The 2008 Annual Management Improvement Carnival Review (published on a number of site) I am counting as #51, making this #52. That annual review turned out to be a very interesting collection, if you have not read all of them yet, take some time to do so. I linked to the first set of posts previously and here are the remaining posts
And then some management posts from the last few weeks:
- What’s happened to great customer service? by Shaun Sayers – What’s happened to American customer service? … There was a worldwide consensus that the US had cracked this customer service mallarky, so the rest of the world paid a visit and learned a lot. But I’ll tell you something, those days are gone.
- Passion: An Important Software Development Trait by Dustin Marx – “in talking with associates, friends, and family members in various careers, it seems to me that engineers in general and software engineers/programmers/developers specifically tend to be more passionate about what they do than many folks in other industries.”
- Tips for Going to the Gemba by Lee Fried – “the transition to spending more time in the gemba is a difficult one for most leaders and is often short lived. They are not used to working directly with front line teams… After a couple of rounds the leader has had enough and the gemba visits no longer appear on their calendar.”
- The 37signals Effect by Louis Brandy – “When you take a single data point and you try to emulate certain practices to try to reproduce their success, you are entering very dangerous territory. In order to reproduce their successes, you need to understand the attributes that caused that success.” [benchmarking by copying is a failed strategy - John Hunter]
- LeanBlog Podcast with Alfie Kohn
- What is viral marketing? by Seth Godin – “Being viral isn’t the hard part. The hard part is making that viral element actually produce something of value, not just entertainment for the client or your boss.”
- Planning for One Piece Flow Cells by Jon Miller – “Takt time is the average rate of customer demand and this number can be used to calculate everything from crew size to standard work in process quantity to lead-time through the cell”
Submit suggestions for the management improvement carnival.
