Tag Archives: Innovation

New Deadly Diseases

Posted on August 29, 2012 by John Hunter

Management and the economy keep evolving. Many good things happen. In the last decade the best things are probably the increased deep adoption of lean thinking in many organizations and the adoption of lean and Deming methods in software development (agile software development, kanban and lean startup [which I do realize isn’t limited to software development]). Sadly all the deadly diseases Dr. Deming described remain. And, as I said in 2007, I think 2 new diseases have become so widespread … Continue reading →

Posted in Creativity, Deming, Economics, Innovation, Lean thinking, Management, quote, Systems thinking | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 12 Comments

You’ve Got to Find What You Love

Posted on October 5, 2011 by John Hunter

Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years … Continue reading →

Posted in Creativity, Deming, Education, Fun, Innovation, Psychology, quote | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | 9 Comments

The Need to Improve Management While Building Organizations Fit For Human Beings

Posted on September 29, 2011 by John Hunter

[embedded video link broken, so that code was removed but you can watch the video by following this link: Gary Hamel: Reinventing the Technology of Human Accomplishment. I agree with Gary Hamel that we need to adopt new management strategies. I happen to believe most of new strategies we need to adopt have been known for decades, we just fail to implement many of them. He argues it is hard to retain knowledge advantages (within companies). I agree. However execution … Continue reading →

Posted in Competition, Deming, Innovation, Management, Respect, Toyota Production System (TPS) | Tagged , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Innovation in Thinking and the Web

Posted on March 29, 2011 by John Hunter

Investing time and effort to attract “the right kind” of contributors to a news site He thought we needed to make the same shift with our users – instead of seeing having to engage with them digitally as a time-consuming and resource eating problem, we should be seeing our audience as an asset to the brand. Any online organisation that doesn’t include readers in the production chain is inherently inefficient. I agree. And I think this is a good example … Continue reading →

Posted in Customer focus, Deming, IT, Management, Process improvement | Tagged , , , ,

Customer Focus and Internet Travel Search

Posted on March 24, 2011 by John Hunter

The internet should make finding airline flight information easy. Instead it is a huge pain. Hipmunk has taken on the challenge of doing this well, and I think they have done a great job. This video provides an excellent view of both web usability and customer focus. This is a great example of focusing on providing customer value and using technology to make things easy – which is done far to little at most companies. Related: Innovation Example (Farecast – … Continue reading →

Posted in Creativity, Customer focus, Innovation, IT, Management, Process improvement | Tagged , , , , , , , | 4 Comments

Learn by Seeking Knowledge – Not Just from Mistakes

Posted on March 7, 2011 by John Hunter

Being open to new ideas and new knowledge is what is needed to learn. Experimenting, seeking out new knowledge is even better. You can be successful and see an even better way to do things and learn from it. This seems the best way to learn to me – not to just learn from mistakes. Of course this means your goal has to be improvement not just avoiding more mistakes than before. Your actions are based on theories (often unconsciously): … Continue reading →

Posted in Career, Creativity, Deming, Innovation, Process improvement, Psychology, Systems thinking | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | 6 Comments

Is Google Failing Too Often?

Posted on January 11, 2011 by John Hunter

I think Google is extremely successful, but they do seem to consistently have problems adding to their portfolio. They did a great job with gmail. Android has been very successful. Google Maps is great. They did well building YouTube. Chrome is very nice. Automatic translation is very nice (as is the integration with Chrome). But so many things just don’t go anywhere. I can’t understand why they can’t take something like Google checkout and make it much more successful (there … Continue reading →

Posted in Google, Management, Software Development, Systems thinking | Tagged , , , , , , , | 5 Comments

Airport Security with Lean Management Principles

Posted on November 16, 2010 by John Hunter

The ‘Israelification’ of airports: High security, little bother [the broken link was removed] We [Israel] said, ‘We’re not going to do this. You’re going to find a way that will take care of security without touching the efficiency of the airport.” … “The whole time, they are looking into your eyes — which is very embarrassing. But this is one of the ways they figure out if you are suspicious or not. It takes 20, 25 seconds,” said Sela. Lines … Continue reading →

Posted in Creativity, Customer focus, Deming, Lean thinking, Psychology, Respect | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

A Theory of a System for Educators and Managers

Posted on October 25, 2010 by John Hunter

Excerpts from The Deming Library Volume XXI, Dr. W. Edwards Deming, Dr. Russell Ackoff and David Langford demonstrate that educators can begin a quality transformation by developing an understanding of the properties and powers of systems-oriented thinking. You can order the entire video, as well as the rest of The Deming Library. Great stuff! If you enjoy this blog (the Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog), you definitely should watch this webcast. This video has some great insight into education, learning … Continue reading →

