• No Excuses by John Shook - “A culture of management seeking where to place the blame — the five whos — will absolutely prevent the flourishing of a culture that fosters ubiquitous use of the five whys”
• Resource Planning by Jurgen Appelo - “Considering that task-switching is bad, the resource planner must seek to minimize the number of different activities per week, per person… Software developers themselves are allowed to reserve a number of academy days. These are days for self-development and training.”
• The Deming Chain Reaction by John Dowd - “According to Deming, quality is not a state to be achieved in manufacturing, but is, rather, an ongoing company-wide effort at continual improvement.”

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Ron Pereira is hosting the Management Improvement Carnival #46 on the Lean Six Sigma Academy blog, highlights include:

• I’m never quite sure how he gets these ideas… but Jon Miller managed to tie leadership and mountain goats together in 7 Leadership Lessons from a Mountain Goat. Great stuff!
• If you are interested in being more productive I have a must read article for you, and I really mean it’s a must read. So be sure to check out The Ultimate Productivity Toolbox for Creative People.
• Finally, I leave you with one of the best marketing minds on the blogosphere as Seth Godin tells us about Reacting, Responding & Initiating.

And here is a great post from his blog last week: Millions of Dollars Saved in 60 Minutes

Read the previous management carnivals. Also see the management Reddit for popular new blog posts to include in future carnivals.

• Hire them, fire them, do what you want with them by Jay Padinjaredath - “A quote from Deming: “In Japan when a company has to absorb a sudden economic hardship… First the corporate dividends are cut. Then the salaries and the bonuses of the top management are reduced…. Lastly, the rank and file are asked to accept pay cuts…”
• The Art of the A3 by Matthew May - “Every A3 tells a story. And like every story, each one is a little different, style-wise. But like any good story, there’s a clear structure.”
• Spirit of the Toyota Suggestion System by Mike Wroblewski - “Our job as lean leaders is to help create that environment and inspire everyone to act, to take action to make improvements.”
• To Motivate or Not to Demotivate by Jurgen Appelo - “Some people tell me that ‘you cannot motivate a person’. You can only “remove the impediments that prevent a person from being motivated”. Or, in other words, ‘you can only eliminate demotivation‘. Well, I don’t agree!”
• Managing To Learn by Tom Southworth - “PDCA, or continuous improvement, never has an end, does it? We’re not solving problems, we’re implementing countermeasures to make positive changes to an existing condition.”
• Demotivating a (Good) Programmer by Louis Brandy - “consider this your executive summary: he is motivated because he likes the actual work. That’s the Achilles heel. Now, before you think you’ve got this problem solved, let me explain to you the secret to the secret: what he thinks is cool is almost beyond your comprehension”
• Apologizing Does NOT Get to the Root Cause by Mark Graban - “if you’re just putting the fire out without looking for a root cause or for prevention, you’re going to have the same problem occur again.”

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Kevin Meyer is hosting the Management Improvement Carnival #44 on the Evolving Excellence blog, highlights include:

• What would Taiichi Ohno do? at TimeBack Management. I do think there’s tremendous value in applying 5S to the information you manage. But. . . when Google desktop can find anything on your computer in .03 seconds, is there real value in spending time organizing, sorting, and deleting emails, spreadsheets, and PDFs?
• Unbundling Dell’s Business at Edge Perspectives. Companies increasingly face an unbundling decision that will force executives to confront the most basic question of all: “what business are we really in?”
• The Problem With Not Being Obsessive About Mistakes at Process Rants. I’m thinking if everyone was obsessed with getting it right, and embarrassed to be caught being wrong, a lot of the quality issue would take care of itself.
• “If you didn’t do it in six sigma, then it didn’t happen.” at the Lean Blog. There’s an expression that pretty much describes Six Sigma’s infiltration at GE: If your only tool is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a nail.

Read the previous management carnivals. I posted on a new tool for finding management resources online, I will monitor the management Reddit for popular new blog posts to include in future carnivals.

