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posts relating to the management improvement carnival. Carnivals are blog posts that serve to provide links to posts on a number of blogs on a related topic. Our carnival covers management improvement: Deming, lean manufacturing, six sigma, innovation, customer focus, leadership, systems thinking, continuous improvement, respect for people...
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Related: Curious Cat Management Improvement Connections - online since 1996

Management Improvement Blog Carnival #167

Posted on May 20, 2012  Comments (0)

The Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog Carnival has been published since 2006. We find great management blog posts and share them with you 3 times a month. We hope you find these post interesting and find some new blogs to start reading. Follow me online: Google+, Twitter, instant management consulting, and more.

Lake with Mountain in the Background

By John Hunter, see more of my trip to Rocky Mountain National Park.

  • Celebrate Learning, Not Success or Failure by Jurgen Appelo – “Failure and success are orthogonal to learning. What you learn from are the experiments and tests that you run.”
  • How to do Hansei by Jon Miller – “There is a fundamental cultural difference between cultures, regions and within organization when it comes to facing up to faults and failures, accepting responsibility, and learning. The capacity to reflect may be what separate homo sapiens from animals, successful organizations from those less so.”
  • Toyota Way Principle #3: “Pull” Systems by Chad Walters – “The purpose of the pull system (also called “kanban” system) is to have a measured queue of materials (raw materials, work-in-process, components, whatever) ready to be ‘pulled’ by the next process step. After the materials are ‘pulled’ a signal is sent to the preceding process step to replace what was taken.”
  • Blaming Deming, Lean, and Six Sigma and the Importance of “Why?” by Kevin Meyer – However both lean and six sigma are phenomenally powerful – if used properly. And at the core of using them properly is to first ask “why?” What is the problem or opportunity, why is it important, what is the desired future state, and what is the most appropriate tool to leverage?… Not asking that simple question is the difference between companies that successfully leverage Deming’s methods, lean, and six sigma…

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Management Improvement Blog Carnival #166

Posted on May 11, 2012  Comments (0)

Tim McMahon is hosting the Management Improvement Blog Carnival #166, highlights include:

  • Performance Organizations – Art Smalley answers why is there such a resistance to creating learning organizations and why are leaders letting the future deteriorate without doing anything about it.
  • Trust – Cornerstone of Performance – George Rathburn explains that teams lose trust in their leaders when they fail to show trust and respect in their teams.
  • Lean Snake Oil Cures What Ails Ya – Mike Wroblewski takes some creative license to explain Lean and it benefits but warns against secrets to implementation as Lean takes hard work and personal commitment.

Take a look at the entire post on Tim’s blog: A Lean Journey

The management sub-Reddit is a social network for those interested in management improvement to post useful online resources and recommend those they found most worthwhile.

Management Improvement Carnival #165

Posted on May 2, 2012  Comments (1)

Matt May is hosting the 165th Management Improvement Carnival. He takes a look at the wonderful manifestos posted at ChangeThis. ChangeThis really is wonderful, if you haven’t already been looking at what they offer you are in for a treat (and have quite a bit to keep you busy for awhile). Highlights from this management carnival edition include:

  • How Habits Work (and How They Change) by Charles Duhigg. His point: “Most of the choices we make each day may feel like the products of well-considered decision making, but they’re not. They’re habits. Countless people, from Aristotle to Oprah, have tried to understand why habits exist…”
  • Changing the Way We Change by Eric Haseltine. He writes: “As a senior executive in fields as diverse as Aerospace, Entertainment and Intelligence, I’ve learned a hard lesson about people and organizations everywhere: they seldom learn from previous failures. To make matters worse, most people not only repeat past mistakes, but fail to learn that they’ve failed to learn from the past so they go on making the same mistakes over and over again.”
  • Grow by Jim Stengel. This manifesto is based on his book Grow. “It’s time to change the narrative of business,” Jim writes. “From a winner-take-all tale, no-holds-barred, no matter what the cost to individual firms, investors, the economy, and society, to doing business on the basis of what I call brand ideals, shared ideals of improving people’s lives. Maximum business growth and high ideals are not incompatible. They’re inseparable.”

