cost), using a systematic approach called “DMAIC” (Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, Control); or it includes the use of the Toyota Production System (Lean); and Design for Six Sigma (DFSS or DMADV).  It also seemed to miss some of the innovations to preventing defects, and software such as Business Process Management / Workflow influenced when I led Motorola University’s Six Sigma practice, and integrated into Motorola’s revitalized, “Digital Six Sigma” program to prevent defects and manage processes effectively.

Technorati Tags: Six Sigma, Lean, Design for Six Sigma, DMAIC, DMADV,

New LinkedIn Groups: Evidence-based Management & Rasch Measurement

I have found LinkedIn to be a very useful professional networking tool.  When I failed to find a Director of Lean Six Sigma at Sutter Health, it helped me find the fantastic Andreea Hurduzeu.  I’m also starting to use it to network with others who value science-based practice.  To connect with those of you who are also interested in evidence-based approaches, I started two new groups on LinkedIn:

• Evidence-based Management is a group inspired by Pfeiffer & Sutton’s “Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths & Total Nonsense: Profiting from evidence-based management”.

• Rasch Measurement is a group inspired by J. Mike Linacre, one of the premier living psychometricians who taught me about modern, objective human measurement.

If you’re interested in joining, I would be very pleased to include you.  Drop me a note requesting to join, and I’ll send you an invitation.

Technorati Tags: Evidence-Based Management, Rasch Measurement, Psychometrics, Item Response Theory, Metrics, LinkedIn

Welcome to the Scientific Leader

Welcome

The Scientific Leader was inspired by many years of work applying what two Stanford Professors, Bob Sutton and Jeffrey Pfeffer call evidence-based management.

Our Founder is an Industrial/Organizational Psychologist, and had launched several corporate Universities and Six Sigma deployments in prior roles with Sutter Health, Merck, Motorola, Lucent Technologies and AT&T. As co-editor of the best selling “The New Six Sigma“, and the forthcoming “The Scientific Leader”, our passion is around teaching the most innovative tools to drive business results by using practical business science.

The Scientific Leader