Management Improvement Carnival - December 2010

Kevin makes the case for single piece shopping at Evolving Excellence, but not everyone is biting in the comments section...me, I'm on the fence on this. JIT for purchasing makes sense for many, many things but probably shouldn't be applied blindly to all purchases...

Mike at Got Boondoggle? stresses the importance of genba observation in order to improving safety conditions while simultaneously introducing me to the Lean Safety blog and the new book of the same namesake. Whew! Nice hat trick Mike!

(For you TWI fans, a friendly reminder that the Job Safety manual is freely available for download in the public domain at the TWI Service website. The free, 111-page publication includes JS session outlines and conference leader manual. Keep in mind that JS is based on the Job Instruction training, an original source of training for the skill of direct genba-style observation.)


Speaking of safety, Mark Graban blogged about the half court football game played at Wrigley Field. Apparently, the administrators at Northwestern have never had the pleasurable genba experience of catching an over-the-shoulder-hail-mary as they were unknowingly running full speed across the warning track of their local high school baseball field into a chain link fence...ouch.

Mark Hamel at Gembatales warns us against the danger of serving two masters...I love the caricatures that he develops for the reader - spot on!

Finally a great take on muda, muri and mura by David Kasprzak at My Flexible Pencil. The way David applies the 3Ms to cultural behaviors is clever and thought provoking. Although seemingly "intangible" at first, the cultural wastes that David describes here soon emerge as the first logical target for attack, thereby allowing individuals in the organization to focus on building the ideal relationships so desperately needed to perform at the highest potential.

Management Improvement Carnival - April 2010

Regular readers of TWI Blog will notice that I've been on a bit of a leave of absence in 2010, the consequence of taking on a new job...so, it is with great pleasure that I accept John Hunter's invitation to host a Management Improvement Blog Carnival this month! Hosting a M.I.B.C. gives me an easy excuse to break away and dig into my favorite blogs!


Bryan Zeigler at Lean is Good dredges up an old Deming experiment to illustrate a common management malpractice: Chasing Rabbits and Process Unimprovements. I like this post because the experiment helps people realize the chaos that can result in their reactive behavior as managers. I have successfully used the famous Table Top Experiments created by Lilian and Frank Gilbreth and this "new" exercise from Deming will go into my bag of tricks for improvement leadership!


Mark Rosenthal at The Lean Thinker makes a distinction between The Expert vs. The Master in his post Knowing vs. Knowing How to Learn. The big deal here is that Mark argues some experts will try to fit their circumstances to a specific tool, but masters distinguish themselves by learning how to go beyond the tool and apply the concept in circumstances with which they are unfamiliar.


My new job as Director of Quality causes me to seek out new information almost on a daily basis. Quality Inspection Blog offers advice on the difficulties of practical Quality Inspection in China...just thought I'd throw this one out there , Buying in China is Risky,  :) Just a friendly reminder for my fellow Leansters out there that we need to double and triple our efforts of educating others about continuous improvement - we have a LONG way to go! China risky? Who woulda' thunk it?!

Finally, Kathleen Fasenella talks about "How to Sew Faster" at Fashion Incubator. Kathleen really has a knack for taking basic improvement concepts and explaining them in plain English. I am not a fashion guy, but find it fascinating to see how people in so many diverse industries are adopting and adapting improvement principles and techniques to their field of expertise - and getting real results.

Leansters will appreciate the industrial engineer that resides in Kathleen's work - Part 4 of her "How to Sew Faster" series talks about the 4Ms: Man, Machine, Material and Machines. Kathleen's posts often remind me of Taichii Ohno's writings when she writes things like this: 

"relying on machine as the singular strategy to cutting faster amounts to a trade off; sacrificing results to get greater speed. It’s not necessary to make this trade off. Change your method -the machine is secondary- and you can have greater speed and better results."

I really have zero interest in fashion, but I do enjoy finding these little nuggets of dichotomy that reveal revolutionary improvement principles for the world to learn from. And all of this from a debate over scissors vs. rotary cutters!

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!