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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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Management Improvement Blog Carnival #150

Posted on December 1, 2011  Comments (0)

Mark Graban is hosting Management Improvement Blog Carnival #150 on the Lean Blog, highlights include:

  • Watching Waste in the ER! – As part of his relatively new blog, Anthony Scott (Frontline Lean) writes about his experiences with waste in an emergency department. The waste isn’t surprising to those who have been a patient or those who have worked in the E.D. Scott is a supervisor in a lean manufacturing setting and he applies lean thinking to this unfamiliar environment.
  • Case Study: The Nordstrom Innovation Lab – Eric Ries (Startup Lessons Learned), author of the excellent book The Lean Startup, has a post with video featuring the use of “Lean Startup” methods and mindsets within a Fortune 500 company. Eric writes, “It’s one thing to talk about “rapid experimentation” and “validated learning” as abstract concepts. It’s quite another to see them in action, in a real-world setting.”
  • Top 3 Things I’ve Learned After 18 Months in Healthcare – My friend and DFW-area neighbor Mike Lombard (Hospital Kaizen) reflects on his first 18 months after transitioning from manufacturing into healthcare. In addition to his main points, Mike ends the post with an invitation for others to Move to Healthcare, writing, “Like I said earlier, I’ve learned a lot (a lot more than is shown here) and I continue to learn everyday. If you’re an engineer, project manager, quality professional, operations manager, or any other type of business professional, you can make the move to healthcare. Just be ready to focus on people, deal with complexity, and be proud of your work. Most of all, be ready to continuously learn and improve.”

I know we are all busy but, Mark, has done a great job highlighting some excellent posts. Take a look at the full carnival post and each of the posts. It is very nice to see how many great posts we are able to find for every carnival. A decade ago finding this kind of content was nearly impossible.

Related: Management Improvement Carnival #50 – Management Improvement Carnival #100

Management Improvement Carnival #149

Posted on November 21, 2011  Comments (1)

Jon Miller hosts Management Improvement Carnival #149 looking at blog posts examining motivation, highlights include:

  • a wonderful cat photo
  • Kevin Meyer found some bright spots on his trip to India and documented them in several fun articles in Evolving Excellence. My favorite was leadership lessons from Ganesha, a set of mindsets and behaviors that are both motivating personally and constructive in motivating others.
  • On productivity and motivation, one article began by explaining how researchers found that doing or saying something nice, even if this was a very small gesture, has proven to improve the job performance of people including doctors. The premise is that positivity promotes performance.
  • Addressing the question of “Where do I start?” in learning lean thinking and putting it into practice, Mark Rosenthal suggests adopting the find the bright spots advice from the book Switch. Finding brights spots is always good advice. While companies fail at thing for a wide variety of local and specialized reasons, success tends to cluster around a handful of factors; motivated people; removing waste, variation and burden; a long-term view. We need to drill a level deeper in each one of these.

I agree that motivation is a very important topic. I think trying to improve management without a good understanding of how people are really motivated is very difficult and weaknesses in this area end up frustrating many improvement efforts.

Related: Incentivizing Behavior Doesn’t Improve Results – Motivate or Eliminate De-Motivation – You’ve Got to Find What You Love

Management Improvement Carnival #148

Posted on November 11, 2011  Comments (0)

Jamie Flinchbaugh hosts Management Improvement Carnival #148, highlights include:

  • Since I’m just back from the 1st Lean for HR Summit, I thought I would also showcase an HR-oriented blog. This one from Emily Douglas challenges HR to step up to the plate in The HR Puzzle.
  • Old Lean Dude, aka Bruce Hamilton, aka “Toast Guy”, writes in Illogical Progression on how hoshin gets used as an organization progresses on their lean journey.
  • Michael Baudin writes about the use of sports metaphors in Black belts, scrums, and other metaphors. His opening sentence says it all: “To be useful, a metaphor must help understanding.” Too often, metaphors are cute but not useful.
  • Matt Wrye, a lean practioner blogging at Beyond Lean, writes Hired for one. Promoted for another. It’s a reflection on the balance between technical and relationship skills.

Make sure you check out the full carnival for many more great management posts.

Management Improvement Carnival #147

Posted on November 1, 2011  Comments (0)

Jason Yip hosts the 147th edition of the Management Improvement Carnival on his blog: You’d think with all my video game experience that I’d be more prepared for this. Highlights include:

Management Improvement Carnival #146

Posted on October 20, 2011  Comments (1)

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 through Curious Cat Management Articles, you can subscribe via RSS for new article additions.

