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.”

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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, lean manufacturing, customer focus, leadership, systems thinking, respect for people, etc..

• We Need to Understand Variation to Manage Effectively by Mike Stoecklein – “I believe that much of what I see and hear these days related to lean and lean thinking can be traced back to Dr. Deming, his teachings and the system of profound knowledge – with one exception. I rarely hear anything about ‘understanding variation’.”
• Lean Leadership Lessons from Costco Wholesale by Jon Miller – “1) Obey the law 2) Take care of our members 3) Take care of our employees 4) Respect our vendors 5) Reward our shareholders. If we do these four things throughout our organization, then we will realize our ultimate goal, which is to reward our shareholders.”


Penguins marching on a beach in South Africa by Justin Hunter.

• Employees leave managers, not companies [link broken :-(] by Alaister Low – “The key to being able to keep the good employees is not so much the salary you offer them or even the actual work, it is more about how you manage them and how they feel working under you as their manager. Do they feel valued within your team?…”
• 10 Penalties That I Would Call if I Were a Management Referee by Dan McCarthy – “1. Employee pass interference: Otherwise known as micromanagement, this penalty is for getting in the way of an employee or team of employees that know how to do the job better than the manager. 2. Illegal use of meetings: A meeting with no agenda, no apparent purpose, no process facilitation, little or no collaboration, and no meaningful decisions or action items…”

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The Curious Cat management blog carnival began in 2006 and it is published twice a month. I also publish a collection management improvement articles on the Curious Cat Management Articles site.

Posts #184 and #185 were summaries of the progress of the 5th annual Curious Cat Management Carnival roundup.

• We agree… but only because we don’t understand each other by Jason Yip – “By making our understanding explicit, we can highlight our disagreements and come to a resolution and real agreement.”
• This is a little story about how I learned the right way to manage people (on my first job, age 14) by Woody Zuill – “Lesson Two: Continuous Improvement. Mr. Smith: ‘However, another part of the job is for you to think about what you are doing, and look for better ways to do things. Keep track of your hours, and next Saturday when I pay you for the week I want you to tell me one way to do things better. Look for problems, and think about how we could deal with them.'”


Dragonfly, at the Banteay Srei temple in Cambodia, by John Hunter

• Here’s what I learned hanging out with Jason Fried by Dan Shipper – “When a lot of people think of marketing or sales they think of tricks that fool people into buying something. But great marketing doesn’t do that. Great marketing comes from understanding exactly what the customer needs on an emotional level, and showing how your product will satisfy those needs.”
• User Gemba by John Hunter – “It isn’t enough to know how you intend that customers will use your products or services; you have to get out to the gemba of actual customer use and learn what problems your customers use your products to solve.”

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