The Curious Cat Management Improvement Carnival began in 2006 with the goal to provide links to interesting blog posts for those interesting in improving the practice of management.

• Reward: Creativity’s Forbidden Fruit by Matt May - “Kaizen does not attempt to light a fire under people. It lights the fire within them.”
• Elegance and Encapsulation by Pete Abilla - “Encapsulation is an elegant and simple principle to ease the burden on your customer by subtracting or covering the unnecessary and adding the meaningful.”
• Deming’s Theory of Knowledge by Marc Hersch - “Systems thinking comes down to developing methods and instincts for hearing the voice of the process, or if you will, the voice of the system. This is the opposite of the reduction that has become the common sense of by-the-numbers and just-the-facts thinking in Western enterprise.”
• Virginia Mason’s CEO on Health Reform by Mark Graban - “The path to better quality and safety is the same as the path to reduced cost… Our system is so full of waste (non-value-added activities), need to systematically reduce and eliminate that waste”
• Does good experimental design require changing only one factor at a time (OFAT)? by Mark J. Anderson - “Multifactor testing is far more effective for statistical power, screening efficiency and detection of interactions. Industrial experimenters are well-advised to forget their indoctrination in OFAT and make use of multifactorial designs.”
• Getting More People Involved in Improvement by Lee Fried - “make sure that all leaders are getting out of the conference room and into the gemba to make sure that the appropriate checking and coaching activities are taking place.”
• How clean is clean enough? by Ron Pereira - “In other words, the true purpose of this step is to clean to inspect.”
• Seeking: Checklist for a Sense of Urgency by Jon Miller - “This is a delicate balance. We need to think long-term, but act each day with urgency.”
• Toyota Develops Thought-controlled Wheelchair by John Hunter - “the more important story is why Toyota and Honda will be dominant companies 20 years from now. And that story is based on their superior management and focus on long term success instead of short term quarterly results.”

• Not Invented Here by Nicole Radziwill - “when a NIH culture is observed, perhaps the resources and opportunities that are available to a group or an organization that could use them are truly invisible.”
• Re-th!nk[ing IT strategy] by David Anderson - “if something is not strategic and we are not good at it then we should outsource it and buy the service instead. If we are good or world class at something but it is not strategic then we should spin it out and sell that service to our competitors.”
• Let’s Teach Our Kids about Standard Work by Bryan Lund - “If we are going to nip this standard work thing in the bud, we need to go back to formula and start teaching our kids two things, 1) how to think about processes and 2) how to instruct.”
• It Might Be Bad Design If Instructions Are Required by Mark Graban - “Sure enough, there was a full page sheet of laminated instructions on the desk for operating the lights”
• HR and Innovation “HR must work diligently to make sure that right systems are in place to attract, identify, and capture the best talent to drive innovation.”
• Learning from Community Medical Care Successes by John hunter - “The only way to get as bad results as we do for the huge cost is to keep doing what we are doing”

Visit the Curious Cat Management Improvement Carnival home

The Curious Cat Management Improvement Carnival began in 2006 with the goal to provide links to interesting blog posts for those interesting in improving the practice of management.

• Jidoka is not just “built-in-quality” by Jason Yip - “Jidoka is not just about stopping and notifying of problems immediately. It also includes the concept of separating human and machine work. Effectively the idea of using machines to free humans.”
• How to Engage People in Kaizen by Jon Miller - “Frame all actions as experiments and not permanent or irreversible changes This allows people to think that they are not really changing something, only “trying it”. In fact if the method is demonstrably better, it may become the new way.”
• To Estimate or Not, That is the Question - “Create your estimates quickly and don’t get paralyzed by precision. Being quick may be the middle ground between estimating and not estimating.”
• Generation Y Deserves No Special Treatment by Chris Young - “Generation Y should not be treated any differently than any other generation. The very same employee performance standards applies to Generation Y as they apply to any other generation.”
• Rapid prototyping in NY’s Times Square by Karen Wilhelm - Experience and observation can determine optimum flow of people (and vehicles now diverted from their usual routes). Just like simulating flow in a full-size cell mockup can allow teams to adjust reality to assumptions. No long meetings, proposals, and computer models can substitute for a simple and quick prototype of a new system.”
• Stop Making Excuses by Nick McCormick - “Refuse to accept any reasons for why things that need to be done can’t be. It’s OK to identify the problems. The important thing is to develop solutions to those problems.”
• Cool Email Mistake Proofing - My main desktop computer runs Ubuntu Linux. The default email client is called Evolution. A recent upgrade introduced a very cool feature. When I hit ‘Send’ it looks for language in the email that might indicate I meant to include an attachment. If there is no attachment, it pops up [a] handy reminder
• Waste and SAP? by Kevin Meyer - “Moral of the story? Be careful of product demos.”

