Management Improvement Carnival #79

Again, I'm very happy to host the Carnival for John Hunter and his Curious Cat blog. My job here is to share some noteworthy and thought provoking posts from the past month. I hope you'll discover a new blog or two (or new idea) in the process. My Carnival selections run the gamut from manufacturing to healthcare to other industries, but I hope it will help you see the common themes of Lean and the Toyota Production System.

• Put Down That Tool (Jamie Flinchbaugh): “Use the simplest tool possible. When you start to use tools that are more complicated than they need to be, we add unnecessary waste and bureaucracy to the process of improvement.”

• Kaizen Corner — for lack of a battery (Paul Levy, Running a Hospital): “The idea is to keep asking why (the 5 why's) until they discover the root cause, which is defined as that level of understanding that will permit development of a countermeasure that will prevent the problem from occurring again.”
  
  
• Words of Taiichi Ohno Sensei: Kaizen by Inspiration is Not Kaizen (Jon Miller, Gemba Panta Rei): “Taiichi Ohno explains that the type of kaizen that you do when the survival of your company depends on doing kaizen is the most important kaizen.”

• We Will Solve Your Problems, But Let Us Solve Some Of Our Own (Lee Fried, Daily Kaizen): “This contract is based on the premise that if management provides the resources and capabilities to allow frontline teams to solve problems that are important to them and help out when the problems need to be escalated these same teams will be far more willing to solve problems that are important to management.”
  
  
• Problems Hidden Out in the Open (Mark Rosenthal, The Lean Thinker): “It isn't enough to ask the team member to call for help. You have to expect it, encourage it and require it.“

• Kaizen – FastCap Style (Ron Pereira, Lean Six Sigma Academy): “If you'd like to see kaizen in action, and I do mean real kaizen, you need to set aside around 23 minutes to watch this video of the FastCap team improving the way some items are packaged.”
  
  
• Never try to change something (Marc Rouppe van der Voort, Lean Thinking in Healthcare: “A burning platform gives momentum for change, but usually the baby is thrown out with the bathwater by also disqualifying what is good.”
• How NUMMI Changed Its Culture (John Shook, Lean.org): “What I learned was most powerful at NUMMI was to start with the behaviors, with what we do.”
• Why is Asking “Why?” So Important? (Tracey Richardson, Toyota Gal Blog): “So what happens if we keep asking WHY? How do we know when to STOP?”

• Boeing Pulls Another Rube Goldberg (Kevin Meyer, Evolving Excellence): “Of course had they not gone down the outsourcing path they could have just walked next door to see how component assembly was going.”
  
  
• A Natural Match (Deborah Dolezal, Lean Healthcare Grand Rounds): “As a healthcare worker and an implementer of lean, I am often struck by the similarity of the human body and the lean methodologies.”
  
  
• The Lean Manager Book Review (Mike Wroblewski, Got Boondoggle?): “In the case of The Lean Manager, it is hands down the best business novel on lean transformation that has been written yet and I thoroughly enjoyed reading it.”

Please submit your favorite management posts to the carnival. Read the previous management carnivals on his site or my previous carnivals by clicking the “Carnival” tag at the bottom of this post.

FTC conflict of interest disclosure: I work for the Lean Enterprise Institute, publisher of John Shook's Management Column and the book “The Lean Manager.” Further disclosure, that link to the left earns me a commission from Amazon. Happy, FTC?

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