Management Improvement Blog Carnival!

John Hunter at Curious Cat Management Blog has been bringing the Management Improvement Blog Carnival to us for many years now. When he invited me to join the carnival, I couldn’t resist! Each of the blogs I’m reviewing here are completely new to me just this week, so I hope you find the same value in them that I have while discovering these new resources. Thanks John, for this great idea!

I’ve been poking my way through the blogs I selected for review. It’s been slow going since I started my new role as Director of Quality this past week. So, how lucky am I to have stumbled across Shaun Sayers’ blog, Capable People? Very! Shaun tackle’s lots of practical issues with ISO, auditing, leadership and many other topics that leansters can appreciate. Take these two posts for example: The Real Benefits of ISO 9001 Certification, and then goes on to Shaun debunks a number of ISO myths in Quality Policy and Quality Objectives. I found myself diving through most of Shaun’s post at night when I’d get home from work – getting an outsider’s point of view on ISO and other matters related to Lean.

Another great resource, Leadership Styles Blog, is brought to us by Superteams. This post helps leaders understand how the simple questioning method can help people buy-in to process improvement. This next post augments the former advice, urging us to create “mistake free zones”.

The next blog in the carnival has been around for a few years. It is also one of my new favorites jammed with practical advice. I need to visit this one more often...Wally Bock, of Three Star Leadership Blog provides a really good reason why we should strive to be the best that we can be in this post, featuring his grandchildren.

Wally talks a lot about problems, and I really like his analogy about how problems are like dinosaurs. Perhaps you will like this too!

As lean practitioners, we should always be questioning everything. Wally sets the example here as he questions conclusions made by a professor at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business. I really like this because we tend to read things in the newest business book and simply take the author at their word. Rarely do we really question and analyze things in a deep and meaningful way.

Process Rants is a blog I like because it is chock full of real life experience. And it is a blog about how sometimes those experiences that can get ugly. Process Rants is also about something I’m completely unfamiliar with: mostly the management and process improvement of software development, among other things. One problem: I can’t determine who the author of this blog actually is. The only thing I can find are replies to blog readers left by commenter named “ProcessRants”. Anonymous, or no, I think this author “gets it.” Take this post for instance: Hold Me I’m Scared, which uncovers fear in the workplace. ProcessRants also uses the experience of a power outage to provide some excellent insight into why sometimes we may want to reconsider the practice of under promising and over delivering. This last post more or less sums up my take on why lean initiatives fails: ProcessRants accomplishes the same thing in this anti-agile rant. But really, I think this blog is good because it touches on so many things that highlight the real problem with lean failures without really talking about lean all that much.

Happy New Year and See You at the next Carnival!