The Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog 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: Google+, Twitter, LinkedIn, instant management consulting, and more.
- For complex systems there is no root cause by John Allspaw – “We like to simplify complex problems so we can work on them in a reductionist fashion. We want there to be a single root cause for an accident or an outage, because if we can identify that, we’ve identified the bug that we need to fix.”
- Get Ready to Fall Off the Cliff by Ron Ashkenas – “Managers of successful firms tend to become complacent and even arrogant, assuming that past performance will continue and that the formulas that worked previously will work in the future.”
- Walter Isaacson’s ‘Steve Jobs’ by John Gruber – “Apple is an experience company. That they create both hardware and software is part of creating the entire product experience… [Jobs:] ‘That’s not what we think design is. It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.'”
- Use heijunka, don’t reduce takt time by Michel Baudin – “Keeping your work force intact and prepared for the next upturn is just as essential. So you stop using temps, cut all overtime, go on four-day weeks, or three-day weeks, and use the available time to solve nagging engineering problems,
experiment with new technology, etc.” - The failure of “Don’t bring me problems, bring me solutions!” by Jamie Flinchbaugh – “I believe one of the utmost hallmarks of a lean organization is that someone can talk very openly about the problems which they have no idea how to solve yet.” [I totally agree, see my previous post: Bring Me Problems, and Solutions if You Have Them]
- Estimating and Planning Are Necessary for Maximizing Delivered Value by Mike Cohn – “They can (and should be) lightweight. You should stop when further planning is not likely to lead to improved decisions worth the extra effort.”
- Why Use Lean if So Many Fail To Do So Effectively by John Hunter – “until someone comes up with the management system that both gets the results using Deming’s management ideas can, and is super easy for organizations to actually fully adopt (and have the great success that doing so provides) I know of nothing better than trying to do these things… There is also an advantage to this stuff being hard to do… you have a great advantage over all those organizations that ignored the ideas or made a bit of effort and then gave up. [if you apply these management improvement ideas]”
Ruby Beach, Olympic National Park, Washington, by John Hunter
