Tag: systems thinking
Management Books
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Ackoff's Best: Timeless Observations on the Life of Business
by
Russell L. Ackoff
From managing teams, maximizing the effectiveness of information systems, and problem solving, to creativity, crime, and the role of the corporation in a democratic society, these writings are a cornucopia of insights, observations, and powerful lessons that will help you improve the effectiveness of your organization.
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The Company That Solved Health Care:
by
John Torinus
"Serigraph, Inc., a Wisconsin manufacturer, took innovative steps to curtail the costs. By giving their employees a stake in the financial outcome of health care, they cut their costs drastically. Torinus, president of the company, outlines steps that any business can take to achieve similar results, which involve a major shift in behavior on the part of the insured employees."
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Systems Thinking for Curious Managers: with 40 New Management f-Laws
by
Russell L. Ackoff, Herbert J. Addison, Jamshid Gharajedaghi
Finished just before Professor Ackoff's death late in 2009, Systems Thinking for Curious Managers opens the door to a joined up way of thinking about things that has profoundly influenced thinkers and doers in the fields of business, politics, economics, biology, psychology.
Although Systems Thinking was 'invented' early in the 20th century, even Peter Senge's best-selling "The Fifth Discipline" (Systems Thinking is the fifth discipline) failed to popularize the term. But now, in business and academia, in the public sector and in the search for solutions to the environmental problems we face, Systems Thinking is being talked about everywhere.
This timely book presents 40 more of Russ Ackoff's famously witty and incisive f-Laws (or flaws) of business - following on from his 2007 collection "Management f-Laws". All those in this collection are new and previously unpublished. Andrew Carey's extended introduction ties these f-Laws into the rest of Ackoff's work and gives the reader new to Systems Thinking a practical guide to the implications of Systems Thinking for organisations and managers.
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Scoring a Whole in One:
by
Ed Baker
A short book that is very easy to read and more importantly packed with valuable insight. Dr. Baker does a great job of tying systems thinking to real life examples. Dr. Baker was a long time associate of Dr. Deming.
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Work the System: The Simple Mechanics of Making More and Working Less
by
Sam Carpenter
"As a matter of policy, everyone in the organization will execute each perfected system in the same exact sequence every single time – yet everyone understands that if a system can be improved, adjustment will be made instantly. This is 'working the system.' The key is this (and this is the heart of the new perspective): Focus on the systems that create the results, not on the bad results that occur due to unmanaged systems."
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Management Matters: Building Enterprise Capability
by
John Hunter
The book provides an overview for viewing management as a system. It is largely based on those of Dr. Deming, along with natural outgrowths or extensions of his ideas such as lean manufacturing and agile software development.
To achieve great results there must be a continual focus on achieving results today and building enterprise capacity to maximize results over the long term. Managers have many management concepts, pactices and tools available to help them in this quest. The challenge is to create and continually build and improve a management system for the enterprise that leads to success.
The book provides a framework for management thinking. With this framework the practices and tools can be applied to build enterprise capacity and improve efficiency and effectiveness.
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Leader of One: Shaping Your Future through Imagination and Design
by
Gerald Suarez
Through Gerald Suarez’s engaging voice, we learn about a process called idealized design, a method first applied in corporations by the renowned Wharton Emeritus Professor Russell Ackoff and his team. Ackoff and Suarez worked together to apply the same methodology in the White House.
As an internationally recognized authority on leadership and organizational redesign, Professor Suarez found the process worked as easily in the classroom as it did in the boardroom. What works for large organizations works for individuals as well. The methodology is simple, but the implications are profound.
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The Essential Deming: Leadership Principles from the Father of Quality
by
W. Edwards Deming, Joyce Orsini
The book is filled with articles, papers, lectures, and notes touching on a wide range of topics, but which focus on Deming's overriding message: quality and operations are all about systems, not individual performance; the system has to be designed so that the worker can perform well.
Published in cooperation with The W. Edwards Deming Institute, The Essential Deming captures Deming's life's worth of thinking and writing. Dr. Orsini provides expert commentary throughout, delivering a powerful, practical guide to superior management. With The Essential Deming, you have the rationale, insight, and best practices you need to transform your organization.
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The Laws of Subtraction: 6 Simple Rules for Winning in the Age of Excess Everything
by
Matthew May
Welcome to the age of excess everything. Success in this new age looks different and demands a new skill: Subtraction.
