Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog Carnival: Annual Roundup 2013, Part 3

John Hunter, the maestro of the Curious Cat Management Improvement blog and the year-end Management Improvement Carnival has once again allowed me to contribute a list of some of my favorite blogs and posts from 2013. I never miss reading these three blogs—they consistently educate, enlighten, and entertain me.

I reviewed Michel Baudin's epnonymous blog here and Mark Rosenthal's Lean Thinker blog here. For my final review, I've selected Bill Waddell's Manufacturing Leadership Center.

Full confession: I’m totally, utterly, and completely jealous of Bill Waddell. He’s smarter than me. He’s opinionated and passionate. He’s forgotten more about lean and manufacturing than I’ll ever know. He actually understands accounting. (I got a 29 out of 120 on my accounting mid-term. How I passed is beyond me.) But mostly, I’m pissed because he’s ten times as funny as me, and a hundred times more entertaining. My goal in 2014 is to bribe him to write my blog for me. Until that time, I’ll have to suffer the indignity of writing in the same blogosphere as Bill, so you should check out some of these posts that I envied loved.

Both of us wrote about the pathetic case of the Harvard business school professor who has dedicated the past several years to trying to prove that, in spite of the success enjoyed by companies like Toyota, Lantech, and Autoliv, workers actually do better when they’re hidden from their managers. So much for respect for people. Read Bill’s acid comments here. (And mine here!)

Bill is never shy about calling bullshit when he sees it, whether it’s from ivory-tower academics or from executives who have nothing better to do than create silos and fragment responsibility. He eviscerates both the “Chief Customer Officer” management fad, and the CEO who claims that you’re dead when your sales team works for the customer. He’s equally adept at the nuts and bolts of lean implementation—check out his argument that SKU reduction, while valuable, is not the same as a comprehensive lean initiative—and can in fact be a step backwards. Most of all, when you read Bill’s column, you get a passionate, articulate, and powerful defense of the principle of respect for people. Take a look at “Right Church, Wrong Pew” and “Respect for People Begins at the Hiring Office. . . Or Not” to see how to make a powerful, unabashed argument in support of this principle.

You may not agree with everything that Bill writes, but he'll always make you think (if only to wonder how he can read so damn much and still find time for his day job).

Check out the other year-end blog reviews on the Curious Cat website here. Or browse the entire blog review category here.

Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog Carnival: Annual Roundup 2013, Part 2

John Hunter, the maestro of the Curious Cat Management Improvement blog and the year-end Management Improvement Carnival has once again allowed me to contribute a list of some of my favorite blogs and posts from 2013. I never miss reading these three blogs—they consistently educate, enlighten, and entertain me. Earlier, I reviewed Michel Baudin's epnonymous blog. Today, I've selected Mark Rosenthal's Lean Thinker blog.

Mark Rosenthal’s occasional posts come straight from the shop floor. When you read his blog, you feel like you’ve been transported right to the action in the production line. That’s where he spends his time, and that’s the spawning ground for his ideas and reflections.

He describes the absurdity of the 20-page “lean audit” another consulting company uses to gauge a company’s progress, and advocates a far simpler approach (which comes straight from the standup meeting): what are you trying to achieve; where are you now; and what’s getting in the way. His story of how a team finally understood the purpose of 5S and how it affects workflow should be read by every consultant that’s ever mindlessly pushed a client to start with 5S because “that’s what you do.” Lest you think that Mark only knows about machine set ups, check out his article on leadership that connects a leader’s journey with Joseph Campbell’s concept of the hero’s journey. And lastly, if you’ve ever struggled to convince people of the value of checklists, read his post on a different way to view them: “Do vs. “Did You Do?” It's a subtle difference, but extremely powerful nonetheless, and might go a long way towards increasing acceptance and usage of checklists where you work.

Mark's writing -- both in style and in content -- reveals both his humanity and his deep understanding of respect for people.

Check out the other year-end blog reviews on the Curious Cat website here. Or browse the entire blog review category here.

Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog Carnival: Annual Roundup 2013, Part 1

John Hunter, the maestro of the Curious Cat Management Improvement blog and the year-end Management Improvement Carnival has once again allowed me to contribute a list of some of my favorite blogs and posts from 2013. I never miss reading these three blogs—they consistently educate, enlighten, and entertain me.

