Management Improvement Carnival #131

Photo by John Hunter at Antelope Island State Park, Utah

The management improvement blog carnival is published 3 times a month (though not this month – May 10th was missed) with select recent management blog posts. Curious Cat also collects articles on improving management practices, you can subscribe via RSS to new article additions.
See more photos from my trip to Utah, including Antelope Island State Park in the Great Salt Lake.

• Drive out Fear by Wally Bock – “Fear corrodes morale and team spirit. Fight or flight rules the day, with team members hiding from the rampaging saber-toothed tiger of a boss, throwing blame at each other and hoping, to borrow from Winston Churchill, that the crocodile will eat them last.”
• 8 Ways to Deal with Employee Personal Problems by Harwell Thrasher – “Every employee is an individual with their own personal strengths and issues. You can’t expect to take advantage of an employee’s strengths without occasionally running up against some of the issues.”
• Three Requirements for Managing by Fact by Jon Miller – “1) decision on the criteria of relevance, 2) testing of hypothesis and conversion of opinion into tested fact, and 3) arriving at consensus through clash and conflict of divergent opinions.”
• Rapid PDCA with 3P by Mark Rosenthal – “The idea is to be able to quickly and cheaply try out, and experience, a process (or product) so that problems can be surfaced, opportunities for improvement can be seen, and the PDCA cycle can be turned far more rapidly than would otherwise be possible.” [One important key to excellent results using PDSA is rapid, quick cycles through the PDSA cycle (many organizations turn the PDSA cycle much too slowly) – John]
• “Measuring” Kaizen Event Team Effectiveness by Mark Hamel – “Kaizen events are excellent and intense laboratories for individual, team and organizational growth. Growth opportunities extend to the technical, teaming, leadership and change management areas and serve as a training ground for daily kaizen.”
• Forget passion, focus on process – “I’m not particularly passionate about payments, but I am passionate about trying to build a good company.” Johnson gets satisfaction from making customers happy, creating a workplace that employees enjoy, and improving “an unscrupulous and broken industry.”
• An Interview with Donald J. Wheeler – “All profound ideas are timeless. While the details may change, the underlying principles remain the same.”
• Team members have clearly defined and interconnected roles, which in turn, depends on shared purpose by Pascal Dennis – “In the absence of [shared purpose], our discourse inevitably devolves into random opinions, factoids and, often, recrimination.”
• Lean at Home: My Visual Schedule by Tim McMahon – “In my experience true Lean practitioners don’t separate home and work. They can’t shut it off. They are trained to find waste and put countermeasures in place to improve the situation.”
• Respect People by Creating a Climate for Joy in Work by John Hunter – “Beyond eliminating bad practices though we need to provide a climate where people can flourish. This requires providing meaningful work…”