Curious Cat management web search.

• Don’t Shoot the Photographer by Mark Riffey examines how to turn a perceived threat to your business income into an opportunity by focusing on customer service.
• NPR Does a Great Job of Covering Toyota by Mark Graban - “How tough the assembly line is depends in part on its creator. Shigenobu Matsubara has helped design assembly lines from Japan to Georgetown, Ky., which has the biggest in the United States. He says he has always designed the lines with the workers’ welfare in mind.”
• Entrepreneurship Doesn’t Have To Be About The Next Big Thing - “Whatever you decide to do, there’s nothing to be ashamed of as long as you are actively going after your goals. Who cares if you are pursuing a not so glamorous business idea? Who cares if your friends are all trying to create hundred million dollar companies?”
• Lean Team Software Process by Corey Ladas - “The customer’s terms likely do not include any notion of defects-per-KLOC. The producer’s end is profit and reputation, which comes from managing cost and consistency. If TSP, or something related to it, helps us realize our ends, then (and only then) it is meaningful.”

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Mike Wroblewski is hosting the Management Improvement Carnival #64 on the Got Boondoggle? blog, highlights include:

• Daily Scrum against the Board by Xavier Quesada Allue-”A good way to know if your team is using their taskboard to really manage their work is to look at their daily standup meeting.”
• Japanese CEOs and Leadership by Mark Graban-”When do you ever hear a Western CEO say ’sorry’ or ‘we were lacking’?”
• Total Company Involvement by Pete Abilla-”When the hearts and minds of everybody in the organization is moving toward the same end then you know the companies’ mission has became a living and breathing inspirational catalyst for good.”
• How Interruptions Drain Productivity by George Ambler-”Time is a leaders most valuable resource. The way a leader uses their time demonstrates to the people around them what’s really important.”

Overview of the management improvement carnival.

Also visit the Curious Cat Management Library for online management improvement articles.

• What You Can Learn Zappos by Robert Scoble - “6. Train, train and train some more. Zappos has a whole department that puts together classes. Your pay goes up the more classes you complete. 18. Remember most policies are to take care of edge cases. They resist writing new policies at Zappos. When they do write a policy, they make sure it really is needed across the company. Usually policies get killed.
• Unknown and unknowable by Michael Neiss - “The concept I see most overlooked and therefore, least implemented, is nemawashi, or the foundational work that needs to be done so that those that do the work on a daily basis integrate the knowledge into their everyday mindset.”
• Simplicity by Ron Pereira - “If I was only able to use one word to describe what lean and authentic continuous improvement meant to me I’d choose, without hesitation, simplicity.”
• How to Quit Your Job and Start a Company by Pamela Slim - “Know the kinds of problems you are trying to solve, and what value solving them would bring to your customers. Get clear on resources needed to bring your business to life… So move quickly, test often, fail fast, and discuss and document your assumptions.”
• In-the-Flow with Acumen Fund by Michael Idinopulos - “…already had all sorts of processes and mechanisms for capturing knowledge and ideas. The question was how to tap into those resources in a way that would create transparency, access, and reuse across the organization’s four locations in Hyderabad, Karachi, Nairobi, and New York.”
• Job Breakdown Sheet vs. Work Instruction by Bryan Lund - “Purpose of a Job Breakdown Sheet is distinctly different and clear. The primary purpose of a JBS is to serve as a trainer’s aid. It is not meant to be read by the trainee. It can be, but that isn’t the primary purpose”
• The difference between truly standing for something and a mission statement - “a tattered piece of paper with some clip art at the top of it pinned to a bulletin board. And it;s a mission statement that says this… And you’re sitting there reading this crap and wondering, ‘What kind of idiot do they take me for?’ It’’ just words on paper that are clearly disconnected from the reality of the experience.”

