Management Improvement Carnival #199

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

• Disentangling Standardization, Harmonization and Improvement by Rob van Stekelenborg – “To be able to actually improve you first need to have a standard and a standardized (and therefore stabilized) process. Only then you have a basis to improve upon.”
• Outgoing CEO Steve Ballmer’s beloved employee-ranking system made me secretive, cynical, and paranoid. by David Auerbach – “The stack rank was harmful. It served as an incentive not to join high-quality groups, because you’d be that much more likely to fall low in the stack rank… it just encouraged people to backstab their co-workers, since their loss entailed your profit.

Rice field outside Ubud, Bali, Indonesia by John Hunter. See more of my photos from Indonesia.

• Engagement Leads to Results by Bill Waddell – “companies with high levels of worker engagement get better results – profitability, defect rates, growth, productivity…”
• Flying Delta; Lessons in Unreliability by Sodzi-Tettey, Sodzi – “It also means designing procedures and building capabilities for fixing failures when they are identified or stopping the harm caused by failures when they are not detected and intercepted. In the experience of clients, the two organizations displayed very little of these; not predictive, not proactive and hardly anticipatory of client needs, but rather touting 50 dollar vouchers as if they would make all the difference!”
• Steve Ballmer and The Innovator’s Curse by Horace Dediu – “The most common, almost universally accepted reason for company failure is “the stupid manager theory”. It’s the corollary to ‘the smart manager theory’ which is used to describe almost all company successes. The only problem with this theory is that it is usually the same managers who run the company while it’s successful as when it’s not.”
• Do We Need to Restrict Looking at Management Ideas to Only Those with Ready Examples from Our Industry? by John Hunter – “One of the biggest weaknesses I have seen in the application of Deming’s management ideas (and lean thinking and other management improvement strategies also) is the demand for examples exactly like the situation face by the organization looking to improve (first in their industry, but if that is found then in our sub-industry, then of their size [national v. local v. international] and on and on). It really seems to me mainly it is about finding a reason to avoid trying to improve.”
• The Ultimate Cheat Sheet For Starting And Running Your Business by James Altucher –
  41) What if one client is almost all of my revenues?
  Treat them very nicely. Don’t forget the Christmas gift basket.
  59) Should I hire people because I can travel on a seven-hour plane ride with them?
  Don’t be an idiot. If anything, hire people the opposite of you. Or else who will you delegate to?
  72) Should I hire a head of sales?
  No. The founder is the head of sales until at least 10 million in sales.
  101a) Corollary: These rules don’t always apply. But like Kurt Vonnegut said, ‘if you want to break the rules of grammar, first learn the rules of grammar.’
• What Management by Objectives Does Wrong and Hoshin Kanri Does Right by Jeff Liker – “at Toyota, there was a socially conscious philosophy and an understanding of organizations as holistic systems in which all the parts needed to be highly developed to contribute to the whole.”
• Agile vs. Waterfall by Dennis Stevens – “In my experience, Agile is about collaborative teams and value based delivery. I prefer this approach on divergent projects that require little governance and upfront planning, and on convergent projects that require significant governance and upfront planning.”
• Bill Hunter, Statistics for Experimenters, City of Madison Quality Improvement effort and EVOP by John Hunter – “If Dad could have convinced the coaches to use some advanced statistical tools to improve sports performance maybe Moneyball could have discussed Wisconsin Badger national championships instead of the success of the Oakland A’s.”