Kevin Meyer hosts the Management Improvement Carnival #108 on his blog, highlights include:

• Gemba Tales: Developing Leader Standard Work – Five Important Steps – key components of leader standard work.
• Flinchbaugh: Small-i ROI as Applied to Strategy – Sometimes instead of focusing on the big R in ROI, it can pay to find a unique niche requiring just a small i.
• Lean Blog: Mental Models: Standardized Work and Performance Measures – Standard work and performance measures mean different things in a traditional command and control organization versus a lean organization.

Related: Lean Daily – Management Improvement Carnival #93 – Management Improvement Carnival #44

The webcast of Mary Poppendieck’s talk, The role of leadership in software development, at Google. As usual Mary does a very nice job of providing some good historical background while exploring wise management practices (tied to software development but plenty useful for any manager).

via: Sheep of a different fold

Related: Lean, Toyota and Deming for Software Development – Webcast on the Toyota Development Process – Don’t Use Performance Appraisals – Lean Software Development – The Leader’s Handbook

• New Rules for Management? No! – “New” rule: “Look out, not in.” What kind of rule is that? It is pretty obvious you need to do both. I find it incredible the amount of time that is taken trying to show “new” ideas that amount to absolutely nothing. See comments on: Fast Company Interview: Jeff Immelt.
• How Google Works – Google understands when you experiment things might not work out. Google’s solution is to experiment quickly and fail early (turn the pdsa cycle quickly). That is something every organization can apply.
• Quality and Innovation – For getting some good ideas about what managers/executives should understand about innovation Gary Hamel and Clayton Christensen (The Innovators Solution by Clayton M. Christensen and Michael E. Raynor, 2003) offer very valuable information.
• Usability Failures – if 63% of purchasers return your phone that you think “have nothing wrong with them” you have bigger problems than production defects.
• Motivation – Most manager focus on motivating people is wasted time and effort. Instead managers would be much more effectively used improving the system, learning, coaching, eliminating de-motivation…

Photo by John Hunter: Shaker Village of Pleasant Hill, Kentucky.

Lean Daily consolidates the latest posts from seven excellent lean blogs in one convenient, free, iPhone app. Learn more about it, see a simulator demo, and download it directly from iTunes.

Mark Graban, Lean Blog, took the lead and a number of us combined efforts to provide this as a free service to our loyal readers:

• Ron Pereria (Lean Six Sigma Academy)
• Jon Miller (Gemba Panta Rei)
• Kevin Meyer (Evolving Excellence)
• Matt May (In Pursuit of Elegance)
• Jamie Flinchbaugh (Lean Learning Center)
• and this site, John Hunter (Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog)

This iPhone app allows you to read these lean blogs while on the go. You can also listen to and view some multimedia lean content, such as the Lean Blog Podcasts and Video Podcasts and the Gemba Academy sample videos in the app as well. You can also find lean news and some other feeds.

Related: Curious Cat management blog directory – Interesting management content (Reddit) – search for management content online

From Managing Our Way to Economic Success, Two Untapped Resources by William G. Hunter, my father. Written in 1986, but still plenty relevant. We have made some good progress, but there is much more to do: we have barely started adopting these ideas systemically.

Related: William Hunter, articles and books – Invest in New Management Methods Not a Failing Company – The Importance of Management Improvement – Statistics for Experimenters

The Curious Cat management blog carnival selects recent management blog posts 3 times each month. Since 2006 the carnival has focused on finding interesting posts for managers on improving the performance of organizations (lean manufacturing, Deming, agile software development, six sigma, customer focus, innovation…).

• “To find out what happens when you change something, it is necessary to change it.” by Andrew Gelman – “From the classic Box, Hunter, and Hunter book. The point of the saying is pretty clear, I think: There are things you learn from perturbing a system that you’ll never find out from any amount of passive observation.”
• Lean and Six Sigma: PDCA and DMAIC Comparison by Pete Abilla – “A big difference between PDCA and DMAIC is the corporate infrastructure required. Six Sigma and the DMAIC methodology in which its work is carried out, requires a steering committee, tollgates, a champion, and a project sponsor.”
• That’s the trouble with targets by Glyn Lumley – “That’s the trouble with targets. The whole mindset is wrong. It’s as if quality is seen as something that should be achieved – an outcome, a result. Meet the target and everything is fine; miss the target and you’re doomed!”
• The question every manager should be able to answer – “What does success and excellence look like for me in this role?”
• Podcast #97 – Bob Sutton, PhD, “Good Boss, Bad Boss” by Mark Graban
• MBA Case Studies Teach the Wrong Things – “The truth is that the corporate ecosystem is enormously complex. Presenting a simplified view of that ecosystem may seem to make pedagogical sense, but it leads to the false belief that problems are easily understood, that there is one “right” answer, and that there’s no need for experimentation. And that’s a tremendous disservice to future business leaders.”
• Feedback is the Key! by Matt Stine – “Perhaps the most important feedback loop of all is team to client. You can have a well-oiled machine of a development team writing the highest quality code in the industry, but if it doesn’t deliver value to your customer, it’s absolutely worthless!”
• Five Critical Success Factors for Project Managers by Sonja Hughes – “If management support is missing, people and funding resources may not be available for the project…. Lack of management support is a major reason for project failures.”
• Idea Deficit Disorder – Stopping the Epidemic by Wally Bock – “Remember human nature. Human beings are natural idea generators. At work they usually have plenty of ideas. They don’t share them because most of their bosses didn’t want to hear new ideas.”