Subtraction is defined simply as the art of removing anything excessive, confusing, wasteful, unnatural, hazardous, hard to use, or ugly... or the discipline to refrain from adding it in the first place. And if subtraction is the new skill to be acquired, we need a guide to developing it.
bolstered by uniquely personal essays contributed by over 50 of the most creative minds in business today - including the founder of this Curious Cat site: http://management.curiouscatblog.net/2012/09/05/manage-better-by-managing-less/
Management Articles
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The Relentless Contrarian
by
Peter Drucker
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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Each necessary, but only jointly sufficient
by
John Allspaw
"for complex systems: there is no root cause.
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Frankly, I think that this tendency to look for singular root causes also comes from how deeply entrenched modern science and engineering is with the tenets of reductionism. So I blame Newton and Descartes.
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In the same way that you shouldn’t ever have root cause 'human error', if you only have a single root cause, you haven’t dug deep enough."
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All Models are Wrong: reflections on becoming a systems scientist
by
John Sterman
"Thoughtful leaders increasingly recognize that we are not only failing to solve the persistent problems we face, but are in fact causing them. System dynamics is designed to help avoid such policy resistance and identify high-leverage policies for sustained improvement. What does it take to be an effective systems thinker, and to teach system dynamics fruitfully? Understanding complex systems requires mastery of concepts such as feedback, stocks and flows, time delays, and nonlinearity. Research shows that these concepts are highly counterintuitive and poorly understood. It also shows how they can be taught and learned."
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Lean Thinking and Management
by
John Hunter
"The biggest thing I think we need to learn from this is that improving management is not easy. The concepts may seem simple but most of us can look around and see much more Dilbert Boss behavior than lean thinking behavior. And the gap between those two types of behavior seems to rise as you go 'up' the organization chart."
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Resist your machine thinking!
by
Jeffrey Liker
"To maintain consistent output, one must continually adjust the
system to changing environmental conditions. This is called dynamic
homeostasis in systems thinking, or running to stay in place.
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Maintenance comes from having clearly defined standards, observing
carefully for deviations from those standards, and then developing
and implementing countermeasures to eliminate the deviations."
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Why Lean Programs Fail
by
Jeffrey Liker, Mike Rother
"a large survey conducted by Industry Week in 2007 found that only 2 percent of companies achieved their anticipated results... When we look at lean in this way it is not only a set of techniques for eliminating waste, but a process by which managers as leaders develop people so that desired results can be achieved, again and again. That means coaching people in practicing an improvement kata every day."
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A Systemic View of Transformational Leadership
by
Russell L. Ackoff
"Therefore, a transformational leader is one who can produce, or encourage and facilitate the production of, a mobilizing vision of a transformed system. Equally important, the leader must be able to inspire and organize or have organized an effective pursuit of that vision and maintain it even when sacrifices are required."
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The Laws of Subtraction
by
Matthew May
"Everywhere, there’s too much of the wrong stuff, and not enough of the right. The noise is deafening, the signal weak. Everything is too complicated and time-sucking.
Welcome to the age of excess everything. Success in this new age looks different, and demands a new and singular skill: Subtraction.
Subtraction is defined simply as the art of removing anything excessive, confusing, wasteful, unnatural, hazardous, hard to use, or ugly—and the discipline to refrain from adding it in the first place."
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Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule
by
Paul Graham
"There are two types of schedule, which I'll call the manager's schedule and the maker's schedule. The manager's schedule is for bosses. It's embodied in the traditional appointment book, with each day cut into one hour intervals.
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When you're operating on the maker's schedule, meetings are a disaster. A single meeting can blow a whole afternoon, by breaking it into two pieces each too small to do anything hard in."
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Maximize Test Coverage Efficiency And Minimize the Number of Tests Needed
by
John Hunter
"The steeper the slope the more efficient your test plan is. If you repeat the same tests of pairs and triples and… while not taking advantage of the chance to test, untested pairs and triples you will have to create and run far more test than if you intelligently create a test plan. With many interactions to test it is far too complex to manually derive an intelligent test plan. A
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Breaking Down the Walls
by
Craig Cochran
"With process orientation, organizations think in terms of integrated processes rather than a confederation of functional departments." Originally published in Quality Digest.