In addition to great ideas the ChangeThis manifestos actually look great. Sadly so much of what you find is distracting to read due to the presentation. ChangeThis puts you in the mood to enjoy the manifesto as soon as you see it.

Related: When new ideas have become habits you have changed

Management Improvement Carnival #164

Posted on April 20, 2012  Comments (0)

Paul Borawski is hosting 164th Management Improvement Carnival on ASQ’s View from the Q blog. Highlights from this edition include:

Remember to add new blogs that you discover through the carnival to your RSS feed so you enjoy their new posts.

Management Improvement Blog Carnival #163

Posted on April 10, 2012  Comments (0)

Jason Yip is hosting Management Improvement Blog Carnival #163. Highlights from this edition include:

Management Improvement Blog Carnival #162

Posted on April 1, 2012  Comments (0)

The Curious Cat management blog carnival is published 3 times a month with hand picked recent management blog posts. I also collect management improvement articles for the Curious Cat Management Articles site; an RSS feed of new article additions is available.

  • Stress Solutions, Not Blame by Kevin Meyer – “My organization often hears me say that 90% of problems are the result of poor processes, not people, and 9%… are probably due to poor leadership.”
  • The Real Leadership Lessons of Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson – “Caring deeply about what customers want is much different from continually asking them what they want; it requires intuition and instinct about desires that have not yet formed.”
  • Kanban and Lean Startup: Making the Most of Both by Alexei Zheglov – “Kanban is an important process-improvement tool for technology organizations. Lean startup is a new approach to discovering new, innovative ways to do business. To get the most from both, it is important to understand how they relate to each other.”
  • Is Agile too inefficient for start-ups? by Jason Yip – “You Ain’t Gonna Need It was about creating a culture of simplicity (you must justify building more than you need to), which tends to preserve cash, versus a culture of anticipation (you must justify why you’re not building something that handles every imaginable scenario), which tends to burn cash as if it magically falls from the heavens.”

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Management Improvement Blog Carnival #161

Posted on March 21, 2012  Comments (0)

Nicole Radziwill is hosting Management Improvement Blog Carnival #161. Highlights from this edition include:

Make sure you check out the full carnival post on the Quality and Innovation blog.

Management Improvement Blog Carnival #160

Posted on March 11, 2012  Comments (0)

monkey at the Singapore Zoo

Monkey at the Singapore Zoo by John Hunter

The Curious Cat Management blog carnival highlights recent management blog posts 3 times each month. The posts generally focus on the areas I have focused on in the Curious Cat Management Guide since 1996 (Deming, innovation, lean manufacturing, customer focus, process improvement…).

  • Reflections on the 100th Birthday of Taiichi Ohno by Masaaki Imai – “Taiichi Ohno always placed respect for the worker first in his approach to kaizen. His focus was always on the customer, both external and internal”
  • A Lean Leader strengthens the business by developing people through coaching process improvement at the gemba by Jeff Liker – “Thinking of a leader as a teacher and coach, as managing from the gemba, believing deeply that people are the only appreciating assets of the company, believing in the value of intentionally creating a common culture and being a role model of that culture, and that the adaptiveness of the business to meet the challenges of the environment comes from how people are developed all the way down to the worker is quite different than the leader as the captain of the ship steering it cleverly through brilliant personal insights.”
  • Inspiration Stimulates Productivity and Engagement by Nicole Radziwill – “I’d also like to propose that engagement is a symptom – a consequence of feeling good and having a high quality consciousness! Let’s work on the root causes, and focus less on the symptoms.”
  • Kanban Networks Exerciseby Yuval Yeret – “The exercise brought to life the complexity of the organization’s network but highlighted how a Kanban system can simplify its operation as well as drive towards improvement. There were several A-Ha moments of understanding how Limited WIP would solve systemic problems currently haunting the organization.”

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Management Improvement Blog Carnival #159

Posted on March 1, 2012  Comments (0)

David Kasprzak is hosting Management Improvement Blog Carnival #159 on My Flexible Pencil. Highlights from this edition include:

Make sure you check out the full carnival post on My Flexible Pencil.