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Mark Graban is hosting the Management Improvement Carnival #62 on the Lean blog, highlights include:

• Why Quality is Dangerous (Dr. John Toussaint - ThedaCare Center Blog): “If we are going to have carrots and sticks it should be centered on what improvements healthcare organizations and providers are making every day, month, and year. Measuring and improving is how we are going to create better performance in healthcare not dictating and punishing.”
• Beth Israel Deaconess: Systems, safety, and (avoided) severance… (Steven J. Spear - Chasing the Rabbit): “… BIDMC’s efforts to achieve perfect safety by being transparent when systems fail, using that transparency to see problems so they can be solved.
• Going to Gemba (Paul Levy - Running a Hospital): “By witnessing problems and work-arounds in real time, the team can have a better idea of how to solve problems to root cause and make incremental improvements in work flows.”
• Managing the Burning Platform (Mark Rosenthal - Lean Thinker Blog): “It is really easy to say that, in these emergencies, long term thinking doesn’t matter. But I contend that it is even more important right now. This is a time for action. It is not a time for panic.”
• LeanBlog Video Podcast #2 - Kevin Frieswick, Error Proofing Handwashing (Mark Graban - Lean Blog): “I’m still experimenting with video podcasting, after my first attempt with Jamie Finchbaugh. LeanBlog Video Podcast #2 is… the video from Kevin Frieswick and MetroWest Medical Center with the device for error proofing hand washing on the way into patient rooms”

Overview of the management improvement carnival.

Submit suggestions for the management improvement carnival.

• Unplanned items and legacy issues by Xavier Quesada Allue - “A small change request if you want. How are you going to manage this work? Are you going to create a new story for this? Too much overhead… just put up a task (a post-it) in Legacy Issues, get it done with and forget about it.”
• Ask Gemba: Nuts and Bolts of the Andon System by Jon Miller - “Each person should have specific and personal responsibility for responding to problems raised within a particular zone. Each person should have a clear person that they can go to when unable to resolve the issue, all the way up the chain to the head of site at a minimum”
• How to Manage a Remote Employee - “My belief is that without deliberate attention, the remote employee slowly becomes irrelevant to the organization.”
• What’s So Special about 3-Sigma? by Marc Hersch - “So where did Shewhart get the 3-sigma limit from? He got it from lots and lots of empirical observation. He says it has no “truth” to it. It is just a value that works to minimize the consequences of the mistakes our minds trick us into making. 3-sigma is a tipping point that minimizes the two mistakes we can make—confusing common cause with assignable cause OR confusing assignable cause with common cause. In his own words”
• Are Business Schools to Blame? by Joel M. Podolny - “There has been little contrition on the part of those involved in MBA education after the crisis… Until business schools make such public gestures of disapproval, society will never fully trust the MBA again. “
• Why requirements stink by Scott Berkun - “Getting Real, by the folks at 37 signals, is a book that puts simplicity first, advocating almost no formal documents, requirements lists or specs at all.”
• Management Poka-Yoke by Dan Markovitz - “But why not institute poka-yoke for management? Why not create systems that prevent bad management practices from taking hold?”

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Kevin Meyer is hosting the Management Improvement Carnival #60 on the Evolving Excellence blog, highlights include:

• TimeBack asks why “thinking time” isn’t part of our standard work.
• Unfolding Leadership gives us some practical words of wisdom in dealing with layoffs.
• Shmula describes his experience and observations while sitting in a Jiffy Lube waiting room.
• Gemba Panta Rei suggests twelve leader standard work questions to ask while at the gemba.
• Evolving Excellence warns us about the perils of going to China in today’s economy.

Please submit suggestions for post to include in future editions of the management improvement carnival.