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A Call for Continued Open Standards and Net Neutrality
by Tim Berners-Lee. "The primary design principle underlying the Web’s usefulness and growth is universality. When you make a link, you can link to anything. That means people must be able to put anything on the Web, no matter what computer they have, software they use or human language they speak and regardless of whether they have a wired or wireless Internet connection. The Web should be usable by people with disabilities. It must work with any form of information, be it a document or a point of data, and information of any quality—from a silly tweet to a scholarly paper. And it should be accessible from any kind of hardware that can connect to the Internet: stationary or mobile, small screen or large."
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America's dysfunctional patent system is stifling innovation
"At the heart of the problem – and we should keep this squarely in mind – is a federal machine that, willy-nilly, grants patents that never should have been allowed in the first place. It is a machine created and run by lawyers, for lawyers, and which has absolutely no incentive to reform itself."
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Performance Reviews Are Obsolete
The CEO of Catapult Systems explains their elimination of the annual performance appraisal. "the most critical flaw of our old process was that the feedback itself was too infrequent and too far removed from the actual behavior to have any measurable impact on employee performance.
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I decided to completely eliminate of our annual performance review process and replace it with a real-time performance feedback dashboard."
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It's Not Just Standing Up: Patterns for Daily Standup Meetings
by
Jason Yip
"It is too easy to confuse effort with work. The stand-up should encourage a focus on moving work through the system in order to achieve our objectives, not encourage pointless activity.
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Post raised obstacles to an Improvement Board. This is a publicly visible whiteboard or chart that identifies raised obstacles and tracks the progress of their resolution. An Improvement Board can be updated outside of stand-ups and serves as a more immediate and perhaps less confronting way to initially raise obstacles."
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Do Interactions Matter?
by
George E. P. Box
"It has recently been argued that in an industrial setting the detection and elucidation of interactions between variables is unimportant. In this report the contrary view is advanced and is illustrated with examples."
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The Trouble with Incentives: They Work
by
Gipsie Ranney
"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...
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Disruptive Innovation
by
Clayton Christensen
Excellent long article (a book chapter) on the topic by the expert.
"Disruptive innovations, in contrast, don’t attempt to bring better products to established customers in existing markets. Rather, they disrupt and redefine that trajectory by introducing products and services that are not as good as currently available products. But disruptive technologies offer other benefits—typically, they are simpler, more convenient, and less expensive products that appeal to new or less-demanding customers.
Once the disruptive product gains a foothold in new or low-end markets, the improvement cycle begins. And because the pace of technological progress outstrips customers’ abilities to use it, the previously not-good-enough technology eventually improves enough to intersect with the needs of more demanding customers."
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Systems Thinking and the Three Musketeers - Deming's SoPK
"So too will organizations move successfully into the future, through the use of Systems Thinking, by providing a clear aim that is not merely limited to profitability but to optimizing the entire organization, removing the forces that destroy a system, and promoting the positive interactions that create the - All for one, one for all - camaraderie found in the most successful organizations."
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Treat yourself to the best coach you can find–talking lean management with Michael Ballé
by
Michael Ballé
The essential steps of becoming a lean leader are first, to lead from the ground up: to spend a lot of time at the gemba, challenging and listening, teaching problem solving and clearing obstacles for employees, encouraging kaizen and learning from people’s initiatives and creativity in order to align the company’s direction with individual fulfillment.
The next step is to accept the learn-by-doing discipline of a pull system. Without the tension of the pull system, real problems won’t appear and people will spend their time kaizening irrelevant issues, essentially learning the wrong things.
The third step is to understand the importance of teamwork and to learn how to intensify collaboration. Quality of problem solving is mostly dependent on how intense the collaboration between people from different specialties. The key to lean leadership is a gut feeling understanding that every one wants to understand where the company is going and why, and wants to contribute to that goal if not discouraged by silly policies and petty bosses. So the true aim of lean leadership is to enable every employee to partake in the joy of creation by having suggestions to move the business forward in their own job sphere, and implementing these suggestions themselves.
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TPS vs. Lean and the Law of Unintended Consequences
by
Art Smalley
"In every piece of TPS literature from Toyota, this stated aim is mixed in with the twin production principles of Just in Time (make and deliver the right part, in the right amount, at the right time), and Jidoka (build in quality at the process), as well as the notion of continuous improvement by standardization and elimination of waste in all operations to improve quality, cost, productivity, lead-time, safety, morale and other metrics as needed. This clear objective has not substantially changed since the first internal TPS training manual was drafted over thirty years ago."
