Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog: Deming, lean thinking, innovation, customer focus, continual improvement, six sigma.
November 17, 2008
Management Improvement Carnival #47
Read the previous management carnivals. Also see the management Reddit for popular new blog posts to include in future carnivals.

  • The Decline and Fall of Agile by James Shore – “Without XP’s agile engineering practices, code quality and productivity asymptotically decreases over time. With them, productivity starts lower, but then it asymptotically increases.”
  • How Do You Measure Success? by Ron Pereira – “First of all, I believe many companies get caught measuring the wrong things… my favorite productivity metric is sales per employee. Of course some will think I’m advocating cutting heads in order to drive this metric up. I’m not.”
  • No Excuses by John Shook – “A culture of management seeking where to place the blame — the five whos — will absolutely prevent the flourishing of a culture that fosters ubiquitous use of the five whys”
  • Resource Planning by Jurgen Appelo – “Considering that task-switching is bad, the resource planner must seek to minimize the number of different activities per week, per person… Software developers themselves are allowed to reserve a number of academy days. These are days for self-development and training.”
  • The Deming Chain Reaction by John Dowd – “According to Deming, quality is not a state to be achieved in manufacturing, but is, rather, an ongoing company-wide effort at continual improvement.”

  • Low-Tech, High Impact Innovation by Nicole Radziwill – “Adopting the perspective of ‘appropriate technology’ is an excellent way to promote and increase innovation. Your solutions don’t have to be high tech, they just have to provide wide benefits”
  • The webcast above is via the Toyota’s New School in India by Matthew May – “Now you know where the movie Gung Ho got its material! I solemnly swear that in my TPS101, Kaizen, and Lean workshops, I do not require calisthentics”
  • Toyota Kyushu – The Manufacturing Ballet by Kevin Meyer – “Toyota is a bit unique in that they have, and operate to, formal 50 year plans. Not five year plans like the rest of us. Fifty. This crisis was expected, cash reserves created, strategies created to implement training in order to come out the other side ahead.”
  • The Truth about Lean Healthcare – “Applying lean thinking to the healthcare sector can provide significant cost and process efficiencies. However, to realise and sustain these benefits fully, there is an urgent requirement to educate and empower healthcare staff in the principles and methodologies involved.”
  • Are you Chasing the Rabbit? by Mike Wroblewski – “Another key insight is step by step training. Instead of dumping tons of information and tasks to learn in unison on a person to learn, it is suggested that teaching in smaller bits is a better approach.”
  • 12 Challenges Facing the Met’s New Director by Gill Corkindale – “Mr Campbell has overseen and implemented a large project in The Antonio Ratti Textile Center, but as a largely unproven business leader, he might wish to enlist a strong commercial manager or consider some formal business training.”
  • What Tool of Lean Manufacturing Do You Use First? by Jon Miller – “What tool of lean manufacturing do you use first? It probably does not matter. The only requirements are that 1) you have a high chance of sustaining its success, 2) it is clear how you can make a progression to the next tool or system, and 3) the purpose of using the tools is clear”
  • Righter Incentivization by John Hunter – “Why can’t we figure out how to incentivize the behavior we desire and have it not backfire on us? What is the righter way to dangle incentives in front of our employees to get them to do what we want?”

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  • Nick McCormick: Agreed John. Slogans can be good or bad. They can be effective if the rank and file come up with...
  • Halvard: I have reservations about the Obama Healthcare Plan. Can it create costly effects to my families well being?...
  • Rob: Absolutely excellent videos. Deming is timeless and his message resonates today.
  • Jamie Flinchbaugh: I am curious to watch it. I believe the executives will probably have some ah-has and some good...
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  • Jamie Flinchbaugh: I’m sure you are right that there are many frustrated people, but one of the benefits of...
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