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

• Lean *is* About Quality, Folks by Mark Graban – “The two ideas are connected — improving flow (in itself) ends up improving quality and improving quality improves flow.”
• Statistical software is not six sigma by Rob 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”
• Key Points for Managing Kaizen Idea Systems by Jon Miller – ” As a rule there should be 1) no suggestion box, 2) a simple suggestion form, and 3) team-based dialog to evaluate ideas.”
• Adjustment or Tampering? by John Dowd – “Deming called it tampering. It is the adjustment of of a stable process after each occurrence; treating every event as though it were special. It makes things worse.” (curious cat: tampering)
• The Importance of Heijunka by Mark Rosenthal – “Production leveling, however, is difficult, and the management has to have the fortitude to do it. Honestly, most don’t. They don’t like to deliberately set the necessary inventory and backlog buffers into place”
• Harmony and Toyota by Ron Pereira – “As we walked along the cat walk we were able to gain a birds eye view of the assembly operation. There was just so much to see… it was overwhelming.”
• A Good Layout is in the Details by Mike Wroblewski – “By focusing the majority of our effort on grasping the situation first, the action of moving was fairly uneventful. No firefighting, no frantic emergencies, no heroics and no customer disappointments.”
• A3 Thinking – More than Just the Paper Size by Dwayne Keller – “it requires the creator to draw pictures, graphs, stick figures or other visuals to deeply understand the problem and clearly and concisely communicate the Causes and their Countermeasures to all stakeholders.”
• Never speculate about problems unless you go see! by Ted Eytan – “It was always really frustrating when leaders would claim to have the solution or worse new just who to blame for this so called problem that might not even exists in the first place.”
• Two Lean Blog podcasts: Jeff Liker and Bob Emiliani on “Practical Lean Leadership”
• Theory of Business, Complexity and Getting Work Done by Michael Kaufman – “the theory of business in use by anyone involved in business (anyone for that matter) will preclude certain responses to the conditions in the environment and hence will preclude certain ways of organizing to get work done.”
• Onshoring: Bucking the Trend by Kevin Meyer – “We’ve said it before: there’s value in them there brains… even if it isn’t recognized on an P&L or balance sheet.”
• Pleasing Customers by John Hunter – “Not compromising leads to solutions that are unlikely to be all things to all people. But with an intelligent and knowledgeable leader that will lead to excellent solutions for those that share certain desires or needs.”