  • PDCA by Lee Fried – “By approaching all work through the Plan, Do, Check and Adjust (PDCA) cycle is incredibly powerful and transferable. It allows everyone to think and talk about their work in a consistent way and it creates a repeatable, data driven approach to improvement.”
  • The Death of PDCA – “Our planning cannot be isolated. In fact, we no longer own our standards. They are only validated through customer interaction. The customer cannot be introduced at the end of the cycle, he must be at the beginning and part of the entire cycle. We must share a Co-Destiny with our customer. CDSA may be the replacement for PDSA.” [I don't actually believe there is any death of PDSA, it is a hugely valuable strategy and will remain one, but this is an interesting post - John]
    • Photo of Arches National Park

    Arches National Park by John Hunter, Curious Cat Travel Photo Blog

  • Going to the Gemba in a Lean Office – “Gemba walks are for a purpose. Initially you are learning to see. The office looks normal to you. But as you start Kaizen, you begin to see the enormous volumes of waste in your office.”
  • The Case for Project Management by Mike Cottmeyer – “I’ve been an agile project management guy from the beginning, but I am becoming increasingly convinced that we need to be teaching teams, not just how to self-organize, but how to effectively manage delivery… product or project delivery, I don’t care which.”
  • All you really need to know about courage and risk in your career by Jamie Flinchbaugh – “So many individuals want to do more, push harder, say what’s on their mind, and take some risks. But something’s stopping them. But it’s the courage and risk-taking that leads to breakthrough ideas, to fantastic gains, and to overall greatness.”

    • Continue reading →

Management Improvement Carnival #145

Posted on October 10, 2011  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…).

photo of me with a blackboard in my father's office

Me in my father's office, drawing by John, photo by Bill Hunter

  • Why Startup Hubs Work by Paul Graham – “The problem is not that most towns kill startups. It’s that death is the default for startups, and most towns don’t save them… Both components of the antidote—an environment that encourages startups, and chance meetings with people who help you—are driven by the same underlying cause: the number of startup people around you.” [Creating entrepreneurship hubs is extremely important economically. Many countries are very interested in making this work for them. Doing so is not easy and still is a huge advantage the USA benefits from in the Valley and also NYC, Boston... - John, previous post: The Future is Engineering]
  • “Management By Walking Around” vs. “Gemba Walks” by Mark Graban – “Study the Toyota model. Read Norman Bodek’s article. Read Quint Studer’s work on “rounding for outcomes” (a great thing to read whether you are in healthcare or not). Studer emphasizes stopping to truly engage with employees, not just slapping them on the back. Bonus – read Jamie Flinchbaugh’s IndustryWeek piece on effective gemba walks.”
  • What I Learned From Steve Jobs by Guy Kawasaki – “Customers cannot tell you what they need… Changing your mind is a sign of intelligence…”
  • About Spread by Lee Fried – “While spreading standard work over time is essential to increasing the rate of improvement of an organization it will never occur or sustain without simultaneously putting in place a Management system.” [this theme is repeated over and over, without a management system the gains made are real, but small fractions of what is possible when management thinks and acts fundamentally differently - John].

    • Continue reading →

Management Improvement Carnival #143

Posted on September 20, 2011  Comments (0)

The Curious Cat Management Improvement 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, more.

  • U.S. Patent Overhaul Won’t Help Innovators by “What they found is that America’s patent system only provides positive incentives for innovation in two industries: pharmaceuticals and chemicals. The value that a patent confers on its owner is outweighed by the cost of obtaining, asserting, and defending that patent for almost all American companies. Anyone innovating outside of those two industries would be better off if there were no patent system at all.” [9 deadly diseases - adding outdated intellectual property practices and excessive executive pay to Dr. Deming's 7 deadly diseases, John]

  • An Explanation and Some Reflection by Reed Hastings (Netflix CEO – see video also) – “Companies rarely die from moving too fast, and they frequently die from moving too slowly. When Netflix is evolving rapidly, however, I need to be extra-communicative. This is the key thing I got wrong.” [Clayton Christensen: "Netflix are going to be held up as a gold standard of how to avoid being disrupted"].
  • User stories applied by Luigi Agosti [from User stories applied for agile software development by Mike Cohn, a great book - John]- “A user story is composed of three aspects:
    Card : written description of the story used for planning and as a reminder
    Conversation : conversations about the story that serve to flesh out the details of the story
    Confirmation : tests that convey and document details and that can be used to determine when a story is complete”
  • “Do You See What I See?” by Mark Hamel – “An example – three people walk the newly designed leader standard work. They stop at each audit point and, without conversing, do the audit…and then share.”

