The Curious Cat Management Improvement Carnival provides links to recent articles to help managers improve the performance organization.

• Lean in Sweden: Tools < Thinking by Mark Graban – “Tools have some value, but only in context of lean thinking and the lean management philosophy. Tools aren’t value-less, but thinking is better.”
• Manufacturing starts to come home by Dan Markovitz – “NCR sees domestic manufacturing as key to increasing sales as well. It enables them to make higher value-added products that their customers want.”
• Correlation or Causation? Interceptions and the Playoffs by Jeff Hajek – “this is a classic case of confusing correlation with causation. If this data truly was a cause and effect relationship, meaning interceptions caused losses, fixing the problem would be simple… If you never threw the ball, you could win nearly four out of five times.”
• Learning from Toyota’s Stumble by Steven Spear – “But as we are now sadly seeing, the capacity for developing people can be overstretched. It was not recognizing this and succumbing to the temptation to make growth its first priority that led to Toyota’s current problems.”
• When in doubt, timebox it by Mark Imbriaco – “If we can solve the compatibility problems in those 30 minutes, it will be a nice win and we can make use of the plugin that we want to. On the flip side, we already have a known solution to the problem.”
• Be Proactive – Prevent your problems! by Sonja Hughes – “Monitoring process performance through statistical process control or other performance measures allows us to detect changes or trends so we can take appropriate action before problems occur.”

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The collection of posts from 10 blogs that made up the 2009 annual management blog are counted as Management Improvement Carnival #85, making this post #86.

• Are Slogans Always Bad or Can They Inspire? by Mark Graban – “Why are slogans bad? Dr. Deming writes, in part, ‘They are directed at the wrong people. They arise from management’s supposition that the production workers could, by putting their backs into the job, accomplish zero defects, improve quality, improve productivity, and all else that is desirable.””
• Fail, Learn, Lead by Jamie Flinchbaugh – “we don’t want to encourage people to make mistakes, but what do we want? We want people to surface mistakes or errors as they occur. We want them to own them and fix them. And we do want them to learn from them when they do occur”
• Five Change Management Errors that Make You Wish You’d Read this Article Sooner by Jon Miller – “it’s best to spend most of the time debating the guiding principles and values of lean in order to gain deep alignment, and then let the tools and specific solutions follow from that.”
• Joy, hope, and lean by Karen Wilhelm – “I think it’s joy and hope that propel continuous improvement. We’re just humans, with primitive brains that run on emotions more often than on facts and figures.”
• Motiv’s Scott Wilbur Teaches Brunswick a Lesson by Kevin Meyer – “Brunswick moved a bowling ball factory from Michigan to Mexico to chase cheap labor… and paid for it in quality. Meanwhile Scott Wilbur decided to stay behind, started Motiv, and became profitable making bowling balls in Michigan.”

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The 2009 annual management improvement blog carnival continues with more bloggers posting highlights from some of their favorite management blogs. Also see 2009 Annual Management Blog Review Part 1 and part 2.

Mark Graban’s review took a Boston theme covering Chasing the Rabbit, Running a Hospital, Gemba Coach and John Shook’s Management Column. Highlights include:

• Medical Intensive Care Units go Lean: Result = Happiness
• What’s health care reform missing? Quality!
• How Do I Convince People to Practice Lean?
• A Trip to the Dentist That You’ll Enjoy

In the 3rd carnival post on the Stats Made Easy blog Mark J. Anderson took a look at Seth Godin’s blog and among other things liked: Godin suggests that under the bright light of the internet being generous and fair in business dealings pays off now more than ever.

Bryan Lund found some inspiration from the Three Star Leadership Blog, Process Rants, Capable People? and the Leadership Styles Blog. Highlights include:

• A simple questioning method to help people buy-in to process improvement
• Wally Bock showing how problems are like dinosaurs
• Underpromising and overdelivering, not such a good idea
• Shaun Sayer’s debunking a number of ISO myths in Quality Policy and Quality Objectives

And I covered, Training Within Industry, Visual Management Blog and Making IT Clear to bring the annual management carnival to a close. Highlights include:

• Information Technology is all about the Business
• Visual Management for Agile Teams
• Building up Standard Work Using Job Instruction

This year 10 blogs took a look back at excellent post from 34 management blogs in 2009, providing some great idea to help managers improve. Don’t forget to visit each carnival post and find some excellent ideas you can use and perhaps some new blogs to add to your RSS reader.