Nicole Radziwill is hosting the Management Improvement Carnival #59 on the Quality and Innovation blog, highlights include:

• June Holley, talking about self-organizing to achieve systems-level innovation. She notes that because theory is lacking, this process might be protracted, but to get to the point of understanding theory we need some more “real life” examples and case studies of how we self-organize in our organizations well – and not so well.
• Small is the new big. Sustainable is the new growth. Trust is the new competitive advantage. All of the rules of business have changed, and the seismic shift is both electrifying and frightening. But there are opportunities to be embraced, and many of them are summed up in this HBS blog article entitled, Why Small Companies Will Win in This Economy
• And did you know that neuroscience may provide some insights into how to stage your process improvement efforts and your initiatives that focus on innovation?

Submit suggestions for the management improvement carnival.

Submit suggestions for the management improvement carnival. Visit the Curious Cat Management Library for online management improvement articles.

• No Blame Thinking by Mike Wroblewski - “It’s not who’s wrong, it’s what’s wrong. It’s not who’s right, it’s what’s right. All other thinking leads to hiding the truth, distorting the information and covering up the problem”
• Three Sigma Bubble? Nonsense! by Marc Hersch - “Grantham’s argument is fallacious. The assumption underlying the use of three-sigma limits is that the system being characterized is in a state of control.” [investors and economic planners consistently fail to understand the volatility of markets - John, see Misuse of Statistics - Mania in Financial Markets]
• Lean Jobs: Current Salary Trends by Ralph Bernstein - “Salaries for people in dedicated lean positions in manufacturing haven’t changed much in the last couple of years, and salaries in manufacturing generally are down since last year”
• Management by Objectives - Why? by Gilad Langer - “You can set goals and metrics for a process, but that will eventually backfire with people.”
• How to Hold the Daily Scrum by Peter Stevens - “The Daily Scrum should be held at the same location and the same time every day, ideally in the team space in front of the team’s big visible task board.”
• Should Cross-trained Workers be Paid More? by Jon Miller - “In lean companies cross training is a prerequisite to advancement to supervisory and leadership positions, as the team leaders, group leaders and even area managers are responsible for training, filling in for absent workers and being intimately familiar with the processes they manage and possible problems within them.”
• What is your ideal organization? by Bob Sutton - “I give the students the final exam question on the first day of class, and it is due the last day. It is, ‘Design the ideal organization. Use course concepts to defend your answer.’”
• 5 Questions - Meet Kathleen Fasanella - “With lean, it’s employees who are truly investing in their employers and they feel it, the owners feel it. It becomes a genuine group effort.”

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Submit suggestions for the management improvement carnival. Also see the management Reddit (what is this Reddit thing?).

• 20 cynical project management tips by Michael Krigsman - “Projects with realistic budgets and timetables don’t get approved… If you don’t know where you’re going, just talk about specifics… A realist is one who’s presciently disappointed in the future.”
• Giving ERP Systems the Finger by Mike Wroblewski - “Anyone of us in business today that has to deal with ERP systems knows that while these systems are meant to make life simple for us, it more times than not works in the opposite direction.”
• If I just keep saying it, it will be true - “It looked as if cases were longer because of outages, but in reality, they would have been longer running regardless. The relationship is incidental.”
• Does Innovation Stem From Corporate Culture? by Dan Markovitz - “Kelly says that at Gore, ‘people are only leaders if someone wants to follow them.’ …adapting to a culture where influence, not title, is the key currency”
• Agile Architecture Method by J.D. Meier - “The Agile Architecture Method is a structured approach for helping you create your candidate architecture, identify relevant spikes and guide your inspections throughout your life cycle. During each iteration, you can use the frames to identify relevant intersections between your user stories and hot spots.”
• Idiot Inspector for Idiot Corporation? by Mark Graban - “So we have an inspector who didn’t have enough time and probably wasn’t trained well enough for his job. So he’s probably not an idiot. I’ll be fair to him, other than my headline. He’s just a bit player in the overall system.” [the system is broken - as I wrote earlier: Losing Consumers' Trust, John]
• Web Check-In: Lean or Not? by Ron Pereira - “I got to their website and in just a few clicks was booking my wife’s appointment… A few minutes later I was done… About 40 minutes after submitting the form they called for my wife to come in, meaning she got to ‘wait’ in the comfort of our home and not some germ filled waiting room.”
• “Modest Incompetence Simply Won’t Do; It’s Mindboggling Screw-Ups That Are Required” by Bill Waddell - “According to Buffett, if a CEO can really foul things up and impact a lot of other people, the government will bail him out, as opposed to local screw ups who just affect the CEOs own employees and investors.”
• Managing the unmanageable by Vincent Chin - “how on earth the hotel manages a process which are out of the hotel’s scope of processes… Well Andy related to me that his hotel works closely with the Tourism Board and cab company ensuring feedback is directed back to the cab company and to that particular cab driver.”
• Warren Buffett’s Letter to Shareholders 2009 by John Hunter - “Warren Buffett is a great investor. He is also a great executive. He hires honest and able people and lets them do their job. He ensures managers retain constancy of purpose…”

