The Curious Cat Management Carnival is published twice each month. The posts selected for the carnival focus on the areas of management improvement I have focused on in the Curious Cat Management Improvement Guide since 1996: Deming, innovation, lean manufacturing, customer focus, leadership, six sigma, respect for employees…
- How would you explain what Lean is to a 7-year-old? by Ron Pereira – “Daddy tries to teach people how to work faster and make less mistakes. And, most importantly, we also try to teach people to be nice and respect each other… that way everyone can do their very best.”
- We must think of the whole enterprise as a continually evolving system by Jeff Liker – “Customer care call center–This is housed in the same building as Toyota Motor Sales in Torrance California and the call centers function like the work groups in Toyota plants to the extend of even holding weekly quality circle meetings and having a team leader and group leader structure as well as visual metrics with targets for improvement.”
- The maker/manager transition phase – “One of the hardest things as a developer transitioning into a manager role has been to get a feeling of progress without writing code. Progress is usually clear with code, and harder with manager activities… As a founder you’re in the best position to guide people and help them be super productive. That becomes your role.”
- How do mid-level managers convince the CEO that adopting lean practices is worthwhile? by Michael Ballé – “You can’t convince your boss to do lean, but you can become more convincing yourself by doing lean rather than talking about it. Few consultants ever get lean because they’re always thinking about getting others to apply it, but not them. As a result, their own learning curve stagnates. Don’t fall into that trap. Lean yourself before you try to lean others.”
- Who Are We Kidding? by Bill Waddell – “We could just as accurately call them LWSCC’s – Low Workplace Safety Cost Countries. The similarities between the fire in Bangladesh last week and the fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist factory in New York in 1911 are striking Locked doors, blocked exits, abusive management in a factory full of over-worked, grossly underpaid women doing garment work.”
- Inspection is too late. The quality, good or bad, is already in the product. by John Hunter – “Inspecting to pull out the failed items from the production before a customer sees them is a path to failure. If the process is this bad, the process needs to be improved. If you can actually stay in business doing this now, you are at risk for not being able to stay in business”
- Multitasking makes you dumb by Simon Hørup Eskildsen – “Multitasking is attempting to handle more than one task simultaneously. The human mind is not directly capable of this, thus it emulates multitasking by rapidly alternating between the tasks. This makes for a higher rate of errors due to lack of attention, and since context switching from one task to another is expensive, the sum of time spent on the tasks is larger than if the tasks were done sequentially.”
- Disconnect Pay from Performance Management by Tom Bolt – “The albatross around the neck of reformers in performance management is the link to pay raises… Paying somebody for their actual accomplishments sounds good to company management and to human resources managers that are trying to balance the needs of people with the needs of the company… There is only one problem… it doesn’t work.”
- The Toyota Avalon Is The Most American Car Made Today by Sonari Glinton – “the most “American car” is the Toyota Avalon, which is built in Georgetown, [Kentucky 85%] of that car’s parts are sourced from the U.S and Canada — a higher percentage than for any car made by a U.S.-based manufacturer.”
- Respect for Everyone by John Hunter – “Lean is a management system that respects everyone. Lean is designed to have everyone contribute. Lean is designed to have people use their brain while they are at work. I don’t see anything about lean’s respect for workers that is unworkable for knowledge workers.”
Batu Caves, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia by John Hunter.