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Great quote from Dee Hock, founder of Visa:

This short article from Fast Company is packed with powerful management and leadership insight. Read more Curious Cat management article suggestions, on our recently improved site.

Related: Hire People You Can Trust to Do Their Job – Hiring the Right People for the Job – find management improvement jobs: lean manufacturing, six sigma… – posts for managers on hiring staff – management and leadership quotes

A bit of fun from Dilbert. I have had the exact experience Dilbert does of tech support refusing to think about the actual symptoms of the problem and insisting on following some script and wasting my time – repeatedly. The second act takes on another time waster with a management tip from Dogbert: “Always postpone meetings with time wasting morons.” Dogbert hasn’t quite adopted the respect for people principle.

via: The final word on making meetings better

Related: Dilbert and Deming – Financial Planning Made Easy – CEOs Plundering Corporate Coffers – posts on meetings

Jon Miller hosts the Management Improvement Carnival #106 on his blog, highlights include:

• 3 Observations of Healthcare vs. Construction by Mike Lombard. Lombi gives us his fresh view on the differences between construction businesses and healthcare organizations, two months after moving to a healthcare lean leader position. Culture is all about people and how they look at the world. I’m looking forward to more observations from Lombi on the culture in healthcare as he continues to explore and support process improvement.
• 10 Tips for Re-energizing Your Day, Every Day by Matthew May. This article is full of everyday wisdom on keeping our energy level high. These practices and habits are so easy to pick up yet so easy to drop during our busiest days. Thanks Matt for bringing these back to the front of our minds. Have you taken a few deep breaths today?
• How to Design Poor Service – Expect 100% Utilization of People or Resources by Mark Graban. Mark gives us a primer on how to show customers you hate them by making sure you optimize one performance metric at the expense of others. It’s a fine object lesson in reverse. It sounds like American Airlines could benefit from a bit from some valid metrics…

Related: Management and Leadership Quotes – Management Improvement Carnival #83 – Management Improvement Carnival #72

50 years after Douglas McGregor’s classic, The Human Side of Enterprise, too many managers still have not learned that using extrinsic motivation is not an effective way to manage complex human systems (organizations). The issue is important to me because their is a huge amount of poor management based on this thinking (focused on how people need to be fixed/motivated) instead of fixing what management really needs to fix.

You can succeed as a manager, and progress in your career, by viewing your role as helping people do their jobs well. As McGregor shows workers want to do a good job. He termed managing with this understanding theory y; and theory x is the idea that people should be motivated with carrots and sticks because they are not going to do work otherwise. Organizations have often so systemically de-motivated people they seem to have lost that desire. What you need to focus on is not motivating them with cheap tricks. Instead focus on eliminating the factors that de-motivate them.

Often simplistic motivation is seen as a replacement for fixing management performance (improving the management systems…). Instead managers should focus on eliminating the sources of de-motivation in the workplace. If you need hints, Dilbert does a good job of showing you what management does that de-motivates.

To succeed as a manager assume people wish to do a good job. If employees are not performing some task well, the manager needs to figure out what is wrong with the system that leads to this outcome (not what is wrong with the employees). When a manger views the problem as one of motivating workers that puts the problem within the worker. They need to be changed. That is the wrong strategy, most of the time. Instead you will have much more success if you seek to improve the system to improve performance.

I believe there is often a burden to overcome. As people have their intrinsic motivation crushed time after time day after day, week after week, year after year they try to protect themselves by shutting off their hope to achieve intrinsic motivation at work. You may have to show you really are serious before they will open up again. You have to make real changes and do so consistently that shows respect for people. The intrinsic motivation is a strong force and a few earlier adopters will quickly come along in all but the most broken organizations. You can build on that success (eliminating more and more de-motivation) to grow intrinsic motivation in more and more people.
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Jason Yip explores the value of reducing work in process and reducing context switching costs to optimize throughput. By designing processes to work on projects serially instead of in parallel we reduce context switching, and other costs, of multitasking.