• Where Does Bad Corporate Culture Come From, and Can It Be Corrected? by Tim Prosser - “while it is natural for bad organizational culture to develop, this tendency can be countered and a more positive and productive organizational culture can be produced, though it requires savvy and introspective management.”
• Toyota’s Commitment to People by Mark Graban - “I’m sure keeping the workers on and training them (with real work, not just letting them sit in the cafeteria) is all about the long-term good of the company.”
• Consulting is easy by Pascal Van Cauwenberghe - “Real Lean is making use of the collective wisdom of everybody in the organisation.”
• Prioritizing and Planning for Market Risk by David Anderson - “Matts-Maassen tells us to push back decisions as far as possible and to gather information, create options and understand when they expire. This helps us to optimize decision making and minimum the risk of a decision being a bad one.”
• An IT Guy Gets Lean by Kevin Meyer - “This isn’t to mean that all software is a problem, and we definitely believe that software tools, appropriately deployed, can create value. But more often than not they mask waste and reduce the ability to change by enforcing rigid processes”
• 5 Things I am Still Learning about Lean Manufacturing by Jon Miller - “maybe I am only just learning that if you properly take care of the people issues first, the factory will fix itself.”
• Congratulations. You’ve mapped out the future state. Now what? by Dan Markovitz - “Establishing standard work, understanding limits and leveling the workload so as not to overload people, allowing them to actually create the future state they’ve mapped out — this is a humane, rational, and far better way to work.”
• The problem with single points of failure - “Companies can’t rely on people like me, or Dr. Hammer, to be their single point of failure. A great process or great ideas must be capable of going on without you.” - I wrote on a similar topic for the Curious Cat Management blog in May: Well Managed Companies
• Lean Tutorial: Production Capacity Template by Ron Pereira - webcast walks through using a spreadsheet (template included in the post) to manage the production line.
• Future Directions for Agile Management by John Hunter - “Deliver working systems quickly (with limited features, add features based on user needs)… Build systems that cope well with uncertainty and allow for constant continuous improvement of processes”

Shaun Sayers is hosting the Management Improvement Carnival #42 on the Capable blog, highlights include:

• How to change the way we think about customer service (by Maria Palma) “it is not that people don’t care about relationships and don’t consider Service Excellence their job … it is simply that they do not appreciate the significance that their interactions may have on the person or client they are serving”
• 3 Steps to Statistical Thinking (by Rob Thompson) - “HG Wells: When you can measure what you are speaking about and express it in numbers, you know something about it. When you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind”
• If Peter Piper Picked a Peck of Prioritized Projects… (by Sue Kozlowski) even if significant costs can be saved - even if reliability can be improved - even if staffing efficiencies can be realized - if the project or deployment champion isn’t engaged, you may end up with a beautiful project that won’t be sustained
• Is long term goal driven planning a waste of time? (by Shaun Sayers) like the idea of an after-life, it’s nice to think that we can develop and execute long-term plans, because the alternative may be an uncomfortable thought
• Operational excellence is not a substitute for effective leadership or a good strategy (by Peter Abilla) Deploying a Lean or Six Sigma culture within your firm … is not a panacea; by itself, a culture of Operational Excellence will find itself lacking in a hyper-competitive world

Please submit your favorite management posts to the carnival. Read the previous management carnivals.

Mark Graban is hosting the Management Improvement Carnival #40. Mark recently authored a new book, Lean Hospitals. Health care highlights from this carnival include:

• Hospital Error - Heparin in the news again (The Lean Thinker Blog): “I am reasonably certain that the two workers who went on “voluntary leave” (yeah, right) will absorb more than their share of blame as the system solves the problem by asking the “Five Who?” questions.”
• Management 101, 201, 301, and 401 (Paul Levy - Running a Hospital): “The only role of management is to create an environment where people left to their own devices and unsupervised are most likely to engage in behavior that advances the goals of the organization.”
• Why I Work In Healthcare (Lee Fried - Daily Kaizen): “Great people that were trying to work in a broken system.”
• Competing Podcast Interview with Mark Graban (Dwight Bowen - Lean Thinking Network): “Most everyone has been aware of the increasing costs of healthcare - the general public is recently becoming more aware of the patient safety and quality risks they face in a hospital. And these are all problems that can be addressed with Lean.”
• 5S, Poka-Yoke, and Visual Controls (Bryan Lund - TWI Blog): “I need a visual control to tell me if the standard is met, in order to avoid mistakes or failure.”