If you want to follow me on Twitter, now you can.

Submit suggestions for the management improvement carnival.

• Can you Buy a Silicon Valley? Maybe. by Paul Graham - “For the price of a football stadium, any town that was decent to live in could make itself one of the biggest startup hubs in the world. What’s more, it wouldn’t take very long. You could probably do it in five years.” [Excellent essay, I wrote about what makes Silicon Valley special on the Curious Cat Science and Engineering Blog.]
• Error Proofing Handwashing? by Mark Graban - “I made it out of Radio Shack and Home Depot parts,” said Frieswick, who wired the one-of-a-kind device together. “You’re not getting in this room without making a conscious effort to ignore this.”
• Counting hours doesn’t make sense by Daniel Tenner - “it soon becomes obvious that our actual output of things done is correlated far more to how we feel on the day than to how many hours we spend “working”. The real measure of work is not hours – it’s energy.”
• Beware of trade guilds maintaining the status quo by Seth Godin - “Why didn’t the RIAA help the record industry figure out how to transform into an industry that would embrace and leverage file sharing? You don’t have to like change to take advantage of it.”
• Genchi Genbutsu: Do You Really Understand It? by Ron Pereira - “Most seem to think it means to visit the gemba, or the place the work is done, when something needs addressed. And I suppose it does. But it’s much more than this.”
• Opportunity Awareness by Lee Fried - “So don’t try to solve world peace, pick the one thing you are going to work on today, make the improvement and then take the next. “
• Taiichi Ohno’s Three Lessons for the New Toyota President by Jon Miller - “Synchronize supply to demand! This means producing just in time - something that Toyota has gotten away from recently as they expand their global production capacity in an effort to capture greater market share”
• Reflections on NUMMI by John Hunter - The problem is that GM management fails to manage well, and has been failing to do so for decades. They have improved over the last few decades but not nearly fast or consistently enough.

Visit the Curious Cat Management Library for online management improvement articles.

Submit suggestions for the management improvement carnival. visit the Curious Cat Management Library for online management improvement articles.

• Cut Customer Service? You’ll Lose Customers by Scott D. Anthony - “Companies might think that innovation and survival are discrete choices. They are not. Companies that stop innovating are sowing the seeds of their own destruction.”
• End Game at Wiremold by Kevin Meyer - “The Wiremold story shows how lean thinking can completely transform a company into a competitive powerhouse… and how quickly the success can be demolished by the return of a traditional mindset.”
• Gemba-Based Leadership – Not Just for Chief Engineers by John Shook - “Here’s what lean practitioners do: grasp the situation, look for facts at the gemba, as opposed to analyzing data removed from it in time and place, and go through the Deming management cycle.”
• Where Did Value Stream Mapping Come From? by Jon Miller - “Like any tool it’s success lies in how we use it. Stakeholder maps are essential tools of change management but only as useful as what you do with the findings.”
• Agile Management with Chris Sims webcast interview by Wayne Turmel - “”
• Helping Employees Improve by John Hunter - “A manager should be enabling their employees to perform. That means taking positive steps that help them perform.”

In the webcast, Corey Ladas discusses lean thinking in software development, Deming and quality, customer pull vs Kano model and gemba.