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Manage Better by Managing Less
by
John Hunter
It can be tempting to cram your days full of activity to show how hard-working and vital you are. Finding time to think is hard enough; maxing out your capacity makes it next to impossible. Everyone agrees taking time to think is wise. But I have rarely seen managers make it a priority. Managers will say they value it, but they cram schedules so full that they can’t really spend time thinking.
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How to Get a New Management Strategy, Tool or Concept Adopted
by
John Hunter
"Often when learning about Deming’s ideas on management, lean manufacturing, design of experiments, PDSA… people become excited. They discover new ideas that show great promise to alleviate the troubles they have in their workplace and lead them to better results. But how to actually get their organization to adopt the ideas often confounds them..."
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Cost is the spectre haunting health reform
by
Atul Gawande
"For many decades, the great flaw in the American health-care system was its unconscionable gaps in coverage. Those gaps have widened to become graves - resulting in an estimated forty-five thousand premature deaths each year..."
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Stop Ignoring the Stalwart Worker
"Perhaps the defining characteristic of Stalwarts is their aversion to calling attention to themselves — even when they need to. They are like the proverbial wheel that never squeaks — and, consequently, gets no grease.
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The other signature trait of Stalwarts is their deep loyalty to the organization. They are responsible and care deeply about the organization's values, and they generally steer clear of risk. Stalwarts are intrinsically motivated by the service they can render for the good of the organization, and they let their own careers take a backseat to the company's well-being. They feel that they have accomplished something if the company is running like a well-oiled machine."
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A Brief Guide to Interactive Planning and Idealized Design
by
Russell L. Ackoff
"Interactive planning is directed at creating the future. It is based on the belief that an organization's future depends at least as much on what it does between now and then, as on what is done to it. Therefore, this type of planning consists of the design of a desirable present and the selection or invention of ways of approximating it as closely as possible. It creates its future by continuously closing the gap between where it is at any moment of time and where it would most like to be."
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The Achilles’ Heel of Agile
by
Jurgen Appelo
"In the case of shared resources, whether it concerns money, space, or system administrators, someone outside of the development teams must keep an eye on long-term sustainability instead of short-term gains by individual teams.
The Tragedy of the Commons is the Achilles’ heel of Agile. It takes management to protect that heel, in order to prevent teams from depleting resources, and crippling the organization."
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Seeing Your Company as a System
by
Andrea Gabor
"The recognition that a company is a complex social system and a living community has been an underlying theme of leading management thinkers as far back as the early 20th century. Nevertheless, the machine continues to be the dominant metaphor for business leaders, many of whom seek to solve their problems by 'pulling levers' or 'pushing buttons': making large-scale changes without a clear feeling for how those changes will affect the collective action of the company.
The speed and complexity of the global business environment calls for a new appreciation of a systems-focused view of the world, one that recognizes the interrelationships of people, processes, and decisions — and designs organizational actions accordingly."
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A Major Mistake That Managers Make
by
Russell L. Ackoff
"Errors of omission, lost opportunities, are generally more critical than errors of commission. Organizations fail or decline more frequently because of what they did not do than because of what they did."
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How Do We Know What We Know? - Deming's SoPK Part IV
by
John Hunter
"If we can break from such beliefs that are not useful in modern organizations, we can improve our decisions. Having a Deming-based theory of knowledge will help us break from those beliefs and it will help us be more thoughtful as we learn to question other management beliefs we hold (many of which simply are not useful - or cause harm).
Understanding the theory of knowledge within the context of the Deming's System for Managing helps us more effectively and consistently learn and improve the processes and systems we work with. "
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Create a System That Lets People Take Pride in Their Work
by
John Hunter
"Using the term implies that it one person empowers another person. This is not the correct view. Instead we each play a role within a system. Yes there are constraints on your actions based on the role you are playing. Does a security guard empower the CEO to enter the building?
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You don't need to think about empowering people if you have a system that lets people take pride in what they do. If you think you need to empower staff, instead fix the system that requires you to think they are in need of empowerment."
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Scrum-ban
by
Corey Ladas
Great article on lean software development ideas: "One simple technique that brings us much closer to our kanban definition is to set a multitasking limit for individuals. You might have a simple principle like: prefer completing work to starting new work
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How to Be Startup CEO
Long article with many good ideas. "In my experience the three most important components of the Start-up CEO’s role are:
1) Creating a product that solves a real customer need (and convincing customers to pay for it).
2) Making sure your users and customers have an extremely positive emotional experience with your product.
