Posted on September 29, 2010  Comments (1)

Surprise! Blue collar jobs are coming back

This is good news for the economy. I believe it is partially due to more companies rethinking off-shoring practices which are flawed and adopting lean manufacturing ideas. As I have written for years USA manufacturing output has continued to increase and still remains by far the largest manufacturer. China is making huge gains by growing their output dramatically (not by the USA’s output decreasing). Manufacturing employment in the USA (and everywhere else – including China) has been decreasing for 20 years. The main stories are not jobs moving but jobs being eliminated by productivity improvement and China growing manufacturing output not a decline in manufacturing output in the USA.

Related: Worldwide Manufacturing Employment Data – 1979 to 2007 – Manufacturing in the USA, and Why Organizations Often Don’t – Top Manufacturing Countries in 2005

Posted on September 21, 2010  Comments (1)

The management blog carnival is published 3 times a month with select recent management blog posts. Also try Curious Cat Management Articles for online management improvement articles.

• Visual Management for having a baby by Xavier Quesada Allue – “The team members (us, the parents) were not working full time on the project. This means that at certain moments, if necessary, we could scale up our efforts on this project to the detriment of other parallel projects we were doing”
• “Systems Thinking” and Me: Never the Twain Shall Meet by Tom Peters – “The best performers seesawed back and forth between ‘ideas’ and ‘actions.’ … Newtonian ‘scientific method,’ wholly dependent on ideas shaped and reshaped by actions—my studies of Nobel laureates in the sciences, for example, suggests (and not oversimplifying by much) that the winners ‘do more experiments faster.’”
• How To Go From Idea To Launching With Paying Customers In 8 Steps by Jasonl Baptiste – “Start killing off things you don’t need right away and leave them to Version 1.1,etc., but also make sure the really important ones have a very high priority… This will make it easier to get the product in the hands of your customers AND it will also make you laser focused on the things that truly matter to your customers.”
• If The Student Hasn’t Learned… by Mark Rosenthal – “Instead of looking for cultural reasons why ‘this won’t work here” we kept faith that, if the initial response was silence and non-participation, there was something that we needed to address in the way we taught, and in the environment we were creating.”
• First Steps – Improving Your Meetings by Jamie Flinchbaugh – “But even for a meeting, this can lead to significant time and action items. If you want to keep it simple and manageable, end your meetings with these 3 questions: 1. What’s 1 thing that we did well? 2. What’s 1 thing that we can improve? 3. What’s 1 thing that we will do differently?
• Go That Way, Really Fast by Jeff Atwood – “Google went from nothing, no web browser at all, to best-of-breed in under two years. Meanwhile, Internet Explorer took longer than the entire development period of Chrome to go from version 7 to version 8.”
• Delegate, don’t dump by Wally Bock – “Part of your job is to help your team members develop. That will only happen if you give them as much control over their work life as you can, based on their ability to do the job and their willingness to tackle it on their own. “
• Bridging the Knowing-Doing Gap by Jon Miller – Mr. Ohno did not tolerate the knowing-doing gap in his presence. One was scolded for claiming to understand something without first putting it into action. Stories like this are the source of the Taiichi Ohno-ism ‘Understanding means doing’.”
• Toyota Texas Tour – Concepts From the Visitor Center by Mark Graban – “I was surprised to see how much of the focus was on TPS. You’d think the general public just wants to know how cars are built (and the visitor center does explain stamping, paint, etc.). But it’s apparently Toyota is proud of TPS as a core of who they are.”

Related: Curious Cat Management Books – management quotes – management glossary

Posted on September 13, 2010  Comments (0)

John Kotter believes technology and globalization are requiring us to change more rapidly. “It is very difficult to innovate without requiring people to do something different.” If an organization culture is mainly avoiding making anyone uncomfortable, innovation and improvement are quite difficult.

Improvement is required to stay in business today. The key to good management systems is how rapidly improvement is achieved, not that improvement is being made.

Related: Communicating Change – Process Improvement and Innovation – Building on Successful Improvement – How to Improve

Posted on September 10, 2010  Comments (1)

The management blog carnival is published 3 times a month with select recent management blog posts. Also try our collected management articles and blogs posts at: Curious Cat Management articles.

• When to coach the process, and when to coach the solution by Jamie Flinchbaugh – “Your focus is not on the solution or the problem itself, but on the process that either created or missed the problem that would end up enabling future problems. Obviously you might end up doing both, but that is a larger investment of your time.”
• Hitting a WIP Limit by “Such a simple thing, but now instead of increasing the number of spinning plates, we’re putting energy into moving the current work faster, which I suspect is going to be more satisfying for developers too.” by Andrew Walker
• The Importance of the Daily Meeting by Kevin Meyer – “Traditional organizations wait a week or two between staff meetings to discuss issues, and by the time the meeting rolls around many subtle issues have been forgotten.”
• Does the “Deming Connection” have a down side? – “Most companies pour money into sales and marketing to lure new customers while giving their existing ones short shrift, in an effort to minimize costs and maximize revenue.”
• We’ve got leaders. What we need is leadership by Wally Bock – “Your challenge is to accomplish the mission and care for your people. That will only happen if you do leadership work, management work, and supervision work.”
• Evidence-Based Study Tips: Nine Ways To Help You Learn by Bob Sutton – “Adopt a growth mindset: This might be the most important of all; as Carol Dweck’s wonderful research shows, when people believe that their intelligence and abilities are malleable rather than fixed, they try harder of learn more”

Read more

Posted on September 3, 2010  Comments (0)

Kevin Meyer hosts the Management Improvement Carnival #108 on his blog, highlights include:

• Gemba Tales: Developing Leader Standard Work – Five Important Steps – key components of leader standard work.
• Flinchbaugh: Small-i ROI as Applied to Strategy – Sometimes instead of focusing on the big R in ROI, it can pay to find a unique niche requiring just a small i.
• Lean Blog: Mental Models: Standardized Work and Performance Measures – Standard work and performance measures mean different things in a traditional command and control organization versus a lean organization.

Related: Lean Daily – Management Improvement Carnival #93 – Management Improvement Carnival #44