Management Improvement Blog Carnival #155

The Curious Cat management blog carnival is published 3 times a month with hand picked recent management blog posts. I also collect select management improvement articles and blog posts in the Curious Cat management article library. The annual management blog roundup event covered #151 – #154, so this is #155.

• We Don’t Know quote by David York, via Mike Wroblewski-
  We don’t know what the problems are…..that’s why we make them visible.
  We don’t know what the root causes of the problems are….that’s why we ask 5 Whys?
  We don’t know what the evidence is….that’s why we collect data.
  We don’t know what is actually happening….that’s why we observe.
  We don’t know what solutions will succeed….that’s why we experiment.
• Why do we pay sales commissions? by Dan Ostlund, Fog Creek Software – “For us, it’s been a great success, and at least from that perspective it might be time we punch the Theory X, commissions-based sales culture right in the nose. Real redemption might lie in removing the source of the derangement and treating sales people like we treat programmers and other workers that we implicitly trust.”


Axes in Nigeria by William Hunter

• The C-Suite Double Standard by Dan Markovitz – “I started noticing what I call the C-suite double standard: leaders and executives who are ferocious about improving manufacturing processes and eliminating waste, but who passively accept waste in their office operations and individual work.”
• Standard Work Is Like Food – Taste before Seasoning by Mark Hamel – “No doubt, we have heard the Taichii Ohno quote, “Where there is no standard, there can be no kaizen.” Standard work implies that there must be adherence. Without it, it’s more like a standard wish…as fickle as the wind. We can’t sustain improvements and we have little foundation for the next.”
• How to trick yourself into thinking you’re doing lean (and trick others at the same time) by Jamie Flinchbaugh – “Don’t believe you are doing lean just because you’re filling out a template or following an agenda. It’s the thinking that counts.”
• Defying Time: Dr. W. Edwards Deming by John Persico – “the more difficult part of our consulting at PMI was not in teaching statistics or process analysis but in helping to change management attitudes from the old thinking of meeting goals and quotas to the new thinking that went beyond goals and quotas to never ending improvement and innovation.”
• Google: “A place where it simply isn’t efficient to act like an asshole.” by Bob Sutton – ” If you watch how people interact there — receptionists and executives, young engineers and senior executives, and people from less prestigious versus more prestigious parts of the company — the more powerful people treat the less powerful people with an unusually large amount of respect, even deference, and the less powerful people don’t cower or kiss-up nearly as much as I see in most places.”
• The Antithesis of Lean by Bill Waddell – “So I have to question just how a company – the fact that the company in question is Toyota notwithstanding – claim to be lean and focused on customer value and send 34 people into a resort town to take film of cars in snow that create no value at all for its customers?”
• Taking What You Don’t Deserve, CEO Style by John Hunter – “Whatever nice words they use to try and give an illusion that they respect those they work with (or their stockholders, suppliers, customers, communities…) doesn’t change their disrespectful actions.”