3) Recruiting a great team to build your product."
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Thinking About the Future
by
Russell L. Ackoff
"My preoccupation is with where we would ideally like to be right now. Knowing this, we can act now so as constantly to reduce the gap between where we are and where we want to be. Then, to a large extent, the future is created by what we do now."
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The Role of Leadership in Software Development
by
Mary Poppendieck
"In this 90-minute talk from the Agile2007 conference, Lean software thought leader Mary Poppendieck reviewed 20th century management theories, including Toyota and Deming, and went on to talk about 'the matrix problem', alignment, waste cutting, planning
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Blame the System
by Steve LeBlanc - "Once we are free to look at and address where the system has failed us, we can let go of our blame and resentment for our co-workers. I propose that we need blame. We are meaning-seeking creatures and as such, we need to blame someone or something for what went wrong. Blame people and you demoralize them and make them afraid. When you blame the system, no one gets hurt and things gently improve.
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Our job is to improve the system while honoring those who work in and around it. Let’s all just blame the system."
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Improve the Affordable Care Act, Don’t Repeal It
by
John Toussaint
"when patients do need care, the processes of care delivery must be redesigned to radically improve the patient experience and reduce errors; 250,000 people dying every year from medical error is unacceptable. Finally, individual hospital and provider outcomes must be made public to the consumer so patient choice can play a role in reform.
Parts of the ACA are clearly on the right track to address health care reform. Other parts need to be significantly improved. The focus should be on improving the affordability of health care for every American. This should be the number one priority of the new government."
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Interview of and by Dr. Ackoff and Dr. Deming
by
Russell L. Ackoff, Clare Crawford Mason, W. Edwards Deming
Great stuff. The transcript spells Dr. Ackoff's name wrong (Akoff). They discuss the important of viewing organizations as systems and a fair amount of time on the problems with business school education in the USA. And they touch on a huge number of management topics. Dr. Deming "When one understands who depends on me, then I may take joy in my work." Dr. Ackoff "If there isn't join in work, you won't get productivity, and you won't get quality."
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The Equally Important “Respect for People†Principle
by
Bob Emiliani
"The 'Respect for People' principle encompasses all key stakeholders: employees, suppliers, customers, investors, and communities. Thus, rather than representing a single dyad, the 'Respect for People' principle is a multilateral expression of the need for balanced, mutually respectful relationships, cooperation, and co-prosperity with these key stakeholders."
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A Different Perspective on Quality: Bringing Management to Life
by
H. Thomas Johnson
Presentation at The Deming Institute. "We truly honor the legacy of Edwards Deming and Gregory Bateson if we begin to recognize that our business and economic organizations should be viewed as life systems, not mechanical systems, and begin to act accordingly. It is time to see these organizations as more than mechanical systems that serve only as instruments of conscious human purpose that we can describe with metaphors from life systems--they are in fact life systems..."
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Knowledge workers are the new capitalists
by
Peter Drucker
"knowledge workers are highly mobile within their specialism. They think nothing of moving from one university, one company or one country to another, as long as they stay within the same field of knowledge. There is a lot of talk about trying to restore knowledge workers' loyalty to their employing organisation, but such efforts will get nowhere. Knowledge workers may have an attachment to an organisation and feel comfortable with it, but their primary allegiance is likely to be to their specialised branch of knowledge."
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Profit = Market Price - Actual Cost or Price = Cost + Desired Profit
by
John Hunter
"Apple would probably sell very few iPhones for $2,000 more than they cost today. How many they would sell at $100 more or $100 less may change significantly but they would still be huge sellers at either of those prices. So that "market sets the price" idea is not 100% accurate (I don't think anyway).
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Pricing decisions also have big long term versus short term considerations. Apple has started pricing many things in a way which makes it hard for competitors to undercut them. Apple, almost for sure could charge more for the laptops they sell and the iPad and iPhone. But if they did they make it easier for a competitor to compete on price. This pricing decision is an Apple decision not a market decision."
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The Next 25 Years in Statistics
by
William Hill, William G. Hunter
(with contributions by Joseph W. Duncan, A. Blanton Godfrey, Brian L. Joiner, Gary C. McDonald, Charles G. Pfeifer, Donald W. Marquardt, and Ronald D. Snee). A transformation of the American style of management has already begun; in order for it to succee
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Dee Hock on Organizations
by
M. Mitchell Waldrop, Dee Hock
"An organization's success has enormously more to do with clarity of a shared purpose, common principles and strength of belief in them than to assets, expertise, operating ability, or management competence, important as they may be."