Related: Management blog directory – 2008 Annual management blog review

10 management blogs are participating in the 2009 Management Blog Carnival. Be sure to check out all the great posts. Here we are looking at some exceptional posts on the , Training Within Industry and Making IT Clear. The quotes below are taken from blog posts on these blogs (and include links to the posts they are taken from)

Visual Management Blog by Xavier Quesada Allue

“Visual Management is the practice of using information visualization techniques to manage work. A simple example is using sticky notes on a wall to manage a list of tasks, a better (and more complex) example is kanban.”

Agile and lean management both stress to the importance of making work in process visible. With agile software development workload is often managed using short iterations to create software code and deploy it (similar to continuous flow). “The goal is that any team can do any story in the backlog. You should stress that the ‘real’ Team is the big one. Sub-teams are just created for communication and coordination purposes. In my opinion, they should not develop too strong a team identity. For example, I would not measure sub-team velocity, and I would make sure people rotate from sub-team to sub-team a lot.”

Short software development iterations “require both soft and hard commitments from team members. The team is required to work as a team (for which soft commitment is required) and to commit to finishing a certain amount of work in one Sprint.”

Training Within Industry by Bryan Lund

Another method of making in process work clear is to make clear what the process is.
Building up Standard Work Using Job Instruction explains why job instruction is critical skill that supports standardized work, in that training is used as a countermeasure against variability. An important idea that is far to often ignored.

“The primary purpose of a Job Breakdown Sheet is to serve as a trainer’s aid. It is not meant to be read by the trainee.” and “My experience is that Work Instructions are used so a number of objectives may be achieved”: reduce training time, have trainees more directly involved with training and compliance and accountability through a a chain of approvals.

Early in the year Bryan included a series of lean comics, including:

Making IT Clear by Harwell Thrasher

Harwell Thrasher focuses on explaining IT issues to a business audience, and giving business people advice on how to improve the effectiveness of their IT organizations. “IT doesn’t succeed because of technology — it succeeds because of its contribution to the business.”

He has several posts with straight forward ideas for managers such as How to Become a Manager – 13 Skills You’ll Need: “Obstacle Removal… Part of your job is to remove the obstacles that are preventing your employees from doing their best.” Managers responsibility to intervene in the system to remove obstacle preventing people from doing their best is a big key to management I believe. One great thing about agile software development is how clearly this is shown to be a project managers responsibility.

As he says in The 7 Biggest Challenges of a Manager “If you ever get to the point where you honestly have no idea how to improve things further, then you should either (a) seek outside advice, or (b) look for another job. There’s always a better way, and you have to keep looking for it.”

“Most technical people who become managers do so because they want more scope and control… perhaps most important, you don’t become a good manager by being good technically – you become a good manager by being able to get things accomplished through other people.”

Take a look at the full list of posts pointing to excellent posts from over 30 management blogs from 2009.

Related: 2008 Curious Cat Management Carnival – Management Reddit – Curious Cat Management Search

The 2009 annual management improvement blog review is underway. Jamie Flinchbaugh found excellent posts from In Pursuit of Elegance, Shmula blog and Got Boondoggle? Those posts include:

• The Art of Symmetry: Fractals and the Mandelbrot by Matthew May
• Respect for People, Underutilized People, and Waste by Pete Abilla
• Get Your Boots On! by Mike Wroblewski

Mark J. Anderson has highlighted posts from Work Matters and will be reviewing Seth Godin and the Hexawise blog in upcoming posts. Highlights from Bob Sutton include: Intuition vs. Data-Driven Decision-Making: Some Rough Ideas.

Jon Miller scoured the Lean is Good, Daily Kaizen and Jamie Flinchbaugh and has posted valuable highlights, including:

• Policy Deployment #4 – Catch Ball by Bryan Zeigler
• It’s All About the Why, the Other Why by Bruce Baker
• Three Ways to Root Cause by Lee Fried

Be sure to check out each carnival post and each of the posts they highlight. The review shows how much excellent material is published on management blogs. 2009 Management Improvement Blog Carnival provides links to the carnival posts noted above, and will include others as they are posted. This is the second year we have posted an annual management blog review: 2008 management blog review.

Reading these posts will give you plenty of ideas to help you make the new year a happy year.

