Please submit your favorite management posts to the carnival.
- Outrageously Good Customer Service by Steven Levitt – “I would trade it all for a few more instances in which the airline does something out of the ordinary to get me home faster to see my wife and kids.”
- Reflections on the Role of Technology in the Lean Workplace by Richard Tucker – “Observe the actual people, doing actual work, in the actual workplace. Second, Kaizen the process before implementing an IT solution.”
- Heijunka in the Front Office by Ron Pereira – “One of the easiest ways to accomplish this is by using a heijunka wheel as shown in the picture above. In the wheel we can place the work, normally in folders, to be done in the slots in a leveled and balanced manner.”
- You’re Not Developing Your People by Norman Bodek – “Your problem is that you are not focusing on developing people. You are very happy to have people continue to do those “boring,” repetitive jobs. Develop people to learn and build new skills every day. Challenge people to find and eliminate waste every single day. Let people learn from their own creative ideas.”
- Complexity Creep by Peter Abilla – “[Institutionalize] simplicity. Amazon has become very, very good at this. In their product development approach, internally dubbed as ‘working backwards’, a focus on the customer weaves simplicity throughout the product development process.”
- Excessive CEO Pay Disrespects Employees by Mark Graban – “The leaders aren’t showing respect for their employees. That’s where the cycle starts. No wonder so many employees are cynical and start looking out for themselves instead of doing what’s right for the company.”
- The Top 10 Suggestion System Stumbles and How to Avoid Them by Jon Miller – “8. Backlog of suggestions needing approval or implementation – Ironically, asking for quantity over quality will force the identification of smaller problem that are easier to solve.”
- Ignore a Customer’s Lifetime Value at Your Own Risk by Ben Yoskovitz – “Too many businesses are shortsighted in their approach. Close a deal, take someone’s money and get ‘em out the door. That’s their way of doing business. And it’s just not good enough.”
- GM Matches Toyota Productivity… So What? by Kevin Meyer – “when you continue to make cars with quality and designs that customers believe to be inferior to your competition, productivity can actually hurt you. Especially when traditional accountants insist on running factories full-bore to absorb overhead.”
- Bad Ad Update by Chris Anderson – “We basically trust the agencies to do the right thing, which is obviously a policy hole that you can drive a bus through. That bus is what blocked our site for thousands of readers yesterday. We’re revising our policies to prevent this in the future”
- Learning From Our Mistakes by Lee Fried – “It was clear that we had a flawed management system and in the spirit of PDCA it was time to adjust. We had defined escalation paths within teams, but we had not adequately defined them across teams.”
- Deming Plaza – Powell Wyoming by Guy Wallace – “Of particular note from those days…1981 – was our initial astonishment when we at MTEC heard that Deming refused to visit with us at Motorola, even being paid, unless the CEO would also be attendance. Later that stance made a great deal of sense. But not right then.”
- Bad Management Results in Layoffs by John Hunter – “Layoffs are a failure of management. If the company has not been executing a long term strategy to respect people and manage the system to continually improve, manage for the long term, working with suppliers… it might be they have created an impossibly failed organization that cannot succeed in its current form. And so yes it might be possible that layoffs are required.”