Related: previous management carnivals - Curious Cat health care article library - Curious Cat Management Improvement blog Health Care posts - improving health care links

• “Certifications” - Buying Credibility? by Mark Rosenthal - “if you are looking for your own professional development, and look at a program for what it is: An academic education, and possibly an opportunity to establish professional network, then go for it. Just don’t go in believing that ‘being certified’ means a whole lot else.”
• Toyota Invests In Workers Instead of Laying Them Off by Mark Graban - “You can treat people as expendable costs or an asset to train and invest in. Even as Toyota’s truck sales have plummeted, are they resorting to layoffs? Nope!!”
• Quality, Productivity and Competitive Position by John Dowd - “I can still clearly hear his words, “There is no substitute for knowledge.” The knowledge is there in the pages of his book. It needs only to be extracted and acted on.”
• Deer Poka Yokes by Mike Gardner - “if the deer would just follow the operation standard and flow with the traffic instead of attempting to flow at right angles to it, all of this could be avoided”
• Too Bad, So Sad by Kevin Meyer - “Like most companies that try to implement lean, it appears that the second pillar, respect for people, was forgotten. Therefore most of the potential benefit was lost.”
• Projects vs. Process Improvement - “By taking a project as opposed to process improvement approach it is very hard to make performance visible and understand the effect improvement interventions are having or will have.”
• We Do Not Make What We Do Not Sell by Jon Miller - “Production control is a comprehensive activity of planning, organizing production and related activities including purchasing, managing inventory and production cost controls”
• Age and the Entrepreneur by Paul Kedrosky - “People founding tech companies over the last ten years had an average and median age of 39-years, nowhere near the age that makes for good stories about dorm room entrepreneurs”
• Queue Management by Mark - “the measurement of ‘on time’ is ‘pull away from the gate’ not “leave the ground” so in order to get an ‘on time’ departure, they will load the plane as scheduled, then go sit on the tarmac rather than delaying the passenger load. A great example of ‘management by measurement’ not getting exactly the intended results.”
• Free Download - Chapter 1 of “Lean Hospitals” by Mark Graban
• Better Meetings by John Hunter - Document decisions on a flip chart that everyone can see in the meeting and then email everyone the decisions.

Please submit your favorite management posts to the carnival. Read the previous management carnivals.

• Adopting Agile Processes by Eric Engelmann - “So scrum is about fixing the system. If you don’t write code, it might not be apparent what’s different about this, so I’ll pull out what I love about it…”
• Generosity comes with international shipping by Andy - “I am the CEO at Timbuk2…and I wanted to say - thank you for the posting. and tell you I am very proud of the team here.

  1. They made this call on their own.
  2. They broke the rules that should be broken

• The gemba of poverty by Karen Wilhelm - “But the idea wasn’t to give these things to those in need. It was to keep designing and trying until you had something that could be manufactured at a profit to meet a price point poor people could afford.”
• Fire Fighting vs. Root Cause Problem Solving by Mark Graban - “The workaround does nothing to prevent the problem from occurring again — this ensures more wasted time and more potential problems in the future.”
• Coffee cup kanban by Corey Ladas - “the cup is the kanban. The cup-ban doubles as an order form that can encode most combinations that a barista should expect.”
• Teams and Improvement by John Dowd - “The lesson is that being aware of the existence of interactions and being attentive to their implications is a part of team management.”
• Conference Calls, Kids, and SMED by Ron Pereira - “Why wait until the machine is stopped to get all the tools and supplies needed? Collect all the tools while the machine is running so you don’t waste time once the machine has stopped.”

