The Curious Cat Management Improvement Carnival is published twice each month. The posts selected for the carnival focus on the areas of management improvement I have focused on in the Curious Cat Management Improvement Guide since 1996: Deming, lean thinking, leadership, innovation, respect for people, customer focus, etc..
- The Management Work Ethic by Bill Waddell – “How on earth the folks in charge can trash the lives of 2,000 employees and their families in order to beat an earnings estimate, and keep a straight face while publishing a mission statement pledging to enable employees to ‘share in the company’s success’ is beyond me. Of course, the reason for such blatant hypocrisy is pure selfishness.”
- Buying the new MacBook Air – “Most salespeople would have sold the more expensive computer, but this guy took the time to explain why I didn’t really need it, and convinced me to spend much less. Apple recognizes what few other retailers do: customer satisfaction starts even before a product is purchased, and it is customer satisfaction that makes companies great.”
- “Customer-In” Design – Best Achieved by Front-line Workers by Tripp Babbitt – “Front-line workers can offer any service organization insight into what is wrong with their design of service in real-time.”
- Growing Deadwood in the Organization by Gregg Stocker – “I have found that, in many organizations, the responsibility to coach and develop talent is much lower on the list of priorities than documenting and replacing the poor performers. This is surprising when one considers what it costs the organization to hire, train, and fire employees. In my experience, this type of situation generally results from a lack of knowledge of how to develop people and/or impatience (or short-term thinking).”
- Improving Problem Solving – Ian Bradbury and Gipsie Ranney: “The same process that delivered the defects delivered outcome or results that were not defective. Study of the defects alone presumes that the defects are necessarily produced by a special cause. Such a presumption may frequently be invalid.”
- Structure 1st: Why You Should Not Start With Practices by Andrew Fuqua – “For agile to work, we must have stable teams. Teams don’t work if management is often moving people around or if people are on multiple “teams”. Teams need to bond, to learn how to work together. Colocation is a huge help. Cross-functional is assumed.”
- Leadership: the Force Multiplier of Kaizen by Kevin Meyer – “Forgetting about the respect for people pillar of lean will cause a lean transformation to fail. Leadership that doesn’t truly commit to and engage with the lean transformation will also cause it to stagnate and fail.”
- Management Information by James Lawther – “All those calls are recorded on different databases, at different frequencies, using different technologies… But most importantly of all, ask yourself why you are counting this thing in the first place?”
- My Thoughts on Out of the Crisis by Evan Leybourn – “While this book is over 30 years old and predates the “Agile” movement, many of the concepts and recommendations that Deming makes align to the values & principles of the agile manifesto… My final thoughts; this is a great book and has remained relevant throughout the last 3 decades.”
- Leadership and Management by John Hunter – “Optimizing systems is most effective when the entire picture is considered and addressed. Doing so requires the traits people divide into leadership and management.”
McKittrick Canyon trail, Texas, USA. By John Hunter.
