Karl Scotland is hosting the 176th Management Improvement Carnival. Highlights include:

• One set of posts that caught my eye was on Agile Fluency. The original post by James Shore and Diana Larsen proposes “a model of Agile fluency that will help you achieve Agile’s benefits. Fluency evolves through four distinct stages, each with its own benefits, costs of adoption, and key metrics”. Dave Nicolette responded that “the gist of the article appears to be that we can effect organizational improvement in a large company by driving change from the level of individual software development teams…
• No, Really: We Don’t Do Forced Ranking and Performance Reviews

The Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog Carnival has been published since 2006. We find great management blog posts and share them with you 3 times a month. We hope you find these post interesting and find some new blogs to start reading. Follow me online: Google+, Twitter, Reddit, and more.

• Reflections on My (Brief) Time with Dr. Deming by Mike Stoecklein – “He was harsh and stern with senior management at the seminars – wanting to shake them into the realization of what their jobs were and that they were not currently doing it. He was sparing with the use of the word ‘leader’. However, he was always very kind and patient one-on-one.”
• Beyond the Kanban Board: An Executive’s Work Visualization by Simon Marcus – “My goals in this approach include minimizing the likelihood that I will be a bottleneck, allowing great ideas to surface from wherever they surface and feeling comfortable with a lot of things happening around me because I know our teams know how to execute.”
• Ford Gets It – Do You? by Bill Waddell – “The heart and soul of Toyota’s success was SMED – flexibility – the ability to make lots of things in one factory without losing too much capacity in the process.”
• What to look for on a gemba walk? by Michel Baudin – “Following the flow. Pretending you are a work piece and following the process backwards from the end to the beginning, noting where and how many times it waits for transportation or processing, how operators perceive upstream and downstream colleagues, the tools, fixtures and storage devices used at each operation.”

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The Curious Cat management carnival is published 3 times a month highlighting some recent management blog posts. The posts generally focus on the areas I have focused on in the Curious Cat Management Improvement Guide since 1996.

I added a page on our blog showing the most recent blog post from a large number of management blogs.

• Software Inventory by Joel Spolsky – “Trello works great for a reasonable amount of inventory, but it intentionally starts to get klunky if you have too many cards in one list. And that’s exactly the point: it makes inventory visible so that you know when it’s starting to pile up.” (I use Trello, and like it, at Hexawise where I am a consultant – John)
• You don’t “do Lean” by Paul Levy – “Lean is not a program. It is a long-term philosophy of corporate leadership and organization that is based, above all, on respect shown to front-line staff.”
• Queueing Theory at Chipotle by Evan Durant – “I like Chipotle for several reasons, not the least of which is the fact that they have hands-down the greatest food service process in the industry. I could talk about standard work, flow, material replenishment, customer focus, and a whole bunch of other lean stuff”
• Microsoft’s Downfall: Inside the Executive E-mails and Cannibalistic Culture That Felled a Tech Giant – “‘Every current and former Microsoft employee I interviewed—every one—cited stack ranking as the most destructive process inside of Microsoft, something that drove out untold numbers of employees,’ Eichenwald writes… ‘It leads to employees focusing on competing with each other rather than competing with other companies.'” [This is exactly what Dr. Deming said would happen and even the current head of HR that lead this process said she was going to get rid of it when she started at Microsoft – John]

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