I'm breaking the list into three separate posts to increase the chance that you'll take the time to check out these posts. For the first installment, I've selected Michel Baudin’s blog. 

Michel Baudin’s posts fall into two general categories: the first is an in-depth discussion of some topic that he finds interesting—and given that he seems to have read a library’s worth of dust-covered tomes related to manufacturing, production, and industrialization, he has a lot of topics to cover. Did you know anything about orbit charts—when to use them, where they came from, and how to make them? Neither did I, until I read Baudin’s post on this topic. His exegesis on the purpose of standard work is a masterful explanation of why it’s essential to manufacturing excellence, while this post explains how it can foster improvement in a non-manufacturing environment as well. And if you want to know anything about poka-yoke, you don’t need to go any farther than this column.

The second type of post you’ll find on Michel Baudin’s site is a commentary on a news story or blog post—he calls this “Michel Baudin’s insight.” From almost anyone else, defining one’s own comments as “insight” would be insufferably arrogant. Michel pulls it off, however, due to the extraordinary depth and breadth of his knowledge and to his serious analytical acumen. Take a look, for example, at his compelling argument that mistake proofing must not add any labor to the operation, lest the people working in the operation work around it. Or the way he skewers the oft-cited maxim that “only the last quarter turn of the nut adds value.” Or his keen eye in spotting space design mistakes in the background photo of a newspaper article about lean in a hospital. Refreshingly, Baudin isn’t just a gear head. His understanding of lean goes far beyond the factory floor and the simple ROI metrics that other, less knowledgeable writers focus on. Notice how he takes to task the BCG consultants who wrote an article on lean that “only speaks the language of money,” neglecting the fact that not all improvements have a direct financial impact.

Read Michel's blog. The extraordinary breadth and depth of his knowledge guarantees that you'll learn something every time.

Check out the other year-end blog reviews on the Curious Cat website here. Or browse the entire blog review category here.

2012 Management Improvement Blog Carnival

I’m very proud to say that John Hunter kindly gave me the reins (for one day, at least) for the Curious Cat 2012 Management Improvement Blog Carnival Annual Roundup. This is my third year to contribute to the Carnival, and it’s a not only a chance to share some of my favorite posts, but to revisit and reflect upon their lessons for myself.

What I’ve tried to do this year is select posts that gave me a new perspective about the world around me, and how improvements could be made to the current state.

First up is Kevin Meyer’s Evolving Excellence blog. I love this blog because of the range of topics Kevin and Bill Waddell cover, and because of their strongly voiced opinions. Nothing politically correct here, and perhaps for that reason, powerful lessons about improvement, value, and excellence.

Just Observing, Sir: Kevin has a real talent for unearthing lessons just about anywhere he goes. In this post, Kevin notices that at the Four Seasons Hotel there is always someone watching the customers. Always. Their uncanny habit of appearing the moment you need something is no accident, nor is it magic. Excellent service, it turns out, comes from discipline and standardized work.

Kevin and Bill both penned more than a few pieces on Apple and its reliance on outsourced Chinese labor. This piece, Apple Is Not a Manufacturer, does the best job of explaining that Apple’s vaunted product design does not make it a model manufacturing company—or a model company, for that matter.

In The Difference Between Leading and Wonking, Bill takes on the politicians (shocking!) and makes powerfully makes the following point: that the best road map and the maximum buy-in comes from letting people closer to the ground work out the details. As he says, “So long as the path they come up with effectively moves the group in the right direction there is little to be gained and quite a lot to lose by having the boss meddle with the details.”

The Wall Street Journal published a story on how companies are increasingly leaning on software to help them hire new people that are less likely to quit within six months. Bill skewers the management mentality that has generated a $3.8 billion industry—or as he says, $3.8 billion in pure waste. Read all about it in It’s All About People and Relationships.

Disruptive Management is an outstanding piece on the absurdity of only looking at innovation through the lens of end products. The management fad of analyzing how existing companies tend to resist “disruptive innovation,” as articulated in the Gospel of Clayton (Christenson), ignores the long-term, sustainable value that management innovation provides.

