Submit suggestions for the management improvement carnival. Also see the management Reddit (what is this Reddit thing?).

• 20 cynical project management tips by Michael Krigsman – “Projects with realistic budgets and timetables don’t get approved… If you don’t know where you’re going, just talk about specifics… A realist is one who’s presciently disappointed in the future.”
• Giving ERP Systems the Finger by Mike Wroblewski – “Anyone of us in business today that has to deal with ERP systems knows that while these systems are meant to make life simple for us, it more times than not works in the opposite direction.”
• If I just keep saying it, it will be true – “It looked as if cases were longer because of outages, but in reality, they would have been longer running regardless. The relationship is incidental.”
• Does Innovation Stem From Corporate Culture? by Dan Markovitz – “Kelly says that at Gore, ‘people are only leaders if someone wants to follow them.’ …adapting to a culture where influence, not title, is the key currency”
• Agile Architecture Method by J.D. Meier – “The Agile Architecture Method is a structured approach for helping you create your candidate architecture, identify relevant spikes and guide your inspections throughout your life cycle. During each iteration, you can use the frames to identify relevant intersections between your user stories and hot spots.”
• Idiot Inspector for Idiot Corporation? by Mark Graban – “So we have an inspector who didn’t have enough time and probably wasn’t trained well enough for his job. So he’s probably not an idiot. I’ll be fair to him, other than my headline. He’s just a bit player in the overall system.” [the system is broken - as I wrote earlier: Losing Consumers' Trust, John]
• Web Check-In: Lean or Not? by Ron Pereira – “I got to their website and in just a few clicks was booking my wife’s appointment… A few minutes later I was done… About 40 minutes after submitting the form they called for my wife to come in, meaning she got to ‘wait’ in the comfort of our home and not some germ filled waiting room.”
• “Modest Incompetence Simply Won’t Do; It’s Mindboggling Screw-Ups That Are Required” by Bill Waddell – “According to Buffett, if a CEO can really foul things up and impact a lot of other people, the government will bail him out, as opposed to local screw ups who just affect the CEOs own employees and investors.”
• Managing the unmanageable by Vincent Chin – “how on earth the hotel manages a process which are out of the hotel’s scope of processes… Well Andy related to me that his hotel works closely with the Tourism Board and cab company ensuring feedback is directed back to the cab company and to that particular cab driver.”
• Warren Buffett’s Letter to Shareholders 2009 by John Hunter – “Warren Buffett is a great investor. He is also a great executive. He hires honest and able people and lets them do their job. He ensures managers retain constancy of purpose…”

If you want to follow me on Twitter, now you can.