The Curious Cat Management blog carnival highlights management blog posts 3 times each month. I have also collected hundreds of online management improvement articles in the Curious Cat Management Library.
- Why You Should Never Listen to Your Customers by Mark Cuban – “Your customers can tell you the things that are broken and how they want to be made happen. Listen to them. Make them happy. But they won’t create the future roadmap for your product or service. That’s your job.”
- Pure Genius: Southwest Airlines Baggage Strategy by Eric Joiner – “Consistently sized aircraft, carefully selected destinations and a desire to compete with the big guys only where they can win, has made Southwest profitable where the big guys have failed.”
- Evolutionary operation by Mark J. Anderson – “a manufacturing improvement method called evolutionary operation (EVOP), which calls for an ongoing series of two-level factorial designs that illuminate a path to more desirable conditions.”
- Why do we use Kanban? by David Anderson – “(1) Evolutionary, incremental change with minimal resistance (2) Achieve sustainable pace by balance throughput against demand (3) Quantitative Management and emergence of high maturity behavior in alignment with senior management desire to have a highly predictable business (4) Better risk management (the emerging theme in the Kanban community)”
- MBWA is Not a Gemba Walk by Kevin Meyer – “What if the top executive led groups of people in spontaneous kaizen activities. Teaching, creating, changing. Not just sneaking around and watching.”
- W.L. Gore: Lessons from a Management Revolutionary by Gary Hamel – Terri Kelly: “Our leaders have positions of authority because they have followers. Rather than relying on a top-down appointment process, where you often get promoted because you have seniority, or are the best friend of a senior executive, we allow the voice of the organization to determine who’s really qualified to be a leader, based on the willingness of others to follow.”
- How a Simple Office Kanban System Works by Mark Graban – “In setting up a system like this, you just have to be careful that the 2nd bin has enough inventory to last you until the new stock arrives. If you order weekly and the material arrives the day after, the re-order quantity really needs to be six days worth of supply.”
- Motivating Employees Without Money by Ankit Patel – “In a Lean business system you not only empower your people to make decisions but actually expect they decide and come up with solutions.”
- Just Promoted? Here’s what you need to know by Wally Bock – “Achieving the objective is part of your job as a leader. But it’s only part. The other part is caring for your people.”
- Price Anchoring, Or Why a $499 iPad Seems Inexpensive by Matthew Amster-Burton – “Any time you have to estimate a numerical value, it turns out you’re very susceptible to the power of suggestion”
- Projects do not define a lean company by Jamie Flinchbaugh – “No organization can become lean just from running lean projects and events… Our focus coming out of projects is that we ensure both sustainability of the changes made and continuous improvement beyond the changes made. “
- Five Most Terrifying Words for a Lean Thinker by Jon Miller – “These words were spoken today during a meeting to review an ongoing and complex problem solving effort within Gemba. These words chilled me to the bone.”
- Understanding data – Taxes per Person by Country by John Hunter – “I think that the idea that data lies is false, and that such a notion is commonly held a sign of lazy intellect. You can present data in different ways to focus on different aspects of a system. And you can make faulty assumptions based on data you look at.” The data is right or false but it doesn’t lie. “Most often when people say data lies they just were misled because they didn’t think about what the data actually showed.”
Related: interesting management content online (social ranking via Reddit) – Curious Cat management search – Management Improvement Carnival #32
Thank you for including me.
I really liked the Mark Cuban blog post, and wouldn’t have found it otherwise. Voice-of-the-customer can lead you down the wrong path if you get overly locked in by it. You must at some point produce insight, wisdom, and vision that exceeds your customer.