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.

• Reward: Creativity’s Forbidden Fruit by Matt May – “Kaizen does not attempt to light a fire under people. It lights the fire within them.”
• Elegance and Encapsulation by Pete Abilla – “Encapsulation is an elegant and simple principle to ease the burden on your customer by subtracting or covering the unnecessary and adding the meaningful.”
• Deming’s Theory of Knowledge by Marc Hersch – “Systems thinking comes down to developing methods and instincts for hearing the voice of the process, or if you will, the voice of the system. This is the opposite of the reduction that has become the common sense of by-the-numbers and just-the-facts thinking in Western enterprise.”
• Virginia Mason’s CEO on Health Reform by Mark Graban – “The path to better quality and safety is the same as the path to reduced cost… Our system is so full of waste (non-value-added activities), need to systematically reduce and eliminate that waste”
• Does good experimental design require changing only one factor at a time (OFAT)? by Mark J. Anderson – “Multifactor testing is far more effective for statistical power, screening efficiency and detection of interactions. Industrial experimenters are well-advised to forget their indoctrination in OFAT and make use of multifactorial designs.”
• Getting More People Involved in Improvement by Lee Fried – “make sure that all leaders are getting out of the conference room and into the gemba to make sure that the appropriate checking and coaching activities are taking place.”
• How clean is clean enough? by Ron Pereira – “In other words, the true purpose of this step is to clean to inspect.”
• Seeking: Checklist for a Sense of Urgency by Jon Miller – “This is a delicate balance. We need to think long-term, but act each day with urgency.”
• Toyota Develops Thought-controlled Wheelchair by John Hunter – “the more important story is why Toyota and Honda will be dominant companies 20 years from now. And that story is based on their superior management and focus on long term success instead of short term quarterly results.”