    • Continue reading →

Management Improvement Carnival #142

Posted on September 10, 2011  Comments (1)

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

  • 5 Things a Good Product Manager Should Think About by Joseph Puopolo – “User experience has become such a core function to any product manager. Is this easy to use? Do people get pissed off when they have to use key features on the site? Will it cause people to abandon your site? UX can be a core competency and key differentiator. Always focus on this!”
  • 21 Concrete Practices for Agile Managers by Jurgen Appelo – “1) Take part in a team’s stand-up meetings, and also answer the questions “What I did yesterday”, etc… 9) Keep every morning free of meetings, so you can do a gemba walk and solve problems… 18) Regularly have a look at a team’s output (the application that they are building).”
  • Why Create Poka-yokes—and Why Disconnect Them? by Michael Ballé – “Lines with overly complex Poka-Yoke devices tend to lose much productivity by having operators simply run the part through the detection device again until a part would be consistently stopped. Not surprisingly, production management can be tempted to simply disconnect the poka- yoke in order to run the line.”
  • 10 Signs You Have a Bad Boss by Alison Green – “7) Ruling by fear. Managers who rule through rigid control, negativity, and a climate of anxiety and fear don’t trust that they can get things done any other way… 10) Fear of conflict. If your manager avoids conflict and tough conversations, chances are high that employees don’t hear much feedback and problems don’t get addressed.”
  • Should fixing bugs count toward velocity? by Jason Yip – “Velocity is a vector, not a scalar. So, should fixing bugs count toward velocity? No, we are measuring progress toward a goal, not effort expended.”
  • Interview with Akio Toyoda about Toyota Under Fire – Akio Toyoda on Jeff Liker’s new book, and Toyota: “you emphasize that you have to go back to the basics and this is the thing that I want them to learn the most. The business environment keeps changing. It is a dynamic environment, but as a company Toyoda was able to grow for the past 70 years or so and this is because there are some timeless values that we always have to keep true to. And that is the basics and that is what I would like them to learn.”

    • Continue reading →

Management Improvement Carnival #141

Posted on September 1, 2011  Comments (0)

photo of rushing water joining the sea

Creek joining the Andaman Sea in Khao Lak, Thailand, 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, leadership, lean manufacturing, customer focus, six sigma…).

  • Kill Rats – Not Messengers by Bill Waddell – “Seems pretty clear to me that YUM’s stock price and sales should drop if there are rats running around their restaurants. The YouTube video isn’t the cause of dropping sales and stock prices – lousy management that lets rats have the run of a Taco Bell is.”
  • Jobs made Apple great by ignoring profit by Clayton Christensen and James Allworth – “When the pressure is on and the CEO of a big public company has to choose between doing what’s best for the customer or making the quarter’s numbers… most CEOs will choose the numbers. Apple never has.”
  • Banishing Fear In The Workplace: Interview With Gallup’s Tom Rieger by Matthew May – “We realized that fear was eroding all these companies in very similar ways—so similar, in fact, that the pattern could be easily recognized if you only knew what to look for.”
  • Saving capitalism from itself by Simon Caulkin – “The theories have driven damaging short-termism, fostered amoral and immoral executive behaviour, and favoured the mushrooming growth of parasitic players in the expectations market to whose tune real-market actors are increasingly made to jump.”
  • The Just-Do-It – Reflect cycle by Jason Yip – “We’ll set aside some time to think about what we want to do, which is hard work, but then we’ll just do it… and then based on a trigger and/or a set time, we’ll reflect and adjust.”

    • Continue reading →

Management Improvement Carnival #140

Posted on August 21, 2011  Comments (0)

Benjamin Mitchell hosts Management Improvement Carnival #140. He has choosen quite a few blogs making their first or second appearance on the management carnival (don’t forget to add blogs to your RSS feed that you are not already subscribed to), highlights include:

  • Forecasting misunderstood by David M. Kasprzak
    David writes well about understanding the purpose of forecasting and reporting to avoid counter-productive fire-fighting management behaviour:

    Forecasting has to do with long-term vision and strategy, measurement, and learning. Focusing on reporting without planning leads to delayed information and chronic “hot buttons” that require immediate attention.