Management Improvement Blog Carnival #158

Posted on February 20, 2012  Comments (0)

The Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog Carnival has been published since 2006. We find great management blog posts and share them with you 3 times a month. We hope you find these post interesting and find some new blogs to start reading. Follow me online: Google+, Twitter, LinkedIn, instant management consulting, and more.

  • For complex systems there is no root cause by John Allspaw – “We like to simplify complex problems so we can work on them in a reductionist fashion. We want there to be a single root cause for an accident or an outage, because if we can identify that, we’ve identified the bug that we need to fix.”
  • Get Ready to Fall Off the Cliff by Ron Ashkenas – “Managers of successful firms tend to become complacent and even arrogant, assuming that past performance will continue and that the formulas that worked previously will work in the future.”
    • photo of beach and trees, Ruby Beach, Olympic National Park

    Ruby Beach, Olympic National Park, Washington, by John Hunter

  • Walter Isaacson’s ‘Steve Jobs’ by John Gruber – “Apple is an experience company. That they create both hardware and software is part of creating the entire product experience… [Jobs:] ‘That’s not what we think design is. It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.’”
  • Use heijunka, don’t reduce takt time by Michel Baudin – “Keeping your work force intact and prepared for the next upturn is just as essential. So you stop using temps, cut all overtime, go on four-day weeks, or three-day weeks, and use the available time to solve nagging engineering problems,
    experiment with new technology, etc.”

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Management Improvement Blog Carnival #157

Posted on February 10, 2012  Comments (0)

The Curious Cat management blog carnival is published 3 times a month with hand picked recent management blog posts. I also collect management improvement articles for the Curious Cat Management Articles site; you can subscribe via RSS for new article additions.

Management Improvement Blog Carnival #156

Posted on February 1, 2012  Comments (0)

The Curious Cat Management blog carnival highlights recent management blog posts 3 times each month. The posts generally focus on the areas I have focused on in the Curious Cat Management Guide since 1996 (Deming, evidence based management, lean manufacturing, agile software development, systems thinking…)

  • The Key Questions for a Minimum Viable Product Project by Anthony Panozzo – “What are you trying to learn with this particular MVP?
    What data are you collecting about your experiment?
    What determines the success or failure of the experiment?” [bold added - John]
  • Less Process, More Discipline by Charlie Martin – “Without it, you lose everything agile methods promise. The key to agile methods is this: You may have less process, but you must have more discipline.”
    • Sunset over Andaman, Khao Lak, Thailand

    Sunset over Andaman, Khao Lak, Thailand. By John Hunter

  • Evaluating Executive Performance by Art Smalley – “One interesting thing that I will note that was considered in Toyota in Japan by the HR department when evaluating executives was how their previous departments fared after they had left. If the department continued to improve then this was generally a good sign.”
  • The evolution of design to amplify flow by John Hagel – “If we want to remain successful and reap the enormous rewards that can be generated from flows, we must continually seek to refine the designs of the systems that we spend time in to ensure that they are ever more effective in sustaining and amplifying flows.”

    • Continue reading →

Management Improvement Blog Carnival #155

Posted on January 22, 2012  Comments (1)

The Curious Cat management blog carnival is published 3 times a month with hand picked recent management blog posts. I also collect select management improvement articles and blog posts in the Curious Cat management article library. The annual management blog roundup event covered #151 – #154, so this is #155.

  • We Don’t Know quote by David York, via Mike Wroblewski-
    We don’t know what the problems are…..that’s why we make them visible.
    We don’t know what the root causes of the problems are….that’s why we ask 5 Whys?
    We don’t know what the evidence is….that’s why we collect data.
    We don’t know what is actually happening….that’s why we observe.
    We don’t know what solutions will succeed….that’s why we experiment.
  • Why do we pay sales commissions? by Dan Ostlund, Fog Creek Software – “For us, it’s been a great success, and at least from that perspective it might be time we punch the Theory X, commissions-based sales culture right in the nose. Real redemption might lie in removing the source of the derangement and treating sales people like we treat programmers and other workers that we implicitly trust.”
    • photo of axes with rough wooden handles

