Walter Shewhart - Biography and Contribution

Date of Birth 18 March 1891


Shewhart's monumental work, Economic Control of Quality of Manufactured Product, published in 1931, is regarded as a complete and thorough exposition of the basic principles of quality control.

He graduated from the University of Illinois with bachelor’s and master’s degrees, and he received a doctorate in physics from the University of California at Berkeley in 1917. He taught for some time at the universities of Illinois and California, and  headed the physics department at the Wisconsin Normal School in LaCrosse.

Shewhart joined industry and  worked as an engineer at Western Electric from 1918 to 1924. At Bell Telephone Laboratories, he served in several capacities as a member of the technical staff from 1925 until his retirement in 1956.  He learned statistics by himself (self learning) and developed statistical process control concepts and related charts as a member of inspection staff at Hawthorne Plant of Western Electric.

He also lectured on quality control and applied statistics at the University of London, Stevens Institute of Technology, the graduate school of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and in India. He was a member of the visiting committee at Harvard’s Department of Social Relations, an honorary professor at Rutgers, and a member of the advisory committee of the Princeton mathematics department. Shewhart served the War Department, the United Nations, and the government of India, as consultant and he was active with the National Research Council and the International Statistical Institute. He was an honorary member of England’s Royal Statistical Society and the Calcutta Statistical Association. He was a fellow and officer of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American Statistical Association, and a fellow of the Econometric Society, the International Statistical Institute, and the New York Academy of Science.

He taught at the universities of Illinois and California, and he briefly headed the physics department at the Wisconsin Normal School in LaCrosse. He served for more than 20 years as the first editor of the Mathematical Statistics Series published by John Wiley and Sons.

Shewhart wrote Statistical Method from the Viewpoint of Quality Control in 1939. He published numerous articles in professional journals.  One of the historical documents of Shewhart kept at Bell Laboratories is  the historic memorandum of May 16, 1924, in which he proposed the control chart to his superiors.

He died on 11 March 1967.

Both Deming and Juran were in touch with him and both promoted his ideas vigorously and added their contribution.

http://asq.org/about-asq/who-we-are/bio_shewhart.html

http://www.qualitymag.com/articles/85973-remembering-walter-a-shewhart-s-contribution-to-the-quality-world

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2464836/

http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/25047976?sid=21105677761361&uid=3738256&uid=4&uid=2
Sankhya - The Indian Journal of Statistics, October 1948
Shewart visited and lectured in India three times during 1947 to 1948 and was awarded D.Sc. by Indian Statistical Institute in 1962.

http://www.amstat.org/about/statisticiansinhistory/bios/ShewhartWalter.pdf

Theory of Values - Component of Organizational Culture

The post is based on the literature review presented in the paper
VALUES WORK: A PROCESS STUDY OF THE EMERGENCE AND PERFORMANCE OF ORGANIZATIONAL VALUES PRACTICES
Academy of Management Journal
2013. Vol. 56. No. 1. 84-112.

VALUES WORK: A PROCESS STUDY OF THE EMERGENCE AND PERFORMANCE OF ORGANIZATIONAL VALUES PRACTICES

JOEL GEHMAN, University of Alberta, LINDA K. TREVIÑO and RAGHU GARUD,
Pennsylvania State University


PERSPECTIVES ON VALUES

An overview of the literature based on cognitive, cultural, and practice perspectives.

______________
The approach was inspired hy Reckwitz's (2002) discussion, as well as the numerous literatures that have circulated cognitive, cultural, and practice "turns" (e.g., Schatzki, Knorr-Cetina, & von Savigny, 2001).
______________

Cognitive Perspective on Values

Multiple strands of literature have explored values from a cognitive perspective, united around a definition of values as abstract conceptions of the desirable (Rohan, 2000). One strand  has  theorized

and validated various typologies of individual human values (Rokeach, 1973; Vernon & Allport, 1931). Schwartz (1992) offered a circumplex model of over 50 discrete values such as honesty, loyalty, authority, and power. Organizational scholars have extended these efforts by developing typologies of individual workplace values (Quinn & Rohrbaugh, 1983; Sagie, Elizur, & Koslowsky, 1996). These scholars have concluded that people differ primarily in the arrangements of their value priorities, rather than in the presence or absence of particular values (Schwartz, 1992; Williams, 1979).