Over the next 2 weeks several management blogs will be posting their contributions to the 2009 year in review of management blogs. Posts will highlight some of the best posts on other management blogs in the last year.

The home page of the 2009 review of management blogs will be updated as new posts are added.

The hosts of the 2009 management blog carnival include the: Lean Blog,
Jamie Flinchbaugh, Stats Made Easy, Gemba Panta Rei and Lean Reflections.

See the 2008 year in review for management blogs. See management improvement carnival posts.

The Curious Cat Management Improvement Carnival provides links to recent blog posts on improving the management of organizations.

• How Do You Get from Here to Agile? Iterate. by Mike Cohn – “…following an iterative transition process. Making small changes on a continual basis is a logical way to adopt a development process that is itself iterative.”
• What is Lean? by Mike Wroblewski – “Do we measure leanness on the number of lean tools being used? Let’s see, 5-S check, Kanban check, Regular kaizen events check, A3 no, TPM no, VSM no, (add as many tools to your checklist as your experience tells you)….sorry you are not lean…”
• How to Deal with a Bad Boss — 3 Approaches by Harwell Thrasher – “There are basically three approaches to dealing with a bad boss: leave, get rid of the boss, or make the situation better.”
• Defining the Problem Statement by Tim McMahon – “The problem statement should not address more than one problem. The problem statement should not assign a cause. The problem statement should not assign blame. The problem statement should not offer a solution.”
• Hospitals Saving Millions with Staff Suggestions by Mark Graban – “The baseline number that Norman Bodek often cites for companies like Toyota or Canon is that the company saves $4,000 per employee based on employee kaizen suggestions.”
• How Much Time In Gemba? by Lee Fried – “Each leader has very clear standard work which includes checking on local standards, progress of improvements and walking frontline processes.”
• 2 Quick Tips on Meetings by Jamie Flinchbaugh – “First, consider if you even need the meeting to begin with…”
• The Advantages of A1 Thinking Over A3 Thinking by Jon Miller – “The A1 thinking document is four times larger than the A3 document. It is big. You can read it from across the room. The caveat is that you have to write at least four times as big as you would on an A3. Don’t use the extra space to cram in more information!”
• Historical Data on the Largest Manufacturing Countries by John Hunter – The first chart shows the USA’s share of the manufacturing output… at 28.1% in 1990, 32% in 2000, 28% in 2005, and 24% in 2008. China’s share has grown from 4% in 1990, 10% in 2000, 13% in 2005 to 18% in 2008.

Related: Curious Cat management articles – Curious Cat Economics and Investing Carnival

Jon Miller is hosting the Management Improvement Carnival #83 on the Gemba Panta Rei blog, highlights include:

How to Explain “How To”

I am constantly referring people to Bryan Lund’s valuable TWI Blog wherein one can find public domain Training Within Industry documents as well as Bryan’s articles and practical insights. He shows us an example of a job breakdown sheet on how to compress hundreds of digital photos in under 1 minute. Follow the link at the end of the article to see the image.

We Need Standards

Group Healthcare Cooperative lean healthcare sensei Lee Fried asked, Who owns standard work? and shares the surprising insight he gained from his recent exposure to some Japanese lean sensei, and their answer to his question.

Problem statement: The Cost of U.S. Healthcare is Too High

John Shook attempts to add some reason into the national shouting match… er, the debate on U.S. healthcare. He delves deeply into the data. Read about the cost problem we have in U.S. healthcare in The U.S. Versus the World Healthcare Cost Gap. John Shook makes judicious use of charts and tables. Now if we could only just fit that all on one A3 sized sheet and drop leaflets all over Washington D.C…

Related: Management Improvement Carnival #72 – Curious Cat management blog health care improvement posts