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Dr. Demings 1950 Lecture to Japanese Top Management
"In 1950, Dr. Deming gave a lecture to 80% of the top management people in Japan. What follows is a English translation of the original Japanese transcript. John Dowd made this happen a few years back and has agreed to share it with the Deming Community."
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Dr W. Edwards Deming’s System of Profound Knowledge
"Improvement requires change. Change requires a plan. Such a plan is a prediction – if we follow this plan, we believe that certain benefits will accrue. Learning comes from observing the implementation, and modifying further iterations of the plan accordingly.
Managers in an improving organisation will see themselves as experimenters and as leader of the learning cycle."
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Ten Questions with Jeffrey Pfeffer
by
Guy Kawasaki, Jeffrey Pfeffer
Interview by Guy Kawaasaki.
"companies often ignore the interdependence or connections between actions in one part and those in another. So, even as some departments are trying to cut the costs of benefits, others are worried about recruiting and retaining enough qualified people. Maybe the parts should work together.
Third, many companies presume that incentives are the answer to everything, and have a very mechanistic model of human behavior. That is also incorrect."
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Going Lean in Health Care
by
Jim Womack
"Lean principles hold the promise of reducing or eliminating wasted time, money, and energy in health care, creating a system that is efficient, effective, and truly responsive to the needs of patients ? the 'customers' at the heart of it all."
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Blind Spots in Learning and Inference
by
Gipsie Ranney
"We all face an onslaught of information daily. We use some of that information to learn and make inferences. As we do so, it helps to know about and avoid potential blind spots. In the following article, I point out some of these blind spots. I will use several examples taken from the reports and analyses of the Challenger and Columbia space shuttle disasters, not because I wish to criticize the U. S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), but because information is publicly available about those two events."
Management Web Sites and Resources
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Inspector Guilfoyle
"I am a serving Police Inspector and systems thinker, passionate about doing the right thing in policing. I write, lecture and advise on the benefits of incorporating systems thinking principles into policing, having studied the works of W. Edwards Deming and associated authors and successfully applied their theories to operational policing."
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Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog
by
John Hunter
Blog by John Hunter on many topics to to improve the management of organizations, including: Deming, lean manufacturing, agile software development, evidence based decision making, customer focus, innovation, six sigma, systems thinking, leadership, psychology, ...
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Quantum Shifting
Vision: People all over the world enjoy meaningful and satisfying work by thinking bigger about themselves, their work and the world.
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W. Edwards Deming Institute
by
W. Edwards Deming
Founded by W. Edwards Deming the institute carries forward his philosophy. The site includes information on the institutes annual conferences and offers newsletters online.
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Toyota Production System
Site on Toyota.com. "The Toyota Production System (TPS) was established based on two concepts: The first is called 'jidoka'(which can be loosely translated as 'automation with a human touch') which means that when a problem occurs, the equipment stops immediately, preventing defective products from being produced; The second is the concept of 'Just-in-Time,' in which each process produces only what is needed by the next process in a continuous flow."
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Benjamin Mitchell's Blog
by
Benjamin Mitchell
"I'm a London-based independent consulting focussed on Systems Thinking, Intervention Theory and Lean / Kanban applied to IT businesses. I am a follower of Ohno, Deming, Seddon and Argyris."
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Not Running a Hospital
by
Paul Levy
Advocate for patient-driven care, eliminating preventable harm, transparency of clinical outcomes, and front-line driven process improvement.
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Curious Cat Management Improvement Connections
by
John Hunter
The aim of Curious Cat Management Improvement Connections is to contribute to the successful adoption of management improvement to advance joy in work and joy in life.
The site provides connections to resources on a wide variety of management topics to help managers improve the performance of their organization. The site was started in 1996 by John Hunter.
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Daily Kaizen
by
Lee Fried
Blog by Lee Fried tracking the journey of a world-class health care system as it continuously improves to serve its members. He works for Group Health Cooperative non-profit care system in Seattle, Washington.
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Curious Cat Management Improvement Articles
by
John Hunter
Hundreds of useful management articles hand selected to help managers improve the performance of their organization. Sorted by topic including: Deming, lean manufacturing, six sigma, continual improvement, innovation, leadership, managing people, software development, psychology and systems thinking.
