6 New Kiva Loan to Manafacturing Entrepreneurs

Posted on July 28, 2011  Comments (0)

I have been a big fan of Kiva for quite some time, and have written about it previously: Kiva – Giving Entrepreneurs an Opportunity to Succeed, Thanksgiving: Micro-financing Entrepreneurs. I made 6 new loans today to manufacturing entrepreneurs in the USA (and Mexico); Tajikistan; Nicaragua; Armenia; and 2 in El Salvador. The webcast above shows Armen Tsaghikyan in Armenia. It does seem like his process maybe could use a benefit from a bit of application of lean manufacturing ideas.

It is great to be able to help out people whether it is providing useful information (like I hope my web site and blog do) or a small loan of capital that allows some capital improvements. Many of the loans through Kiva amount to providing a loan to get additional supplies (often they have very limited capital). But my favorite loans are those that allow for purchases of new equipment that will make them more efficient.

It is easy to help out yourself; you can loan as a little as $25. The 10 members of the Curious Cat team have made 292 loans for a total of $12,000. Comment with the link to your Kiva page and I will add a link on Curious Cat Kivans.

Related: Kiva Fellows Blog: Nepalese Entrepreneur Success – More Kiva Entrepreneur Loans: Kenya, Honduras, Armenia… – 100th Entrepreneur Loan

Management Improvement Carnival #137

Posted on July 21, 2011  Comments (0)

The Curious Cat management blog carnival is published 3 times a month with select recent management blog posts. I also collect management improvement articles through Curious Cat Management Articles, you can subscribe via RSS to new article additions. Photo is the view I see as I post this issue of the carnival.

• The importance of understanding variation or how to avoid treating all contractors as thieves by Benjamin Mitchell – “The fix for common cause variation (and most variation is common cause) is to go and study the situation, experiment and try and look for patterns or trends in the data before making a change to the system.”
• Deming’s 14 Points by David Joyce – “The 14 points are not a menu you can pick and choose from. Deming intended you use all 14. They are one philosophy.”
• Misconceptions about Self-Organizing Teams by Esther Derby – “Like all teams, they need a compelling goal, skills, information, and enough time to form and perform. And they still need managers to create a supportive context, set appropriate boundaries and constraints and connect the team to the organization.”
• New York City Halts Teacher Bonus Program: Another Blow to Evidence-Resistant Ideology by Bob Sutton – “The decision was made in light of a study that found the bonuses had no positive effect on either student performance or teachers’ attitudes toward their jobs.”
• Agile Prioritisation by Mike Griffiths – “There is no single best way to always prioritise; instead, try to diagnose issues arising in the prioritisation process, be it “lack of involvement” or “too many priority 1’s”, and then try approaches such as Monopoly money, MoSCoW or a pure list to assist if the problems cannot be resolved via dialogue. The goal is to understand where features lie in relation to others as opposed to assigning a category label.”

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Touring Factories on Vacation When I Was Young

Posted on July 13, 2011  Comments (0)

Growing up, occasionally, a family vacation would include a factory tour related to my Dad’s work. He was providing some management or engineering consulting and took the opportunity to check in on progress and visit the gemba. Here is a photo from one of those tours (in Nigeria, I think). My brother and Mom are visible in the photo.

The tours (which were not a very common occurrence) were quite enjoyable and interesting. Though I really didn’t like how noisy the factories were. Seeing all the machines and vast scale of the systems was quite a change of pace and added some excitement to the vacations (that often were already pretty exciting). I remember we also visited some factories in Kenya (in between seeing the game parks).

On this tour we found a bit of visual management showing which side of a crate should be on the top.
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Management Improvement Carnival #136

Posted on July 11, 2011  Comments (1)

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 Guide since 1996 (Deming, leadership, agile software development, lean manufacturing, continual improvement…).

• The Purpose of a Business is not Customer Value by Jurgen Appelo – “Every business is a complex adaptive system of stakeholders working together in order to create value for everyone involved… Unfortunately, again and again, management fads and hypes try to reduce this systemic view on organizations into a simplistic view, with dumb suggestions such as “maximize shareholder value” or ‘delight your customer’.” [Curious Cat on the purpose of organizations - John]
• Line of Sight, Employee Engagement, and Daily Kaizen by Mark Hamel – “Perhaps the toughest transformational challenge is flipping the organizational pyramid “upside down” so that the leaders become enablers, not bottlenecks.”
• Should You Let People Go, or Keep People and Reduce Salaries? by Harwell Thrasher – “When faced with the choice between layoffs and reducing salaries across the board, most businesses and governments follow the logic I’ve outlined above, and they go with layoffs. It’s the easy choice, but as I’ve noted in my list of three exceptions, it’s not always the best choice.”
• You can purchase the whole interview.

• Thoughts on Exceptional Leaders by Wally Bock – “Exceptional leaders constantly work at getting better.”

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Management Improvement Carnival #135

Posted on July 5, 2011  Comments (1)

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 Guide since 1996 (Lean manufacturing, Deming, agile software development, systems thinking, customer focus, six sigma, leadership…).

• Go See, Ask Why, Show Respect by John Shook – “Go see, ask why, show respect is the way we turn the philosophy of scientific empiricism into actual behavior. We go observe what is really happening (at the gemba where the work takes place), while showing respect to the people involved”
• Don’t delegate unless by Wally Bock – “Can the team member do the work you want to delegate? If they can’t you need to give them the training or resources they need to do what you assign. If you’re not sure, you should delegate but monitor.
  Will the team member pitch in and do the work when you’re not checking?”
• The Seeds of Legendary by Mark Riffey – “To me, the folks that deliver legendary service offer consistency, little surprises, thoughtful, caring service. Not just nice, but more than you expect. Above and beyond. More than that, they set expectations by sharing with you that you’re about to experience the extraordinary – and then they deliver that and more. Talk isn’t enough. Delivery is critical.”
• My Week with Mr. Masaaki Imai by Ron Pereira – “The thing that I most taken aback by was how kind and humble Mr. Imai was (and is). Many of the so-called lean gurus of our time are not always the most humble and kind… in fact, some of them are flat out arrogant and hard to listen to.”

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