Management Improvement Carnival #44

Evolving Excellence has the honor to be the host for this edition of the Management Improvement Carnival.  A sampling of interesting posts over the past week include:

• What would Taiichi Ohno do? at TimeBack Management.  I do think there's tremendous value in applying 5S to the information you manage.  But. . . when Google desktop can find anything on your computer in .03 seconds, is there real value in spending time organizing, sorting, and deleting emails, spreadsheets, and PDFs?
• "If you didn't do it in six sigma, then it didn't happen." at the Lean Blog.  There's an expression that pretty much describes Six Sigma's infiltration at GE: If your only tool is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a nail.
• The "3 Mu" of Lean Design at Gemba Panta Rei.  All lean management, whether it be in manufacturing, logistics, healthcare or knowledge work focuses on getting rid of muri, mura and muda in order to improve performance.
• Kaizen - American Airlines Style at Lean Six Sigma Academy.  Instead of focusing on making value flow AA is actually increasing the time their planes are on the ground!
• Does the Data Deluge Make the Scientific Method Obsolete? at Curious Cat.  Petabytes allow us to say: “Correlation is enough.” We can throw the numbers into the biggest computing clusters the world has ever seen and let statistical algorithms find patterns where science cannot.
• Unbundling Dell's Business at Edge Perspectives.  Companies increasingly face an unbundling decision that will force executives to confront the most basic question of all: “what business are we really in?” 
• The Problem With Not Being Obsessive About Mistakes at Process Rants.   I'm thinking if everyone was obsessed with getting it right, and embarrassed to be caught being wrong, a lot of the quality issue would take care of itself.
• Sesame Street Simple: Lafley's Leadership Philosophy at Bob Sutton's Work Matters.  Yet in a company where more than half the employees don't speak English as their first language, he says his Sesame Street- simple slogans, repeated over and over, keep everyone trained on what's important.
• Email, Lean and Concise at Evolving Excellence.  Good writers know that lean, vibrant language is almost always preferable to verbose, rambling writing. There is virtually no writing in the world so good that it can’t be made better by making it shorter.

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