Management Improvement Blog Carnival #169

Bayon temple, Siem Reap, Cambodia by John Hunter

The Curious Cat management blog carnival is published 3 times a month with some recent management blog posts. The posts generally focus on the areas I have focused on in the Curious Cat Management Guide since 1996.

• How Kanban visualisations and conversations enable process improvement by Benjamin Mitchell – “Reviewing the board at the daily stand up meeting provided visual feedback that lead to productive conversations about what might be stopping us and how we could improve. After we implemented new behaviours the board highlighted whether we improved and allowed us to continue to monitor our behaviour.”
• Why Cheap Customers Cost More by Sacha Greif – “So it’s not that cheap people require more support. It’s that people who require more support are more likely to make their decision based on price alone.”
• Would you like to improve your organization’s relationship with your physicians? “It’s about all those things that motivate people that don’t have anything to do with money – the intrinsic motivators. Everybody wants to feel like they’re part of something that matters, something bigger than themselves. And with our mission of transforming health care and putting patients at the top – that’s huge.”
• Perseverance, intelligence and flexibility – 3 things that will never get you past HR by David Kasprzak – “What is needed, instead of ‘Managers’ – is a caste of teachers and mentors who aggressively look for raw material they can shape and inspire into becoming the workers and leaders that companies need.”
• The Myth of Potential: 5 Ways to Develop Talent by Joel Garfinkle – “With the frenetic pace of business, it’s easy to get lost in a sea of deadlines and shifting priorities. The best leaders encourage employees to spend time absorbed in a single project or area of focus—especially when it’s a stretch assignment that will challenge their abilities.”
• Panera’s Experiment in Human Nature: Let Customers Decide What to Pay by Ron Shaich – “Panera Cares started out as an experiment. The year we spent planning the cafe was really a matter of shaping a hypothesis: Can we attack the nation’s food-insecurity problem by creating pay-what-you-can cafes, which communities will then support?”
• We all individually had standards we followed as well as the team collectively by Tracey Richardson – “I think from my 10 years at Toyota (TMMK) standards were the basis for everything we did, including 5S. It really was the key to our success and the infrastructure for the culture.”
• 3 Enduring Ways to Approach Innovation by Matt May – “A great innovation fits–fits the innovator, fits the times, and fits within a larger system. A great innovation shapes the attitudes and behaviors of people. A great innovation, big or small, changes how people think and work.”