Management Improvement Carnival #198

The Curious Cat Management Improvement Carnival has been published since 2006. The carnival, has been published twice a month – but will now be published once or twice a month depending on how things work out. I hope you find the post included in this edition interesting and find some new blogs to add to your blog/RSS reader. Follow John Hunter online: Google+, Twitter and elsewhere.

• Observations From A Tipless Restaurant by Jay Porter – “Our ability to make sure team members in all parts of the house were taken care of, and to remove tip-related squabbling from our business, gave us a huge competitive advantage in the marketplace; this in turn allowed us to serve a much higher quality of food and take lower margins on it.”
• An open letter to Jeff Bezos: A contract worker’s take on Amazon.com by Steve Barker – “As experienced temps left and new ones rolled in, the breakdown began. Temps who had not paid attention in training were now training new temps. Different temps were teaching different techniques and it wasn’t long before the quality of work suffered. As witness to the poor quality, I made a few attempts to express my concerns, but none of my suggestions were implemented. When one of the higher-ups checked our work and realized that mistakes were being overlooked, performance scorecards were implemented.”
• Change has to Start from the Top – webcast, included here, with David Langford: “You are the top of your system. Change your thinking, change your process – you change your system. As soon as you start to modify your system you are going to have an effect on the larger system: the way you organize, the way you manage what you do everyday, how you process the work that you are doing [will impact the larger system].”
• No filter: the meanest thing Paul Graham said to a startup – “the vast majority of teams have the opposite problem: people filter their thoughts too much. The psychological and social incentives to do so are quite strong: we don’t want to go against the team, or we’re worried about giving offense, or we don’t want to be ‘the bad guy’… And that has a corrosive effect on culture.” [I agree – “I wish more people objected to bad ideas instead of just letting them go because they were afraid of being seen as negative.” – John]
• 5 Ways to Make Your Employees Happy At Work by Tim McMahon – “Whether on the widget-line or in the executive suite, every employee feels happier knowing that their hard work benefits not just the business but the larger world.”
• Kanban – The Anti-SAFe For Almost A Decade Already – “Kanban is about installing an adaptive capability in your organization, about taking a management led approach to cultural change. Every knowledge worker is a manager. They manage work and make decisions that affect the performance of the business that they are part of.”
• Visual management as embedded into other tools by Michel Baudin – “visual management should be part of everything else we do”
• Victory Lap for Ask Patents by Joel Spolsky – “The number of actually novel, non-obvious inventions in the software industry that maybe, in some universe, deserve a government-granted monopoly is, perhaps, two.

  The other 40,000-odd software patents issued every year are mostly garbage that any working programmer could “invent” three times before breakfast. Most issued software patents aren’t “inventions” as most people understand that word. They’re just things that any first-year student learning Java should be able to do as a homework assignment in two hours.”

• Standard Work for Astronauts by Jon Miller – “The purpose of establishing daily routines as standard work is not only to make sure that all necessary tasks are done in line with the mission, but to make abnormal conditions immediately obvious. When the daily standard work cannot be performed within the standard time, something is wrong and corrective action is taken. Standard work must be paired with kaizen in order to be effective.”
• Design of Experiments: The Process of Discovery is Iterative – George Box: “Always remember the process of discovery is iterative. The results of each stage of investigation generating new questions to answered during the next.”