Management Improvement Carnival #136

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, leadership, agile software development, lean manufacturing, continual improvement…).

• The Purpose of a Business is not Customer Value by Jurgen Appelo – “Every business is a complex adaptive system of stakeholders working together in order to create value for everyone involved… Unfortunately, again and again, management fads and hypes try to reduce this systemic view on organizations into a simplistic view, with dumb suggestions such as “maximize shareholder value” or ‘delight your customer’.” [Curious Cat on the purpose of organizations – John]
• Line of Sight, Employee Engagement, and Daily Kaizen [the broken link has been removed] by Mark Hamel – “Perhaps the toughest transformational challenge is flipping the organizational pyramid “upside down” so that the leaders become enablers, not bottlenecks.”
• Should You Let People Go, or Keep People and Reduce Salaries? by Harwell Thrasher – “When faced with the choice between layoffs and reducing salaries across the board, most businesses and governments follow the logic I’ve outlined above, and they go with layoffs. It’s the easy choice, but as I’ve noted in my list of three exceptions, it’s not always the best choice.”
• Thoughts on Exceptional Leaders [the broken link has been removed] by Wally Bock – “Exceptional leaders constantly work at getting better.”
• Bounded Rationality by Mark Needham – “When the people who recently moved into a management position are challenged on this they will often point out that ‘you can’t see the bigger picture’ which is true but still doesn’t account for the fact that they probably aren’t seeing it either!”
• Dispel the myth of “lean will not work here by Jeff Liker – “So every organization is indeed unique and “different.” The thinking process of lean which focuses on problem solving to move toward a clear vision through a series of targets is generic. But the real variability that ultimately matters, and what makes change so difficult, is the people at all levels, but particularly starting with the senior leaders.”
• At TEDxBoston, Novel Approaches to Disruptive Innovation [the broken link has been removed] by Evan Schwartz – “TEDxBoston delivered on its promise of serving up ‘revolutionary ideas.’ All of these approaches to innovation—empathetic design, open source discovery and radical simplicity—deserve to be key tools for developing disruptive products and services that transform markets by improving life and serving new consumers.”
• The Importance of Respect for People by Matt Wrye – “By respecting the team’s talents and knowledge and letting them use it to define the process the results came.”