Thank you for the tunes and the moves.
Today we live in a post "credit boom" era... we've spent the last 2 decades inebriated with cheap or even free credit. And like an "all you can eat" banquet, we've had little respect for the credit we used. Now change has been forced on us and we must adapt.
After a recent company memo about improving the business and compulsory annual reviews; I decided to do some research in to ways of improving my effectiveness as a manager and the best way is usually to look at what the best of the best have done in the past.
In my quest for the best of the best I came across William Edwards Deming (you can google his name for more info).
In one of his books Out of the Crisis he describes 14 points for management and transforming business effectiveness, none of them are catchy phrases, but any GM/COO interested in more than short term share holders could do worse...
- Create constancy of purpose toward improvement of product and service, with the aim to become competitive and stay in business, and to provide jobs.
- Adopt the new philosophy. We are in a new economic age. Western management must awaken to the challenge, must learn their responsibilities, and take on leadership for change.
- Cease dependence on inspection to achieve quality. Eliminate the need for inspection on a mass basis by building quality into the product in the first place.
- End the practice of awarding business on the basis of price tag. Instead, minimize total cost. Move towards a single supplier for any one item, on a long-term relationship of loyalty and trust.
- Improve constantly and forever the system of production and service, to improve quality and productivity, and thus constantly decrease costs.
- Institute training on the job.
- Institute leadership. The aim of supervision should be to help people and machines and gadgets to do a better job. Supervision of management is in need of overhaul, as well as supervision of production workers.
- Drive out fear, so that everyone may work effectively for the company.
- Break down barriers between departments. People in research, design, sales, and production must work as a team, to foresee problems of production and in use that may be encountered with the product or service.
- Eliminate slogans, exhortations, and targets for the work force asking for zero defects and new levels of productivity. Such exhortations only create adversarial relationships, as the bulk of the causes of low quality and low productivity belong to the system and thus lie beyond the power of the work force.
- a. Eliminate work standards on the factory floor. Substitute leadership.
b. Eliminate management by objective. Eliminate management by numbers, numerical goals. Substitute workmanship.
- a. Remove barriers that rob the hourly worker of his right to pride of workmanship. The responsibility of supervisors must be changed from sheer numbers to quality.
b. Remove barriers that rob people in management and in engineering of their right to pride of workmanship. This means, inter alia," abolishment of the annual or merit rating and of management by objective.
- Institute a vigorous program of education and self-improvement.
- Put everybody in the company to work to accomplish the transformation. The transformation is everybody's job.
Another set of management principals is The Deming System of Profound Knowledge which advocates:
- Appreciation of a system: understanding the overall processes involving suppliers, producers, and customers (or recipients) of goods and services (explained below);
- Knowledge of variation: the range and causes of variation in quality, and use of statistical sampling in measurements;
- Theory of knowledge: the concepts explaining knowledge and the limits of what can be known (see also: epistemology);
- Knowledge of psychology: concepts of human nature.
I thought I would share this tid-bit.
I’ve always had mixed feelings about doctors. In one hand I know that they’re there to help me if I have a problem with my body. In the other hand I’ve had nothing but bad help from every doctor I’ve ever visited, and if it wasn’t bad it was definitively a waste of money and time.
Unfortunately I’m not a qualified doctor and I live in a country that will not provide even the most basic of medicines without a “doctors” prescription. But I’m also a dreamer and here’s a brief redaction of one of my dreams.
Maybe dream isn’t a good word for it, because it’s more of a conscious wish.
My dislike for doctors started when I was 13, up until then I had a generally very healthy life, no broken limbs, serious infections or operations. The worse were Chickenpox and Mumpes which were handed down to me by my older brother.
Anyway back to 13... I contracted the flu and made the mistake of seeing a Dr. The Dr. prescribed 500mg a Amoxicillin (yes I can remember the type) a week later and I had really bad flu and my tonsils had swollen up so much I couldn’t eat, and drinking was very painful. I managed to crawl to the “Dr.” again and the bastard prescribed me yet more antibiotics, this time Amoxicillin and another type. My symptoms didn’t get any worse but they sure didn’t get any better until I completely stopped taking the antibiotics.
In all I was out of action for 7 weeks of a great Mediterranean summer. My tonsils never really recovered, so another Dr. thought they should be removed. Luckily I didn’t attended the surgery because I was eventually able to cure myself with some Cell Salts.
Over the years, I’ve had other issues with “Drs” from wrong prescriptions for Conjunctivitis, to charging me $100 for a 2 second diagnosis to a Dr not willing to prescribe a medicine that would have resolved sever inflammation from a fall.
What have I learned from Drs?
I’ve learned that they can kill you just as well as they can help. And according to research by Dr. Barbara Starfield of the Johns Hopkins School Public Health (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10904513?dopt=Abstract and http://faculty.jhsph.edu/?faculty_id=667); doctors are the 3rd leading cause of death in the US.
I now research my symptoms and diagnose myself. If I can’t find a legally available treatment I will go to a Dr and ask him to prescribe what I need. Needless to say I have been healthy since; apart from some broken vertebras.
Get to your dream already!
My dream is MedNet.
What is MedNet? MedNet is an international medical information network. All consultancies, practices, surgeries, homeopathies, holistic centres, hospitals, dentist, pharmacies, etc are connected. The network contains a knowledge base of every medical procedure, medicine, herb, compound, allergy, virus, bacteria ever discovered by man.
How does it work? Numerous geographically dispersed connected databases with mankind’s medical knowledge. Health providers use a national registry system that references the knowledge.