Related: Multi-Tasking: Why Projects Take so Long – The Importance of Making Problems Visible – One piece flow (continuous flow) – Kanban

In Out of the Crisis, page 121, Dr. Deming wrote:

So what do you do then? I am a strong advocate of Deming’s ideas on management. I see understanding system thinking, psychology, the theory of knowledge and variation as the tools to use when you can’t get precise measures (or when you can).

Even if you can’t measure exactly what you want, you can learn about the area with related data. You are not able to measure the exact benefit of a happy customer but you can get measures that give you evidence of the value and even magnitude. And you can get measures of the costs of dis-satisfied customers. I just mention this to be clear getting data is very useful and most organizations need to focus on gathering sensible data and using it well.

Without precise measure though you have to use judgment. Judgment will often be better with an understanding of theory and repeated attempts to test those theories and learn. Understanding variation can be used even if you don’t have control charts and data. Over-reaction to special causes is very common. Even without data, this idea can be used to guide your thoughts.

The danger is that we mistake measures for the thing itself. Measures are a proxy and we need to understand the limitation of the data we use. The main point Deming was making was we can’t just pretend the data we have tells us everything we need to know. We need to think. We need to understand that the data is useful but the limitations need to be remembered.

Human systems involve people. To manage human systems you need to learn about psychology. Paying attention to what research can show about motivation, fear, trust, etc. is important and valuable. It aids management decisions when you can’t get the exact data that you would like. If people are unhappy you can see it. You may also be able to measure aspects of this (increased sick leave, increased turnover…). If people are unhappy they often will not be as pleasant to interact with as people who are happy. You can make judgments about the problems created by internal systems that rob people of joy in work and prevent them from helping customers.

For me the key is to use the Deming’s management system to guide action when you can’t get clear data. We should keep trying to find measures that will help. In my experience even though there are many instances where we can get definite data on exactly what we want we fail to get data that would help guide actions a great deal). Then we need to understand the limitations of the data we can gather. And then we need to continually improve and continually learn.

When you have clear data, Deming’s ideas are also valuable. But when the data is lacking it is even more important to take a systemic approach to making management decisions. Falling back into making the numbers you can get drive decisions making is a recipe for trouble.

LinkedIn discussion on the topic

Related: Manage what you can’t measure – Statistical Engineering Links Statistical Thinking, Methods and Tools – outcome measures

The management blog carnival is published 3 times a month with select recent management blog posts. Also try our collected management articles and blogs posts at: Curious Cat Management articles.

• Instead of a Layoff by Gregg Stocker – “Everyone has a stake in the company. When a company has a history of layoffs, though, people feel powerless, disconnected, and expendable. The organization’s leaders send a very clear message that employees are not important when jobs are cut in response to a crisis.” (Also see my 2007 post, Bad Management Results in Layoffs, John)
• The Importance of the Storefront in Lean Manufacturing by Jon Miller “Like fish, the defects should be ‘sold’ or taken care of that day, because old fish begin to smell bad.”
• Comparing Lean Principles to the 14 Toyota Principles – “Toyota Principle #1: Base Your Management Decisions on a Long-Term Philosophy, Even at the Expense of Short-Term Financial Goals… Toyota Principle #2: Create Continuous Process Flow to Bring Problems to the Surface”
• 10 Engagement-Building Behaviors for the Boss by Wally Bock – “Make sure people have the resources to do what you expect. Resources include skills and time and equipment and support. If your people don’t have them, get them before you hold people accountable for results.”
• Switching to a Data-Driven Culture by Brent Dykes – “How can a data-driven identity transform your online marketing team’s behaviors? Rather than perceiving analysis to be someone else’s job, what if they thought of themselves as analysts, not just marketers?”
• A chance to prevent failures rather than cleaning up after them – “FMEA is an analytical approach that is used in the development stage as well as operations management to focus on “What could go wrong?” with respect to a product or service. Teams identify potential failures in a system, and in the design stage, try to eliminate these potential failures as far as possible.”
• Valid or reliable – in the board room by Jamie Flinchbaugh – “In order to maximize the utilization of board time, use of a suite of reliable metrics can provide a steady point of focus. Most of these will be quantitative such as financial, customer-focused, or employee-focused.”

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If you have customers that see you as adequate you will keep customers based on inertia.

But you have several big problems awaiting you. Those trying to win your customers business only have to overcome inertia – which can be very low hurdle (saving a small bit of money, some minor additional feature). If your customers are delighted they won’t leave (by and large) without significant reasons to.