    When this occurs, the PDCA cycle is simply broken. The end result is a system where the people in the organization are in a constant state of “Do!” and “Act!” without any sense of why they are doing anything, or if their efforts have actually caused an improvement.

  • Change Artist Challenge #7: Being Fully Absent by Gerald Weinberg
    For managers who want to create systems that allow people to do great work, one solid test is to see if the systems works without you there:

    Your challenge is to take a week away from work, and when you get back, notice what changed without you being there. … Do you think you can’t do this? Then you have a different assignment … “If you’re going on a week-long vacation and feel the project cannot do without you, then take a two-week vacation.”
  • Leadership Coaching Tip: A Process for Change by Barbara Alexander
    Starting with a reference to Deming’s famous quote “It is not necessary to change. Survival is not mandatory”, Barbara writes a summary of the work of Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey including their focus on uncovering the competing commitments and underlying assumptions which keep us “immune from change”:

    One example from Immunity To Change that many of us may relate to is the leader whose goal is to be more receptive to new ideas. As you might imagine the behaviors he’s doing instead of his goal include talking too much, not asking open-ended questions and using a curt tone when an employee makes a suggestion. His hidden competing commitments? You guessed it . . . to have things done his way and to maintain his sense of self as a super problem solver

Management Improvement Carnival #139

Posted on August 10, 2011  Comments (0)

comic showing the dangers of drawing false conclusion based on statistical significance

Randall Munroe illustrates RA Fisher point that you must think to draw reasonable conclusions from data. Click the image to see the full xkcd comic.


The Curious Cat Management Improvement 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 John Hunter online: Google+, Twitter, LinkedIn, more.

  • Questioning the Value of the P-Value by Jon Miller – “Father of modern statistics Ronald A. Fisher invented the p-value as an informal measure of evidence against the null hypothesis. Although often overlooked, Fisher called on scientists use other types of evidence such as the a priori plausibility of the hypothesis and the relative strengths of results from previous studies in combination with the p-value.”
  • Teachers Cheating and Incentives by Dan Ariely – “they began to do anything that would improve their performance on that measure even by a tiny bit—even if they messed up other employees in the process. Ultimately they were consumed with maximizing what they knew they would be measured on”
  • It’s About The Journey and Sometimes It Starts With Failure by Tim McMahon – “If we allow ourselves to become discouraged during the learning process we may give up right before we reach our goal. Anytime we learn from our efforts we are in the process of succeeding. Each lesson brings us closer to our intended result.”
  • When Patents Attack – “as many as 80 percent of software engineers say the patent system actually hinders innovation. It doesn’t encourage them to come up with new ideas and create new products. It actually gets in their way.” (I added “An outdated intellectual property system” as deadly management/economic disease number 9 – building on Deming’s 7 deadly
    diseases a few years ago – John). Also from NPR: The Patent War
  • 3 Things You Can Do When Your Manager Doesn’t Support Continuous Improvement by Ron Pereira – “So keep fighting… keep learning… keep improving. If you do this, one thing is for certain, you and the organization you work for will be better off even if they don’t realize it.”

    • Continue reading →

Management Improvement Carnival #138

Posted on August 2, 2011  Comments (0)

Wally bock hosts Management Improvement Carnival #138 on the Three Star Leadership Blog, highlights include:

  • Evidence Soup by Tracy Allison Altman. This is a blog about assessing evidence. If statistics are not your thing, you’ll pick up some tips and tricks that will help you analyze evidence to guide your decision making. If you’re a statistical whiz, you’ll find a lot here that’s just fun.

    Representative Recent Post: Big Ideas may not have supporting evidence, but they sell books by the boatload.
    “Haven’t we had enough of authors pitching an oversimplified analysis of something important? It’s great to boil things down into plain language, but when an entire book is based on A Big Idea, complicated things are glossed over, evidence is cherry-picked, we get bamboozled. (And books are sold. Maybe I’m just jealous.)”

  • Life in Perpetual Beta by Harold Jarche. Harold Jarche’s blog is the point in my universe where a host of sources on personal knowledge management and the changing workplace come together. In addition to his own lucid analysis, Harold supplies pointers to many great sources that are new to me. As a bonus, this blog could serve as a primer on using illustrations to explain concepts. The representative post describes Harold’s view of what the blog is about.

