Management Improvement Carnival #125

Photo of Cypress Trees by John Hunter

The Curious Cat Management Blog Carnival selects recent management blog posts 3 times each month. You may submit a link to the management Reddit to have it considered for inclusion in our carnival. More photos from Cypress Gardens, South Carolina.

• What Next? by David Ing – “The underlying problem is that it seems to come down to having to completely change the culture of an existing business. This can be done internally, and often is done by heroic souls today, but like the advice of how to eat an elephant (‘one bite at a time’) after a while anyone’s going to get pretty sick of tasting just bad elephant every day.”
• Systems in Place to Prevent These Medication Errors? Seems Not… by Mark Graban – “We’re taught in the Lean methodology that ‘standardized work’ is not just a matter of writing procedures. We need a culture and an environment where standardized work is actively managed.”
• Driving Out Fear and Other Similarities Between Drucker and Deming by Kelly Allan – “[Drucker] Inherent in the managerial task is entrepreneurship: making the business of tomorrow. Inherent in the task is innovation. Innovation is above all, top-management attitude and practices. [Deming] The moral is that it is necessary to innovate, to predict the needs of the customer.” (Deming on Innovation – John Hunter)
• The second death of agile by Niklas Bjørnerstedt – “Agile should evolve, but I think it should not loose its focus on software. If you are interested in “agile” outside of software you should study systems thinking. Why reinvent the wheel? The combination of systems thinking and agile is much more potent that some new bloated variant of agile.”
• Lean’s Fork In The Road by Bill Waddell – “They are driven by the idea that the future is unknown, but if you continually improve the processes for getting work done you will be in good shape, no matter what the future holds. Do the work well in terms of minimal waste, excellent quality, driving yourself to take the best care of customers, and things will turn out all right. Better than all right, in fact…”
• Recognizing System Loops in Life by Orrin Woodward – “Each person in a community needs to understand the systematic mindset as their actions will affect the others in the interdependent communities. Every leader, like the cliff climbing leader, must learn to think systematically in order to lead to his full potential, understanding how individual parts influence one another within the entity as a whole.”
• It’s About Throughput not Capacity by Dan Markovitz – “remember that 100% utilization of that capacity is ultimately self-defeating. You need slack in the system, because throughput is what counts. Not capacity.”
• Iteration, Increments, and Timeboxes by George Dinwiddie – “Working in an iterative fashion helps us move toward our goal in smaller steps. It lets us interleave working on the various functions we want to incorporate, effectively doing all of the coarse sanding before proceeding to medium grit on any of them.”
• Ozymandias and Modern Management by Wally Bock – “If you’re a boss, it’s easy to get caught up in the affairs of the day, even though you may not recall today’s crisis even a month from now.”
• The end of the IT department – “You no longer need a tech person at the office to man “the server room.” Responsibility for keeping the servers running has shifted away from the centralized IT department. Today you can get just about all the services that previously required local expertise from a web site somewhere.”
• 3 Key Skills that Enable Innovation by Jamie Flinchbaugh – “Each experiment was an investment in his knowledge. Learning leads to innovation and invention. But learning is a process and a skill, and there is a large difference between experimentation and ‘trying stuff.'”
• Warren Buffett’s 2010 Letter to Shareholders by John Hunter – Warren Buffett is not only a great investor he embodies some excellent management concepts and buying companies with leaders and businesses he trusts and having a hands off, long term focus has worked very well.