Management Improvement Blog Carnival #192

The Curious Cat management blog carnival has been published since 2006. New posts are published twice a month. I also publish a collection management improvement articles on the Curious Cat management improvement articles site.

• Customer Service Andon Cord: Jeff Bezos and Customer Experience by Pete Abilla – “Lean principles have taken such a hold on Amazon and on Jeff Bezos that job titles now contain terms often used in Lean Manufacturing. For example, Jeff Bezos’ comment on ‘Customer Service Andon’ – well, it’s also a current job opening at Amazon…”
• The Neuroscience of Deming by John Hunter – From the video (embedded below), JW Wilson: “Fast thinking is what you use when you are running from the bear, slow thinking is the kind of thinking you use when you want to change the world… We think we only have time to run from the bear; the consequences are devastating… [slow thinking is required for] making adaption to unsuccessful attempts”
• Procter & Gamble: Basis Point Wise, Percentage Point Foolish by Bill Conerly – “If one of the parties in a transaction has to borrow, it should be the party with the cheaper debt cost.” [This is another example of stovepipe thinking and optimizing part of the system at great expense to the whole. People continue to fail to apply decades olds knowledge of the benefits of focusing on system improvement instead of optimizing components within the system. In addition to systems thinking failures it is an example of a focus on financial metrics themselves which often leads to silly actions due to not appreciating the proxy nature of measures. – John].
• Are you providing leadership or support? by Dan Markovitz – Leadership means hacking through the jungle with a machete, clearing a path for front-line staff, supervisors, and managers to follow.
• Using Binary Logistic Regression to Investigate High Employee Turnover by Carly Barry – “The output from his Minitab analysis yielded a regression equation Parks could use to predict the probability of employees quitting based on the number of miles that made up their commute to work. He used the equation to analyze distances up to30 miles, and found that commuting distance had little impact on the probability of an employee quitting until the 12 mile mark.”
• Hidden Benefits of Job Instruction by Bryan Lund – “If you write [Job Breakdown Sheets] JBS with others, you are modeling one of the high quality leadership behavior traits: mentoring and teaching. And doing this with others increases each person’s emotional intelligence, working with others, resolving differences, testing assumptions, organizing actions, reflecting on results. We need tools to help us do what is required of us for the benefit of our team. A JBS is another deliberate method we can use to maximize the potential of our people.”
• The Problem with A3 Reports by Ron Pereira – “the power isn’t found in the A3… instead the power comes from the collaborative efforts of the team that happens to be documenting their improvement journey using an A3.”
• Innovation Demands Discipline, Patience by Matt May – “All change demands learning. Meaningful change—aka innovation—demands profound learning. Learning and innovation go hand in hand, but learning comes first. Again, that takes time. There are no overnight sensations—great careers and great companies are built painstakingly over time.”
• The Role of the Sensei in Learning by Gregg Stocker – “The role of a specialist, or sensei, is to guide people in the new way of thinking. The more the experts do things – change systems, redesign processes, etc. – or tell people what they need to be doing, the more they interfere with learning and reduce the chances of sustaining the change.”
• Agile Life: Personal Kanban Revisited by Christian Fogel – “There is nothing new here, the method is the same as the one I used at work, but I’d still like to point out two things… Now, with this extraordinarily simple method, I usually get 80-90% of the tasks done, which is a vast improvement… The second thing is, again, transparency…”
• 100 percent of managers fail by Wally Bock – “You and your team members will fail. Prevent as many as you can and minimize the impact of the rest. Learn from every failure.”
• The Art of Discovery by John Hunter – George Box (in video presentation): “I think the quality revolution is nothing more, or less, than the dramatic expansion of the of scientific problem solving using informed observation and directed experimentation to find out more about the process, the product and the customer.”