Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog Carnival #194

Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog Carnival #194:
The Curious Cat Management Improvement 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 John Hunter online: Google+, Twitter and elsewhere.

• Define Your Organization’s Habits to Work More Efficiently by Brad Power – We need to do away with the notion that standards necessarily mean rigidity. Rather, standard work can help people do their jobs consistently and reliably, and improve how they do it… he traditional view that efficiency requires bureaucracy and that bureaucracy impedes flexibility should be replaced with a new model: clever application of standard work allows you to have efficiency and flexibility.
• Forget passion, focus on process by Matt Linderman – “Find meaning in what you’re doing. Work to improve your industry. Get joy from making a customer’s day. Surround yourself with the kinds of people and environment that keep you engaged. Figure out the details and day-to-day process that keep you stimulated. Focus on how you execute and making continual improvements.”
The Family, a sculpture by David Green. Photo by John Hunter during trip to Los Angels.
• Effective Communication is Explicit by John Hunter – “Making communication explicit and obvious, so that everyone that needs to know, does, will reduce problems and reduce the damage the problems that were not eliminated cause.”
• Whey Too Much: Greek Yogurt’s Dark Side by Justin Elliott – This post discusses the system problem (waste whey). I also like how it shows academics helping to find solutions for business, again showing how professors can be part of the business process improvement when playing a role of innovators, experimenters to find solutions for the system.
• “Respect for People” and “The Design of the System” by Larry Miller – “As a manager or leader you are a ‘systems engineer.’ You are responsible for the design of the technical and social systems of your organization. Here are just a few ways you can design respect for people into your organization’s system…”
• Agile and Sales: Reflections on my first Scrum Sales Team by Eric Kristfelt – “One challenge we faced was determining how to set-up our teams. Typically, sales professionals are viewed as individual contributors and not part of a team. We found that management had more challenges moving to a team approach than the sales professionals.”
• Houshin Advice by Art Smalley – “The Houshin needs to be cascaded to all levels and parts of the company and this is not as easy as it sounds. It is not simply a communication exercise. For each level and department of the company actual thought has to go into how do we support the Houshin, what are our actions, how will we measure and review them etc.”
• Can you afford not to limit work in progress? by Julia Wester – “What is truly important is finishing things so value can be delivered. So much time is wasted and so much value lost by splitting focus — starting new work. When work is started it should be carried through to completion and not interrupted. When interruptions happen, in thought work especially, we incur time costs due to context switching.”
• Behave! by Mike Stoecklein – “If we want better behaviors, then we need to think about systems and try to redesign them. It’s that simple, and that complex.”
• Executive Leadership by John Hunter – “When the senior executives are not leading improvement of the management system they inevitably undermine the efforts of others because they don’t understand the impact of their actions.”

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