Management Improvement Carnival #89

The Curious Cat Management blog carnival highlights management blog posts 3 times each month. Also visit the Curious Cat Management Library for online management improvement articles.

• Three Surprises About Change by Chip and Dan Health (this is actually the full text of the first chapter of their new book, Switch, they wrote the great Made to Stick previously) – “we don’t promise that we’re going to make change easy, but at least we can make it easier. Our goal is to teach you a framework, based on decades of scientific research, that is simple enough to remember and flexible enough to use in many different situations—family, work, community, and otherwise.”
• The Switch to Kanban – “By limiting the work in progress rather than limiting the work per time Kanban presented a viable alternative we felt better reflected how we actually work, while preserving the discipline necessary to deliver working software multiple times a week.”
• Not Going Away by Lee Fried – “changes in behavior throughout management, discipline to not stray far from the principles for too long and most importantly each and every employee needs to have meaningful and direct involvement in improving their own work.”
• Obvious and Underutilized by Kevin Meyer – “How often do we look for a complex solution to what is really a simple problem? Spend a few million on nightmarish ERP software instead of mapping and improving a process to remove complex flows and massive WIP, which will usually show how simple good manufacturing really is”
• How do you check that you are engaging people? by Bruce Baker – “I take suggestions that recommend fairly specific countermeasures as a sign of higher engagement. When small groups or individuals work really thorough ‘plan phases’ autonomously I take it a sign that they are ‘in the game.'”
• Designing a kanban board – not as simple as you might think by Adam Shone – “Needless to say, this all came out during our first sprint retrospective and our kanban boards have evolved since that first attempt. But it taught me something – you might think that you can draw out your workflow with your eyes closed, but how closely does your theory match reality?”
• Re-visiting Chapter 2 of Out of the Crisis by Mark Graban – “It’s hard to improve when you’re always fighting fires. Put out the fire, but then also improve the process to reduce the number of fires in the future.”
• Quieting the lizard brain by Seth Godin – “Want to know why so many companies can’t keep up with Apple? It’s because they compromise, have meetings, work to fit in, fear the critics and generally work to appease the lizard. Meetings are just one symptom of an organization run by the lizard brain.”
• The Fall of the Mighty Toyota by Jamie Flinchbaugh – “Toyota’s failure was a failure in execution to that system, principles, skills, etc. As I already mentioned, I don’t know the facts of where and how things went wrong. But that doesn’t invalidate lean in any way, and certainly doesn’t mean as some of implied that lean caused the problem.”
• Circle of Influence by John Hunter – “By taking the long view you can put yourself in good positions to have influence on decisions… Prove yourself to be valuable and you will gain influence. Help people solve their problems… Provide people useful management tools and help them apply them successfully.”

Related: Management Improvement Carnival #55 (Feb 2009) – Management Improvement Carnival #29 (Feb 2008) – Curious Cat Management Blog Directory