• 7 Practical Ways to Respect People by Ron Pereira - “Some think that to be respectful you can never disagree. This is ridiculous. My old boss at Nokia used to tell his management team that if all 8 of us agreed he had 7 too many people in the room. So true.”
• Is Brainstorming a Waste of Time? by Mark McGuinness - “For Sutton, the problem isn’t with the technique but the way it’s applied: ‘when brainstorming sessions are managed right and skillfully linked to other work practices, they can promote remarkable innovation.’”
• The Remarkable Chief Engineer by John Shook - “So the Chief Engineer has no choice but to lead by the soft skills of true leadership. By soft skills, I am referring to the suite of skills written of in books about leadership or management books and taught in leadership training – characteristics such as ‘leading through influence’ or ’servant leadership’ or ‘win-win negotiating’.”
• Yet another form of muda by Dan Markovitz - “You’ll learn, among other things, that making an ironclad commitment to spend 15 or 20 minutes each day with your assistant is essential. Your assistant is there to extend your reach and capability to effect change in the organization.”

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Shaun Sayers is hosting the Management Improvement Carnival #53 on the Capable blog, highlights include:

• The correct sequence for doing 5-S? - by Jon Miller. “Why would people alter the order and still call it 5-S instead of my version of 5-S?”
• Cost of Changes vs. Risk and Uncertainty by Darth Sidious. “… as the project matures, cost of changes sky rocket, and stakeholder influence drops off quickly”
• Quality - the Men-Tai approach by Shaun Sayers. It’s quality - with noodles

Submit suggestions for the management improvement carnival.

The 2008 Annual Management Improvement Carnival Review (published on a number of site) I am counting as #51, making this #52. That annual review turned out to be a very interesting collection, if you have not read all of them yet, take some time to do so. I linked to the first set of posts previously and here are the remaining posts

• Lean Six Sigma Academy:   Lean Blog, Gemba Panta Rei, Evolving Excellence, Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog
• Evolving Excellence:   LSS Academy, Got Boondoggle, Work Matters and Edge Perspectives
• Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog:   Lean Software Engineering, Timeback Management, Know HR and Quality and Innovation

And then some management posts from the last few weeks:

• What’s happened to great customer service? by Shaun Sayers - What’s happened to American customer service? … There was a worldwide consensus that the US had cracked this customer service mallarky, so the rest of the world paid a visit and learned a lot. But I’ll tell you something, those days are gone.
• Passion: An Important Software Development Trait by Dustin Marx - “in talking with associates, friends, and family members in various careers, it seems to me that engineers in general and software engineers/programmers/developers specifically tend to be more passionate about what they do than many folks in other industries.”
• Tips for Going to the Gemba by Lee Fried - “the transition to spending more time in the gemba is a difficult one for most leaders and is often short lived. They are not used to working directly with front line teams… After a couple of rounds the leader has had enough and the gemba visits no longer appear on their calendar.”
• The 37signals Effect by Louis Brandy - “When you take a single data point and you try to emulate certain practices to try to reproduce their success, you are entering very dangerous territory. In order to reproduce their successes, you need to understand the attributes that caused that success.” [benchmarking by copying is a failed strategy - John Hunter]

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Over the last couple of years the quality of management material available online has increased dramatically. And blogs have provided much of the best management material. The Curious Cat Management Improvement Carnival now provides highlights 3 times a month. Each carnival post highlights recent management related posts from several management blogs. And for the 2008 year in review 9 blogs have each taken a handful of management blogs and provided annual highlights.

In this post we will cover four blogs: Lean Software Engineering, Timeback Management, Know HR and Quality and Innovation. All I aim to do in the post is highlight a few excellent posts for the year. To capture the depth of these blogs add them to your RSS reader and read them throughout the year.

Lean Software Engineering by Corey Ladas (a management carnival host) and Bernie Thompson does an excellent job of discussion the application of lean manufacturing ideas in software development. Corey also published: Scrumban, Essays on
Kanban Systems for Lean Software Development this year. The blog is a must read for anyone working in software development applying lean thinking.

