Creek joining the Andaman Sea in Khao Lak, Thailand, by John Hunter.
The Curious Cat Management blog carnival highlights recent management blog posts 3 times each month. The posts generally focus on the areas I have focused on in the Curious Cat Management Guide since 1996 (Deming, leadership, lean manufacturing, customer focus, six sigma…).
- Kill Rats – Not Messengers by Bill Waddell – “Seems pretty clear to me that YUM’s stock price and sales should drop if there are rats running around their restaurants. The YouTube video isn’t the cause of dropping sales and stock prices – lousy management that lets rats have the run of a Taco Bell is.”
- Jobs made Apple great by ignoring profit by Clayton Christensen and James Allworth – “When the pressure is on and the CEO of a big public company has to choose between doing what’s best for the customer or making the quarter’s numbers… most CEOs will choose the numbers. Apple never has.”
- Banishing Fear In The Workplace: Interview With Gallup’s Tom Rieger by Matthew May – “We realized that fear was eroding all these companies in very similar ways—so similar, in fact, that the pattern could be easily recognized if you only knew what to look for.”
- Saving capitalism from itself by Simon Caulkin – “The theories have driven damaging short-termism, fostered amoral and immoral executive behaviour, and favoured the mushrooming growth of parasitic players in the expectations market to whose tune real-market actors are increasingly made to jump.”
- The Just-Do-It – Reflect cycle by Jason Yip – “We’ll set aside some time to think about what we want to do, which is hard work, but then we’ll just do it… and then based on a trigger and/or a set time, we’ll reflect and adjust.”
- Zipcar Customer Experience: Variability, Utilization, and Queueing by Pete Abilla – “Variability is a given in dynamic systems. And, if a system is scheduled to 100% utilization with no regard to variability, the customer experience will be negatively affected.”
- Steve Jobs and the Eureka Myth by Adrian Slywotzky – “We are all mesmerized by Apple’s beautiful design, from device to screen, to the packaging itself. We see what the magicians want us to see. What we don’t see is the 18 months of negotiating with the music companies. Nor the three years of teaching the supply chain that the Macbook Air had to be really thin, really light, and really enduring (10-hour battery).”
- Like It or Not, They are Watching Us by Mike Wroblewski – “it takes many good examples on a consistent basis to catch on yet it seems that it only takes one bad example to spread like wild fire through our company culture.”
- What Must an Educated Person Know? by Josh Kaufman – “1) Information-Assimilation – how to find, consume, and comprehend information and identify what’s most important in the face of a problem or challenge. 2) Writing – how to communicate thoughts and ideas in written form clearly and concisely. 3) Speaking – how to communicate thoughts and ideas to others clearly, concisely, and with confidence. 4) Mathematics – how to accurately use concepts from arithmetic, algebra, geometry, calculus, and statistics to analyze and solve common problems. 5) Decision-Making – how to identify critical issues, prioritize, focus energy/effort, recognize fallacies, avoid common errors, and handle ambiguity…”
- Visual Management with Brown M&Ms by John Hunter – “it might just be those crazy celebrities are using visual management (granted I think there could be better methods [a bit more mistake proofing where the real problems would be manifest] but it is an interesting idea).”
The photo is from my current visit to Khao Lak, Thailand.