Other researchers have considered individual and collective values as distinct phenomena (Hofstede,

Neuijen, Ohayv, & Sanders, 1990; House, Hanges, Javidan, Dorfman, & Cupta, 2004), suggesting that collectives such as organizations have values too. For instance, Schwartz (1999) found that individual and collective values differ significantly from one another structurally. As .one example, in hierarchical organizations, members must accept that they are inferior to some and superior to others. In this case, the values of "humility" and "power" are positively correlated at the collective level despite being negatively correlated at the individual level. An important issue left unaddressed by this work concerns how tensions between individual and collective values are worked out (Callon,

Lascoumes, & Barthe, 2009). Some scholars have attempted to address this issue by taking a "fit" approach (Kristof, 1996; Ostroff & Judge, 2007), examining the extent to which congruence between individual and organizational values explains outcomes such as job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and employee turnover (Chatman, 1991; Edwards & Cable, 2009). Others have related individual values and occupational choices Qudge & Bretz, 1992; Spokane, Meir, & Catalano, 2000), as well as managerial values and organizational strategies (Hage & Dewar, 1973; Hambrick & Brandon, 1988). Despite the empirical tractability of this approach, these scholars have proposed that more research is needed on how individual and organizational values come together (Kristof-Brown, Zimmerman, & Johnson, 2005: 321), describing these processes as "a theoretical black box that has been largely neglected" (Edwards, Cable, Williamson, Lambert, & Shipp, 2006: 822).

Viewed broadly, these different cognitive perspectives have offered increasingly nuanced vocabularies for describing values in abstract terms, while demonstrating the importance of both individual and collective values. Yet, in conceiving of values as abstractions, cognitive perspectives undertheorize the connections between individuals and collectives, and relatedly, how abstract values

come to be embodied and manifest in organizational practices.

Cultural Perspective on Values

Another approach to values is offered by those who have taken a cultural perspective that focuses

on the manifestation of values in various artifacts, rituals, and symbols (Harrison & Beyer, 1984; Mar

tin, 1992; Schein, 1985). One prominent strand of organizational culture studies emphasizes the role

of entrepreneurs and executives in instilling their personal values into an organization through a topdown, or hierarchical, process (Barnard, 1938; Schein, 1985). For instance, some scholars have

suggested that senior executives play an important role in influencing whether organizations adopt

compliance-driven or aspiration-oriented ethics programs (Weaver, Treviño, & Cochran, 1999).

Charismatic leadership is one avenue through which values are thought to be instilled (Brown &

Treviño, 2009; Fanelli & Misangyi, 2006). Consequently, some consider "engineering" an organization's values to be an essential executive function (Kunda, 1992; Peters & Waterman, 1982).

Many scholars have seen organizational cultures predominately in terms of values that are espoused

by management and then harmoniously and uniformly shared by employees (Barley, Meyer, &

Gash, 1988; Detert, Schroeder, & Mauriel, 2000). Yet organizational cultures may remain differentiated or fragmented (Martin, 1992). And efforts at engineering values have even been shown to induce "concertive control" (Barker, 1993). Other studies have shown that imposing values from the top down is difficult to accomplish given the more open, transparent, and virtual forms of organizing now common in many domains (Gha & Edmondson, 2006; Palmisano, 2004). Thus, rather than being homogeneous, "cultural manifestations are interpreted, evaluated, and enacted in varying ways because cultural members have differing interests, experiences, responsibilities and values" (Martin, 2005: 272).

Within the cultural perspective, another strand is a discursive approach, in which organizing is

viewed as contingent upon language, and thus, as the result of ongoing conversations and meaning

making (Heracleous & Barrett, 2001; Phillips, Lawrence, & Hardy, 2004; Thomas, Sargent, & Hardy,

2011). According to Meyer, "narratives serve to encapsulate and entrench the values that are key to an organization's culture" (1995: 210). In this view, senior managers may hold privileged positions

when it comes to introducing values discourse, but other employees are involved as meanings are negotiated among actors (Gheney, 1999; Ford, Ford, & D'Amelio, 2008). But how these dynamics might unfold in the case of values has not been a concerted focus.

All the above viewpoints are  predominately closed system perspectives in which values are assumed
to be internal to an organization and its members.


