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Curious Cat Management Improvement Library - New Additions

• Jeff Bezos Interview   May 2001  
  "I think one thing I find very motivating -- and I think this is probably a very common form of motivation or cause of motivation is, I love people counting on me, and so, you know, today it's so easy to be motivated, because we have millions of customers counting on us at Amazon.com. We've got thousands of investors counting on us. And, we're a team of thousands of employees all counting on each other. That's fun."
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• Larry Page on how to change the world   by Andy Serwer,   May 2008  
  "Breakthrough ideas are around the corner, says the Google co-founder. But most of us are failing to take a chance on them... My experience is that when people are trying to do ambitious things, they're all worried about failing when they start. But all sorts of interesting things spin out that are of huge economic value. Also, in these kinds of projects, you get to work with the best people and have a very interesting time. They're not really taking a risk, but they feel like they are... Almost everyone who has had an idea that's somewhat revolutionary or wildly successful was first told they're insane."
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• The Relentless Contrarian   by Peter Drucker,   Aug 1996  
  what's absolutely unforgivable is the financial benefit top management people get for laying off people. There's no excuse for it. No justification. No explanation. This is morally and socially unforgivable, and we'll pay a very nasty price.
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• Lean Software Engineering - My progression toward Kanban   by Brian Doll,   Dec 2009  
  I was really impressed with how much work the various development teams could accomplish, given the fairly bureaucratic environment they were working in. Scrum brings some fairly specific and rigorous processes to agile development that appeals to the sensibilities of project managers. For developers used to working in waterfall or similar processes, this can be blast of fresh air... Developing software systems requires many different disciplines and no two projects or teams are the same. Spending time focusing on how you deliver value can dramatically increase your effectiveness and reduce unnecessary work, which reduces frustration. No matter where you end up, youll likely be happier than where you are now."
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• The Role of Purpose and Your Role   by Mark Graban,   Feb 2010  
  "Are you just laying bricks or are you building a cathedral? You want people to understand their purpose, not just their job description or the tasks that are assigned to them. This is very similar to Jim Womack's 'Purpose, Process, People' model. Your 'role' (what you are responsible for) is more than your task assignments"
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• The Human Side Of Management   by William Hewlett,   Jan 1982  
  "Management is in a position to take the lead in such a new relationship. Managers have traditionally developed the skills in finance, planning, marketing and production techniques. Too often the relations with their people have been assigned a secondary role. This is too important a subject not to receive first-line attention. In this regard we could learn much from the Japanese. We must reinvest in the human side of management." The author is the co-founder of Hewlett-Packard.
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• Behind the Troubles at Toyota   by Bill Saporito with Michael Schuman and Joseph Szczesny,   Feb 2010  
  "Kingston puts his finger on one failing in modern Japanese corporations like Toyota: those lower in the organization find it difficult to deliver bad news to managers. Nearly every company faces this issue from time to time... Toyota is still an extraordinary outfit, one likely to set the pace in the automotive industry for years. But it can't do so without addressing its shortfalls. Complexity is the enemy of any manufacturer, and rapid growth increases it. 'Toyota faced excessive or overwhelming complexity that even its strong capability could not handle adequately,' notes University of Tokyo professor Takahiro Fujimoto..."
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• Role of the Manager in Scrum   by Pete Deemer,   Jan 2010  
  "- Provide input to the Product Owner on the product strategy and vision, and give feedback to the Product Owner on the content and prioritization of the Product Backlog. - Provide support and assistance to Teams and their ScrumMasters. Be prompt and proactive in helping remove impediments that are harming Teams' ability to be effective. - Actively support ScrumMasters' efforts to protect Teams from disturbance, disruption, or outside interference..."
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• Dangers of Forgetting the Proxy Nature of Data   by John Hunter,   Aug 2004  
  "We use data to act as a proxy for some results of the system. Often people forget that the desired end result is not for the number to be improved but for the situation to be improved. We hope, if the measure improves the situation will have improved. But there are many reasons this may not be the case (one number improving at the expense of other parts of the system, the failure of the number to accurately serve as a proxy, distorting numbers, etc.)."
