Please submit your favorite management posts to the carnival.

• Employee Driven Improvement at Southwest by Mark Graban – “It’s not called Lean, nor does it reference Toyota, but it sounds like Lean. It’s always nice to see management taking that approach with employees, since most of the airline industry seems to treat employees like a cost, rather than an asset (or real human beings).”
• SPESA Trip Report by Kathleen Fasanella – “I keep saying over and over till I’m blue in the face that lean manufacturing is the way to go, especially if you’re a small company. This system set up will pay for itself quickly”
• eBay and Toyota: Respect for People by Peter Abilla – “The eBay Values are not just rote statements and the behaviors are not just empty slogans, but they are truly practiced by the people at eBay”
• Differing Perspectives On Suppliers by Kevin Meyer – “You can bash your suppliers into submission, losing more than a few of them along the way, or you can develop true long-term partnerships that benefit everyone in the supply chain.”
• How fear of failure destroys success by Adrian Savage – “The constant covering up of the smallest blemishes. The wild finger-pointing as everyone tries to shift the blame for the inevitable cock-ups and messes onto someone else…. The lying, cheating, falsification of data, and hiding of problems—until they become crises that defy being hidden any longer.”
• 5 Steps to Data Collection by Ron Pereira – “1) Clarify your data collection goals… 2) Develop operational definitions and procedures.”
• Do Kaizen Like Toyota by Jon Miller – Standardize how you solve problems… This is where following a standardized approach to problem solving based on the scientific method can help keep your kaizen efforts on track. Not to be prescriptive, but the PDCA wheel is hard to beat.
• SAP – Look in the Mirror by Kevin Meyer – “If you haven’t developed your shop floor folks enough so they can effectively manage a simple pull system to a couple key metrics, then you aren’t lean. Basic policy deployment or hoshin kanri can handle the execution piece. In the end it’s about people, smart knowledge people, not software.”
• Rethinking the Social Responsibility of Business by John Hunter – At Whole Foods they measure their success by how much value we can create for all six of our most important stakeholders: customers, team members (employees), investors, vendors, communities, and the environment. Not just short term stockholders.