Gemba Tales is proud to host the 99th edition of the Curious Cat Management Improvement Carnival. Curious Cat’s founder John Hunter facilitates this sharing of lean thought provoking posts thrice monthly.

In order to select a cross-section of great blog posts from the last several weeks, I scanned through both Mark Graban’s prodigious blogroll and mine (not so prodigious). Consequently, I read a lot and learned a lot. My only regret is that I could not pick a post from every worthy blogger.

Nevertheless, I trust that you will enjoy the posts. They effectively challenge conventional thinking and they end with a post from new dad (congratulations!), Brian Buck who definitely shares the voice of the customer and reinforces the need for lean healthcare. Hope you enjoy these. Cheers.

  • Does “Lean” Become Self Perpetuating? by Steven J. Spear – “…‘Lean’ never becomes self sustaining.  Never ever ever.  No way, no how.  It simply cannot.”
  • Everyone Is Responsible for Their Systems by Jamie Flinchbaugh – “…I believe we (meaning lean thinkers) send blame up the organizational chart too far, as a natural reaction to too much blame being pushed down on people in traditional organizations.”
  • Fake Lean and the Spotting Thereof by Jon Miller – “…While lean is journey of continuous improvement and there is no such thing as arriving at state where we can say ‘we are lean’ there are plenty of false paths, dead ends and wilderness areas on this journey that we can label ‘fake lean’.”
  • Inefficiency through Default Meeting Times by Tim McMahon – “…Who decided meetings should be 30 or 60 minutes?”
  • New Book Gives Negative Review to Performance Reviews by Mark Graban – “…Yes, there are alternatives to the annual review. As Dr. Deming might have said, we invented that practice (and we invented management) so we can change it.”
  • People Cannot Multitask by John Hunter – “…People think they are multi-tasking but in fact they are just doing 4 tasks serially switching back and forth between them. Which slows them down and increases the odds of forgetting something.”
  • Stealing Monkeys by Bryan Lund –  ”No, I’m not going to steal your pet chimp, but it is often tempting and easy to “steal a monkey” from people while in the genba…”
  • The Downside of Automation by Dan Markovitz – “…When I see companies leaping at technological solutions for time and attention management, I have a feeling that they’re in for a big disappointment.”
  • More Committed than Ever by Brian Buck – “I am now back from my wonderful 4.5 weeks of paternity leave and am more committed than ever to help hospitals become lean.”

Post to Twitter Tweet This Post