Posted in Creativity, Deming, Education, Management, quote, Systems thinking, webcast | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | 7 Comments

Why Don’t Football Players Just Thrown the Ball Out of Bounds to Stop the Clock

Posted on October 24, 2010 by John Hunter

I have never understood why players don’t lateral the ball out of bounds to stop the clock in pro or college football in the USA. If time is running out and the player is tackled in bounds the clock keeps running and time can expire. You can stop the clock by running out of bounds. Also if the ball goes out of bounds the clock is stopped. I figured maybe there was some rule against just throwing the ball out … Continue reading →

Posted in Creativity, Innovation | Tagged , , , | 4 Comments

Change How Your Business Changes

Posted on September 13, 2010 by John Hunter

[They seem to have broken the webcast so I have delete it. How sad it is how poor a job well financed organizations to at maintaining what they put online.] John Kotter believes technology and globalization are requiring us to change more rapidly. “It is very difficult to innovate without requiring people to do something different.” If an organization culture is mainly avoiding making anyone uncomfortable, innovation and improvement are quite difficult. Improvement is required to stay in business today. … Continue reading →

Posted in Creativity, Innovation | Tagged , ,

Frugal Innovation

Posted on June 9, 2010 by John Hunter

First break all the rules The device is a masterpiece of simplification. The multiple buttons on conventional ECGs have been reduced to just four. The bulky printer has been replaced by one of those tiny gadgets used in portable ticket machines. The whole thing is small enough to fit into a small backpack and can run on batteries as well as on the mains. This miracle of compression sells for $800, instead of $2,000 for a conventional ECG … Frugal … Continue reading →

Posted in Creativity, India, Innovation, quote | Tagged , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Observations of a New Googler

Posted on February 6, 2010 by John Hunter

Some interesting thoughts from a new Google engineer, Things I’ve learned at Google so far I would describe Google’s culture as “creative chaos”. There was some confusion about where I was supposed to be when I started. This resulted in the following phone call, “Hello?”, “Hello Ben, this is Conner (that’s my new manager), where are you?” “Mountain View.” “Why are you there?” “Because this is where the recruiter said to go.” “Good answer! Nice of them to tell me. … Continue reading →

Posted in Creativity, Google, Innovation, IT, Management, Software Development | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

Hospital Providing Better Health Care While Reducing Costs

Posted on January 19, 2010 by John Hunter

Business Week has a good article on the strides one hospital has been able to make at reducing costs and improving quality. Hospitals: Radical Cost Surgery [the broken link was removed] Walk into Providence Regional Medical Center, in Everett, Wash., and you will see a hospital trying something different: It brings the equipment to the patient. In 2003, Providence opened one of the few “single stay” wards in the nation. After heart surgery, cardiac patients remain in one room throughout … Continue reading →

Posted in Creativity, Health care, Innovation, Management | Tagged , , ,

An Introduction to Deming’s Management Ideas by Peter Scholtes (webcast)

Posted on September 14, 2009 by John Hunter

An Introduction to Deming’s Management Teaching and Philosophy by Peter Scholtes – webcast from the Annual W. Edwards Deming Institute conference in Madison, Wisconsin, November 9th, 2008. My previous post on this speech: 6 Leadership Competencies. Next month, the Annual Deming Institute conference will be held at Purdue on Oct 10th, 2009. Related: Peter Scholtes’ Life – Curious Cat’s Deming on Management – The Leader’s Handbook – Performance without Appraisal

Posted in Creativity, curiouscat.com, Deming, Education, Innovation, Lean thinking, Management, Performance Appraisal, Popular, Process improvement, Psychology, quote, Respect, Science, Systems thinking, webcast | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | 4 Comments

Blame the Road – Not the Person

Posted on August 19, 2009 by John Hunter

The system is responsible for 90, 92, 94, 97% of problems – W. Edwards Deming. Fix the system, don’t blame the people. When you seek system fixes you approach situations differently than if you search for people to blame. By the way, I am often asked about the data supporting Deming’s contention that the system was responsible for 97% of the problems. This statement was not based on a set of data but on Dr. Deming’s decades of experience. And … Continue reading →

Posted in Creativity, Data, Deming, Economics, Health care, Management, Systems thinking | Tagged , , , , , , | 5 Comments