Management Improvement Carnival #86

The collection of posts from 10 blogs that made up the 2009 annual management blog are counted as Management Improvement Carnival #85, making this post #86.

• Are Slogans Always Bad or Can They Inspire? by Mark Graban – “Why are slogans bad? Dr. Deming writes, in part, ‘They are directed at the wrong people. They arise from management’s supposition that the production workers could, by putting their backs into the job, accomplish zero defects, improve quality, improve productivity, and all else that is desirable.””
• Fail, Learn, Lead by Jamie Flinchbaugh – “we don’t want to encourage people to make mistakes, but what do we want? We want people to surface mistakes or errors as they occur. We want them to own them and fix them. And we do want them to learn from them when they do occur”
• Five Change Management Errors that Make You Wish You’d Read this Article Sooner by Jon Miller – “it’s best to spend most of the time debating the guiding principles and values of lean in order to gain deep alignment, and then let the tools and specific solutions follow from that.”
• Joy, hope, and lean by Karen Wilhelm – “I think it’s joy and hope that propel continuous improvement. We’re just humans, with primitive brains that run on emotions more often than on facts and figures.”
• Motiv’s Scott Wilbur Teaches Brunswick a Lesson by Kevin Meyer – “Brunswick moved a bowling ball factory from Michigan to Mexico to chase cheap labor… and paid for it in quality. Meanwhile Scott Wilbur decided to stay behind, started Motiv, and became profitable making bowling balls in Michigan.”
• Sustainability: Ten Factors for Making Culture Change Stick by Tim McMahon – “Many small wins, rather than the occasional big win – Small wins keep up the enthusiasm, and certainly add up. Management needs to continually recognize small wins…”
• Stacking the Box, Throwing Downfield, and PDCA by Dan Markovitz – “a tremendous example of making a plan (run, don’t throw), doing the plan (running on 10 of first 13 plays), checking the results of the plan (0 points, 11 net yards), and then acting upon those results and adapting (throw downfield and more often).”
• Management 3.0: The Era of Complexity by Jurgen Appelo – “The concept of social complex systems makes us realize that we are all participants in self-organizing systems. All of us have to lead and rule in some ways.”
• Undercover Boss – Will They Really Change? by John Hunter – Going to the Gemba is great. But unless the management systems are in place to improve it is more like a site-seeing trip than a management tool.

Related: 2009 Annual Management Blog Review Part 3 of 3 – Curious Cat management articles – past management carnival posts