    Representative Recent Post: Adapting to Life in Perpetual Beta “On my consulting page, I have summarized my perspectives on 21st century work. It’s called: Adapting to Life in Perpetual Beta.

    There is no such thing as a social media strategy.
    There are only business strategies that understand networks.

I hope you enjoy Wally’s carnival post and find some new ideas worth pursuing. I have added a couple more blogs to me RSS feed reader. The management improvement carnival is posted 3 times a month spotlighting great posts related to management.

Management Improvement Carnival #137

Posted on July 21, 2011  Comments (0)

photo of Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

Petronas Towers, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia by John Hunter. View from my hotel room.

The Curious Cat management blog carnival is published 3 times a month with select recent management blog posts. I also collect management improvement articles through Curious Cat Management Articles, you can subscribe via RSS to new article additions. Photo is the view I see as I post this issue of the carnival.

  • The importance of understanding variation or how to avoid treating all contractors as thieves by Benjamin Mitchell – “The fix for common cause variation (and most variation is common cause) is to go and study the situation, experiment and try and look for patterns or trends in the data before making a change to the system.”
  • Deming’s 14 Points by David Joyce – “The 14 points are not a menu you can pick and choose from. Deming intended you use all 14. They are one philosophy.”
  • Misconceptions about Self-Organizing Teams by Esther Derby – “Like all teams, they need a compelling goal, skills, information, and enough time to form and perform. And they still need managers to create a supportive context, set appropriate boundaries and constraints and connect the team to the organization.”
  • New York City Halts Teacher Bonus Program: Another Blow to Evidence-Resistant Ideology by Bob Sutton – “The decision was made in light of a study that found the bonuses had no positive effect on either student performance or teachers’ attitudes toward their jobs.”
  • Agile Prioritisation by Mike Griffiths – “There is no single best way to always prioritise; instead, try to diagnose issues arising in the prioritisation process, be it “lack of involvement” or “too many priority 1’s”, and then try approaches such as Monopoly money, MoSCoW or a pure list to assist if the problems cannot be resolved via dialogue. The goal is to understand where features lie in relation to others as opposed to assigning a category label.”

    • Continue reading →

Management Improvement Carnival #136

Posted on July 11, 2011  Comments (1)

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, leadership, agile software development, lean manufacturing, continual improvement…).

Management Improvement Carnival #135

Posted on July 5, 2011  Comments (1)

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 (Lean manufacturing, Deming, agile software development, systems thinking, customer focus, six sigma, leadership…).

  • Go See, Ask Why, Show Respect by John Shook – “Go see, ask why, show respect is the way we turn the philosophy of scientific empiricism into actual behavior. We go observe what is really happening (at the gemba where the work takes place), while showing respect to the people involved”
  • Don’t delegate unless by Wally Bock – “Can the team member do the work you want to delegate? If they can’t you need to give them the training or resources they need to do what you assign. If you’re not sure, you should delegate but monitor.
    Will the team member pitch in and do the work when you’re not checking?”
  • The Seeds of Legendary by Mark Riffey – “To me, the folks that deliver legendary service offer consistency, little surprises, thoughtful, caring service. Not just nice, but more than you expect. Above and beyond. More than that, they set expectations by sharing with you that you’re about to experience the extraordinary – and then they deliver that and more. Talk isn’t enough. Delivery is critical.”
  • My Week with Mr. Masaaki Imai by Ron Pereira – “The thing that I most taken aback by was how kind and humble Mr. Imai was (and is). Many of the so-called lean gurus of our time are not always the most humble and kind… in fact, some of them are flat out arrogant and hard to listen to.”

    • Continue reading →

Management Improvement Carnival #134

Posted on June 20, 2011  Comments (0)

snow pack on trail in North Cascade National Park

Snow pack on the Helitrope Ridge Trail in North Cascade National Park. Photo by John Hunter.

The Curious Cat Management Improvement Carnival has been published since 2006. We find great management blog posts and share them with you. We hope you find these post interesting and find some new blogs to start reading. You may submitted a post to the management subreddit to have it considered for the next carnival. See more photos from North Cascade National Park, Washington, USA.

