There have been a number of great post recently about management improvement:

• Amazon’s Long Public Haul by Kevin Meyer – “Amazon has now been around a while and has a loyal following. Their culture is apparently deep, at least for the most part. But that does not guarantee long-term success.”
• Jeff Bezos Risky Bet Isn’t New by Peter Abilla – “Guess what everybody — Bezos’ Risky Bet isn’t new. Amazon has been doing that for years, but they’re just now opening services up to the masses.”
• How to Put Kaizen into Your Culture by Jon Miller – “The reason we can make our living is because we serve our customers… Improvement is everyone’s job… The current condition is unacceptable, no matter how good we are.”
• Choices = Headaches by Joel Spolsky – “Inevitably, you are going to think of a long list of intelligent, defensible reasons why each of these options is absolutely, positively essential. Don’t bother. I know.”
• Two podcast interviews by Mark Graban: Jim Womack on lean in China (podcast) and Norman Bodek on Educating Leadership
• Using Quality Tools to Identify Root Cause by Jay Marino – “One of the steps of the PDSA cycle is “identifying root cause” and includes several quality tools to help identify the “culprits” in a system including: Cause and Effect Diagram; Relations Diagram; and the 5 Whys.”
• Welfare waste by Karen Wilhelm – “It’s a lesson in going to the gemba. You can’t really understand the process until you’ve walked it.”
• Lessons from the Ritz-Carlton by Don MacAskill – “The bottom line: We felt special. We felt pampered. We felt like the Ladies and Gentlemen of the Ritz-Carlton knew us personally and really cared about making sure we were happy. They’ve earned a customer for life.”
• Statistical Software is not Six Sigma by Robert Thompson – “With a good understanding of the process at hand, practitioners can solve many problems using statistical software. However, if there’s a lack of process knowledge, it’s hard to be sure of what’s going on in the process, or what the statistical analysis is revealing.”
• The Pitfall of Cost Calculation by Jon Miller – “Simple, fully depreciated general purpose machines can be easily modified and dedicated for a new part, and this is a key aspect of flexibility for Lean manufacturing.”
• The 18 Mistakes That Kill Startups by Paul Graham – “In a sense there’s just one mistake that kills startups: not making something users want. If you make something users want, you’ll probably be fine, whatever else you do or don’t do.”

And a couple from my blog:

• What Could we do Better? by John Hunter – “To encourage useful feedback, specifically give the customer permission to mention something that could be improved. What one thing could we do better?”
• European Blackout: Human Error-Not – “But at the absolute least, given that they say it was an error not to check for the impact of a second line failure why allow the line to be shut down without that check being done? Mistake proof the process.”