Management Improvement Carnival #25

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

• Some theoretical thinking by John Dowd – “Deming was fond of saying, ‘management is prediction‘ and, in this, I think he was exactly right. Management never takes action or makes decision to affect what happened yesterday, but rather to bring about what is hoped to be a desirable outcome tomorrow.”
• TPM Excellence: Visual Equipment Management by Mike Gardner – Visual aids must be clear to be useful, but they do not have to be fancy. You can see this gauge was effectively marked with a red marker–effective and cheap.
• A3–Its about the Thinking by Lee Fried – “the A3 is a tool and without the process and thinking behind it nothing really changes.”
• Lean Enterprise Rules of Three by Jon Miller “Like any good system of continuous improvement, Lean should be used to nurture people, profit and the planet (let’s expand our thinking off-planet after we confirm that our impact beyond it is significant). This is sometimes called the ‘triple bottom line.'”
• Why Sham Employee Participation Is Worse Than No Participation at All by Bob Sutton – “Hire the least expensive and least disruptive consultant you can find; if you aren’t going to listen to them anyway, you might as well waste as little money and time as possible.”
• Meeting Rules by David Maister – “1) Do not call meetings when some other form of information sharing is possible. 2) Since most people can read ten times faster than a presenter can speak, send material ahead. 3) Meetings need to have concrete goals” (previous curiouscat post: Most Meetings are Muda)
• Poppendieck: Should Lean be top-down or bottom-up? by Peter Abilla – “At its heart, Lean is a management philosophy based on deep respect for people and relentless elimination of waste from the delivery of value to customers to return sustainable prosperity for the organization.”
• No Standards No Kaizen by Ron Pereira – “Once you have the steps documented ask someone who does the same or similar job to review the steps to see if they agree with them. If they don’t, and many times they won’t, discuss it with them and see if you can mutually agree on the best way to do this task.”
• Safety is the foundation – Taiichi Ohno by Karen Wilhelm – “Quality, delivery, cost, safety and morale (QDCSM) are all important goals at Toyota. Taiichi Ohno said that safety comes before everything else.”
• Quaid Case Update: Whose Responsibility is Standardized Work? by Mark Graban – “Proper training and re-training should happen BEFORE problems occur. The employees directly involved in the Quaid incident are suspended. What about the managers and leaders?”
• Toyota Raises the Tide by Kevin Meyer – “At Toyota the employees first learn to use their brains, then their hands.”
• Deming Companies by John Hunter – “Toyota has created a management system that is based on Dr. Deming’s ideas and then they have evolved that over 60 years into something that is consistent with Deming’s management philosophy and has new ideas Deming did not mention.”