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, instant management consulting, and more.
By John Hunter, see more of my trip to Rocky Mountain National Park.
- Celebrate Learning, Not Success or Failure by Jurgen Appelo – “Failure and success are orthogonal to learning. What you learn from are the experiments and tests that you run.”
- How to do Hansei by Jon Miller – “There is a fundamental cultural difference between cultures, regions and within organization when it comes to facing up to faults and failures, accepting responsibility, and learning. The capacity to reflect may be what separate homo sapiens from animals, successful organizations from those less so.”
- Toyota Way Principle #3: “Pull” Systems by Chad Walters – “The purpose of the pull system (also called “kanban” system) is to have a measured queue of materials (raw materials, work-in-process, components, whatever) ready to be ‘pulled’ by the next process step. After the materials are ‘pulled’ a signal is sent to the preceding process step to replace what was taken.”
- Blaming Deming, Lean, and Six Sigma and the Importance of “Why?” by Kevin Meyer – However both lean and six sigma are phenomenally powerful – if used properly. And at the core of using them properly is to first ask “why?” What is the problem or opportunity, why is it important, what is the desired future state, and what is the most appropriate tool to leverage?… Not asking that simple question is the difference between companies that successfully leverage Deming’s methods, lean, and six sigma…
- Not All Data Are Valid by Gregory Gull – “It is not that using data is wrong it is using data uncritically that is wrong… Just as we know that the map is not the territory, we must also be mindful of the fact that the numbers are not ‘the thing’ but rather they are abstractions of the constructs of concrete experience we are seeking to understand.” [I wrote about this idea before, Dangers of Forgetting the Proxy Nature of Data, John]
- Lean Effort Pays Big in a Colorado Springs Hospital by Mark Graban – “Instead of assuming we know the problem, going to the Gemba (where the work is actually done) to observe the process and talk to customers (internal customers or patients) can be very powerful and eye opening.”
- Richard Feynman Explains the PDSA Cycle by John Hunter – “1) Plan, hypothesis. You make a guess about a theory (in using the PDSA cycle this step is often missed, while in the scientific method this is of the highest priority). You make a prediction based on that theory. 2) Do the experiment 3) Study the results…”