But an open systems perspective (Emery & Trist, 1965; Scott & Davis, 2007) suggests a variety
variety of stakeholders and institutional actors are likely to influence an organization's values (Freeman, 1984; Kraatz, Ventresca, & Deng, 2010; Suddaby, Elsbach, Greenwood, Meyer, & Zilber,
2010). Notably, Selznick (1957) defined institutionalization as the process of infusing an organization
with values beyond the technical requirements at hand. Once institutionalization has occurred, Selznick argued, organizations would not readily give up or change their values. He conceived of values as "a prime function of leadership" (Selznick, 1957: 27), but later work has shown how organizational values may be translated through social movements, changes in field-level values, and the hiring of outsiders (Amis, Slack, & Hinings, 2002; Kraatz & Moore, 2002; Lounsbury, 2001).
These different cultural perspectives have drawn attention to how values can emerge from a variety
of sources—executives, employees and other stakeholders, the broader institutional environment—
and are manifest in various organizational artifacts, discourses, and practices. However, prior research has seldom studied values practices directly and has stopped short of understanding the processes involved in the emergence and performance of these values practices over time. Moreover, such an approach implies making a shift in how values, practices, and their relationship to one another are conceptualized.

Toward a Practice Perspective on Values

Both cognitive and cultural perspectives define values in "ostensive" terms (Latour, 1986). In other
words, they start with values as given and already objectified phenomena. By contrast, some scholars
have argued for a more dynamic and performative understanding of organizing (Gzarniawska, 1991;
Feldman & Pentland, 2003; Hatch, 2004).

This perspective suggests the need to focus on the processes whereby values emerge in performances. Thus, understanding what is of value, why it is valued, and how it is made recognizable requires attending to the practices through which values are performed. Such an approach is broadly consistent with the "practice turn" (Schatzki et al., 2001; Whittington, 2006) that has contributed new insights to diverse organizational phenomena such as strategies (Ghia & MacKay, 2007; Jarzabkowski, 2005), routines (D'Adderio, 2008; Feldman & Pentland, 2003), work and occupations (Hargadon & Bechky, 2006; O'Mahony & Bechky, 2008), sustainability and innovation (Garud & Gehman, 2012; Garud, Gehman, & Kumaraswamy, 2011), information technologies (Leonardi, 2007; Orlikowski, 2000), and knowledge (Gherardi, 2006; Nicolini, 2011).

At the core of the practice perspective is a relational ontology, one that flattens out conventional dualisms and reconceives of agency as distributed across social and material elements (Latour, 2005). In this perspective, values are to be found in practice (Dewey, 1939; Joas, 2000; Rouse, 2001). As Schatzki explained: "The organization of a practice is normative. . . . By 'normativity' I mean, first, oughtness and, beyond this, acceptability" (2002: 80, 85; see also Rouse, 2001). Thus, practices imply which ends should be pursued, what should be said and done, and how actions should be carried out.

Although offering a potentially promising reconceptualization of values, these literatures have not

explicitly addressed the emergence and performance of practices that are normatively right or wrong, good or bad, and thus, pursued as ends in themselves—what we call values practices.

O'Reilly - Organizational Culture Profile (OCP)

Values included in OCP

In alphabetical order

1. A willingness to experiment
2. Achievement orientation
3. Action orientation
4. Adaptability
5. An emphasis on quality

6. Being analytical
7. Being aggressive
8. Being Calm
9. Being careful
10. Being competitive





These values are given in the page 516 of the paper "People and Organizational Culture: A Profile Comparison Approach to Assessing Person-Comparison Fit," Academy of Management Journal, 1991, Vol. 34, No. 3, pp. 487-516  

Reviewed in the class of Fellow Programme 2014.

Prof T.V. Rao - Biography and Contribution

He was a professor at IIM, Ahmedabad. He remained very active after his retirement also and is spearheading HR movement in the country.


IIM Ahmedabad Faculty Page
http://www.iimahd.ernet.in/faculty-and-research/faculty-profile.html&user_id=65

Detailed biogrphy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T._V._Rao

Professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter - Biography and Contribution

Date of Birth  15 March 1943

Rosabeth Moss Kanter holds the Ernest L. Arbuckle Professorship at Harvard Business School, where she specializes in strategy, innovation, and leadership for change. She is also Chair and Director of the Harvard University Advanced Leadership Initiative, an innovation that helps successful leaders at the top of their professions apply their skills to national and global challenges in their next life stage.


http://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/profile.aspx?facId=6486

http://www.economist.com/node/12492049

Leadership Theory - Contribution of Howard Gardner

Did a google search on transactions between leaders and followers



Leading Minds: An Anatomy of Leadership (Google eBook)
Howard Gardner
Basic Books, 2011 - Business & Economics - 415 pages

Leader and followers, together, have embarked on a journey in pursuit of certain goals, and along the way into the future, they can expect to face some obstacles or resistances that must be overcome. The leader has to understand his followers: where they have been and where they would like to go. He needs to tell a story of a vision which appeals to them in their context.   But there are already stories in the air. The story that the leader is going to tell must be superior to the existing stories to have an impact.

