Management Improvement Carnival #110

The management blog carnival is published 3 times a month with select recent management blog posts. Also try Curious Cat Management Articles for online management improvement articles.

• Visual Management for having a baby by Xavier Quesada Allue – “The team members (us, the parents) were not working full time on the project. This means that at certain moments, if necessary, we could scale up our efforts on this project to the detriment of other parallel projects we were doing”
• “Systems Thinking” and Me: Never the Twain Shall Meet by Tom Peters – “The best performers seesawed back and forth between ‘ideas’ and ‘actions.’ … Newtonian ‘scientific method,’ wholly dependent on ideas shaped and reshaped by actions—my studies of Nobel laureates in the sciences, for example, suggests (and not oversimplifying by much) that the winners ‘do more experiments faster.'”
• How To Go From Idea To Launching With Paying Customers In 8 Steps by Jasonl Baptiste – “Start killing off things you don’t need right away and leave them to Version 1.1,etc., but also make sure the really important ones have a very high priority… This will make it easier to get the product in the hands of your customers AND it will also make you laser focused on the things that truly matter to your customers.”
• If The Student Hasn’t Learned… by Mark Rosenthal – “Instead of looking for cultural reasons why ‘this won’t work here” we kept faith that, if the initial response was silence and non-participation, there was something that we needed to address in the way we taught, and in the environment we were creating.”
• First Steps – Improving Your Meetings by Jamie Flinchbaugh – “But even for a meeting, this can lead to significant time and action items. If you want to keep it simple and manageable, end your meetings with these 3 questions: 1. What’s 1 thing that we did well? 2. What’s 1 thing that we can improve? 3. What’s 1 thing that we will do differently?
• Go That Way, Really Fast by Jeff Atwood – “Google went from nothing, no web browser at all, to best-of-breed in under two years. Meanwhile, Internet Explorer took longer than the entire development period of Chrome to go from version 7 to version 8.”
• Delegate, don’t dump by Wally Bock – “Part of your job is to help your team members develop. That will only happen if you give them as much control over their work life as you can, based on their ability to do the job and their willingness to tackle it on their own. “
• Bridging the Knowing-Doing Gap by Jon Miller – Mr. Ohno did not tolerate the knowing-doing gap in his presence. One was scolded for claiming to understand something without first putting it into action. Stories like this are the source of the Taiichi Ohno-ism ‘Understanding means doing’.”
• Toyota Texas Tour – Concepts From the Visitor Center by Mark Graban – “I was surprised to see how much of the focus was on TPS. You’d think the general public just wants to know how cars are built (and the visitor center does explain stamping, paint, etc.). But it’s apparently Toyota is proud of TPS as a core of who they are.”

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