    Axes in Nigeria by William Hunter

  • The C-Suite Double Standard by Dan Markovitz – “I started noticing what I call the C-suite double standard: leaders and executives who are ferocious about improving manufacturing processes and eliminating waste, but who passively accept waste in their office operations and individual work.”
  • Standard Work Is Like Food – Taste before Seasoning by Mark Hamel – “No doubt, we have heard the Taichii Ohno quote, “Where there is no standard, there can be no kaizen.” Standard work implies that there must be adherence. Without it, it’s more like a standard wish…as fickle as the wind. We can’t sustain improvements and we have little foundation for the next.”
  • How to trick yourself into thinking you’re doing lean (and trick others at the same time) by Jamie Flinchbaugh – “Don’t believe you are doing lean just because you’re filling out a template or following an agenda. It’s the thinking that counts.”
  • Defying Time: Dr. W. Edwards Deming by John Persico – “the more difficult part of our consulting at PMI was not in teaching statistics or process analysis but in helping to change management attitudes from the old thinking of meeting goals and quotas to the new thinking that went beyond goals and quotas to never ending improvement and innovation.”

    • Continue reading →

2011 Management Blog Roundup Completed

Posted on January 11, 2012  Comments (0)

The 2011 Management Blog Roundup has been completed. I hope you enjoyed it and learned from the great posts highlighted by all the participants in this effort. The final group of posts to be added are:

I offer my thanks to all the bloggers who took the time to participate.

I hope you found many concepts and ideas to adopt at your organization in 2012. And lets hope that those companies we have to deal with in 2012 are adopting these ideas so we can have much more rewarding and enjoyable experiences as customers.

Related: More 2011 Management Blog Roundup Posts Added – Newly Added 2011 Management Blog Roundup Posts – 2010 Annual Management Blog Review

2011 Management Blog Roundup: Stats Made Easy

Posted on January 8, 2012  Comments (0)

The 4th Annual Management blog roundup is coming to a close soon. This is my 3rd and final review post looking back at 2001, the previous two posts looked at: Gemba Panta Rei and the Lean Six Sigma Blog.

I have special affinity for the use of statistics to understand and improve. I imaging it is both genetic and psychological. My father was a statistician and I have found memories of applying statistical thinking to understand a result or system. I also am comfortable with numbers, and like most people enjoy working with things I have an affinity for.

photo of Mark Anderson

Mark Anderson

Mark Anderson’s Stats Made Easy blog brings statistical thinking to managers. And this is not an easy thing to do, as one of his posts shows, we have an ability to ignore data we don’t want to know. Wrong more often than right but never in doubt: “Kahneman examined the illusion of skill in a group of investment advisors who competed for annual performance bonuses. He found zero correlation on year-to-year rankings, thus the firm was simply rewarding luck. What I find most interesting is his observation that even when confronted with irrefutable evidence of misplaced confidence in one’s own ability to prognosticate, most people just carry on with the same level of self-assurance.”

That actually practice of experimentation (PDSA…) needs improvement. Too often the iteration component is entirely missing (only one experiment is done). That is likely partially a result another big problem: the experiments are not nearly short enough. Mark offered very wise advice on the Strategy of experimentation: Break it into a series of smaller stages. “The rule-of-thumb I worked from as a process development engineer is not to put more than 25% of your budget into the first experiment, thus allowing the chance to adapt as you work through the project (or abandon it altogether).” And note that, abandon it altogether option. Don’t just proceed with a plan if what you learn makes that option unwise: too often we act based on expectations rather than evidence.

In Why coaches regress to be mean, Mark explained the problem with reacting to common cause variation and “learning” that it helped to do so. “A case in point is the flight instructor who lavishes praise on a training-pilot who makes a lucky landing. Naturally the next result is not so good. Later the pilot bounces in very badly — again purely by chance (a gust of wind). The instructor roars disapproval. That seems to do the trick — the next landing is much smoother.” When you ascribe special causation to common cause variation you often confirm your own biases.