Photo of sunset in Mount Rainier National Park by John Hunter

• Cease Mass Inspection for Quality – “Deming point 3 is ‘Cease dependence on inspection to achieve quality.’ Eliminate the need for inspection on a mass basis by building quality into the product in the first place.”
• Lean Management – most organizations will not seriously consider changing the current management thought process without drastic threat (bankruptcy) or numerous successful improvements that give credibility to the new management ideas…
• Using Design of Experiments – While the adoption of DoE is still growing slowly, an increasing number of organizations are using DoE to improve. In the past most companies (in most industries anyway) did not have to compete with others that were using DoE to improve…
• Saving for Retirement – Savings for retirement is difficult mainly because of our trouble planning for the long term, it is not at all a complex problem. The fable of the ant and the grasshopper illustrates this point very simply and it is really that simple…
• Six Sigma and Bad Management, is not Really Six Sigma – if you read the work of Roger Hoerl, Soren Bisgaard, Forrest Breyfogle III… and learn and apply what they talk about as Six Sigma you will definitely have to address bad management practices…
• Deming and Toyota – I believe Toyota applied Deming’s ideas to create a management system and continued to develop that system to create the Toyota Production System)…
• No More Lean Excuses – Within a couple minutes the service person had picked up a Canon A700 and explained how to open the door for batteries. I happen to think the instructions, and design, could be much better but..

Related: Curious Cat Investment Blog – Retirement posts – Deming Companies

Mike Wroblewski is hosting the Management Improvement Carnival #82 on the Got Boondoggle? blog, highlights include:

• A Problems First Culture by Mark Rosenthal “‘Problems first’ is one of the mantras used by Phil Jenkinson, the CEO character in The Lean Manager by Michael and Freddy Ballé. Now that I have had a few weeks to let it sink in and synthesize with my mental models, I am seeing a concept that is so fundamental I would think it would be hammered into students in every management and leadership course taught in the world.’”
• Keeping Lean Japanese by Brian Buck “There is a trend towards removing the Japanese language or jargon from Lean transformations in the U.S. I understand why organizations would want to make lean thinking and the corresponding tools easier to digest, but I think we should seriously consider keeping it Japanese.”
• Lean is about More than the Myths by Tim McMahon “It’s important when you are starting out your lean journey to understand what lean is really about.”
• 17 Lessons I learned from Japanese Consultants by Jeff Hajek “Over the years I have worked with some premiere lean consultants from Japan. Here are some of the many lessons I learned from them.”
• The Kipling Method vs. the Ohno Method by Jon Miller “Are you a Kipling person, taking the accepted tool or situation as given, or are you an Ohno person, constantly challenging the norms and looking for better ways?”

Related: Management Improvement Carnival #64 – Be Careful What You Measure – Do you Read Instructions Carefully Before Assembly?

• Liars, Blowhards, Con Artists, and Management Consultants by Marc Hersch – “Many years ago I had a conversation with Dr. Deming in which I asked him about what my role as a consultant, should be. He explained that my role was to provide my client with an outside perspective and a set of a methods for figuring out how to optimize their system of enterprise.”
• Distributed Software Teams by John J. Peebles – “it forced us extremely early on to invest in systems, processes, and a way of working that brought everything we did online. Project management, change control, bug tracking, issue tracking, source control, testing, collaboration, documentation, document management, communication, all of these things needed to be ubiquitous and consistently used by the entire staff.”
• The 5 Universal Laws of Gemba Management by Jon Miller – “The frequency of leadership going to the gemba is inversely proportional to the number of walls separating them from the gemba.”
• Intuition vs. Data-Driven Decision-Making: Some Rough Ideas by Bob Sutton – “The trouble with intuition is that we now have a HUGE pile of research on cognitive biases and related flaws in decision-making that show ‘gut feelings’ are highly suspect. Look-up confirmation bias — people have a very hard time believing and remember evidence that contradicts their beliefs.”

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Jamie Flinchbaugh is hosting Management Improvement Carnival #80 on his new blog, highlights include:

• A New Strategy for the Kaizen Blitz from Lean Homebuilding – on PDCA, kaizen, with lots of good comments
• To Err is Human…To Error Proof is Divine from Ankit Patel – fundamentals of error proofing from a new lean blogger
• Difference Between Inspect and Adapt and PDCA from Al Shalloway – yes, PDCA works even in non-deterministic systems
• Is the Answer Right There in Front of You? from Lean Laboratory – a great example and reminder on digging deeper into a problem
• Eliminating Tunnel Vision from Lean Builder – on using voice of the customer to eliminate missing the big picture

Nominate your favorite management improvement posts.