Cognitive psychologists examine how ideas develop and how they are stored etc.

https://books.google.co.in/books?id=IHNMg2zBayIC

Leadership is  always a transaction between the leader, his or her followers, and the goal or dream. A resonance exists between leaders and followers that makes them allies in support of a common cause. My studies show, for instance, that leaders are highly focused, that they are able to inspire trust, and that they are purveyors of hope.

Leaders are capable of deep listening: Gandhi demonstrated that when he traveled throughout India learning the heart of his people. But what distinguishes leaders from, say, psychotherapists or counselors is that they find a voice that allows them to articulate the common dream.

Effective leaders put words to the formless longings and deeply felt needs of others. They create communities out of words.

Review of Gardner Book (1995 edition) by Warren Bennis contain the above lines.
https://hbr.org/1996/01/the-leader-as-storyteller

Principles of Management - Koontz and O'Donnell - Propositions - 4th Edition

Staffing Principles

Principles Related to the Purpose of Staffing

1. Principle of staffing objectives
   

• The objective of managerial staffing is to assure that organization roles are filled by personnel able and willing to occupy them.

2. Principle of staffing


• The better the clear definition of an organizational role and its translation into human requirements and the better candidates and incumbents are evaluated and trained, the more the quality of personnel can be assured.


Principles related to the Process of staffing
3. Principle of job definition


• Specification for the job rest on the need for results from plans, the requirement of a clear structure of roles, and the provision for incentives to induce efficient and effective performance.

4. Principle of managerial appraisal


• Complete appraisal of managers requires appraisal of performance in terms of verifiable objectives and in terms of the quality of managing.





5. Principle of open competition in promotion


• If an enterprise is to assure maintenance to the best quality of management, it is necessary to open selection of candidates for promotion to those available both inside and outside the enterprise.

6. Principle of management development


• The more programs of management development aim at improving the abilities of existing managers in their present position, as well as making it possible for them to be promotable, and the more top managers give example and encouragement through participating actively in the leadership and operation of such programs, the more effective such programs will be.

7. Principle of universal development


• Since management techniques and knowledge and the total environment of managing change constantly, the enterprise that would assure its managerial competence cannot tolerate mangers who are not interested in their continuous development.




A comparison of Major Control Principles (Book by Harold Koontz and Cyril o’Donnel – page 731-736)  and A Preliminary Statement of Principles of Planning and Control (Paper by Harold Koontz in 1958 – page 57 - 60 )

The basic principles of control can be grouped into three categories, reflecting their purpose and nature, structure, and process.


1. Purpose and nature of control includes (book)
1) Principle of assurance of objective
2) Principle of efficiency of control
3) Principle of control responsibility
4) Principle of direct control

Principle of assurance of objective:

The statement of principle is in preposition form as,
“The task of control is to assure accomplishment of objectives by detecting potential or actual deviation from plans early enough to permit effective correction action.” (book)
The purpose of control is attainment of objectives. This it can be achieved by detection of failures in plans that are designed to attain objectives. (paper)


Principle of efficiency of control:
The statement of principle is in preposition form as,
“The more control approaches and techniques detect and illuminate the causes of potential or actual deviations from plans with minimum of costs or other unsought consequences, the more efficient these control are.”  (book)
Principle of control responsibility:
The statement of principle is in preposition form as,
“The primary responsibility for the exercise of control rests in manager charged with the execution of plan”. (book)
This principle clarifies the often misinterpreted role of controllers and control units. The control units may act in staff or service capacity to furnish control information to managers, but they cannot exercise control without assuming the managerial responsibility and managerial authority for the things controlled.


Principle of direct control:
The statement of principle is in preposition form as,
“The higher the quality of managers and their subordinates, the less will be the need for indirect controls”. (book)
While the statement of principle in paper is as follows,
“The most effective technique of control in an enterprise is to assure the quality of subordinates, particularly managers.” (paper)
From book the assumptions of principles of direct control are different than as mentioned in paper except 1) manager makes a minimum error / fewer mistakes.
Other assumptions of principles of direct control mentioned in the book are managerial performance can be measured, management principle are useful diagnostic tools in measuring management performance, application of management principle can be evaluated.

While paper mention best managers plan better and more thoroughly, establish a clear and coordinated organization, do best job of selecting and training subordinates and most effectively direct the activities of subordinate.

