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.
- How to Identify Your Team or Organization’s Purpose by Jesse Lyn Stoner – “What is the end-result that you offer? Look at your purpose from the viewpoint of the result, not the products or services you offer.”
- What we can learn from Russell L. Ackoff by Aleksis Tulonen – “If you want to (dis)solve the problem you need to understand how (dis)solving the problem will affect the system and what the problem really is. Gathering the mental constructs of several people with different mindsets will gain you more understanding of what you are dealing with.”
- Why smart managers do stupid things by John Stepper – “What You See Is All There Is. Over and over, he demonstrates how people systematically disregard basic probability and other facts in order to (quickly and easily) make up a story that fits with the things they see.”
- Downtime Antipatterns for SaaS owners, ZipCar edition – “Use an automated system to point DNS entries to a ‘sorry, we’re down, please see http://status.zipcar.com’ page running on a commodity VPS in a completely different datacenter. Provide useful information to the customer RIGHT AWAY, and don’t leave them wondering why the page isn’t loading.”
- Espoused Vs. In-Use by Anthony DaSilva – “From over 10,000 empirical cases collected over decades of study, Mr. Argyris has discovered that most people (at all levels in an org) espouse Model II guidance while their daily theory in-use is driven by Model I.”
- MD Anderson Presentation: W. Edwards Deming: The Man and the Message by Mark Graban – “He could be hard on executives, but tended to be more patient with front-line workers. Deming told Doris, ‘They don’t pay me to sugar coat the truth’ (to the execs). But, one day was hard on a production worker for not understanding variation. That evening, Deming agonized over that and realized he shouldn’t have been hard on her for not understanding… he wrote multiple drafts of an apology letter for before sending it to the woman.”
- Overfocus on tech skills could exclude the best candidates for jobs by Mike Loukides – “A number of articles recently have suggested that the problem with jobs isn’t the workforce, it’s the employers: companies that are only willing to hire people who will drop in perfectly to the position that’s open.”
- Beginning to understand the power of coaching – seeing the connection to respect for people by Connor Shea – “Coaching is less focused on specific content then it is on the person, and the relationship’s ability to empower the coachee to find capabilities and a self sufficiency they didn’t fully believe in or know they have.”
- Value Stream Mapping for Fun and Profit by Evan Durant – “During implementation the team was considering increasing batch size in order to smooth out some issues with the new kanban system. Rather than speculate as to the impact of such a change (as might have been the case in the past) the team returned to the future state map, changed the batch size, and recomputed the timeline.”
White House Rose Garden, Washington DC. By John Hunter. See more photos from Washington DC.
