Management Improvement Carnival #127

Photo of Cliff Palace at Mesa Verde by John Hunter.

The Curious Cat Management blog carnival highlights recent management blog posts 3 times each month. The posts generally focus on the areas I have focused on in the Curious Cat Management Guide since 1996 (Deming, agile software development, systems thinking, lean manufacturing, customer focus…).

• Jim Womack, lean blog podcast #116 – Great, as you would expect. Includes a great explanation of the problems that have made adopting lean ideas in medicine, which somewhat counter-intuitively includes the reluctance to use the scientific method/pdsa to examine results.
• What Larry Page really needs to do to return Google to its startup roots – “If your company has to have ‘No meetings Thursday’ then you’re doing it wrong. How about ‘No meetings except for Thursday’… Having to launch a simple service in multiple datacenters around the world, and having to deal with near-weekly datacenter maintenance shutdowns is unacceptable for an agile startup. Startups need to focus on product, not process and infrastructure.”
• Don’t forget what it’s like to be 10 by Richard G Russell – Your job isn’t telling them what to do. 80% of your job is understanding what your team does, and what they need to accomplish their job; then helping them do it.
• Relationship between Process and Innovation by Jeffrey Phillips – “Let’s distinguish between effective processes that accelerate innovation and those failed processes that either weren’t meant to accelerate innovation or weren’t the right processes for innovative ideas to begin with.” [Curious cat 2007 post: Process Improvement and Innovation
• Surfacing Problems Daily by Jamie Flinchbaugh – “When it comes to building a problem-solving culture, one of the most important traits is being able to surface problems quickly and face them honestly.”
• How to start a movement in your company – by David Choe – “So, here I am to tell the tale and advocate for good leadership, clear vision, constancy of purpose, and true empowerment.”
• Cultivating Empowered Employees by Tim McMahon – “Whenever possible, provide opportunities for employees to work in self-managed or self-directed work teams. Allow these teams freedom to determine the best course of action for meeting agreed-upon goals and objectives.”
• Reactions to Google and Boss Building by Wally Bock – He collects reactions to Google’s look at what makes a good boss.
• Avoid the Improvement Hype Cycle by Brad Power – “They then asked two key questions: ‘What were the patterns of previous continuous improvement attempts?’ And ‘What can we do now to ensure we don’t repeat the mistakes of the past?'”
• Setting Stretch Goals by Lee Fried – “Over the last couple of years we have learned a lot about how to drive behavior and improvement by setting good measures. We have moved away from ROI’s, budget based measures and index measures which is all good news.”
• Learn by Seeking Knowledge, Not Just from Mistakes by John Hunter – “Experiment and be open to learn from what could be better and improve (PDSA is a great way to try things and evaluate how they work). And the idea is not to be so conservative that every turn of the PDSA cycle has no failures. In order to get significant successes it is likely you will try things that don’t always work.”

More photos from my visit to Mesa Verde National Park.