Submit suggestions for the management improvement carnival.
- Can you Buy a Silicon Valley? Maybe. by Paul Graham – “For the price of a football stadium, any town that was decent to live in could make itself one of the biggest startup hubs in the world. What’s more, it wouldn’t take very long. You could probably do it in five years.” [Excellent essay, I wrote about what makes Silicon Valley special on the Curious Cat Science and Engineering Blog.]
- Error Proofing Handwashing? by Mark Graban – “I made it out of Radio Shack and Home Depot parts,” said Frieswick, who wired the one-of-a-kind device together. “You’re not getting in this room without making a conscious effort to ignore this.”
- Counting hours doesn’t make sense by Daniel Tenner – “it soon becomes obvious that our actual output of things done is correlated far more to how we feel on the day than to how many hours we spend “working”. The real measure of work is not hours – it’s energy.”
- Beware of trade guilds maintaining the status quo by Seth Godin – “Why didn’t the RIAA help the record industry figure out how to transform into an industry that would embrace and leverage file sharing? You don’t have to like change to take advantage of it.”
- Genchi Genbutsu: Do You Really Understand It? by Ron Pereira – “Most seem to think it means to visit the gemba, or the place the work is done, when something needs addressed. And I suppose it does. But it’s much more than this.”
- Opportunity Awareness by Lee Fried – “So don’t try to solve world peace, pick the one thing you are going to work on today, make the improvement and then take the next. “
- Taiichi Ohno’s Three Lessons for the New Toyota President by Jon Miller – “Synchronize supply to demand! This means producing just in time – something that Toyota has gotten away from recently as they expand their global production capacity in an effort to capture greater market share”
- Reflections on NUMMI by John Hunter – The problem is that GM management fails to manage well, and has been failing to do so for decades. They have improved over the last few decades but not nearly fast or consistently enough.
Visit the Curious Cat Management Library for online management improvement articles.