Example:
In the USofA poorer individuals have a Medicaid number, this is a record in a database. Now say I got the Flu and decided to play Russian roulette by going to a Dr., I could log on to my national MedNet by entering my Medicaid number; I could then press a “I’m not feeling well button”, it would then ask me a couple of questions to determine how bad I'm feeling. Because I’m lazy and I want to see a Dr. I just click on “I don’t know” the system then looks for the nearest practice with an available slot or my usual Dr. and an appointment with Dr. Suresh Chandra is made.
With my Medicaid card I crawl over to the Dr. who then with my approval looks up my medical records. He proceeds to diagnose me and enters my symptoms. MedNet knows that the latest N1H1 influenza is going around in my area and also knows what’s been reported as the best treatment. The Dr. doesn’t like MedNet so he wasn’t paying attention when MedNet recommended a allergy cross referenced treatment and figured he knew that all I need is some Amoxicillin.
The Dr. can only prescribe medicines on MedNet so he goes to the “Treatment” tab and selects Amoxicillin... MedNet tells him that antibiotics are ineffective against Viral infections and could cause death. MedNet then reminds the Dr. that patients have reported that the most effective treatment has been a combination of 100mg Calcium Sulphate, 1gr Vitamin C and warm UV light daily.
I go to the nearest Chemist with my Medicaid card, the Chemist looks up my treatment record and gives it to me.
I go home and do the treatment. 5 days later I feel much better but I notice a wart on my foot, so I log on to MedNet; I get prompted to confirm efficacy of my previous treatment, I then try and arrange an appointment for my wart... this time I feel better so I enter my symptoms. MedNet concurs with my diagnosis and also notes other patients having contracted Human Papilloma virus soon after visiting Dr. Suresh’s practice. MedNet recommends a treatment of applying a 3cmx3cm piece of duct tape over the Wart for 14days and alerts the Department of Public Health of an outbreak of Human Papilloma virus at Dr. Suresh’s practice deferring all future appointments to the practice.
We already have similar systems available to the Tax Office and Road Authorities, I believe it’s much more appropriate to apply this technology to the health industry.
The 1st step is getting the knowledge in to databases, then getting the practices to connect securely and then letting the system grow organically.
Microsoft is still trialing HealthVault (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_HealthVault) and there are numerous other systems out there like Google Health and Indivo... these are fairly useless without integration with health providers. I believe access to accurate health information really needs to be a basic Human Right and our archaic health management systems need to embrace the 21 century. Some hospitals have HIT systems that allow digital sharing of patients records, but again they lack the integration.
I guess at the end of the day I would like to breath in to a device connected to MedNet and for the device to tell me every treatable problem I have. Like when your car goes for a service they plug the ECU (Electronic Control Unit) in and print out the fault codes.
I would also like my DNA sequence and possible hacks so I can make my beard grow to a defined length :).
I created 2 web parts for aiding the redirection of users to specific area I would like to share with y'all.
- Group Page Redirector; this has a group property, a URL and redirect once property.
If you belong to the selected group it will redirect you to the specified URL. This can be handy if you want to show specific content to a group; like an announcement or terms and conditions. Just add more web parts for other groups.
- SubSite Redirector; this doesn't any properties... it just checks which Sub Sites you have access to, and if you only have access to one it will redirect you to it.
They're both simple Web Parts with the source/project code and wsp.
Also you can set them to Minimized and no Chrome, so that they're not visible.
So you want to know what a specific user can and can't see in your SharePoint site?... well for that you'll need to perform an eye examination.
OK really you want to know what items/list/sites for which a specific user has access?
Well believe it or not you can't with the standard SharePoint tools, but it's a fairly simple exercise to create a web part that does, and to save time here's one I made before.
It's fairly simple... get the SPUser > Check what groups he/she belongs to > loop through all the lists > items then the sub sites...
I show an icon for SPBasePermissions instead of the usual Full Control, Contribute, ect. The tree goes down to items, but won't fetch them until you click on the list expand icon to aid performance.
Since I'm using SPUser it also works for forms authentication.
If you don't have permission to check permissions on an object you can set a web part property to show this or not.
In any event the whole project source is included, so feel free to play and recommend changes.
Keywords: RenderPreText RenderPostText TreeNode PeopleEditor SPUser TreeView SPGroup HasUniqueRoleAssignments TreeNodePopulate
I mostly work with Virtual Machines and I like to pre-allocating the disk size. When I created my VM I figured 10GB would be enough for C:\ with Win2003 Server and a couple of SDK's and if I needed more I could always add another drive. I was wrong.
After 2 years my faithful Win2003 dev VM is out of space on C: and I can't shuffle any more files around.
My C:\windows\installer directory is >2GB so this is my prime candidate to move.
Luckily there are always solutions to problems... no I'm not going to delete the directory, or change my registry to point to a new location.
I'm going to add a symbolic link from C:\windows\installer to F:\installer.
- Download Junction from http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896768.aspx
- Copy OR move C:\windows\installer to F:\installer
- Delete all the files in C:\windows\installer
- Close all your Explorer windows
- Run > cmd> C:\junction C:\WINDOWS\Installer F:\installer
That should do it. I wrote a batch (run.bat) script to do the whole procedure.
@set src=F:\a
@set trg=F:\b
::copy %src%\* %trg%
::detele %src%\*
move /y %src%\* %trg%
junction %src% %trg%
pause
This should work for most directories. The batch file should be in the same directory as junction.exe.
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