The Curious Cat management carnival is published 3 times a month highlighting some recent management blog posts. The posts generally focus on the areas I have focused on in the Curious Cat Management Improvement Guide since 1996.
I added a page on our blog showing the most recent blog post from a large number of management blogs.
- Software Inventory by Joel Spolsky – “Trello works great for a reasonable amount of inventory, but it intentionally starts to get klunky if you have too many cards in one list. And that’s exactly the point: it makes inventory visible so that you know when it’s starting to pile up.” (I use Trello, and like it, at Hexawise where I am a consultant – John)
- You don’t “do Lean” by Paul Levy – “Lean is not a program. It is a long-term philosophy of corporate leadership and organization that is based, above all, on respect shown to front-line staff.”
- Queueing Theory at Chipotle by Evan Durant – “I like Chipotle for several reasons, not the least of which is the fact that they have hands-down the greatest food service process in the industry. I could talk about standard work, flow, material replenishment, customer focus, and a whole bunch of other lean stuff”
- Microsoft’s Downfall: Inside the Executive E-mails and Cannibalistic Culture That Felled a Tech Giant – “‘Every current and former Microsoft employee I interviewed—every one—cited stack ranking as the most destructive process inside of Microsoft, something that drove out untold numbers of employees,’ Eichenwald writes… ‘It leads to employees focusing on competing with each other rather than competing with other companies.'” [This is exactly what Dr. Deming said would happen and even the current head of HR that lead this process said she was going to get rid of it when she started at Microsoft – John]
- Traction mistakes by Gabriel Weinberg – “use initial customer development to inform your product roadmap and literally prevent yourself from a) building something people don’t really want and b) building something people want but not enough to form a business around it.”
- Apple’s Average Traditional Supply Chain by Kevin Meyer – “To manage this process they send planeloads of engineers from Cupertino, and Steve Jobs once proclaimed that one reason they’re in China is because there’s no place else they could wake thousands of engineers at 1am and get them onto a line to solve a problem. Sounds like a very traditional supply chain to me…”
- When things go bad by Wally Bock – “If you’re going to handle emergencies effectively you’ve got to do your thinking ahead of time. Plan for the things you know can happen.”
