Management Improvement Carnival #45

Read the previous management carnivals. Also see the management Reddit for popular new blog posts to include in future carnivals.

  • Hire them, fire them, do what you want with them by Jay Padinjaredath – “A quote from Deming: “In Japan when a company has to absorb a sudden economic hardship… First the corporate dividends are cut. Then the salaries and the bonuses of the top management are reduced…. Lastly, the rank and file are asked to accept pay cuts…”
  • The Art of the A3 by Matthew May – “Every A3 tells a story. And like every story, each one is a little different, style-wise. But like any good story, there’s a clear structure.”
  • Spirit of the Toyota Suggestion System by Mike Wroblewski – “Our job as lean leaders is to help create that environment and inspire everyone to act, to take action to make improvements.”
  • To Motivate or Not to Demotivate by Jurgen Appelo – “Some people tell me that ‘you cannot motivate a person’. You can only “remove the impediments that prevent a person from being motivated”. Or, in other words, ‘you can only eliminate demotivation‘. Well, I don’t agree!”
  • Managing To Learn by Tom Southworth – “PDCA, or continuous improvement, never has an end, does it? We’re not solving problems, we’re implementing countermeasures to make positive changes to an existing condition.”
  • Demotivating a (Good) Programmer by Louis Brandy – “consider this your executive summary: he is motivated because he likes the actual work. That’s the Achilles heel. Now, before you think you’ve got this problem solved, let me explain to you the secret to the secret: what he thinks is cool is almost beyond your comprehension”
  • Apologizing Does NOT Get to the Root Cause by Mark Graban – “if you’re just putting the fire out without looking for a root cause or for prevention, you’re going to have the same problem occur again.”
  • Agile, Day 1 – “Bob wants a daily status meeting, not a brief peer-pressure meeting. I hate meetings either way, so the idea of meeting daily with my boss or the whole team sounds unpleasant.” (I like agile development and this post is not advocating it but I also like people poking fun at things when they deserve it 🙂 – John)
  • The Deadly Sin of Perfectionism by Ron Pereira – “A perfectionist may plan and plan and plan the improvement idea, or new business, or new anything… only to find themselves frozen with fear in such a way as to never actually give it a try.”
  • Q&A with Mark Graban, Author of Lean Hospitals by Jon Miller – “using data to determine which methods work best and standardizing key methods that impact quality or safety, rather than trying to standardize for the sake of standardization”
  • Financial Market Meltdown by John Hunter – “It is very challenging to remain focused after decades of great success on keeping the organization designed to survive well in extremely bad circumstances.”
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