2. The structure of control (book)
1. Principle of reflection of plans
2. Principle of Organisational suitability
3. Principle of individuality of controls

Principle of reflection of plans
The statement of principle is in preposition form as,
“The more controls are designed to deal with and reflect the specific nature and structure of plans, the more effectively they will serve the interests of the enterprise and its managers.”

Principle of Organisational suitability
The statement of principle is in preposition form as,
“The more controls are designed to reflect the place in the organisation structure where responsibility for action lies, the more they will facilitate correction of deviation of events for plans.”. Controls must fit a manger’s authority area and therefore be designed to reflect organization structure.(book)
Controls must be designed to reflect organization structure. Effective controls must be applicable to a manager’s authority area and therefore must reflect organization structure. All figures and reports used for the purpose of control should be in terms of the organization structure. (paper)

Principle of individuality of controls
The statement of principle is in preposition form as,
“Since it is the task of controls to inform people who are expected to act to avoid or correct deviation from plans, effective controls require that they be consistent with the position , operational responsibility ,competence, and needs of the individual concerned.” (book)

3. The Process of control
1. Principle of standards
2. Principle of critical point control
3. The exception principle
4. Principle of flexibility of controls
5. Principle of action

Principle of standards
The statement of principle is in preposition form as,
“Effective control requires objective, accurate , and suitable standards”. (book)
There should be simple, specific , and verifiable way to measure whether a planning program is being accomplished. Control is accomplished through people. Good standards of performance objectively applied , will more likely to be accepted by a subordinate as fair and reasonable. (book)

Under the Principle of Strategic point control , it is mentioned that “Although total plans furnish the most complete and accurate standards against which to measure performance, it would ordinarily be wasteful for the manager to follow every detail of planning execution and often unnecessary and inefficient for him to watch even every fairly important phase of performance. What he must know is that plans are executed in such a manner that they can be accomplished. He must therefore concentrate his attention on such factors of performance as will indicate whether significant deviations are occurring or will occur”. The author says that he doesn’t know any guideline which might be applied by a practicing manager to determine what standards he should have, since selection of standards seems predominantly a matter of the managerial art.(paper)

Principle of critical point control
The statement of principle is in preposition form as,
“Effective control requires attention to those factors critical to appraising performance against an individual plan.” (book)
The Principle of Strategic point control states that the most effective control occurs when primary attention is given to such factors as are strategic to the appraisal of performance. (paper)
The exception principle
The statement of principle is in preposition form as,
“The more a manager concentrates his control efforts on exceptions , the more efficient will be the results of this control.” (book)
The Principle of Strategic point control says that manager can reach his own solution to his problem by asking himself what things in his operations will show him best whether plans for which he is responsible are being accomplished. This Koontz says is akin to Taylor’s exception principle. It was Taylor’s wise contention that manager should only concern himself with the especially good and especially bad situations. In a very real sense , the principle of strategic point control is a refinement and extension of the exception principle. (paper)

 Principle of flexibility of controls
The statement of principle is in preposition form as,
“If controls are to remain effective despite failure or unforseen changes of plans, flexibility is required in the design of controls.”(book)


Principle of action
The statement of principle is in preposition form as,
“Control is justified only if indicated or experienced deviations from plans are corrected through appropriate planning, organising, staffing, and directing.”


Summary:
Paper
The Principles of Control
1. The principle of strategic point control:
The principle states that the most effective control occurs when primary attention is given to such factors as are strategic to the appraisal of the performance.
Manager must concentrate on factors of the performance as well as will give an indication whether significant deviations are occurring or will occur.
Refinement of Taylor’s Execution principle:
Taylor’s Execution principle: Manager should concern himself with especially good or especially bad situations.
But the extension is given as the emphasis on strategic point of control by Koontz in the principle of strategic point control.
2. The principle of organizational suitability:
In accordance with this principle, control must be designed to reflect organizational structure.
Managers and their subordinates are the means through which planning events must be accomplished and control exerted, it follows that if effective controls mist be applicable to manager’s authority area and therefore must reflect in organizational structure.

Refinement of Urwick’s principle of Uniformity: All the figures and reports used for purpose of control must be in terms of the organizational structure. (L. Urwick The elements of Administration, Harper and Bros. New York 1943)
3. The Principle of Future control
Past can’t be changed; effective control should be aimed at preventing present and future deviations from plans.
Just as planning, control should also be forward looking; Koontz claims this as simple principle as ‘often disregarded in management practice.’
4. The principle of Direct Control
“The most effective technique of control in an enterprise is to assure the quality of subordinates, particularly managers.”