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Kevin Meyer is hosting Management Improvement Carnival #35 on the Evolving Excellence blog, some of the highlights include

• Hidden Problems from TPM Log.  "We must encourage people to speak up and identify problems. We must
  also develop avenues for people to do so in a comfortable manner."
• It’s the People, Not Just the Tools from Shmula.  “what most folks forget is that ‘Kaizen’ was truly build upon the philosophy that ‘Toyota builds people and then cars’ - that is, Kaizen came from the notion that the collective intelligence of your line workers is valuable and that people, if given the training and the
  chance, can truly do amazing things.”
• True Work, Apparent Work, and Busy Work from Gemba Panta Rei.  “True work is of course the small amount of work in any process which changes form, fit or function as the customer desires.”
• Innovation on the Edge from Edge Perspectives.  “Why bother about the edge when everyone knows that all the profit is in the core?”
• Why Do Employees Underperform? from the Lean Six Sigma Academy.  “Muri means to overburden equipment or operators.  In many cases, muri can be avoided by the implementation of some basic forms of standard work.”

Read past management carnivals.

Please submit your favorite management posts to the carnival. Read the previous management carnivals.

• Introduction to Factorial Designs by Jonathan Mendez - “I like the idea of velocity in marketing — test, learn, test, learn, test. Instead of one large test I prefer focusing attention on certain areas or elements to achieve deeper understanding.”
• MIT’s Message about Lean Enterprise Transformation by Mark Edmondson- “1. Market leaders are good at embracing enterprise change; 2. Enterprise change requires a holistic approach that engages all stakeholders. This includes employees, suppliers, customers, unions, and investors/owners”
• Two Types of Bottleneck by David J. Anderson - “I now teach that there are two types of bottleneck: capacity constrained resources CCRs; and non-instant availability resources”
• Oranges, Pebbles, and Sand by Ron Pereira - “In this video my daughters and I demonstrate how meeting an objective is just the beginning to improvement.”
• Why errorproof when you can double-check? - “If you are in the position to prevent the error in the first place, why wouldn’t you? And, I’d argue, if you can write a tool to detect the screw up - ie, it is possible to programmatically figure out that the template is wrong,”
• Systems and Improvement by John Dowd - “Thus did Deming, over sixty years ago, show a basic model about how to think about quality and improvement.”

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Shaun Sayers is hosting Management Improvement Carnival #33 on the Capable blog, some of the highlights include

• Lean and six sigma at Amazon (by Peter Abilla) a tiny peek inside the quality philosophy of this highly successful but intensely secretive corporate beast
• Thinking outside the wooden pallet (by Mark Wroblewski) a critical examination of the role traditional materials management methods on efficiency and work flow
• Lean six sigma for health care (by Sue Kozlowski) a short and timely guide to implementation of the methodology in the health care profession
• System design - make the right thing also the easiest thing (by Shaun Sayers) an examination of some key behavioural criteria for making system compliance much more likely

Read past management carnivals.

Please submit your favorite management posts to the carnival. Read the previous management carnivals.

• The Skipper & First Mate: A Pattern for Continual Progress by Jamie Dinkelacker - “An organization can only depend on individuals in critical chain processes when individuals are fungible — one can quickly take over for another with no interruption of the work flow. Moreover, it implies that there’s a pool of available developers, ready to step in, who themselves aren’t engaged in other priority activities. Software isn’t like that.”
• The evils of mass production by Kathleen Fasanella - “Really, I’d love to get feedback on what you think defines subassemblies and where you think batching is unavoidable. I don’t mean unavoidable in your particular situation, I mean over-all, assuming you had every resource at your disposal.”
• 10 Benefits of One Piece Flow by Ron Pereira - “we are better able to respond to last minutes changes from the customer. And everyone knows, no matter what industry you work in, customers love to change their mind.”
• Ask Why? - but How? by Mark Rosenthal - “Observe and gather information. Formulate possible hypotheses. For each reasonable possibility, determine what information would confirm or refute it… Observe, gather information, experiment. Get answers to those questions.”
• Improving Healthcare Delivery by Studying Toyota by Jon Miller - “As part of this they have taken hundreds of physicians and hospital administrators to Japan to learn kaizen on the shop floor. Their approach was radical surgery in the minds of some, but it has absolutely turned VMMC around in terms of profitability and speed of positive change.”
• If you can’t distort the data, just don’t look at it - “Just yesterday I ran into a baffling extension of distorting the data: if you have data which tells a bad story about your own organization, hide it!…I’m still seething that someone would turn a blind eye to a productivity problem for fear of how it might reflect on them.”

