The Curious Cat Management Improvement Carnival began in 2006 with the goal to provide links to interesting blog posts for those interesting in improving the practice of management.

• Jidoka is not just “built-in-quality” by Jason Yip – “Jidoka is not just about stopping and notifying of problems immediately. It also includes the concept of separating human and machine work. Effectively the idea of using machines to free humans.”
• How to Engage People in Kaizen by Jon Miller – “Frame all actions as experiments and not permanent or irreversible changes This allows people to think that they are not really changing something, only “trying it”. In fact if the method is demonstrably better, it may become the new way.”
• To Estimate or Not, That is the Question – “Create your estimates quickly and don’t get paralyzed by precision. Being quick may be the middle ground between estimating and not estimating.”
• Generation Y Deserves No Special Treatment by Chris Young – “Generation Y should not be treated any differently than any other generation. The very same employee performance standards applies to Generation Y as they apply to any other generation.”
• Rapid prototyping in NY’s Times Square by Karen Wilhelm – Experience and observation can determine optimum flow of people (and vehicles now diverted from their usual routes). Just like simulating flow in a full-size cell mockup can allow teams to adjust reality to assumptions. No long meetings, proposals, and computer models can substitute for a simple and quick prototype of a new system.”
• Stop Making Excuses by Nick McCormick – “Refuse to accept any reasons for why things that need to be done can’t be. It’s OK to identify the problems. The important thing is to develop solutions to those problems.”
• Cool Email Mistake Proofing – My main desktop computer runs Ubuntu Linux. The default email client is called Evolution. A recent upgrade introduced a very cool feature. When I hit ‘Send’ it looks for language in the email that might indicate I meant to include an attachment. If there is no attachment, it pops up [a] handy reminder
• Waste and SAP? by Kevin Meyer – “Moral of the story? Be careful of product demos.”

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