The Curious Cat Management Improvement Carnival has been published since 2006. We find great management blog posts and share them with you 3 times a month. We hope you find these post interesting and find some new blogs to start reading. Follow me online: Twitter, LinkedIn, more.
- U.S. Patent Overhaul Won’t Help Innovators by “What they found is that America’s patent system only provides positive incentives for innovation in two industries: pharmaceuticals and chemicals. The value that a patent confers on its owner is outweighed by the cost of obtaining, asserting, and defending that patent for almost all American companies. Anyone innovating outside of those two industries would be better off if there were no patent system at all.” [9 deadly diseases – adding outdated intellectual property practices and excessive executive pay to Dr. Deming’s 7 deadly diseases, John]
- An Explanation and Some Reflection by Reed Hastings (Netflix CEO – see video also) – “Companies rarely die from moving too fast, and they frequently die from moving too slowly. When Netflix is evolving rapidly, however, I need to be extra-communicative. This is the key thing I got wrong.” [Clayton Christensen: “Netflix are going to be held up as a gold standard of how to avoid being disrupted“].
- User stories applied by Luigi Agosti [from User stories applied for agile software development by Mike Cohn, a great book – John]- “A user story is composed of three aspects:
Card : written description of the story used for planning and as a reminder
Conversation : conversations about the story that serve to flesh out the details of the story
Confirmation : tests that convey and document details and that can be used to determine when a story is complete” - “Do You See What I See?” by Mark Hamel – “An example – three people walk the newly designed leader standard work. They stop at each audit point and, without conversing, do the audit…and then share.”
- How Succinctly Can I Explain Why Pie Charts Are Evil? by Tim Wilson – “That’s a fundamental challenge with pie charts — we don’t do a very good job of comparing the areas of these odd sorta-triangular-but-with-one-curved-side shapes. In the case of the bar chart, all you have to compare is lengths — much easier.”
- The Positive Trend of “Lean Design” of Space and Processes in Healthcare by Mark Graban – “Lean design is a very iterative process, one that engages front-line staff in creating space and processes that are amazingly patient centered and staff friendly.”
- How Whole Foods “Primes” You To Shop by Martin Lindstrom – “Flowers, as everyone knows, are among the freshest, most perishable objects on earth. Which is why fresh flowers are placed right up front–to “prime” us to think of freshness the moment we enter the store. Consider the opposite–what if we entered the store and were greeted with stacks of canned tuna and plastic flowers?”
- With New Technology, Where Should We Go? by Jon Miller – “Like any technology, Lean must be used to create opportunities for people, not destroy them. Respect for humanity means developing greater thinking skills, job skills and life skills through teamwork and problem solving.”
Netflix has long been a great example of a company with great management culture and customer focus. I must say I didn’t see much in the changes to change my opinion that they continue in that vein. It does seem many customers are upset though. My plan was to subscribe to Netflix streaming in Malaysia. Little did I know most of the world is not allowed to be Netflix customers. From where I sit that is much worse than the price increases and changes. It is very sad how many ways our broken intellectual property system harms society and how many billions of people are refused access to much that those in the USA and Europe expect.