Also your attempts to increase price are very likely to lead to increased customer losses (than if customers are delighted). Delighted customers are willing to pay a premium which helps profits enormously (Apple has done this quite well).

Delighted customers will refer others to you – great free marketing.

Satisfied customers leave you very little leeway for error. If you cause satisfied customers some problem (which granted, hopefully you won’t but if you do) they are not likely to be forgiving. If they are delighted they may well stay even if you have a delay, provide less than stellar customer service for some request…

There are many ways to attempt to delight customers. One of the simplest powerful tools is to ask a very simple question: What Could we do Better?

Related: What Job Does Your Product Do? – It Just Works – Kano Model of customer satisfaction – customer focus resources

Metrics are valuable when they are actionable. Think about what will be done if certain results are shown by the data. If you can’t think of actions you would take, it may be that metric is not worth tracking.

Metrics should be operationally defined so that the data is collected properly. Without operationally definitions data collected by more than one person will often include measurement error (in this case, the resulting data showing the results of different people measuring different things but calling the result the same thing).

And without operational definitions those using the resulting data may well mis-interpret what it is saying. Often data is presented without an operational definition and people think the data is saying something that it is not. I find most often when people say statistics lie it is really that they made an incorrect assumption about what the data said – which most often was because they didn’t understand the operational definition of the data. Data can’t lie. People can. And people can intentionally mislead with data. But far more often people unintentionally mislead with data that is misunderstood (often this is due to failure to operationally define the data).

In response to: Metrics Manifesto: Raising the Standard for Metrics

Related: Outcome Measures – Evidence-based Management – Metrics and Software Development – Distorting the System (due to misunderstanding metrics) – Manage what you can’t measure

Wally Bock hosts his first carnival for us, Management Improvement Carnival #104, on the Three Star Leadership Blog. He has long posted his Leadership Reading to Start Your Week and Midweek Look at the Independent Business Blogs that also highlight great posts. Highlights for this carnival include:

• From Mary Jo Asmus: Coaching Others: Short Term Pain for Long Term Gain
  “One of the biggest pushbacks I get from those I teach almost always has to do with the time that coaching takes. Admittedly, it can take longer to coach others than to either ignore them or to bark orders. Coaching is a methodology to help people figure things out for themselves, so you can see why it might require more time and effort than other methods a manager could use.”

  Wally’s Comment: Mary Jo Asmus is an executive coach who has actually been an executive. How cool is that? She also shares powerfully simple observations and suggestions. In this post, Mary Jo points out why spending time to coach your people is really an investment.

• From QAspire: 5 Ideas To Ensure That Lessons are �Really� Learned
  “All improvement depends on lessons you document and what you, as a leader, do about it. If you are a business leader, project leader or an improvement expert, here are five practical things you can do to ensure that lessons are really learned.”

  Wally’s Comment: Tanmay Vora says that his QAspire blog is about “practical insights on quality, leadership and improvement. This post is a fine example of his work.

Related: Curious Cat Management Improvement Connections – Management Reddit – Curious Cat Management Improvement Glossary

I believe the problem is likely not the person pointing out the problem. Now granted I have often been that person. Part of what I have been tasked with doing in various jobs is finding ways to improve the performance of the organization. I was told the managers wanted to hear about problems from someone working there, so I was asked to do so. What it often meant was they wanted someone to fix the problems they thought existed not point out the problem was the systems, not the people forced to deal with the systems.

I have learned managers are a lot happier if I just shut up about all the problems that should be addressed. There are happy if I can fix what I can (though really they seem to care much more about not being negative than any actually improving) and just be quiet about anything else – otherwise you are seen as “negative.”

How to Manage Whining with no Problem Solving

I think it is right to focus the effort on problem solving to improve the situation. I fear that far too often though “As individuals begin to focus on the negative and don’t engage in problem solving, this behavior is unacceptable.” turns into ignore problems. Yes, I know that isn’t what the post is suggesting. I am just saying that the easy “solution” that is taken far too often is to focus on the words “negative” and “unacceptable.”

I believe the focus should be on “broken systems are unacceptable.” I would prefer problem solving to address the issues but a culture of ignoring issues and seeing those that don’t as being negative is often the real problem (not the person that points out the problems).

I have discussed this topic in some posts previously: Ignoring Unpleasant Truths is Often Encouraged and Bring Me Problems, and Solutions if You Have Them. Once I am given those problems I agree with you completely. Use them as an opportunity to coach effective problem solving and process improvement strategies to improve the situation. And to develop people.