Mark’s blog doesn’t mention six sigma by name in his 2011 posts but the statistical thinking expressed throughout the year make this a must for those working in six sigma programs.

Related: 2009 Curious Cat Management Blog Carnival – 2010 Management Blog Review: Software, Manufacturing and Leadership

More 2011 Management Blog Roundup Posts Added

Posted on January 3, 2012  Comments (2)

As we start 2012, the 4th Annual Management Blog Roundup continues. Once again some of the most popular management bloggers are taking a look back at the last year in the management blogging world. The following reviews have been added since my last update:

These posts provide many great ideas for you to apply in the new year. The 2011 management blog roundup has more great posts coming up in the next week. The home page for this collaborative effort of many management bloggers provides links to all the posts in the 2011 Management Blog Roundup.

Related: 2010 Management Blog Roundup – 2011 Management Blog Roundup Begins – Curious Cat Management Blog Directory

2011 Management Blog Roundup: Lean Six Sigma Blog

Posted on December 29, 2011  Comments (1)

For my contribution to the 4th annual management blog roundup I am taking a look at 3 management blogs. In this post I look back at the year that was at the Lean Six Sigma blog.

We are lucky to have so many great management blogs to read all year. They provide inspiration and great advice to managers. Though, one of my frustrations is how few good six sigma resources there are online. In this area we are unlucky. The disparity between the amazingly high number of very high quality lean blogs and agile software development blogs compared to almost nothing of similar quality for six sigma content is dramatic (and unfortunate).

photo of Ron Pereira

Ron Pereira

Ron Pereira is the managing partner of Lean Six Sigma Academy and the Gemba Academy which provide high quality online lean manufacturing training. One of the ways Ron stands out are his posts that make continuous improvement a family affair (which I appreciate given that I grew up in such an environment).

In Let’s Dance he looks at understanding psychology as it relates to working with groups/teams (in this case his daughters soccer team): “my coaching style and my assistant coach’s style had become a bit too intense and, as a result, the girls were playing tight and scared to make mistakes… We kept this ‘dancing’ theme alive for the rest of the season. During warm-ups before games I, and the girls, would dance like fools. The other teams watched us like we were nuts… but we didn’t care. We kept right on laughing and dancing.” Take a look at this post, it really packs in a ton of great thoughts for managers.

Another way Ron stands out is with his webcasts on discussion lean terms (the gemba glossary). In this webcast he looks at the topic of standardized work processes.

One of the great things about blogs is the focus on what people really deal with day in and day out. It is nice to read about a great management system in a book like the Leader’s Handbook by Peter Scholtes. But what do you do when you are in a much more common situation, where others don’t share your desire to reshape the management system into something new and better? Ron took a look at this in his post: 3 Things You Can Do When Your Manager Doesn’t Support Continuous Improvement: “The best way to combat this is to demonstrate the value without them asking you to. In other words, make something better and let them know about it. And when I say make it better I mean it. Do something to positively impact the business.”

Another wonderful family related post by Ron this year was Training Wheels – “Like most young people my boy was itching to take the training wheels off his bicycle… The best part of all is he’s learning to solve his own problems. He’s not waiting for people to hand him things on a platter… How many times do we continuous improvement practitioners moan and groan about the lack of management support when, in actuality, even though they may not care they won’t stop you from making things better?”

Continue reading →

2011 Management Blog Roundup: Gemba Panta Rei

Posted on December 24, 2011  Comments (0)

For my contribution to the 4th annual management blog roundup I will take a look at 3 management blogs. In this post I look back at the year that was at the Gemba Panta Rei blog.

We are lucky to have so many great management blogs to read all year that provide inspiration and great advice. This year 12 management bloggers contributed to highlight nearly 40 blogs, be sure to check out all the posts.

photo of Jon Miller

Jon Miller

Jon Miller is the of the Executive Director of Kaizen Institute Consulting Group and author of the excellent Gemba Panta Rei blog. With so many good management blogs it is hard to read all the good posts, but this is one blog that is at the top of my to do list.

