Monthly Archives: June 2008

Mississippi Plans Manufacturing Management Center

Posted on June 30, 2008 by John Hunter

Ole Miss plans manufacturing center Ole Miss plans to build a center to teach manufacturing management skills. Gov. Haley Barbour, Ole Miss officials and Toyota executives announced the $22 million Center for Manufacturing Excellence on Monday in Jackson. Construction of the 47,000- square-foot center could start this fall. “We in Mississippi continue to have a larger percentage of our population employed in manufacturing than the country as a whole,” Barbour said. “One way to help our businesses innovate and stay … Continue reading →

Posted in Career, Management, Manufacturing, Public Sector | Tagged ,

Printer Product Development Using Design of Experiments

Posted on June 29, 2008 by John Hunter

MEMS development in less than half the time by Christopher N. Delametter, Eastman Kodak Company The traditional approach to optimizing a product or process using computer simulation is to evaluate the effects of one design parameter at a time. The problem with this approach is that interactions between design factors and second-order effects are likely to result in a locally optimized design that will provide far less performance than the global optimum. Kodak researchers use DOE to develop tests that … Continue reading →

Posted in Design of Experiments, Investing, Systems thinking | Tagged

Google Knows it is a 2.0 World

Posted on June 27, 2008 by John Hunter

You can accomplish a great deal by just talking to people. Google Public Relations: I did not really expect it, but the next day I got a call from Jeffrey Korn at Google California. He explained that he was the one responsible for building the Google Bookmarks and Google Web History tools. The problem with my extension was something I hadn’t imagined: a scaling problem. Hehe, Google had scaling problems :-). The gBrain extension creates a lot of bookmarks. Several … Continue reading →

Posted in Google, Innovation, Management | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Management Improvement Jobs

Posted on June 25, 2008 by John Hunter

Curious Cat Management Improvement Career Connections provides a source of jobs targeted to those interested in this blog. Take a look at the jobs listed now including: Lean Manager at Erlanger in Kentucky; Senior Lean Six Sigma Specialist at Cooper Crouse-Hinds in New York and CEO of Jefferson State Forest Products in California. At the recent Deming Seminar in Colorado Springs I met the CEO of upstream21, which owns Jefferson State Forest Products: Bryan Redd. He has a great understanding … Continue reading →

Posted in Career, Deming, Lean thinking, Management | Tagged ,

Management Blog Posts From June 2005

Posted on June 24, 2008 by John Hunter

Here are the blog posts from 3 years ago this month on the Curious Cat Management Improvement blog: From Mechanistic to Social Systemic Thinking – Targets Distorting the System – Dilbert and Deming. The Dilbert site has learned to take advantage of the web and allow embedding of the strips on blogs and web pages. Good for them, but you really would have thought they would have lead this trend not delayed so long. [Was displaying Dilbert strip from 21 … Continue reading →

Posted in Fun, Management | Tagged , , ,

The Contradictions That Drive Toyota’s Success

Posted on June 23, 2008 by John Hunter

An interesting article in this month’s Harvard Business Review looks at the seeming contradictions at Toyota – The Contradictions That Drive Toyota’s Success by Hirotaka Takeuchi, Emi Osono, and Norihiko Shimizu Many of Toyota’s goals are purposely vague, allowing employees to channel their energies in different directions and forcing specialists from different functions to collaborate across the rigid silos in which they usually work. For example, Watanabe has said that his goal is to build a car that makes the … Continue reading →

Posted in Management, Process improvement, Systems thinking, Toyota Production System (TPS) | Tagged , ,

Zipcar Innovation

Posted on June 21, 2008 by John Hunter

Zipcar is an intriguing idea where you rent cars by the hour. The whole process is a significant change from the previous rental model (gas, parking and insurance included). Zipcar makes deals with local governments to secure zipcar parking near public transportation. They also have deals with universities, apartment buildings and businesses all of which provides a new level of easy customer access with cars available in many locations. The internet is used to schedule and provide up to date … Continue reading →

Posted in Creativity, Customer focus, Deming, Innovation, Lean thinking, Management, Systems thinking | 4 Comments

Hustle and Flow

Posted on June 17, 2008 by John Hunter

There are actually examples of good management by airlines: CEO Flight Attendant – Engineering the Boarding of Airplanes. Here is another one: Hustle & Flow Moving customers from frustration to relief–in a fraction of the time–has been at the root of Alaska Airlines’ Airport of the Future project. The carrier has spent more than a decade designing a better way to get customers through airport check-in, debuting the first iteration in its Anchorage terminal in 2004. Last October, the $3.3 … Continue reading →