  • To Change Culture, Change the System by David Joyce – “Deming learned it’s not a problem of the people it’s a problem of the system that people work within. He found that if you want to change behaviour, then you need to change the system, and change management thinking that creates it. Doing so, culture change is then free.”
  • Customer Engagement is Employee Engagement (and vice versa) by Julian Birkinshaw and Simon Caulkin – “And that was the conclusion: putting every employee in the customer loop on a regular basis could strengthen the entire culture of the company. Every time a Roche employee met with a customer, the employee would leave more engaged in the work of the company.”
  • Looting Factories For Fun and Profit by Bill Waddell – “These sorts of leveraged buyout games have made investment bankers millionaires, and destroyed tens of thousands of manufacturing companies over the last thirty years. It is a legal way to suck all of the value others have created from a company without adding anything.”
  • Why? Such a powerful question by Mishkin Berteig – “This communication is paramount during the Sprint or Cycle but is absolutely mandatory during the planning meeting. A team cannot simply be given a list of instructions to follow. The team needs to understand what their Goal is.”
  • Whoever Experiments Fastest, Wins by Mike Rother – “our current management paradigm tends to seek certainty. How rarely do we hear, ‘I don’t know,’ ‘Let’s observe what happens,’ ‘Not sure yet,’ ‘We’re testing that.’ (it is a shame when people are afraid of saying “I don’t know” – John)

    • Continue reading →

Management Improvement Carnival #133

Posted on June 10, 2011  Comments (0)

photo of Tree at the Clifton Gorge State Nature Preserve The Curious Cat management blog carnival is published 3 times a month with select recent management blog posts. I also collect management improvement articles through Curious Cat Management Articles, you can subscribe via RSS to new article additions.

  • Why I can’t convince executives to invest in UX (and neither can you) by Jared Spool “Neither I, you, nor anybody else can convince an executive to invest in user experience… You’ll need to do something custom. Something specific to their current focus. And if that doesn’t work, maybe it’s time for you to find someplace else to work. Someplace where the executives are already convinced and want to make the investment.” [You can substitute "lean, six sigma, customer focus or any other wise management strategy for UX in the quote above. - John Hunter]
  • Jeff Bezos on innovation at Amazon – Jeff Bezos: “If you invent frequently and are willing to fail, then you never get to that point where you really need to bet the whole company… We are stubborn on vision. We are flexible on details…. We don’t give up on things easily. Our third-party seller business is an example of that. It took us three tries to get the third-party seller business to work. We didn’t give up.”
  • Kanban and Shifting the Burden by Karl Scotland – “The Containment action is the symptomatic solution taken to resolve the problem quickly. Then, after root cause analysis, the Countermeasure action is the fundamental solution to prevent repeated recurrence.”
  • The Iceberg That Sinks Performance by Dan Markovitz – “Time management ‘problems’ are really just manifestations of dysfunction in one or more of the following areas: strategy; priorities; internal systems and processes; corporate cultural expectations; or individual skills.”
  • About that bus … by Wally Bock – “This is the kind of guru advice where the principle (get the best people you can) is good, but to use it you have to deal with reality that’s a lot messier than it seems in the books. “
  • Drucker and Executive Compensation – Are CEOs Paid Too Much? by Robert Swaim – “Few people- and probably no one outside the executive suite – sees much reason for these very large executive compensations. There is little correlation between them and company performance.” Peter F. Drucker, The Frontiers of Management, 1986.

    • Continue reading →

Management Improvement Carnival #132

Posted on June 1, 2011  Comments (1)

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, agile software development, systems thinking, lean manufacturing, customer focus…).

  • If management stopped demotivating their employees… by Mark Graban – “Think of a person in your workplace who is considered to have a “bad attitude.” Do you think they started their career or their job at that point? If so, why were they ever hired? … What do you think happened to turn the “live trees” you hired into “dead wood” as Peter Scholtes said?“
  • The Poison of Performance Appraisals by Nicole Radziwill – “Progressive organizations might use a 360-degree approach, a la Jones & Bearley, but the underlying dynamic is the same: I’m telling you what I think about you and that’s my evaluation. I’m not familiar with any managers or organizations who can pull this off with impartiality and avoid the many sources of bias that can creep into the process.”
  • One factor at a time (OFAT) Versus Factorial Designs by Bradley Jones – “The most common argument I read against OFAT these days has to do with inability to detect interactions and the possibility of finding suboptimal factor settings at the end of the investigation. I admit to using these arguments myself in print.
    I don’t think these arguments are as effective as Fisher’s original argument.”

