The management blog carnival is published 3 times a month with select recent management blog posts. Also try our collected management articles and blogs posts at: Curious Cat Management articles.

• When to coach the process, and when to coach the solution by Jamie Flinchbaugh – “Your focus is not on the solution or the problem itself, but on the process that either created or missed the problem that would end up enabling future problems. Obviously you might end up doing both, but that is a larger investment of your time.”
• Hitting a WIP Limit by “Such a simple thing, but now instead of increasing the number of spinning plates, we’re putting energy into moving the current work faster, which I suspect is going to be more satisfying for developers too.” by Andrew Walker
• The Importance of the Daily Meeting by Kevin Meyer – “Traditional organizations wait a week or two between staff meetings to discuss issues, and by the time the meeting rolls around many subtle issues have been forgotten.”
• Does the “Deming Connection” have a down side? – “Most companies pour money into sales and marketing to lure new customers while giving their existing ones short shrift, in an effort to minimize costs and maximize revenue.”
• We’ve got leaders. What we need is leadership by Wally Bock – “Your challenge is to accomplish the mission and care for your people. That will only happen if you do leadership work, management work, and supervision work.”
• Evidence-Based Study Tips: Nine Ways To Help You Learn by Bob Sutton – “Adopt a growth mindset: This might be the most important of all; as Carol Dweck’s wonderful research shows, when people believe that their intelligence and abilities are malleable rather than fixed, they try harder of learn more”

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Kevin Meyer hosts the Management Improvement Carnival #108 on his blog, highlights include:

• Gemba Tales: Developing Leader Standard Work – Five Important Steps – key components of leader standard work.
• Flinchbaugh: Small-i ROI as Applied to Strategy – Sometimes instead of focusing on the big R in ROI, it can pay to find a unique niche requiring just a small i.
• Lean Blog: Mental Models: Standardized Work and Performance Measures – Standard work and performance measures mean different things in a traditional command and control organization versus a lean organization.

Related: Lean Daily – Management Improvement Carnival #93 – Management Improvement Carnival #44

The Curious Cat management blog carnival selects recent management blog posts 3 times each month. Since 2006 the carnival has focused on finding interesting posts for managers on improving the performance of organizations (lean manufacturing, Deming, agile software development, six sigma, customer focus, innovation…).

• “To find out what happens when you change something, it is necessary to change it.” by Andrew Gelman – “From the classic Box, Hunter, and Hunter book. The point of the saying is pretty clear, I think: There are things you learn from perturbing a system that you’ll never find out from any amount of passive observation.”
• Lean and Six Sigma: PDCA and DMAIC Comparison by Pete Abilla – “A big difference between PDCA and DMAIC is the corporate infrastructure required. Six Sigma and the DMAIC methodology in which its work is carried out, requires a steering committee, tollgates, a champion, and a project sponsor.”
• That’s the trouble with targets by Glyn Lumley – “That’s the trouble with targets. The whole mindset is wrong. It’s as if quality is seen as something that should be achieved – an outcome, a result. Meet the target and everything is fine; miss the target and you’re doomed!”
• The question every manager should be able to answer – “What does success and excellence look like for me in this role?”
• Podcast #97 – Bob Sutton, PhD, “Good Boss, Bad Boss” by Mark Graban
• MBA Case Studies Teach the Wrong Things – “The truth is that the corporate ecosystem is enormously complex. Presenting a simplified view of that ecosystem may seem to make pedagogical sense, but it leads to the false belief that problems are easily understood, that there is one “right” answer, and that there’s no need for experimentation. And that’s a tremendous disservice to future business leaders.”
• Feedback is the Key! by Matt Stine – “Perhaps the most important feedback loop of all is team to client. You can have a well-oiled machine of a development team writing the highest quality code in the industry, but if it doesn’t deliver value to your customer, it’s absolutely worthless!”
• Five Critical Success Factors for Project Managers by Sonja Hughes – “If management support is missing, people and funding resources may not be available for the project…. Lack of management support is a major reason for project failures.”
• Idea Deficit Disorder – Stopping the Epidemic by Wally Bock – “Remember human nature. Human beings are natural idea generators. At work they usually have plenty of ideas. They don’t share them because most of their bosses didn’t want to hear new ideas.”

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Jon Miller hosts the Management Improvement Carnival #106 on his blog, highlights include:

• 3 Observations of Healthcare vs. Construction by Mike Lombard. Lombi gives us his fresh view on the differences between construction businesses and healthcare organizations, two months after moving to a healthcare lean leader position. Culture is all about people and how they look at the world. I’m looking forward to more observations from Lombi on the culture in healthcare as he continues to explore and support process improvement.
• 10 Tips for Re-energizing Your Day, Every Day by Matthew May. This article is full of everyday wisdom on keeping our energy level high. These practices and habits are so easy to pick up yet so easy to drop during our busiest days. Thanks Matt for bringing these back to the front of our minds. Have you taken a few deep breaths today?
• How to Design Poor Service – Expect 100% Utilization of People or Resources by Mark Graban. Mark gives us a primer on how to show customers you hate them by making sure you optimize one performance metric at the expense of others. It’s a fine object lesson in reverse. It sounds like American Airlines could benefit from a bit from some valid metrics…

Related: Management and Leadership Quotes – Management Improvement Carnival #83 – Management Improvement Carnival #72