Finally, for all of you that have suffered through the deployment of lean tools and seen those improvement efforts come to naught, Kevin’s post—Sustaining, Leadership, and Why—on the necessity of understanding why you’re adopting a tool is as pithy as it gets. Read it in conjunction with this analysis of Sony’s demise and the absurdity of blaming Deming for their fall: Blaming Deming, Lean, and Six Sigma and the Importance of Why. (Don’t worry: both of these posts are far better written than their inelegant titles would indicate!)

Brad Power’s regular contributions to the HBR blog are seldom written about in the lean blogosphere, and I think that’s a real mistake. While not a regular contributing member of the lean community, Brad has been researching business process innovation for the last 30 years and has valuable insights to share. His posts are invariably well-written and filled with terrific stories and case studies.

Brad’s post, Understanding Fear of Process Improvement, is a perfect example. He posits that fear of change is the root cause of failures to create a culture of continuous improvement, and suggests three countermeasures: get people involved in the improvement; remove the downside risks and provide upside; and hire people who are committed to the organization’s larger mission.

If you’ve ever been involved in process improvement activities, you know the drill: map the process, identify improvement opportunities, and make an implementation plan. You also know that the momentum from these events usually fizzles out after a few months. In Get Your Team to Work Across Organizational Boundaries, Brad argues that the most important outcome of these activities is actually development of the team itself, and describes how social networking technologies offer new ways to support teams, especially process teams that cut across organizational boundaries. As he says, “constancy of purpose matters more than one workshop's flash of brilliance.”

Why Doesn't HR Lead Change? is Brad’s analysis of why the human resources department, which ostensibly should be at the forefront of any improvement process, typically lags, or actually acts as a brake on innovation and change. Brad believes that there are three root causes for this situation. Although he doesn’t provide countermeasures in this post (he does in other posts), the points he makes are seriously thought-provoking for leaders from all departments in your organization.

Those are my suggestions for valuable, pithy, and thought-provoking reading for the holidays. I hope you enjoy these posts as much as I did.

You can read the 2012 annual management carnival summary here, and you can follow John's semi-monthly carnival posts here.

Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog Carnival: Annual Roundup 2011

I'm very proud to say that John Hunter kindly gave me the reins (for one day, at least) for the 2011 Management Improvement Blog Carnival Annual Roundup. What I’ve tried to do this year is select posts that gave me a new perspective about the world around me, and how improvements could be made to the current state.

First up: Shmula, the blog of Pete Abila.

Zipcar Customer Experience: Variability, Utilization, and Queueing is about as dry a blog post title as you could imagine. But what a fantastic analysis of the Zipcar system! Pete lucidly explores some of the major challenges stemming from variability and utilization facing an operation like Zipcar, and addresses the three kinds of buffers that the company needs to make it work. I’m not a process engineer, but even for me, this was one of the coolest posts of the year.

Death by a Thousand Cuts highlights how organizations begin their journey toward failure through many small decisions made over a long period of time—which is, incidentally, also how culture is created.

Pete provides a nice report on a presentation by Mark Zuckerberg in Mark Zuckerberg: I’d Rather Them Believe the Company Was Broken. If you only know of Zuckerberg from the movie, The Social Network, this is a refreshingly different view. He comes across as a modest guy who’s fully aware that his team deserves the credit for making the company successful.

Finally, check out Leader Standard Work. This concept is garnering more visibility of late. Pete provides a concrete description and approach to implementing it yourself. You’ll inevitably customize it to your specific needs, but this is a great place to start.

Next up: Daily Kaizen, the blog of the improvement folks at Group Health Cooperative.

Consultant Space Kaizen: Practicing What We Teach is a beautiful—and detailed—example of eating one’s dog food. The team describes how they applied all the tools they teach to their own workspace in order to reduce their resource consumption and model the process for the future.

Connecting to the “Why” is an excellent reminder that improvement for its own sake is pointless, uninspiring, and doomed to failure. Successful, sustainable change must be linked to the “why.” If you don’t know the ultimate purpose, then your improvement is a house built on sand.

Learning to Offer Questions, Not Solutions reminds us that change management and improvement is best led by questions, not solutions—and that those questions need to engage both the head and the heart.

The “D” Word tackles the under-appreciated trait of discipline, and explores how it’s “the fuel that drives the lean engine.”