• Boehm’s Spiral Revisited by Bernie Thompson - “Twenty years ago this month, in response to the problems associated with waterfall-style approaches to software projects, Barry Boehm proposed his Spiral Model of Software Development. Which bore some resemblance to Deming’s “Plan, Do, Check, Act” cycle.“
• Queue utilization is a leading indicator by Corey Ladas - “there is a very pragmatic reason to adopt a Lean workflow strategy, regardless of what sort of product you are building: Lean scheduling provides crystal clear leading indicators of process health. I am speaking of kanban limits and andon lights.”
• Two axioms of lean software development by Corey Ladas - “Axiom 1: It is possible to divide the work into small value-adding increments that can be independently scheduled. Axiom 2: It is possible to develop any value-adding increment in a continuous flow from requirement to deployment. “
• Perpetual multivote for pull scheduling by Corey Ladas - “In our system, development capacity can free up at any time. When it does, the next candidate should have been previously selected so that the team can get right to work. That means we’ll have to make frequent updates to the selection process. If we’re going to do this frequently, it has to be inexpensive. Consensus building is expensive. My goal is to do this with no estimates and no meetings.”

The Timeback Management blog by Dan Markovitz focuses on applying lean principles to promote effective management. And as the name suggest he also posts on making effective user of your time.

• The Danger of Easy Access - “When we don’t value our limited time and attention sufficiently, we open the floodgates to infinite requests from coworkers — to our detriment… Get lean: in the tradition of Toyota’s andon, put up a sign at your cube or office that says when you’ll be available to talk.” [I must admit I have challenges with the common lean view of open offices, for the same reasons Dan mentions here. I prefer the model Joel Spolsky uses for software development staff, where collaboration is encouraged but developers have private offices. I am sure I benefit from a distraction free environment. There is debate in the lean blogosphere about the proper lean model though. My belief is that partially the answers lies in examining what is right for the specific office in question (though perhaps I am just clinging to an outdated idea). I find Instant Messaging (IM) useful (for encouraging collaboration and providing less distraction - including allowing people to work from home). This disruption from IM seems less obtrusive and you can set a status as Dan mentions to indicate how hesitant people should be before sending an IM. - John Hunter]

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The first half of the 2008 annual management blog carnival posts are online now. The posts highlight some of the best posts on management blogs in the last year. Follow the links to read some of the excellent posts that have been highlighted on the following blogs:

• Making Sense With Facilitated Systems:   Tom Peters, MetaSD, John Schmidt, Paul Graham, FunnyBusiness, The Artful Manager and Amicus Agraria.
• Lean Blog:   The Lean Thinker, Elegant Solutions, John Shook’s Management and Daily Kaizen
• Got Boondoggle?:   Lean Printing, Learning About Lean, Improve with Me and Lean Insider
• Quality and Innovation:   Agile Management, Managing Software Development, Clarke Ching - More Chilli Please and iSixSigma blogs
• Elegant Solutions:   Shmula, Reforming Project Management, and Made to Stick

Related: Management Improvement Blog Carnival - Management Carnival posts - Curious Cat Management Improvement Search - The first Management Improvement Carnival

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

• Lean Six Sigma Academy:   Lean Blog, Gemba Panta Rei, Evolving Excellence, Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog
• Evolving Excellence:   LSS Academy, Got Boondoggle, Work Matters and Edge Perspectives
• Lean Blog:   The Lean Thinker, Elegant Solutions, John Shook’s Management and DailyKaizen
• Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog:   Lean Software Engineering, Timeback Management, Know HR and Quality and Innovation
• Quality and Innovation:   Agile Management, Managing Software Development, Clarke Ching - More Chilli Please and iSixSigma blogs
• Elegant Solutions:   Shmula, Reforming Project Management, and Made to Stick
• Got Boondoggle?:   Lean Printing, Learning About Lean, Improve with Me and Lean Insider
• Making Sense With Facilitated Systems:   Tom Peters, MetaSD, John Schmidt, Paul Graham, FunnyBusiness, The Artful Manager and Amicus Agraria.

This posts is updated to link to annual review posts as they are posted.


See all previous management improvement blog carnivals.

Happy Holidays,

Related: Management Improvement Carnival, Best of 2007 - Curious Cat Management Improvement Search - Management Management Improvement Blog Carnival

Photo by John Hunter, on the Cascade Pass trail in North Cascade National Park.