Please submit your favorite management posts to the carnival. Read the previous management carnivals.
- Could Microsoft’s Windows Be Disrupted? by Scott Anthony – “as Clayton Christensen pointed out in his seminal book The Innovators’ Dilemma, market leadership isn’t just an insufficient buffer against disruption, in some cases it is the root cause of failure.”
- Learning to say no by Dan Markovitz – “The CFO says no when the president want to renovate the offices or hire new people, and the company can’t afford it — that’s part of her fiduciary responsibility. You have a responsibility, too — you have to set expectations about what can be accomplished with the resources (time and people) available.”
- Connecting to the Customers by Lee Fried – “It is amazing how much you can learn in a short period of time by spending time listening to the voice of the customer. What is just as amazing is how much you can learn from talking to the people who spend forty hours a week listening to the customer”
- Remembering the Model T by Jon Thompson – “So on the 100th anniversary of the Model T, it seems worth tipping the Toyota hat to Henry Ford and the production techniques he so cleverly harnessed. Those techniques put us all on wheels.”
- The Hard Sell for Cells by Jon Miller – “The cell brings processes together, thereby bringing people together. The basic unit for natural work teams to form work zones that connected physically and in terms of work flow. When the person working to either side of you directly depends on the work you do to be successful, team spirit can take root.”
- Why my oil company can’t deliver by “They could make fewer, or at least better timed visits to the customer… I’m guessing because they can’t predict my oil use that well and if they targeted a refill at a 1/4 tank, I’d run out of oil sometimes… And what’s horrible about it is a little extra free information is all they’d need to cut visits and still not have anyone run out of oil.”
- Systemic problems in US healthcare? by Bill Harris – “Treating the symptoms might make things better in the short term, but we shouldn’t be surprised when they return if the disease remains present. That’s where the systemic approaches come in: they can help us find the structures at work creating our problems, and they can help us test our theories about proposed solutions.”
- Be Careful with Copying by Mark Graban – “Unfortunately, there are no short cuts to this process. Copying someone else’s layout may end up being suboptimal for your needs.”
- Interactions and Systems by John Dowd – “Successful managers understand these interactions, how they work and they manage them as well as the main effects.”
- My CI by Mike Wroblewski – “Within the first few months at Batesville Casket, I quickly noticed a significant weakness in our lean approach. This weakness is very common among companies that try to follow the lean path of continuous improvement. It’s the lack of total employee involvement and I’ll stress the TOTAL part.”
- Google and memorization by Dan Heath – Google is the perfect real-world memory aid for students. It makes it easy to retrieve the factoids that will inevitably be lost from memory. It makes it so easy, in fact, that it’s foolish to obsess about teaching the factoids.
- IW Swings Both Ways on Robots by Kevin Meyer – “Holy cow… he gets it! And believe it or not, I’m not necessarily against all robots; I’m against the danger of robots covering up or automating waste.”
- 10 Practical Uses For Psychological Research in Everyday Life – “This surprising psychology study finds that if one person in a group repeats the same opinion three times, it has 90% of the effect of three different people in that group expressing the same opinion.”
- Total = Involvement by Mike Gardner – “Everyone is capable of learning how to take care of the equipment. If your people really are not capable, than you have to ask yourself if you have hired the right people in the first place”
- In HR, Don’t Say It Unless You Mean It by Frank Roche – “Don’t say transparency and then only communicate to selected managers… Don’t say employee engagement when you really want compliance.”
- Keeping Good Employees by John Hunter – “Good advice. I like direct, simple, questions. What can we do to keep you? What do you enjoy about your job? What do you dislike? What can I do to increase your joy in work? What one thing would you most like to see changed? What do you want to see continue?”
Related: The Psychology of Too Much Choice – Do What You Say You Will
