The Curious Cat Management Improvement Carnival is published twice each month. The posts selected for the carnival focus on the areas of management improvement I have focused on in the Curious Cat Management Improvement Guide since 1996: Deming, lean thinking, innovation, respect for people, customer focus, etc..
- Dr. Deming’s “Role of a Manager of People” by Mark Graban – quoting Dr. Deming “A manager understands and conveys to his people the meaning of a system. He explains the aim of the system. He teaches his people to understand how the work of the group supports these aims.”
- Does Standard Work Destroy Creativity? by Janet Dozier – “When standard work is consistently and uniformly adhered to, it drives continuous improvement by exposing problems within the process. Making problems easier to see inspires planned experimentation to discover better ways to perform the work. Standards are the foundation for continuous improvement.”
- How to Be Startup CEO by Ryan Allis – “In my experience the three most important components of the Start-up CEO’s role are:
- Creating a product that solves a real customer need (and convincing customers to pay for it).
- Making sure your users and customers have an extremely positive emotional experience with your product.
- Recruiting a great team to build your product.”
- Distorting the System, Distorting the Data or Improving the System by John Hunter – “It is good to get in the habit of considering if the measured improvements are truly an indication of an improved system or merely the result of distorting the system or the data.”
- Rapid PDCA by Mark Rosenthal – “All of this happened over less than a couple of hours, and it was in production that afternoon with immediate results. A far cry from the traditional tooling and jig design process.”
- Estimates in Software Development. New Frontiers. by Michael Dubakov – “I think we should embrace estimate distribution and invent new ways to model and use it.”
- J.C. Penney Spent $170 Million to Install Johnson Team by Matt Townsend – “Ron Johnson’s tenure at J.C. Penney Co. (JCP) will long be associated with a 25 percent sales plunge. Lost amid the criticism since his departure last month is the $170 million it cost to install Johnson and his top three executives.” [Massively overpaying executives and the hero worship, disrespect for people, foolish risk taking, HiPPO thinking instead of evidence based thinking and rest that goes along with management that engages in such a poor management practice continues to do great harm to our organizations – John]
- Going to Gemba vs. Statistical Analysis by Ron Pereira – “I was successful at my job because I worked at gemba and also knew how to do more advanced statistically based analysis.I could have stood at gemba all day long and watched our processes spin out of control without a clue as to how to help…
But, because I did both – lived and worked at gemba and leveraged statistical analysis – I was able to do very well.”
- The Myth Of Multitasking – “Clifford Nass, a psychology professor at Stanford University, says today’s nonstop multitasking actually wastes more time than it saves—and he says there’s evidence it may be killing our concentration and creativity too.”
- Lean Blog Podcast with John Hunter, Mark Graban interviewed me about the ideas in my book – Management Matters: Building Enterprise Capability
