Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog Carnival #195

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.

• If you develop people results will follow! by Tracey Richardson – “They developed us and conditioned us to always ask questions based on standards to current state, that pure essence kept us perpetuating the thinking until it became the “norm”. I reflect back now and realize it was all really simple when you have leaders aligned with expectations, discipline and accountability that were first and foremost. It wasn’t Lean, it was our JOB! Imagine that concept! It wasn’t a choice, option or convenience thing, it was how we did business everyday, we all lived it because it was who we were.”
• Can You Really Improve Your Emotional Intelligence? by Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic – “While many ingredients are required for a good coaching program, the most important aspect of effective EQ-coaching is giving people accurate feedback. Most of us are generally unaware of how others see us — and this especially true for managers. As noted , ‘it is remarkable how many smart, highly motivated, and apparently responsible people rarely pause to contemplate their own behaviors.'”
• The Development of Deming’s Management System – Mike Tveite: “I achieved my goal by not my aim. That happens a lot, we honestly translate aims to goals. And then we do stupid things in the name of the goal get it the way of the aim. We forget the aim sometimes and put the goal in its place.” [the video above shows Mike his experience with this problem]
• Pivots and Portfolios: A Contrarian View by John Hagel – “Rather than pivoting, we can periodically step back and reflect on our progress, then rapidly iterate and enhance the initiatives we are pursuing to achieve near-term impact. By constantly zooming out and zooming in, we maintain focus on what is really important and avoid spreading ourselves too thin. Within the context of a stable framework, agile methodologies of rapid iteration and learning can become powerful vehicles for progress.”
• In 8 months in Microsoft, I learned these things – “I have seen the knowledge inside the company is mostly transferred by talking and hands-on sessions… If this would have been my own company there would be tons of wiki pages… Somehow in this environment it is almost impossible to get 2 hours straight of coding for me. I spend most of my time trying to figure out how others’ uncommented/undocumented code work, debugging strange things and attending daily meetings.”
• Training Within Industry (TWI) – The Missing Lean Element? by Rob van Stekelenborg – “TWI became a foundational element of the Toyota Production System (TPS) and what is nowadays known as Lean. The influences of Job Instruction can clearly be seen in Lean elements like standardized work, on-job training and the skill matrix. Job Methods has strongly influenced problem definition, process analysis, waste recognition, kaizen and A3-thinking and doing.”
• Dr Deming Meets the IT Crowd by Chris Preston – “Software Engineering is a process of problem solving. You cant solve a problem by breaking it into pieces, giving each piece to a different person, then expecting the subsequent assembled parts to be cohesive.”
• Introduction to Fractional Factorial Designed Experiments by John Hunter – “This video looks at using fractional factorials to reduce the number of experiments needed when doing a multifactor experiment. I grew up understanding that the best way to experiment is by varying multiple factors at the same time. You learn much quicker than One Factor At a Time (OFAT), and you learn about interactions (which are mainly lost in OFAT).”
• 2013 Lean Healthcare Transformation Summit Wrap-Up – “Lean is about creating more value for the customer and designing systems and processes that empower employees to do the most rewarding work they can and continuously participate in the structure and flow of that work.”
• Yelling improves employee performance by Sami Honkonen – “This is easy to demonstrate. Take a normal 6-sided die and throw it. When you get a 1 or a 2, yell at the die and make it understand how worthless it is. Then throw again, and observe how most of the time the results improve after yelling.”
• Toyota’s Jamie Bonini on Organizational Culture by Mark Graban – “That’s the power of Lean principles… it’s not about copying tools, it’s about adopting the culture and philosophy… that’s what makes the tools useful, when oriented in the direction of the customer.”
• Experience Teaches Nothing Without Theory by John Hunter – Too often managers are applying behaviors without understanding the theory… And so the managers don’t understand that the behavior will not be successful given the conditions they find themselves in.