  • Lean Strategy: The Role of Ideal State Thinking by Jamie Flinchbaugh – “One of the opportunities in building a strategy is really understanding the roles that all the different product/services that you offer fit together”
  • Lean UX at work by Jeff Gothelf – “It seems that as a team matures and the trust bonds between the members grow, the rituals of formal process fall away in favor of less-prescribed, more “understood” cadences.”
  • TryStorming by Lee Fried – “stop brainstorming and start “trystorming (actual simulation or creation of the idea).” This meant putting away the flip charts and sticky notes and getting out on the floor and getting our hands dirty. Having the 3D, tangible “mock-ups” allowed the teams to quickly understand each others ideas and iteratively improve the solution in a way that would not be possible on paper.”

    • Continue reading →

Management Improvement Carnival #131

Posted on May 21, 2011  Comments (2)

Antelope Island State Park - Great Salt Lake

Photo by John Hunter at Antelope Island State Park, Utah

The management improvement blog carnival is published 3 times a month (though not this month – May 10th was missed) with select recent management blog posts. Curious Cat also collects articles on improving management practices, you can subscribe via RSS to new article additions.
See more photos from my trip to Utah, including Antelope Island State Park in the Great Salt Lake.

  • Drive out Fear by Wally Bock – “Fear corrodes morale and team spirit. Fight or flight rules the day, with team members hiding from the rampaging saber-toothed tiger of a boss, throwing blame at each other and hoping, to borrow from Winston Churchill, that the crocodile will eat them last.”
  • 8 Ways to Deal with Employee Personal Problems by Harwell Thrasher – “Every employee is an individual with their own personal strengths and issues. You can’t expect to take advantage of an employee’s strengths without occasionally running up against some of the issues.”
  • Three Requirements for Managing by Fact by Jon Miller – “1) decision on the criteria of relevance, 2) testing of hypothesis and conversion of opinion into tested fact, and 3) arriving at consensus through clash and conflict of divergent opinions.”
  • Rapid PDCA with 3P by Mark Rosenthal – “The idea is to be able to quickly and cheaply try out, and experience, a process (or product) so that problems can be surfaced, opportunities for improvement can be seen, and the PDCA cycle can be turned far more rapidly than would otherwise be possible.” [One important key to excellent results using PDSA is rapid, quick cycles through the PDSA cycle (many organizations turn the PDSA cycle much too slowly) - John]

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Management Improvement Carnival #130

Posted on May 1, 2011  Comments (1)

The 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 Improvement guide since 1996 (Deming, lean thinking, agile software development, respect for people, leadership…).

  • Autonomy: condition for continuous improvement by Rob van Stekelenborg – “Teams that should take the responsibility over a (part of a) process should at the same time also be given the opportunity to actually improve something within their area of responsibility… That the team is allowed to experiment with suggestions that were put forward…”
  • Laying Off Hands, Losing Brains by Kevin Meyer – “Remember, there’s a brain attached to that pair of hands. Value can be created even if the hands aren’t being used at the moment.”
  • Lunch by Joel Spolsky – “Ten years ago Michael and I set out with the rather ambitious goal of making a great place to work. Eating together is a critical part of what it means to be human and what it means to have a humane workplace, and that’s been a part of our values from day one.”
  • Tools, Rules, Principles, and Lean Wallpaper by Art Smalley – “You need a critical mass of people that have both the right thinking patterns (know what) but also the right technical knowledge (know how)… Unfortunately I don’t see as much advancement on the actual technical “know how” dimension of the equation and until that problem is solved actual performance results will not match up with the associated performance expectations.”
  • How to succeed in business by doing nothing by Michael Blastland – “the fashion for corporate dashboards displaying up-to-the-minute information about company performance makes me wonder – will bosses everywhere be staring at the numbers, twitching with every down, feeling the pulse race with every up, on the phone demanding action with every flicker on the dial?” [tampering is a common problem - John]
  • Exorbitant Executive Salaries = Resources Wasted On Those Who Don’t Need Them by Aaron Anderson – “The question I raise here is as to if the monies beyond a certain level of salary might not be better spent on developing a pool of resources that can be utilized to generate organizational slack that can invigorate invention, creativity, and lead to new ways of doing in an ongoing way that allows people to break free of the shackles of the long standing tradition or status quo.”

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