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Please submit your favorite management posts to the carnival. Read the previous management carnivals.

• Lean *is* About Quality, Folks by Mark Graban - “The two ideas are connected — improving flow (in itself) ends up improving quality and improving quality improves flow.”
• Statistical software is not six sigma by Rob Thompson - “With a good understanding of the process at hand, practitioners can solve many problems using statistical software. However, if there’s a lack of process knowledge, it’s hard to be sure of what’s going on in the process, or what the statistical analysis is revealing”
• Key Points for Managing Kaizen Idea Systems by Jon Miller - ” As a rule there should be 1) no suggestion box, 2) a simple suggestion form, and 3) team-based dialog to evaluate ideas.”
• Adjustment or Tampering? by John Dowd - “Deming called it tampering. It is the adjustment of of a stable process after each occurrence; treating every event as though it were special. It makes things worse.” (curious cat: tampering)
• The Importance of Heijunka by Mark Rosenthal - “Production leveling, however, is difficult, and the management has to have the fortitude to do it. Honestly, most don’t. They don’t like to deliberately set the necessary inventory and backlog buffers into place”
• Harmony and Toyota by Ron Pereira - “As we walked along the cat walk we were able to gain a birds eye view of the assembly operation. There was just so much to see… it was overwhelming.”
• A Good Layout is in the Details by Mike Wroblewski - “By focusing the majority of our effort on grasping the situation first, the action of moving was fairly uneventful. No firefighting, no frantic emergencies, no heroics and no customer disappointments.”

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Please submit your favorite management posts to the carnival. Read the previous management carnivals.

• How not to improve a process - “It is not enough to think you know what’s right for the process, if you don’t understand how the process works, then don’t play with it”
• A tour of a lean-inspired clinical laboratory by Ted Eytan - “In the design, which involved a labor-management partnership, the team elected to replace a million-dollar conveyer belt system with a $200 dollar cart to move specimens to the work area.”
• Should you hire specific experience, or the ability to learn and lead? by Kent Blumberg - “is the hiring process about what’s easy, or about making a great decision for the long term? I hope it’s about a great decision.”
• Toyota’s Value Innovation: The Art of Tension by Matthew May - “But the implied question for all of us to consider in light of the above is this: are resource constraints enabling or preventing innovation?”
• One Piece Flow versus Mass Production by Ron Pereira - webcast of the traditional “mass production” manufacturing technique square off against the lean “one piece flow” methodology
• Deming on leadership by Shaun Sayers - “We could therefore conclude that a system that is pock marked with such “work-arounds” is likely to be suffering from poor leadership. A tell tale symptom”
• Toyota’s Growth, Globalization, and Training by Mark Graban - “Toyota isn’t stuck in their own past, why should we be?”

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Another edition with links to interesting management improvement blog posts.

• Lean Office Redesign by Marcie MacRae - “We freed up space, improved visibility and flexibility. And the best part is the lack of a “control center” for visual boards is no longer an excuse for not having Hoshin Kanri review sessions.”
• The Bullwhip Effect by Peter Abilla - Tips “Reduce lead time of material, Reduce variability with effective use of the Heijunka and one-piece flow, Cooperation and good relationships with your supply chain partners.”
• Lean Trip to Toyota by Elizabeth Seyler - “Let’s just say that i had an “awe-inspiring” moment when we entered the facility. It was big. Very big. There were so many visuals that my sensory system went into overload”
• If You Don’t Slow Down and Think Now, You’ll Curse Yourself Later - “When people grab for quick, simple, and, above all, quick answers, they lay themselves wide open to the mistakes collectively called attribution error: this process of assuming links and patterns where none exist.”
• W. Edwards Deming on the Forces of Destruction by Michael Kaufman - “Extrinsic motivation slowly destroys self esteem, dignity, cooperation and a yearning for learning - all of which are innate and high early in life.”
• What is Kaizen? by Mike Wroblewski - “As soon as they read the clue, they just started running without trying to understand the meaning of the clue. In their excitement to act, they did not think first.”

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