Often the problem is not the person at all. The organization never adopts fixes. People have learned that they can bang their head against the wall and then never get approval for the fix or they can just whine. Blaming them for choosing whining is not useful. I don’t see how Asking 5 whys you get to blaming the employee, except in very rare cases for not problem solving. It seems to me the issue is almost always going to lay with management: for why people are frustrated with system results and are not problem solving.
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Do ‘Quick Wins’ Hurt Lean Initiatives?

If you don’t change how people think, the quick improvement can end up not helping much. I think quick wins help. But managing how those quick wins happen is important. Creating a maintaining a dialogue that while quick wins are possible, much bigger wins are possible by building on the gains to adopt more critical improvement (and often more complex and requiring more effort) .

As quick wins are achieved try and be sure they are building capacity at the same time. Get people to think in new ways and see improvement opportunities. Also have people learn new tools to attack more problems with. I firmly believe you learn lean best by doing lean. So getting quick successes is great training – better than classroom training. But in doing so, you do want to focus on making sure people understand how the quick fix is a process they can repeat to improve other areas.

And one of the skills you have to practice in the example mentioned in the post mentioned above is managing up. It is tricky but part of what you need to do is coach your bosses to understand lean so that you can expand the adoption of more lean thinking in your organization.

Related: How to Improve – Building a Great Workforce – Flaws in Understanding Psychology Lead to Flawed Management – Leadership

Jamie Flinchbaugh hosts the Management Improvement Carnival #103 on his blog, highlights include:

• How do you change a culture? – Obviously a big question and one I spend considerable time on, but LeanRI.org throws in on a challenging and important question.
• Spot the Northwest Flight Attendant – Simon Sinek demonstrates how pervasive culture can be and how it impacts customer service, and even customer culture.
• UK Government Wants Lean and Six Sigma or Just Cost Cutting – Mark Graban takes on simultaneously the misunderstanding of lean by the press and the misapplication of lean by the UK Government.
• Lean Consumption: A Summary – since Womack and Jones Lean Solutions book, there still hasn’t been much written about lean consumption but Pete Abilla take it on here.

Related: 2009 Annual Management Blog Review Part 1 – management improvement articles – Curious Cat Management Improvement Search

I started out basically working on management improvement from the start of my career. My makeup (I am never satisfied and figure things should always be better) along with a few traits, experiences and probably even genes made this a natural fit for me. I tend to take the long view and find fire fighting a waste of time. Why fix some symptom, I want to fix the system so that problem doesn’t happen again. My father worked in statistics, engineering and business improvement and as I was growing up I had plenty of experience with process improvement, understanding variation, experimenting, measuring results…

I came into the IT world as I had needs and found the best solution was to write some software to help me accomplish what I wanted to. One thing that better software tools allowed is this type of thing when organizations failed to use technology well, individuals could just do so themselves. Without these tools people had to rely on the organization, but today atrophied IT organizations can often be circumvented. Though the IT organizations often try to avoid this largely by bans (instead of by providing the tools people need), which is not a good sign, in my opinion.

I then spent more and more of my time working with technology but I always retained my focus on improving the management of the organization, with technology playing a supporting role in that effort. That is true even as where I sat changed. And I have become more convinced organizations would be served well by using the information technology staff as business process experts.

At one point I sat in the Office of Secretary of Defense, Quality Management Office where I was able to focus on management improvement and using technology to aid that effort. Then I went to the White House Military Office, Customer Support and Organizational Development office and focused largely on how to using technology to meet the mission. Then I was moved into the White House Military Office, Office of Information Technology Management.

And now I work for the American Society for Engineering Education in the Information Technology department. My role started as partially program management and partially software development and as we have grown and hired more software developers I am now nearly completely a program manager.

I believe technology is a central component of understanding business processes today. But the truth is, many business people don’t have as complete an understanding as I feel they should. Now I believe, most anyone interested in planning their management career needs to develop a facility with technology and specifically how to use software applications to improve performance. You don’t need to be an expert programmer but you need to understand the strengths, weakness, limits of technical solutions. You need to understand how technology can be used (and the risks of options).

At the same time I just don’t think it is likely management everywhere will get a decent understanding of application software development. I also believe that in many cases organizations should do software development in house. This is a issue that certainly can be argued (but I won’t do it here). Basically I don’t think organizations should cram their processes into designs required by off the shelf software. Instead I believe they should design processes optimal for their organization and using off the shelf software often does the opposite (forces the process decisions around what software someone decided to buy). There is plenty of use for off the shelf software that doesn’t force you to make your processes fit into them (and sometimes even if it does that is the business decision that has to be made – I just think far too often organizations look at short term costs and not the overall best solutions for the system).
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