Tag Archives: Carnival

Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog Ranking

I created a ranking of top management improvement blogs for fun. There is no way to objectively rate blogs by how worthy or valuable they are. I just wanted to create a listing that ranked blogs I thought were worth reading using a collection of metrics that I think have some merit (even if that merit is fairly limited).

Here are the top 10 as of now (it will change over time):

The most important factor is my selection of what blogs to include in the first place. Then I rank them using several other factors: link popularity (how many links to the sites, with more authoritative links carrying more weight), a subjective ranking by me, traffic (using an admittedly pretty flawed measure of traffic – but again this is just for fun so…), Twitter authority of the author, domain authority (based on links, not just to the blog, but the web site overall).

I have also created a ranking for personal travel blogs, leadership blogs and will add a few more.

I hope you enjoy the ranking and really hope you find a few new blogs you benefit from reading. There are quite a few interesting management improvement blogs, though honestly there are many fewer good posts than there were 5 years ago. Most of the best active blogs from 6 or 7 years ago are either much much less active today or are gone altogether. But even so there are still quite a few valuable blogs for managers to read.

6th Annual Curious Cat Management Blog Review

Each of the participants post reviews of several blogs on their blog. Links to all the 2013 Management Blog Review posts are listed below, ordered by the number of years each author has participated in the annual review.

2013 Hosts	Years	Blog reviews
Evolving Excellence	6	Timeback, Matthew May, HBR: Brad Power
Lean Reflections	5	Deming Institute blog, MIX
TimeBack Management	5	Michel Baudin, Manufacturing Leadership Center, The Lean Thinker
QAspire	4	Squawk Point, Jesse Lyn Stoner, Jamie Flinchbaugh
A Lean Journey	3	Beyond Lean, Lean Pathways, Old Lean Dude
Beyond Lean	3	Lean Blitz, Personal Kanban
Lessons in Lean	2	Gemba Panta Rei, The Drucker Exchange
encob blog	2	Lean Post, Gemba Coach
Michel Baudin	2	The Lean Edge
Lean Blitz	1	Lean Blog, Karen Martin, Quality and Innovation, Let’s Talk About Quality

Only 3 blogs have been reviewed in all 6 years: Evolving Excellence, Gemba Panta Rei and Timeback Management.

Management Improvement Carnival #200

The Curious Cat Management Improvement Carnival has been published since 2006 and this is the 200th edition. 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 (17 years now, which I find pretty amazing): Deming, lean thinking, leadership, innovation, respect for people, customer focus, etc..

Eiji Toyoda – the Master Innovator by Bill Waddell – “He was a master innovator in the days when innovation wasn’t cool, and his focus was not so much on the product as it was on the processes – on management.”
The Man Who Saved Kaizen by Jon Miller – “Eiji Toyoda led from the front. His message to leaders within Toyota: ‘I want you to use your own heads. And I want you actively to train your people on how to think for themselves.'”

photo of Bill and John Hunter balancing on a log on a beach in Malaysia

Dad, Bill Hunter and me in Malaysia.

The consumer is the most important point on the production-line by John Hunter – “The continued view of the organization as a hierarchical pyramid of authority and responsibility hides the connection of the customer/user to the processes in our organizations.”
Lean IT at Toyota by Pierre Masai – “educate yourself on the subject, since so many stories of dramatic or step-by-step improvements do exist out there. Then, soon after, experiment yourself. This is the basis of TPS. Make sure you also get enthusiastic people on board, and take the support of experienced external coaches if you need this to get started. Create a culture within your company where the principles of lean become embedded in everything you do.”

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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]

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Management Improvement Blog Carnival #190

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, evidence based management, systems thinking, respect for people, applied statistics, etc..

photo of George Box, John Hunter and Peter Scholtes

photo of (from right to left) Peter Scholtes, John Hunter and George Box in Madison, Wisconsin at the 2008 Deming Conference

George Box (1919 to 2013) by John Hunter – George Box was a very kind, smart, caring and fun person. He was a gifted storyteller and writer. He was also one of the most important statisticians of the last 100 years. He had the ability to present ideas so they were easy to comprehend and appreciate…
George Box: A remembrance by Bradley Jones – “His greatest contribution to my life was the wonderful book, Statistics for Experimenters, which he wrote with William G. Hunter and Stu Hunter and published in 1978, the same year he served as president of the American Statistical Association. I remember the excitement I felt on reading the description of how the attainment of knowledge is an endless spiral proceeding alternately from deduction to induction and back. Even now, I recall with pleasure the discussion of the randomization distribution early in the book.”
Getting Started with Factorial Design of Experiments by Eston Martz – “When I talk to quality professionals about how they use statistics, one tool they mention again and again is design of experiments, or DOE. I’d never even heard the term before I started getting involved in quality improvement efforts, but now that I’ve learned how it works, I wonder why I didn’t learn about it sooner. If you need to find out how several factors are affecting a process outcome, DOE is the way to go.”
Brian Joiner Podcast on Management, Sustainability and the Health Care System – Recently Brian has shifted his focus to the health care system (while maintaining a focus on quality principles and sustainability). “Our health care system is an economic tsunami that is about to overwhelm us if we don’t do something very significant, very soon.”

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Curious Cat 5th Annual Management Blog Review – Part 2 of 2

The 5th annual Curious Cat Management Blog Review has been completed.

This year, 15 blogs (a record) reviewed a total of 39 management blogs (not a record, in 2010 44 were reviewed).

