Management Improvement Carnival #142

The Curious Cat management improvement blog carnival is published 3 times a month with hand picked recent management blog posts. I also collect management improvement articles through Curious Cat Management Articles, you can subscribe via RSS for new article additions.

• 5 Things a Good Product Manager Should Think About by Joseph Puopolo – “User experience has become such a core function to any product manager. Is this easy to use? Do people get pissed off when they have to use key features on the site? Will it cause people to abandon your site? UX can be a core competency and key differentiator. Always focus on this!”
• 21 Concrete Practices for Agile Managers by Jurgen Appelo – “1) Take part in a team’s stand-up meetings, and also answer the questions “What I did yesterday”, etc… 9) Keep every morning free of meetings, so you can do a gemba walk and solve problems… 18) Regularly have a look at a team’s output (the application that they are building).”
• Why Create Poka-yokes—and Why Disconnect Them? by Michael Ballé – “Lines with overly complex Poka-Yoke devices tend to lose much productivity by having operators simply run the part through the detection device again until a part would be consistently stopped. Not surprisingly, production management can be tempted to simply disconnect the poka- yoke in order to run the line.”
• 10 Signs You Have a Bad Boss by Alison Green – “7) Ruling by fear. Managers who rule through rigid control, negativity, and a climate of anxiety and fear don’t trust that they can get things done any other way… 10) Fear of conflict. If your manager avoids conflict and tough conversations, chances are high that employees don’t hear much feedback and problems don’t get addressed.”
• Should fixing bugs count toward velocity? by Jason Yip – “Velocity is a vector, not a scalar. So, should fixing bugs count toward velocity? No, we are measuring progress toward a goal, not effort expended.”
• Interview with Akio Toyoda about Toyota Under Fire – Akio Toyoda on Jeff Liker’s new book, and Toyota: “you emphasize that you have to go back to the basics and this is the thing that I want them to learn the most. The business environment keeps changing. It is a dynamic environment, but as a company Toyoda was able to grow for the past 70 years or so and this is because there are some timeless values that we always have to keep true to. And that is the basics and that is what I would like them to learn.”
• Cottage cheese, and the mindless adherence to rules by Dan Markovitz – “I tell this story not because I want to highlight the lunacy of security theater and the TSA’s policies. That’s been done many times before. What’s relevant to you, as a leader, is the danger of creating a culture of unthinking obedience to rules.”
• Ridiculously Transparent by Scott Weiss – “As CEO of IronPort, I wanted to be completely transparent with my entire team but my board of seasoned industry veterans was sharply opposed… I came to believe that our type of total transparency was a competitive weapon that applied primarily to private companies.”
• Lean Government Example: Defect Display Board by Jon Miller – “What these two examples of visual controls have in common is that they personalize the defect or problem in a much more powerful way than two-dimensional warning signs, charts or tables ever could. Personalizing a problem creates motivation to be part of the solution…”
• Many Good Employees Want to Continue to Do Their Current Job Well by John Hunter – “There are several psychological factors behind this mindset. Many of those striving to get ahead can’t really conceive of the idea that others don’t have the same driving goals (and as many find in a “mid-life crises” – they may not have that either, but they don’t want to question their thoughts on this matter).”