Posted in Lean thinking, Management, Process improvement, Systems thinking | Tagged

Management Improvement Carnival #37

Posted on June 16, 2008 by John Hunter

Ron Pereira is hosting Management Improvement Carnival #37 on the LSS Academy blog, some of the highlights include: Are we Cowboys or Not? by Mark Graban – “Anyway, I’m not trying to start a Liker v Bodek battle, but it’s an interesting contrast in perspectives.” Numb3rs by Sue Kozlowski – “Now, part of the reason for this hyperbole is that exciting headlines get more people to buy the paper, and so you may think that the exaggeration is just a … Continue reading →

Posted in Carnival, Management

Photos of Forest Glen Preserve in Illinois

Posted on June 14, 2008 by John Hunter

Photos from my hike in Forest Glen Preserve, Illinois 2 years ago. Other photos: Kentucky Travelogue – Metropolitan Museum of Art – North Cascades National Park

Posted in curiouscat.com, Travel photos | Tagged

Respect for Employees at Southwest Airlines

Posted on June 12, 2008 by John Hunter

“You have to treat your employees like customers” “We’ve never had layoffs,” he told me the day before the annual meeting, sitting on the couch of the single messiest executive office I’ve ever seen. “We could have made more money if we furloughed people. But we don’t do that. And we honor them constantly. Our people know that if they are sick, we will take care of them. If there are occasions or grief or joy, we will be there … Continue reading →

Posted in Customer focus, Deming, Management, Psychology, Respect, Systems thinking

Continual Improvement

Posted on June 10, 2008 by John Hunter

Dr. Deming used the term continual improvement (rather than continuous improvement) later in his life because that would include continuous and dis-continuous improvement (innovation, etc.). I use continual improvement for that reason also. I think the improvement process must be never ending must focus daily on how any process can be improved must focus on adopting improvement systemically (not just locally, by one person or team) must focus on discontinuous improvement which could include high energy kaizen events and dramatic … Continue reading →

Posted in Deming, Innovation, Management, Process improvement, quote | Tagged , , , | 19 Comments

Fairness Matters

Posted on June 9, 2008 by John Hunter

Sense of Fairness Affects Outlook, Decisions Burnout has been long associated with being overworked and underpaid, but psychologists Christina Maslach and Michael Leiter found that these were not the crucial factors. The single biggest difference between employees who suffered burnout and those who did not was the whether they thought that they were being treated unfairly or fairly. … Their research on fairness dovetails with work by other researchers showing that humans care a great deal about how they are … Continue reading →

Posted in Management Articles, Psychology, Respect, Science | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Internships Increasing

Posted on June 8, 2008 by John Hunter

Hard to find a job, but not an internship The bullish market for interns is good news for those in college, who find that internships are increasingly required for landing that first job. The summer posts allow students to bolster their resumes, learn more about their field of choice and meet executives who could hire them for full-time positions one day. And they often pay a good wage: on average, $16.33 an hour, or $7,850 over 12 weeks, Luckenbaugh said. … Continue reading →

Posted in Career, Management | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

Department of Defense Lean Six Sigma

Posted on June 5, 2008 by John Hunter

Gordon England, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, signed a directive establishing policy and assigning responsibilities to institutionalize the effort throughout DoD. See a webcast of his speech [the broken link was removed] on lean six sigma to a DoD conference on continuous process improvement. Leading Business Transformation the “Lean” Way [the broken link was removed] Since it began employing LSS, the Department of the Navy (DON) has completed 1,700 Black Belt/Green Belt projects and over 2,000 Kaizen events (i.e., action-oriented … Continue reading →

Posted in Lean thinking, Management, Public Sector, Six sigma | Tagged , , , ,

Businesses Tell the IRS They Are Not American but Executives Stay in USA

Posted on June 4, 2008 by John Hunter

I have previously written about the ethically challenged companies that claim they are not American to avoid paying the taxes that they owe. For some reason the executives, often seem to stay in the USA though? It is sad that such behavior is tolerated. 10 Big Businesses That Have Moved Their Headquarters Abroad to Pay Less U.S. Taxes [the broken link was removed] Halliburton: Houston-based Halliburton, which offers a broad array of oil-field technologies and services to upstream oil and … Continue reading →

Posted in Economics | Tagged , , , , | 3 Comments