Management Improvement Carnival #77

The Curious Cat Management Improvement Carnival provide links to recent blog posts for those interesting in improving management of organizations.

• A lesson in strategy, taught by a Cat by Mark Hurst – “Without direction, we’re presenting our flipcharts and our powerpoints to the Cheshire Cat. And he just griiiiiiins.”
• Respect for People, Underutilized People, and Waste by Pete Abilla – “Worldview and Values matter – those dictate the behaviors of everybody in the company. When ‘tools’ don’t work, that is because the values don’t support the ‘tools’. Focus on Worldview and Behavior – then the rest will follow.”
• Top Ten Things Programmers Hate About Agile by Damon Poole – “If you want Agile to succeed, you need to point out, and be sincere about it, that Agile will affect the whole organization, management included.”
• AT&T, I’m Begging You to Take My Money! by Kevin Meyer – “I’ve had automatic bill pay for three years so every payment was on time, with the iPhone being one of their more expensive plans… But she couldn’t authorize the credit for me to get a FREE phone.”
• Why is asking “why” so important? by Tracey Richardson – “the next time you are at the GEMBA remember a few of these rules to effectively getting to root cause and past a symptom. This will not only help your team members but effect cost and productivity as well.”
• The Importance of Going to the Gemba by Tim McMahon – “You can’t solve problems at your desk. Going to the Gemba is a great way to get the entire team involved in identifying and solving problems. It is grounded in fact finding using actual conditions from the actual workers who perform the work”
• Genchi Genbutsu on the Retail Floor Jon Miller – “The facts that will transform our businesses don’t come from the boardrooms but from the floor (sales, production, hospital, etc.). We need to go see how customers are actually using our products and services in order to improve. Often there are unexpected differences between the design of the product, service or process and how customers use them.”
• After Lehman: How Innovation Thrives In a Crisis by Scott D. Anthony – “Today, a company that enters the S&P 500 index will stay on it for less than 20 years… Increasingly, companies that buck the trend and last 30 or more years will do so only by mastering the ability to perpetually transform themselves.”
• Key Measurements in Implementing Andon by Jamie Flinchbaugh – “no measure or indicator will tell you half as much as being on the floor, in the process, observing how people are using the system. You need to test people’s understanding and use of the processes. You need to see the responders methods and capability.”
• Purpose of Lean Tools by Mike Wroblewski – “The main purpose is to immediately make problems visible. Then we must focus our effort on solving them daily. Everybody. Every day.”
• Agile Testing versus Waterfall Test Phases by Kelly Waters – “As there is at least a daily build, and ideally continuous integration, features can be tested as they are developed, in an integrated environment… Importantly, though, each feature is tested as it’s developed, not at the end of the Sprint or iteration, and certainly not at the end of the project.”
• Was NUMMI a Success? by John Shook – “GM’s global initiative was successful because of the deep learning that had occurred among the ranks of people with NUMMI experience…. by the end, when other GM operations had improved so much, NUMMI no longer provided the dramatic impact on visitors it did back in the 80s, when visitors would leave slack-jawed at what they had seen.”
• Personal Kaizen: 15 Tips for your continuous improvement by Garr Reynolds – “One of the best ways to deepen and solidify your new knowledge is to teach it to others. Give a presentation, run a seminar, teach a class, or volunteer to run a small internal workshop to teach others in your organization what you are learning. Real learning occurs when you share it.”
• What are the Dumbest Practices Used By U.S. Companies? by Bob Sutton – “If you dig into the problems in the banks and a lot of other companies, they actually punish people who help others succeed, both via the reward systems and who gets the most prestige.”
• Extrinsic Incentives Kill Creativity by John Hunter – Dan Pink: “you’ve got an incentive designed to sharpen thinking and accelerate creativity and it does just the opposite. It dulls thinking and blocks creativity… This [research result] has been replicated over and over and over again for nearly 40 years.”

Related: Curious Cat Economics and Investing Carnival – Curious Cat Management Dictionary