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• The Trouble with Incentives: They Work   by Gipsie B. Ranney,   Jan 2010  
  "There may be cases in which incentives work only as intended, but I suspect they are relatively rare. The trouble is that we are usually dealing with complex systems (people and organizations) that may behave not at all like our myths would predict. The best policy may be to avoid incentives altogether and focus instead on creating systems in which intrinsic motivation, cooperation, ethical behavior, trust, creativity, and joy in work can flourish."
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• A Hospital That Slashes Costs and Delivers High-quality Care   by Catherine Arnst,   Jan 2010  
  "High quality at a low price. Every other industry strives for that combination, but a hospital that does both is all too rare. Providence and its cost-efficient brethren demonstrate that quality care can be delivered at an affordable price, provided hospitals can be persuaded to rethink decades-old practices."
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• The Unnatural Environment   by H Thomas Johnson,   Jan 2010  
  "Toyota's management culture at its zenith was process-driven, not results-driven. Toyota eschewed the financial markets' absurdly impossible demand to produce higher results quarter by quarter. It rejected the idea espoused by lean authorities that a company can improve its overall performance by subtracting parts... Its pathway to higher results echoed Deming's advice, given many years ago, to improve the capability of the process, not to demand that people meet higher targets."
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• Test Smarter, Not Harder   by Scott Sehlhorst ,   May 2006  
  "This is a much more manageable situation. Exhaustive coverage required us to use 2.3 million tests, where using N-wise testing with N=3, yields only 179 tests! Existing studies have consistently shown that N=3 creates on the order of 90% code coverage with test suites, although the number will vary from application to application. When we're testing any software, we are faced with the tradeoff of cost and benefit of testing. With complex software, the costs of testing can grow faster than the benefits of testing. If we apply techniques like the ones in this article, we can dramatically reduce the cost of testing our software. This is what we mean when we say test smarter, not harder."
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• CMMI or Agile: Why Not Embrace Both!   by David Anderson, Hillel Glazer et. al.,   Nov 2008  
  40 page report from the Software Engineering Institute. "The purpose of this report is to clarify why the discord need not exist and to ask for your help in making the software development community aware that, when properly used together, CMMI and Agile can dramatically improve performance... When viewed holistically, CMMI's ultimate goal (i.e., continuous process improvement) is to cause an organization to become less wasteful, leaner, and more in touch with actual development progress. Ultimately, both Agile and CMMI, especially in high-trust environments, expect organizations to see gains in productivity by eliminating unnecessary effort. It's true that implementing Agile methods will often eliminate many unproductive efforts and behaviors at the project level."
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• Test for Actual Use, not Intended Use   by Jamie Flinchbaugh,   Dec 2009  
  
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• I Come to Bury Agile, Not to Praise It   by Alistair Cockburn,   Sep 2009  
  Webcast: "Agile came from small, colocated projects in the 1990s. It has spread to large, globally distributed commercial projects, affecting the IEEE, the PMI, the SEI and the Department of Defense. Agile now sits in a larger landscape and should be viewed accordingly. This talk shows that landscape, clarifying how classical agile fits in and what constitutes effective development outside that narrow area."
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• Visualizing Agile Projects using Kanban Boards   by Kenji Hiranabe,   Aug 2007  
  "I'll discuss Kanban Boards as the main information radiators, and Burndown Charts and Parking lot Charts as sub-tool which summarize Kanbans visually... A project team consists of people working toward the same goal. Typically, a manager, customers, developers, business analysts, users, testers and other stakeholders should be members of the team. The whole team should share information on time and tasks to achieve the project goal..."
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• Kanban Family Job Chart   by Peter Abilla,   Nov 2009  
  "Our family needs something that is visible, without equivocation, and shows the Person, Jobs, Day, and Status. So, we created a Kanban Family Job Chart ... We want, instead, to teach self-reliance, demonstrate our trust in the kids, and help them grow in their own terms, but with our loving guidance. We also have to make sure that the job is equal to the capability of the child  their mental capacity, hand size, strength, etc."
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