Management Improvement Blog Carnival #188

The Curious Cat Management Carnival has been published since 2006. The carnival, published twice a month, links to great, recent, management blog posts. I hope you find these post interesting and find some new blogs to start reading. Follow me online: Google+, Twitter and elsewhere.

• Toyota, Respect for People (or “Humanity”) and Lean by Mark Graban – “I’ve really come to appreciate how ‘respect for people’ and ‘continuous improvement’ (or Kaizen) are intertwined. We practice CI because we have RFP… we practice RFP by engaging people in CI and challenging them to perform better… for the sake of our customers and our patients (who we have respect for).”


Van Gogh self portrait. Photo by John Hunter, Musee d’Orsay, Paris.

• Where There is Fear You Do Not Get Honest Figures by John Hunter – “The problems fear creates result in bad data, ineffective decision making and the destruction of joy in work.”
• Comparing the Five Lean Principles to the Toyota 14 Principles by Matt Wrye – “The standardization allows for a baseline when a problem arises. If standards are being followed then the problem becomes easier to diagnose. Once the root cause is discovered, allowing the employees the freedom to improve the standard so the issue doesn’t surface again promotes empowerment and respect for people. This respect for their knowledge of the process will help to foster more improvement ideas from them.”
• Disruption guru Clay Christensen says incumbent media players are making a classic mistake by Mathew Ingram – “incumbent players in a particular industry routinely fail to make the necessary changes to the way they do things, even when they can see the disruption occurring all around them. In almost every case, they see the disruptors as not worthy of their attention because they are operating at the low end of the market, and either don’t see that as important or are too committed to their existing business models.”
• Data, Facts, and Truth by Kevin Meyer – “truth requires perspective, context, reference, and understanding. Knowing when outliers are relevant or irrelevant, when the dataset is complete or incomplete, and how to make the correct, or necessary, conclusions when data is incomplete or inappropriate. Experience and intuition create relevance. The ability to create relevance is a core component of leadership.”
• Dr. Deming’s Joy at Work, Happiness, & the High Performance Organization by Larry Miller – “Creative dissatisfaction is the awareness of the gap between where I am or who I am and where I could be or who I could be… It is a core function of leadership in every organization to generate both optimism or hope and creative dissatisfaction.
• How Patent Trolls Kill Innovation – Reason TV from Reason TV. See more links of interest on the new deadly diseases of excessive executive pay and the broken copyright and patent systems.
• Leadership, Culture and the Situation of Marissa Mayer by David Kasprzak – “Mayer is attempting to benchmark against other organizations and believes that worked over there will also work at Yahoo. That’s a bit short-sighted, however, it’s also the exact same dynamic being offered by her critics – finding the best case example of a situation just like your preferred alternative, and then using that as evidence that the alternative is the right one.”
• Podcast Discussion on Management Matters, John Hunter – In this podcast I discuss the importance of viewing the organization as a system made up of people to increase the effectiveness of the organization, today and into the future.