The Curious Cat management blog carnival is published 3 times a month with hand picked recent management blog posts. I also collect management improvement articles for the Curious Cat Management Articles site; an RSS feed of new article additions is available.
- Standardized Confusion by Art Smalley – “Changing of a work standard was done very infrequently and normally an engineering activity for the types of items I just described. Maybe we wanted to improve the life of a tool, or alter how the part was clamped in response to a problem on the shop floor, etc. Problems or kaizen sometimes drove us to reconsider work standards but by and large these did not and should not change very often if we planned and launched the process correctly.”
- Deming’s Speech at Mount Hakone, Japan (1950) – “The first step, therefore, belongs with management. First, your company technicians and your factories must know that you have a fervor for advancing product quality and uniformity and a sense of responsibility for product quality.
Nothing will come of this if you only speak about it. Action is important…
At first do it on a small scale, and once you think that has value, then expand.” - How we reduced our cancellation rate by 87.5% by Kareem Mayan – “Since implementing changes 1-3 two months ago, we’ve seen our cancellation rate drop from 40% to 5% – an 87.5% decrease. We’re going to run another cohort analysis in a couple months to isolate the impact of each change as it’s still too early to know the long-term impact of these changes”
- Design of Experiments: “Fractionating” and “Folding” a DOE by Bruno Scibilia – “In science and in business, we need to perform experiments to identify the factors that have a significant effect. The objective of DOE is to reduce experimental costs—the number of tests—as much as possible while studying as many factors as possible to identify the important ones.”
- PDCA: Kaizen Tool Or Mental Model by Gregg Stocker – “Whether an action results in the desired improvement or not, proper testing can provide valuable information for future activities, as well as increasing the knowledge of team members. As with much of a lean deployment, the benefit lies in transforming thought rather than implementing tools. Thinking of the PDCA cycle as a management model rather than a tool is critical to a successful and sustained lean effort.”
- Notes from Meeting Masaaki Imai by Mark Graban – “Imai noted… you need to start with the top three most important things: Top management involvement, Top management involvement, and Top management involvement. Too many companies ‘skip all three’ he noted, which drew laughs from the crowd.”
- Great ideas are often found in quiet places by David Kasprzak – ” – “Insightful introverts, however, have a remarkable characteristic that many extroverts don’t always show – they quietly do what they believe is the right thing to do, without prompting, and without an expectation of reward. These positive deviants often demonstrate ideal behaviors, but don’t seek attention and, therefore, their great ideas go unnoticed and their efforts go unrecognized.”
- Howard Schultz’s Call to Action on American Manufacturing by Kevin Meyer – “And thus a few more jobs were saved, and a small amount of manufacturing competency retained – in a low technology and high labor content industry no less. If it makes sense for Starbucks and American Mug, imagine how it could be for a higher technology area.”
- Introductory Videos on Using Design of Experiments to Improve Results by John Hunter – The videos provide a nice overview of many important aspects of design of experiments including factorial designed experiments, fractional factorial design, blocking and response surface design.
Green Beetle at the Clifton Gorge State Nature Preserve in Ohio, by John Hunter.
Related: articles on design of experiments –