4 blogs have been reviewed every year: Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog, Evolving Excellence, Gemba Panta Rei (all of which were reviewed by Ron Pereira on Lean Six Sigma Academy in 2008) and Timeback Management which was reviewed by me here on the Curious Cat Management Improvement blog. 2008, and this year, are the years that prevented several others from recording 5 year appearances. Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog and Evolving Excellence are the only 2 blogs to have hosted a review every year.

Here are links to the those reviews that have been posted since part 1 (with the number of years each author has participated in the annual review).

Years	Author of blog	Blogs reviewed
5	John Hunter, Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog	Gemba Walkabout and Not Running a Hospital
4	Karen Wilhelm, Lean Reflections	Michel Baudin and Square Peg Musings
3	Mark Hamel, Gemba Tales	Shmula
2	Nicole Radziwill, Quality and Innovation	Business 901, Design Thinking, Peter Bregman and Stats Made Easy
2	Joe Dager, Business 901	Beyond Lean and Knowledge Jolt with Jack
1	Scott Rutherford, Square Peg Musings	Lean Pathways, Quality and Innovation and Squawk Point
1	Gregg Stocker, Lessons in Lean	Steven Spear

Follow the management carnival all year with twice monthly highlight of management blog posts.

See annual review posts for 2011 – 2010 – 2009 – 2008

Curious Cat 5th Annual Management Blog Review – Part 1

This is the 5th year in which multiple management blogs have participated in reviewing the year in management blogging. Once again we have many great blogs reviewed. Each year a few blog authors stop, or nearly stop publishing, but each year more great new management blogs start.

Here are links to the reviews that have been posted so far with the number of years each author has participated in the annual review.

Years	Author of blog	blogs reviewed
5	Kevin Meyer, Evolving Excellence	Edit Innovation and TimeBack Management
4	Dan Markovitz, TimeBack Management	Evolving Excellence and Brad Power on HBR blog
3	Tanmay Vora, QAspire	HR Bartender, Jamie Flinchbaugh and Seth Godin
3	Mark Hamel, Gemba Tales	Old Lean Dude
2	Tim McMahon, A Lean Journey	Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog, encob blog and Kaizen Notebook
2	Matt Wrye, Beyond Lean	Lean Blitz and My Flexible Pencil
1	Michel Baudin	Gemba Panta Rei, Lean Edge and Lean Reflections
1	Evan Durant, Kaizen Notebook	Gemba Tales and Gotta Go Lean
1	Dragan Bosnjak, encob blog	Gemba Coach and The Lean Edge
1	Scott Rutherford, Square Peg Musings	Fridge Magnets

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Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog Carnival #174

The Curious Cat management blog carnival is published 3 times a month with hand picked recent management blog posts. I also collect management improvement articles for the Curious Cat Management Articles site; an RSS feed of new article additions is available.

How to Identify Your Team or Organization’s Purpose by Jesse Lyn Stoner – “What is the end-result that you offer? Look at your purpose from the viewpoint of the result, not the products or services you offer.”
What we can learn from Russell L. Ackoff by Aleksis Tulonen – “If you want to (dis)solve the problem you need to understand how (dis)solving the problem will affect the system and what the problem really is. Gathering the mental constructs of several people with different mindsets will gain you more understanding of what you are dealing with.”

photo of White House Rose Garden with Oval Office in the background

White House Rose Garden, Washington DC. By John Hunter. See more photos from Washington DC.

Why smart managers do stupid things by John Stepper – “What You See Is All There Is. Over and over, he demonstrates how people systematically disregard basic probability and other facts in order to (quickly and easily) make up a story that fits with the things they see.”
Downtime Antipatterns for SaaS owners, ZipCar edition – “Use an automated system to point DNS entries to a ‘sorry, we’re down, please see http://status.zipcar.com’ page running on a commodity VPS in a completely different datacenter. Provide useful information to the customer RIGHT AWAY, and don’t leave them wondering why the page isn’t loading.”
Espoused Vs. In-Use by Anthony DaSilva – “From over 10,000 empirical cases collected over decades of study, Mr. Argyris has discovered that most people (at all levels in an org) espouse Model II guidance while their daily theory in-use is driven by Model I.”

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Management Improvement Blog Carnival #157

Maximize Test Coverage Efficiency And Minimize the Number of Tests Needed by John Hunter – “The steeper the slope the more efficient your test plan is. If you repeat the same tests of pairs and triples and… while not taking advantage of the chance to test, untested pairs and triples you will have to create and run far more test than if you intelligently create a test plan.”
Listen to Your Community, But Don’t Let Them Tell You What to Do by Jeff Atwood – “Community feedback is great, but it should never be used as a crutch, a substitute for thinking deeply about what you’re building and why. Always try to identify what the underlying needs are, and come up with a sensible roadmap.”
You must balance the principle of ‘build to takt’ with the principle of ‘heijunka,’ and the principle of ‘respect for people.’ by Jeff Liker – “By keeping some planned inventory, and using it in the right way, you can achieve a more leveled schedule, heijunka, which in the early TPS models was the foundation of TPS. Building to takt, pull, balancing the workload, and protecting the jobs of team members is not possible without heijunka.”

Toyota University Lean Video – This video shows one of the lean training simulations developed by the experts at Toyota. As you can see, the game uses toy car manufacturing (what a surprise!) to illustrate pull production.
The Apple Voice by Zach Holman – “Mechanically, The Apple Voice is characterized by short, declarative sentences that are informally and personally delivered to you with a hint of smugness.
Our most amazing iPhone yet. 10,000 songs in your pocket. We think you’ll like it.

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