Management Improvement Carnival #109

The management blog carnival is published 3 times a month with select recent management blog posts. Also try our collected management articles and blogs posts at: Curious Cat Management articles.

• When to coach the process, and when to coach the solution by Jamie Flinchbaugh – “Your focus is not on the solution or the problem itself, but on the process that either created or missed the problem that would end up enabling future problems. Obviously you might end up doing both, but that is a larger investment of your time.”
• Hitting a WIP Limit by “Such a simple thing, but now instead of increasing the number of spinning plates, we’re putting energy into moving the current work faster, which I suspect is going to be more satisfying for developers too.” by Andrew Walker
• The Importance of the Daily Meeting by Kevin Meyer – “Traditional organizations wait a week or two between staff meetings to discuss issues, and by the time the meeting rolls around many subtle issues have been forgotten.”
• Does the “Deming Connection” have a down side? – “Most companies pour money into sales and marketing to lure new customers while giving their existing ones short shrift, in an effort to minimize costs and maximize revenue.”
• We’ve got leaders. What we need is leadership by Wally Bock – “Your challenge is to accomplish the mission and care for your people. That will only happen if you do leadership work, management work, and supervision work.”
• Evidence-Based Study Tips: Nine Ways To Help You Learn by Bob Sutton – “Adopt a growth mindset: This might be the most important of all; as Carol Dweck’s wonderful research shows, when people believe that their intelligence and abilities are malleable rather than fixed, they try harder of learn more”
• This Software Method Doesn’t Work Here by Jurgen Appelo – “‘The recipe doesn’t work here’ is probably just an excuse for ‘I didn’t work to understand how to adapt to local circumstances and make the recipe work.'”
• 8 Reasons to Love Kaizen Events by Jon Miller – “The kaizen event is a great team building activity. The shared purpose, goofy team names, challenges overcome through cooperation and persistence all help create a new sense of connection with team members and co-workers.”
• Don’t Copy: There Is No “Instant Pudding” by Mark Graban – “you can learn from other organizations, but you also have learn basic Lean principles and try to figure it out for yourself. You can be inspired by others, but you shouldn’t copy them.”
• Leading Project Teams: Much Like Herding Cats – by Jan Pridgen – Effective performance of project teams is aided by clearly defined roles based on the talents and expertise of the team members, when, team members understand the value and impact of their individual roles.
• What to do with a long list of user request? — Just discard the older part! by Hiranabe – passing on some advice from the Poppendieck’s when confronted with “a list you would have to spend *years* to catch up, so they said to them ‘Discard the older part. you cannnot do with them anyway'”
• Build an Environment Where Intrinsic Motivation Flourishes by John Hunter – “50 years after Douglas McGregor’s classic, The Human Side of Enterprise, too many managers still have not learned that using extrinsic motivation is not an effective way to manage complex human systems (organizations).”