Posted on February 25, 2011  Comments (0)

“I want you to pause for a minute, you wretched weaklings, and take stock of your miserable existence.” Nigel Marsh paraphrasing (or quoting, I can’t find the source though) the advice that Saint Benedict gave his startled followers.

I wrote some about focusing on your whole life recently: Work and Life.

Related: Medieval Peasants had More Vacation Time – Positivity and Joy in Work – We don’t Have to Accept Despair – The Importance of Management Improvement

Posted on February 21, 2011  Comments (0)

The Curious Cat Management blog carnival highlights recent management blog posts 3 times each month. The posts generally focus on the areas I have focused on in the Curious Cat Management Improvement guide since 1996 (lean manufacturing, Deming, agile software development, innovation, six sigma, customer focus…).

• Tradable Quality Hypothesis by Martin Fowler – “Instead it’s vital to focus on the true value of internal quality – that it’s the enabler to speed. The purpose of internal quality is to go faster” (add I believe better reliability – John)
• Lean Mindsets for Healthcare by Mark Graban – “Problem solving, leadership, and kaizen can’t be done effectively from an office or conference room… Instead of fighting the same fires each and every time, it’s time to focus on improving systems and processes.”
• Working smarter by Gabriel Weinberg – “By planting a lot of different seeds, you are spreading your risk a bit hoping that some of them will blossom, or more often than not, prompt you to think of new related or combined efforts that eventually turn into something meaningful.”
• The Fine Line Between Micro-Management and Surfacing Problems by Jamie Flinchbaugh – “The difference between engagement and micro-management is how management responds to this increased transparency.”
• Toyota’s Recall Crisis: What Have We Learned? by Jeffrey Liker – “We also learned that the NHTSA knew all along that the only problems were floor mats and sticky pedals, but they had to go ahead with the NASA study to convince members of Congress who believed electronics were the cause of sudden acceleration despite a total lack of evidence to support that belief.”
• What’s Next for the Agile Manifesto by Dennis Stevens – “We need to learn how to do a better job of defining value and aligning the cadence across the organization and improving the flow of value from concept to delivery.”

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Posted on February 10, 2011  Comments (0)

The management blog carnival is published 3 times a month with select recent management blog posts. Since 2006 the carnival has focused on finding interesting posts for managers on improving the performance of organizations (lean manufacturing, Deming, agile software development, leadership, systems thinking…).

• Slow and Steady, and Routine by Jamie Flinchbaugh – “Truly internalizing behaviors and skills cannot be done all at once. It takes repetitive practice, which cannot be compressed into one single experience.”
• Scott Heiferman looks back at Meetup’s bet-the-company moment – “This is going to sound terrible, but the thing I would have done differently is frankly, to have respectfully listened to everyone but, not taken the complaints too seriously.”
• Why Do Some Testers Find The Critical Problems? by Michael Bolton – “Testers, to be successful, must be given the freedom and responsibility to explore and to contribute what they’ve learned back to their team and to the rest of the organization.”
• Lean Lego Game – 4 Rounds to Successful Lean Training – “Covering many Lean concepts including waste (the seven wastes), inventory buffers and kanban, kaizen and workcells, it’s perfect for facilitating your own Lego session, whether you’re implementing Lean in software development or on a manufacturing shop floor.”
• The Hole in the Soul of Business by Gary Hamel – “Apple is in the beauty business. It uses its prodigious software and design talents to produce products and services that are aesthetic stand-outs. There are many within Google who believe their company is in the wisdom business, who talk about raising the world’s IQ, democratizing knowledge and empowering people with information. Sadly, though, this kind of dedication to big-hearted goals and high-minded ideals is all too rare in business.”
• Why Don’t We See More QC Circles? by Jon Miller – “The lean community seems to be largely rediscovering ideas that were developed 100 years ago, abandoned, adopted, rediscovered, abandoned and discovered yet again. Perhaps QC Circles are the next thing for lean?”
• Thinking about Moving to Management by Wally Bock – “Are you willing to make decisions and be accountable for the results? Leaders take the blame and share the credit. Are you OK with that? Do you enjoy helping others succeed? It will be your primary job…”
• Continual Learning by John Hunter – “Look at people like Ackoff and Deming. They knew more than pretty much anyone about management. Yet both continued learning until the day they died. They were quick to credit others. They were quick to challenge people but also had an obvious respect and compassion for people.”

Related: Curious Cat Investing and Economics Carnival – Management and Leadership Quotes – The aim proposed here for any organization is for everybody to gain

Categories: Carnival, Management
Tags: Carnival,management


Management Improvement Carnival #121

Posted on February 6, 2011  Comments (0)

This edition of the Management Improvement Carnival is #121 (editions 119 and 120 were the annual 2010 blog reviews part 1 and part 2). Also try Curious Cat Management Articles for online management improvement articles: you can subscribe to an RSS feed for management articles now.

• Managing Nerds – “Until you’ve experienced the solving of a seemingly impossible problem, it’s hard to understand how far a nerd will go to protect his problem solving focus and you can help. The road to either High is a mental state traditionally called the Zone. There are three things to know about the Zone: 1. The almost-constant quest of the nerd is managing all the crap that is preventing us from entering the Zone as we search for the Highs. Meetings, casual useless fly-bys…”
• Jeffrey Liker on Toyota’s Challenges and His New Books by Mark Graban – “Toyota didn’t react very quickly because the engineers in Japan didn’t see these problems as defects with the car. Engineers in Japan are pretty isolated from the gemba and they don’t understand how Americans would use the car… ‘The ultimate root cause was not listening to customers well enough and they took too a long time to investigate and respond.’ That was the problem they needed to solve.”
• What being in a band taught me about management by Neil Johnson – “Limit work in progress – Getting a song to a performable state is massive step. It brings the group together and feels like progress. It’s better to have three presentable songs than nine nearly finished ‘things’, not least because it then provides a means for feedback from outside of the group.”
• We Need Less FAKE Lean, More FAIL Lean by Jon Miller – “What we need is less FAKE lean and more FAIL lean: the type of lean that stretches, bends and turns things inside out to the point where were are forced to look at the mental, business and organizational models and challenge our dogma that what worked in the past is still valid today.”
• Experience agile in an accelerated form and focus on innovation at the same time by Yuval Yeret – ” During the sprints we worked on elaborating our ideas, using Agile User Stories and techniques such as story mapping, as well as started implementation and delivery of “Working Software”. It proved a real challenge to deliver on such short sprints, especially for those of us who didn’t have a somewhat formed idea at the starting point.”

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Categories: Carnival, Management
Tags: Lean thinking,management