Mark Graban is hosting Management Improvement Carnival #79 on the lean blog, highlights include:

• A Natural Match (Deborah Dolezal, Lean Healthcare Grand Rounds): “As a healthcare worker and an implementer of lean, I am often struck by the similarity of the human body and the lean methodologies.”
• Kaizen Corner — for lack of a battery (Paul Levy, Running a Hospital): “The idea is to keep asking why (the 5 why’s) until they discover the root cause, which is defined as that level of understanding that will permit development of a countermeasure that will prevent the problem from occurring again.”
• Put Down That Tool (Jamie Flinchbaugh): “Use the simplest tool possible. When you start to use tools that are more complicated than they need to be, we add unnecessary waste and bureaucracy to the process of improvement.”
• How NUMMI Changed Its Culture (John Shook, Lean.org): “What I learned was most powerful at NUMMI was to start with the behaviors, with what we do.”

Related: Management Improvement Carnival #62 – Management Improvement Carnival #40 – Management Improvement Carnival #29

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

• Journey from Agile To Lean by Kenji Hiranabe – “Agile is a connector between business and software engineering…. From the business perspective, IT or software development is just one activity in the value stream of a company.”
• Planning Managerial Capacity by Dan Markovitz – “While it’s very easy to take on more projects and responsibilities, it’s *stopping* work that’s critical to getting out of the office and meetings, and into the gemba where the learning happens.”
• The Problem With Planning by Kelly Waters – “Rather than a detailed plan, I prefer to see a strong vision, a strategy, goals, and a roadmap (high level outline plan). The tactics to achieve this, for example the precise features and all the tasks to deliver them, can vary along the way and are best not articulated up-front.”
• Enterprise Methods: Stop Tampering with the System of People by Marc Hersch – “Give everyone the job of systematically improving methods constantly so that all can experience joy and pride in workmanship.”
• Lean thinker Paul O’Neill by Jamie Flinchbaugh – “to understand why you have a problem, you must understand the process or the means. Bad systems beat good people – manage the system.”
• Innovation Is as Innovation Does? by Mark Graban – “More than rewarding “experimentation” (which is necessary for ‘kaizen’ or continuous improvement), does your organization manage to not punish ‘failure?’”
• How to Be Lean in a Batch Production Industry by Jon Miller – “Engage people. This is really a basic condition for whatever lean and continuous improvement system you apply within a process industry. If you do nothing else, do this.”
• Production Planning: What is it, and why should I care? by Connor Shea – “Establish a set time (weekly?) to go through Production Planning steps and to implement countermeasures when necessary. Creating a set time will ensure it becomes a regular part of your role and isn’t slowly displaced by the tyranny of the urgent.”
• Level 5 Leadership by Ron Pereira – “be humble while holding fast to the path you feel is best for the organization no matter how difficult it may be”

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

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.”

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Kevin Meyer is hosting the Management Improvement Carnival #76 on the Evolving Excellence blog, highlights include:

• The World Used to be Flat (Indexed): Question what is accepted as fact, ubiquitous in effect, and practiced by people. Traditional accounting…?
• The Retrospective of Retrospectives (Agile Tips): How large agile teams with multiple sub-teams can effectively implement the Retrospective phase.
• Timeboxing for Creative Professionals (Change Order): Using short, structured sprints to defeat procrastination.
• Standard Work and the Folly of Multitasking (Time Back): Even more data that supports the admittedly counterintuitive notion of single flow sequential work being more efficient that multitasking.

Read more management improvement carnivals

• Agile Lessons from a Management Guru by Ahmed Yousuf – “Agile methodologies have a fundamentally different approach to quality – an approach that is inherent in this teaching from Deming. Quality cannot be achieved by testers inspecting work done by developers. Quality can only be achieved if developers, business analysts, architects and testers – all take measures to ensure that it is part of every task they perform.”
• How Resource Constraints Can Set You Free by Matthew E. May – “He envisioned a self-contained, self-sustaining water system complete with a high-capacity water tank and four large spaces for billboard advertising and public service messages. The ad revenue pays for maintenance. Children playing powers it.” (Appropriate technology is something I have always been very interested in, as a child I traveling around with my father (engineer, statistician, professor and management consultant) as he worked on such practical projects. See my Curious Cat Engineering and Science Blog posts on appropriate technology, including both examples in the post – John Hunter).
• ScrumButs Are the Best Part of Scrum by Jurgen Appelo – “Scrum teams are self-organizing complex systems… then you must accept that optimal behavior of a team cannot be predicted. It is impossible to design the process up-front. It must emerge, just like the design of the solution.”
• Whirlpool Evansville Dies the Unnecessary but Expected Death By Kevin Meyer – “Rest in peace Whirlpool of Evansville. With a management team focused on the cost of hands instead of the value of brains we’ll probably be saying the same for Whirlpool as a whole in a few years.”

