Management Improvement Blog Carnival #178

The Curious Cat management blog carnival is published twice a month: with hand picked recent management blog posts. I also collect management improvement articles for the Curious Cat Management Articles site.

• Disruptive Management by Bill Waddell – “The professional management experts break the fundamental rule of lean – they miss Dr Deming’s essential point. Failure is ascribed to personal failing, rather than flawed processes.”
• Amazon’s Play by John Gruber – “What he’s [Bezos] done that is Jobs-like is doggedly pursue, year after year, iteration after iteration, a vision unlike that of any other company — all in the name of making customers happy.”

Stupas at Borobudur Buddhist temple in Java, Indonesia. Photo by John Hunter. See a video and more photos of the Borobudur temple.

• The absurdity of the 40 hour workweek by Dan Markovitz – “Even if you’re not a plumber or a lawyer, there’s a tendency to focus on the amount of time you spend on a project and what the output is.”
• Metrics in Lean – Deming versus Drucker by Michel Baudin – Deming “thought MBO was a bad idea and he would not pussyfoot. 15 years later, Drucker himself came around to the same point of view and recognized that MBO had failed.” [also many comments on the post are interesting – John]
• “L.A.M.E.” in the News; These Three Articles Get Lean Wrong by Mark Graban – “Considering the way Toyota and other Lean factories (and hospitals) engage everybody in problem solving and continuous improvement, not even Lean factories reduce workers to robots, it’s silly to think Lean in an office setting would be that way. You get L.A.M.E. when managers who don’t respect workers (who already think of them as “office drones”) get a hold of Lean tools…”
• Are you as bold as this Oregon insurance agency? by Dan Pink – The insurance company switched away from commission as, obviously, commissions are aimed not at agents looking out for customers interests but agents looking out for their own interests. The owner decided it would be better to design systems to focus on providing customer value.
• What We Know That Ain’t So by Gregory Gull – “This living systems view of reality shows that we are simultaneously whole entities and a part of a larger whole, that we are deeply interconnected and interdependent.”
• Manage Better by Managing Less by John Hunter – “Most of what I needed to do simply required listening, observing, thinking, and sometimes deciding. Action wasn’t high on the list. My goal was to intervene as little as possible, and then only when doing so would optimize the whole system.”