Jon provides extremely thought provoking posts that challenge managers to think. Over the years I have been thinking about why so many organizations fail to get most of the benefits provided by lean thinking and I have become more convinced in recent years a significant problem is the oversimplification and desires for solutions that don’t require thought. If you are not willing to spend time thinking about the profound implications of lean thinking the benefits you can achieve are several limited. Jon’s blog will help you by providing a reminder. But you then have to think yourself about how the ideas he raises relate to your situation. A few posts from last year in this vein:

  • The New Math of Daily Kaizen – “When kaizen is done in ways that it involves everybody and everywhere, but not on a daily basis, the gains from each additional person or area is additive. However, when even one person in one area is able to do kaizen every day, a curious thing happens. The impact is not additive. It is geometric, transformational.” [Lean is geometric, transformational, when done right. Reading Jon's blog and adopting fundamental changes in how you think and work is how you can find yourself on this path instead of one where you have incremental success but not much more. - John]
  • Lean Maturity and the Four Stages of Competence – “The lean journey is a long and arduous one. It spans one’s full lifetime… There is a larger contest that is being played out every day: the battle of backsliding versus continuous improvement.”
  • The Importance of Thinking About the Box – “The fruit I buy travels in boxes of metal, wood, cardboard and finally reaches me in a plastic container. Nature only makes containers that are edible, biodegradable or both. That is a thinking box worth stepping back into.”
  • Why Don’t We See More QC Circles? – “Even today the span of control of a typical leader is far too large and ineffective, driven by direct-to-indirect labor ratios and financial models that are divorced from the reality that people who function in small teams can solve and prevent problems in ways that lower cost. [I recently posted some comments on QC circles - John]
  • Kitchen Jidoka: Low Cost Automation Example – “separate human work and machine work so that humans can do less non value added and more value added work within a given period of time… Second, autonomation is used to prevent processes from making error after error by building in en error prevention or detect-and-stop functions.

Another theme on the Gemba Panta Rei blog is ambiguous visual controls. Effective visual management tools greatly enhance safety, productivity and usability. But using a concept is not the same thing as successfully using it, as the periodic posts on failed attempts Jon posts illustrates very well. Ambiguous Visual Controls: Airport Hotel Edition, too much information, in the park, lost in the supermarket…

Take a look at the other 2011 Management Blog Roundup posts.
Continue reading →

Newly Added 2011 Management Blog Roundup Posts

Posted on December 20, 2011  Comments (0)

The 4th Annual Management Blog Roundup is making good progress. It is wonderful how many great blogs there are to chose from. Even with us covering 40 management blogs there are many more great management blogs we didn’t include. The following reviews have been added since our initial post:

image of the cover of A Factory of one by Daniel Markovitz

A Factory of One by Daniel Markovitz

These posts provide many excellent management ideas and the annual review has many more great posts coming up. The home page for this collaborative effort of many management bloggers provides links to all the posts in the 2011 Management Blog Roundup.

Related: 2010 Management Blog Roundup – Curious Cat Economics, Investing and Personal Finance Carnival

4th Annual Management Blog Roundup

Posted on December 12, 2011  Comments (1)

The Curious Cat Management blog carnival highlights recent management blog posts 3 times each month. This is the 4th year that the normal rhythm is being broken to review the past year in management blogging. From now until January 12th some excellent management blogs will be hosting reviews of what has transpired on great management blogs over the last year.

You can find links to all the reviews, as they are posted, on the home page for Management Blogs: 2011 in Review. As managers looking to improve the performance of our organizations, we really are lucky to have so many excellent management blogs to learn from. It is difficult to stay on top of all the wonderful options: hopefully these posts will provide some good resources to follow in the year, and years, ahead.

Matt Wrye, at Beyond Lean, has started things off with posts looking at: Squawk Point and All Things Workplace.

Again this year we have many management bloggers joining the annual roundup. Over the next 3 weeks posts will be seen on some great blog, including: Jamie Flinchbaugh, Lean Six Sigma Academy Blog, Business 901 and many more.

Related: 2010 management blog review – 2009 management blog roundup – Curious Cat Management Blog Directory

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