Please submit your favorite management posts to the carnival. Read the previous management carnivals.

• Assessing Results vs. Reflection by Mark Rosenthal – “Your plan for the year consisted of a designed experiment. ‘If we do these things, we expect this results.’ Then do that thing, and check that you actually did it. Compare your actual result with the expected result. Explain any difference. Learn.” – This process is key to improving, see my previous post: Predicting Improves Learning John
• Leadership and Systems Thinking by George Reed – “Success in the contemporary operating environment requires different ways of thinking about problems and organizations…It is insufficient and often counterproductive for leaders merely to act as good cogs in the machine.”
• “Heightened Vigilance” is Not Enough by Mark Graban – “Instead, we blame, we punish, and we say “be careful.” No wonder we have such problems. Being careful helps, but it is not enough.”
• Top 10 Problems with Problem Statements by Jon Miller – “1. Assign a cause 2. Contain the solution 3. Are based on conjecture or belief rather than fact 4. Are too long”
• Root Cause Customer Service by Kevin Meyer – “Why are customers calling? What is wrong with the design, quality, intuitiveness, or use of the product that creates problems? With few exceptions, having to answer a call from a customer is a band-aid on a problem.”
• Two Steps Forward, One Step Back by Mike Wroblewski – “For me, the challenge is helping create a learning culture that drives continuous improvement forever, even as we go two steps forward and one step back.”
• 10 Pitfalls of Agility on Large Projects by Bernie Thompson – “Most of these pitfalls don’t apply to very small projects. They reflect some of the feedback you’d get when trying to drive agility at a large company with a lot of inertia behind existing ways of working”
• Step One in Creating Management Standard Work by Lee Fried – “We have begun the work of implementing a new management system and there is a great need to free up time on managers calendars to support planning, deployment, checking and improvement work.”
• Six sigma – it’s so like, yesterday by Rob Thompson – “AAARRGGHHH!! How many more times do will I hear that six sigma and innovation are not compatible.”
• Norman Bodek in Japan (podcast) by Mark Graban – some of the topics include: how ROI, short-term thinking is killing America; Poka-yoke and error proofing and Going after waste relentlessly.
• The Problem with Targets by John Hunter – Brian Joiner provides another reason why targets are harmful: there are “3 ways to improve the figures: distort the data, distort the system and improve the system. Improving the system is the most difficult.”

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”
- George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman
See my post on the Lazy Unreasonable Man