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Curious Cat Management Improvement Library - New Additions

Cost Cutting is Much Different than Waste Removal by Jim Womack, Dec 2008
"As the lean transformation proceeds, convert physical inventories into cash, but keep an inventory of cash to buffer the firm during the down cycle. From the standpoint of modern financial thinking, this seems sub-optimal. Shouldn't all of the freed-up cash be put aggressively in play in the financial markets? But in the current crisis, firms with stable cash reserves can keep new programs on schedule and will surge in the upturn as competitors who delay or cancel new projects fall behind."
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Your Code Sucks and I Hate You: The Social Dynamics of Code Reviews by Jonathan Lange, Sep 2008
"Code reviews provide an amazing opportunity to grow as a programmer and to improve the software we make. There are many choices that a project can make about how reviews are done and what they can achieve."
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Tesco's Approach to Strategy Communication by Robert S. Kaplan, Sep 2008
"How can you keep distributed frontline employees--regardless of industry--engaged with and acting on the company's central strategy? Leahy explained his approach: "Tesco doesn't want one leader. We want thousands of leaders who take initiative to execute the strategy."
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Moving Management Online by Gary Hamel, Nov 2007
"Like the stock market, the Web allows individuals to trade on their own account, to be free agents in the global economy; yet unlike the stock market, it also allows them to collaborate across time and space to build things of enormous complexitylike a computer operating system. Like a bureaucracy, the Web is filled with mini-hierarchies, where some voices carry more authority than others; yet unlike a bureaucracy, where share of voice is a product of credentials and titles, influence on the Web is a measure of the value one actually brings to the broader community."
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Geared for Happiness by Clare Crawford-Mason and Robert Mason, Nov 2008
"quality first and follow through with the honest practice of developing quality products and quality people ... Deming liked to tell how the Great Western Sugar would take newspaper ads to advise the farmers when to plant, thin and harvest their sugar beets so they would get the best crop. This led him to advise Toyota to work with their suppliers and customers rather than go for the lowest price or highest profit."
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Lean coding by Jack Ganssle, Dec 2008
"Lean manufacturing and the quality movement showed that defects indicate a problem with the process rather than the product. Clearly, if we can minimize waste the system will be delivered faster and with higher quality. In other words, cut bugging to shorten debugging. The best tool we have to reduce bugging is the code inspection."
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The Years of Experience Myth by Jeff Atwood, Feb 2008
It's been shown time and time again that there is no correlation between years of experience and skill in programming. After about six to twelve months working in any particular technology stack, you either get it or you don't... I'm not saying experience doesn't matter in software development. It does. But consider the entire range of a developer's experience, and realize that time invested does not automatically equal skill.
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Drastic Changes for Western Management by W. Edwards Deming, Jun 1986
A compact summary of the most important points that Dr. W. Edwards Deming has been making about changes that must be made by American businesses if they are to be competitive from 1986.
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Awakening Faith in an Alternative Future by Peter M. Senge, Dec 2004
C. Otto Scharmer, Joseph Jaworski, and Betty Sue Flowers. "In the end, we concluded that understanding presence and the possibilities of larger fields for change can come only from many perspectives from the emerging science of living systems, from the creative arts, from profound organizational change experiences and from direct contact with the generative capacities of nature."
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Manufacturing and the Economy by John Hunter, Oct 2005
"The conventional wisdom was that the rest of the world would not be able to compete with the United States for high wage, high value jobs. It turns out the rest of the world is much more able to compete for that work than was expected. ... To achieve economic success in the next 50 years will require doing what we did well last century well again, improving things we could get away with doing poorly and learning and applying new ideas (in management and elsewhere)."
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Toyota Kyushu - The Manufacturing Ballet by Kevin Meyer, Aug 2008
"Every sixty seconds. A car to an SUV to a hybrid version of that SUV back to a car... think about the material flows, line balancing, standard work required to keep such a line humming along. That should give pause to anyone believing that Toyota doesn't do mixed model production, or that quick changeover is a pipe dream. ... Toyota is a bit unique in that they have, and operate to, formal 50 year plans. Not five year plans like the rest of us. Fifty. This crisis was expected, cash reserves created, strategies created to implement training in order to come out the other side ahead."
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Mary Poppendieck: Agile theses and mistakes by Casper Fabricius, Jun 2008
"'IT' is part of 'The Business' and not outside of it. The team should be responsible for business success, not just technical success, which has no value in itself."
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Beyond Scrum: Lean and Kanban for Game Developers by Clinton Keith, Nov 2008
Time-boxing is the first step in beginning to find a balanced flow for our value stream as visualized on our Heijunka board. However, one problem exists. Each stage of effort in the stream will require a different length time-box. This can cause gaps and pileups. ... We have to find ways to balance this workflow smoothly so that everyone has work to do every day. One way of doing this is to balance the effort on each stage to achieve the same flow through the system.
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Steering the wrong course by Tom Southworth, Oct 2008
"Too many Lean efforts rely too heavily on classroom training and not enough on actual implementation. Just like leaders who need to get out of their chairs and out onto the floor, teams need to be taught how to do something and not simply be told how to do it. Toyota's Taiichi Ohno once said, "Understanding means doing." Learning Lean is very kinesthetic; you have to go out and actually do something in order to fully understand."
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Managing Change Requests Using Lean Methods and a Kanban Board by Eric Landes, Nov 0002
"Existing Agile techniques assume a team working on one project, not an enterprise team working on multiple applications. There is another agile way to mitigate these issues. You will explore how to use the lean artifact Kanban board to manage your software's change requests."
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Business Process Improvement using Cause-and-Effect Analysis and Design of Experiments by Nari Kannan, Jul 2005
"a combination of process modeling with cause-and-effect analysis combined with careful design of experiments (DOE) can help a company decide how and where they can allocate the monies they have to maximize their salutary effects on the company."
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A Useful Method for Model-Building II: Synthesizing Response Functions from Individual Components by William G. Hunter and Andrzej P. Jaworski, Nov 0002
"Analyzing which components of a response are due to each factor is an alternative way to find the best model for studying the properties of a product or process (and thus for improving both)." Published in Technometrics.
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Woes? Executive, Blame Thyself. by Jeffrey Pfeffer, Sep 2008
"So, the next time you hear an airline executive complain about their problems, ask two questions. How much is that person actually getting paid? It ought to be relatively inexpensive to find someone to blame others for his company's difficulties -- how hard can that be? And then ask if the airline is making any, maybe even one, decision consistent with the evidence on what works."
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