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Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog Carnival

• What Else Can Software Development and Testing Learn from Manufacturing? Don’t Forget Design of Experiments (DoE). by Justin Hunter – “In short, Design of Experiments methods are a proven approach to creating and manage experiments that alter variables intelligently between each test run in a structured way that allows the experimenter to learn as much as possible in as few experiments as possible.”
• The Versatile Leader by Ron Pereira – “I firmly believe the best leaders are those that can apply the appropriate leadership style at the appropriate time.”
• Manually Collecting Data is a Good Thing! by Lee Fried – “having the teams and local managers collect the data manually is one of the best things they can do to learn their processes and understand the problems of their area.”
• Scrum of Scrums: Making it visual by Xavier Quesada Allue – “There are only two columns: ‘Story’ and ‘Status’. Story has a copy of the story card that is on the team board. Status is normally ‘not started, ‘in progress’, ‘done’ or ‘done-done’ (a curious distinction between ‘we think we’re done’ and ‘we’re sure we’re done’).”
• Hospital Gets Vendor Visits Under Control by Karen Wilhelm – “An estimated $10 million has been saved as doctors now prescribe generic drugs 74% of the time, up from 60% in the past. Without sales reps prodding them, they use more tried-and-true medications unless the new ones have been shown to be really more effective.”
• Lean Energy Treasure Hunts at GE by Jon Miller – “The energy treasure hunt is the classic ‘go see’ activity. Form a cross-functional team and go find energy waste.”

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Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog Carnival

• The Maddening Effectiveness of Root-Cause Analysis – “And I wonder: how often this is a subtle blockage to individuals and teams doing good root cause analysis? How often am I fearful of Really Knowing just what is at the root of some undesirable outcome?”
• Lean and Basketball – “in a strong Lean business, it is essential to have a well-trained and motivated staff to execute all of the good tools and methodologies that have been introduced to them.”
• Phronetic Leadership — Father of Scrum explores a new type of Leadership by Kenji Hiranabe – “Phronesis is a concept that synthesizes ‘knowing why’ as in scientific theory, with ‘knowing how’ as in practical skill, and “knowing what” as a goal to be realized. Unlike episteme, it emphasizes practices in particular contexts. However, phronesis is not just knowledge within a certain, particular context per se. Since it is knowledge to serve the “common good”, it implies an affinity with universal principles.”
• What Happened to the Deming Philosophy? by Rip Stauffer – “I have had Quality executives from major corporations tell me that “Deming was just a philosophy,” implying that it was pie-in-the-sky, without any practical use for business. It’s hard to get these people to listen to you after you explain how ignorant a statement that is…”
• One reason why so many lean initiatives fail by Dan Markovitz – “But it’s worth thinking about whether top management is doing what they need to do to make it work. As Jamie Flinchbaugh says, when clients tell him that management is 100% behind them: ‘Behind is still behind. Leadership is about being out in front.’”

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Jon Miller is hosting the Management Improvement Carnival #72 on the Gemba Panta Rei blog, highlights include:

• Three Key Principles when Leading without Authority – One piece of advice passed down by Toyota managers is to “lead as if you had no power” George Ambler writes about the three key principles of leading without authority. They are built around having enthusiasm, humility and the strength to not let results come before leadership. Most of us who lead or attempt to do so are lacking in one or more of these areas. If I said that my weakness was enthusiasm, would that mean I fail at humility?
• Lean Accounting SuperGroup – Although not exactly a blog, the Lean Accounting SuperGroup is a destination for its growing body of information on lean, management and how to count correctly. The five videos introducing lean accounting are not t be missed.
• When is it time for lean “lite”? – For a full scale implementation there are certain things that should first be in place, but there are plenty of broken windows we can fix. Jamie Flinchbaugh tells us that it’s better to get started where you can, stumble and learn than to wait.
• What if we chose leaders differently? – This was a thought provoking piece on Wally Block’s Three Star Leadership Blog. Those of us who live in countries where we can elect our leaders are fortunate, and should ask ourselves this question. I do every election cycle, looking at the choices we are given for leaders. On a more practical level, anyone who is a member of a team or a leader of a team has influence on the selection of a leader. The answers to this question aren’t easy but this is a question worth pondering.

Visit the Curious Cat Management Improvement Carnival home