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: you can subscribe to an RSS feed for management articles now.
- Why Google can’t build Instagram – ” 4. Google forces its developers to use its infrastructure, which wasn’t developed for small social projects. At Google you can’t use MySQL and Ruby on Rails. You’ve gotta build everything to deploy on its internal database “Big Table,” they call it. That wasn’t designed for small little dinky social projects. Engineers tell me it’s hard to develop for and not as productive as other tools that external developers get to use.”
- Don’t Let Benchmarking Replace Your Own Process Engineering by Mark Graban – “One thing I’ve seen in hospitals is that there’s a general lack of Industrial Engineering (aka Management Engineering, in healthcare) basics that would allow a department or manager to determine the right staffing levels based on inputs including patient demand, quality and safety requirements, and that hospital’s processes.”
- Putting Performance Reviews On Probation – Samuel Culbert, author of Get Rid Of The Performance Review!, couldn’t agree more. “It’s the most ridiculous practice in the world,” he tells NPR’s Neal Conan. “It’s bogus, fraudulent, dishonest at its core, and reflects stupid, bad, cowardly management.”
- How many different types of A3’s are there? by Tracey Richardson – “I will briefly describe the 4 different types of A3’s and when to use them based on my experience: Problem Solving A3, Proposal A3, Status Report A3, Strategic Planning A3”
- Should story points be assigned to a bug fixing story by Mike Cohn – “My usual recommendation is to assign points to the bug fixing. This really achieves the best of both worlds. We are able to see how much work the team is really able to accomplish but also able to look at the historical data and see how much went into the bug-fixing story each sprint. Knowing this can be helpful to a team and its product owner”
- Performance management: looking in the wrong place by Glyn Lumley – “Improvements to organisational performance do not occur one employee at a time. The problems are in organisational systems and processes; it’s here that we will find the real opportunities for improvement.”
- How to Drive Fear and Inaction Out of Organizations by Jon Miller – “let’s not talk about punishment but rather direct people’s attention towards things they can positively do. Hypothesis testing, learning by doing and the small daily improvements made by people within an organization that has a kaizen culture all work to keep the fear out.”
- Go East, Young Man – As India grows (along with China) and more Americans look to live abroad, it is tempting to suggest that the U.S. might be on the verge of a new brain drain. Indeed, Drucker asserted in a 2003 lecture that India and China “are rapidly becoming counterforces to American economic dominance,” and he cited India, in particular, as “a knowledge center.”
- The Problem With Gurus by Ron Pereira – “When asked a question gurus almost never reply with ‘I don’t know’ as they see this as a sign of weakness. It’s not.”
- What Failed Today? by Mark Rosenthal – “The question is not, whether or not you have process breakdowns. The question is how you respond to them. Actually, a more fundamental question is whether you even recognize “process failure” that doesn’t knock you over”
- You Can’t Buy Flow by Bill Waddell – “For most factories, though, there is a lot of work to be done before you get to that point. And it stands to reason that you are not going to realize any of the enormous benefits from cycle time compression – flow – if you don’t resolve the things that are truly constraining cycle time compression.” [read the comments too they are excellent]
- Work and Life by John Hunter – “Time away from work can reinvigorate people. Time away from the day to day work can lead to better performance when people are actually at work. Time to enjoy life is valuable in itself. The USA has enormous financial wealth. But vacation time in the USA is much less than most other rich countries.
Maybe a stretch to call these related but good links, I think: Help me start a free and open source software Tithing movement by Gabriel Weinberg – Curious Cats Kiva Lending Team
