Petronas Towers, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia by John Hunter. View from my hotel room.
The Curious Cat management blog carnival is published 3 times a month with select recent management blog posts. I also collect management improvement articles through Curious Cat Management Articles, you can subscribe via RSS to new article additions. Photo is the view I see as I post this issue of the carnival.
- The importance of understanding variation or how to avoid treating all contractors as thieves by Benjamin Mitchell – “The fix for common cause variation (and most variation is common cause) is to go and study the situation, experiment and try and look for patterns or trends in the data before making a change to the system.”
- Deming’s 14 Points by David Joyce – “The 14 points are not a menu you can pick and choose from. Deming intended you use all 14. They are one philosophy.”
- Misconceptions about Self-Organizing Teams by Esther Derby – “Like all teams, they need a compelling goal, skills, information, and enough time to form and perform. And they still need managers to create a supportive context, set appropriate boundaries and constraints and connect the team to the organization.”
- New York City Halts Teacher Bonus Program: Another Blow to Evidence-Resistant Ideology by Bob Sutton – “The decision was made in light of a study that found the bonuses had no positive effect on either student performance or teachers’ attitudes toward their jobs.”
- Agile Prioritisation by Mike Griffiths – “There is no single best way to always prioritise; instead, try to diagnose issues arising in the prioritisation process, be it “lack of involvement” or “too many priority 1’s”, and then try approaches such as Monopoly money, MoSCoW or a pure list to assist if the problems cannot be resolved via dialogue. The goal is to understand where features lie in relation to others as opposed to assigning a category label.”
- Making It Look Easy by Wally Bock – “Art thanked people a lot and praised them a lot and encouraged them to do more and do better. A colleague once challenged him on that, saying that too much praise would make his people soft. But Art thought that if you encouraged people they tried harder and grew more, but if you constantly told people what not to do, they would stop trying anything.”
- Second Try at My Personal Kanban by Matt Wrye – “As I look for ways to improve, I am inspired by other lean thinkers and bloggers. I see what they are trying and look to how that might work for me. I try and experiment with things in order to make my job easier and to feel more in control and organized.”
- 7 Amish Habits to Make You Lean and Wealthy by Jon Miller – “Permit experimentation. While each Amish community adheres to their rules or “Ordnung”, there is local variation between communities… They conduct their own personal experiments and conclude that their parents’ hypotheses were correct. The Amish way is not an imposed dogma, neither is lean.”