Finally, Peter Drucker’s Management Philosophy blog. Sadly, it’s not written by Drucker himself. But the author, Jorrian Gelink, does a wonderful job of channeling Drucker’s insights, connecting them to current events, and reminding us how relevant his ideas are to both lean and management excellence.

In a business world increasingly engorged with email, text messages, and IMs, Effective Communication—The Speed, Quality and Cost Triangle, higlights the very significant tradeoff between ease and quality in our communications. Read this before you send your next email.

Keeping the focus on communication, Effective Communication – Execution and Results in an Organization provides three key points to remember when communicating within an organization. Attending to these points is a good way to reduce waste and improve the quality of your communication.

How do you build trust as a leader? The Three Cores to Building Leadership Trust eloquently explains that trust relies upon execution, people development, and honesty. The are simple, but incredibly powerful truths that are too often forgotten in the drive to get through one’s email.

If you liked this curated list of links, check out the other 2011 Annual Review posts here, and the regular Management Improvement Carnival here.

Blog Carnival Annual Roundup: 2010 – Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog

I'm tickled to have the opportunity to share some of my favorite posts of 2010 for John Hunter's Management Improvement Carnival Annual Roundup. For my selections, I've strayed a bit from the core lean blogs that many of you read in lieu of posts that often embody the lean spirit, even if they don't whack you over the head with Japanese terms.

Bob Sutton is best known for his books The No Asshole Rule and Good Boss, Bad Boss, but his Work Matters blog covers a wide range of management issues that are valuable reading for anyone. Here are three posts that I really enjoyed.

• In The Better By Design Summit: Cool Things I Heard in New Zealand, Bob lists some of his favorite quotes from leaders at a meeting he attended in New Zealand. The ideas aren't earth-shaking revelations, but they can give you a fresh way of explaining things to your team or your client. One of my favorites is "If you want to change things, make hard things easier. Or raise the cost the cost of the status quo. Or do both."

• Strategy Is For Amateurs, Logistics Are For Professionals is Bob's eloquent argument that far more than the daily work done by the collection of bosses and their followers in an organization isn't as sexy as "leadership," but it's probably most crucial to success.

• It Isn't Just a Myth: A Little Thanks Goes a Long Way presents evidence that saying "thank you" really does improve performance. John Hunter has written several times about misguided incentives; this post provides an alternative way to reward people.

The folks at Behance not only developed the very interesting "Action Method" approach to project and workflow management, they write thought-provoking articles and tips (though, honestly, I'm not entirely sure how they distinguish between the two categories) for achieving greatness in what you do. Here's what I liked best this year:

• RSS Creativity: Routines, Systems, Spontaneity: (Okay, technically this was from last year, but it came in December, and I loved it.) Mark McGuinness explains how routines -- mundane, boring, routines -- are an essential component of creativity. Can you say "standard work"?

• How Analog Rituals Can Amp Your Productivity is Scott Belsky's paean to the low-tech way of getting your work done. Don't rely too heavily on technology, because, as he says, "a task left undone SHOULD be a burden."

• What Should You Start/Stop/Continue Doing? Scott Belsky's easy approach to hansei once a project is done. You might want to tweak it, but it's as good a starting point as any, and it provides a valuable framework.

Peter Bregman writes weekly for the HBR blog on productivity, leadership, creativity, and -- for lack of a better word -- humanity. He has wide-ranging interests that make for a worthwhile read.

• An 18-Minute Plan for Managing Your Day. You don't need to buy into Getting Things Done, the Action Method, the Pomodoro Technique, Inbox Zero, or Lifehacker's flavor of the week: just follow Peter's logical PDCA approach and you'll succeed.
• Why The Best Solutions Are Always Temporary Ones: Lean teaches us that there are no permanent solutions, only temporary countermeasures. But don't dismiss them just because they're not silver bullets. As Peter says, "For something to be a great success, it doesn't have to last forever."

• The Farm-to-Table Secret to Motivating People elegantly explains why involving people in the design (or redesign) of a process leads to better outcomes. Useful for both internal and external change initiatives.

If you like these posts, I encourage you to see my selections for 2009 here. Also check out the regular Management Improvement Carnival page here.