Learning from Customers

Don’t make it hard for customers to be heard. Provide training and tools to employees to document customers voices. Train employees to learn as much as possible from customers. Value the time employees spend listening to customers and learning from them. Most customers won’t speak up, those that do speak up provide valuable insight. Don’t […]

Mar 2021

Most Popular Posts on the Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog in 2020

These posts were the most popular posts on the Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog in 2020 (as measured by page views recorded by my analytics application). I wrote very few posts for this blog last year. The historical Curious Cat management RSS feed provides a feed of all the past posts about management (I also […]

Jan 2021

Interview of Bill Hunter: Improving Quality and Productivity in Organizations

Interview of William G. Hunter on Improving Quality and Productivity in Organizations by Peter Scholtes. Bill taught a course at the University of Wisconsin – Madison, Improving Quality and Productivity in Organizations, which was co-sponsored by the business school, statistics department and industrial engineering department. There were a few undergraduate...

Sep 2020

Mary Jenkins: Statistical Approach to HR Systems

Guest post by John Hunter, author of Management Matters: Building Enterprise Capability. Mary Jenkins gave this presentation on Statistical Approach to HR Systems at the Ohio Quality and Productivity Forum in 1992. In the presentation Mary provides a view of the organization as a system and the existing and possible systems to manage personnel. She...

Jul 2020

I Have Published an Update to Management Matters: Building Enterprise Capability

I have published some edits and additional content for my book – Management Matters: Building Enterprise Capability. One of the things I really like about how I have published the book (with Leanpub) is that anyone that has previously purchased the book gets these, and all future, updates for free. So if you have purchased […]

Jun 2020

Popular Posts on the Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog in 2019

These posts were the most popular posts on the Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog in 2019 (as measured by page views recorded by my analytics application). 14 posts are repeats from the 2018 top 20 list. Of the new top 20 posts 3 were published in 2010, 1 in 2008 and 2 in 2019. The […]

Jan 2020

Management Improvement System Flavors

ASQ has asked their Influential Voices to explore the question “Is Agile the new Lean?” I have participated with the program since 2012: see my past blog posts as part of the ASQ Influential Voices program. No Agile is not the new Lean. On this blog, in 2008, I wrote about Future Directions for Agile […]

Sep 2019

Bill Hunter and the Quality Movement

Watch this presentation by George Box at the 1st Annual Hunter Conference on Quality: Bill Hunter and the Quality Movement. In the presentation George discusses interesting student design of experiments projects; read more on those efforts in 101 Ways to Design an Experiment, or Some Ideas About Teaching Design of Experiments. To read more about […]

Aug 2019

How to Successfully Lead Change Efforts?

ASQ has asked their Influential Voices to explore the question “How can an individual become a successful Change Leader?” I have participated with the program since 2012: see my past blog posts as part of the ASQ Influential Voices program. In order to lead efforts to improve the management of an organization understanding how people […]

Jun 2019

Factfulness – The Importance of Critical Thinking

Factfulness by Hans Roling (of TED talks and Gapminder charts fame) is an exceptionally good book. It provides great insight into how to think more effectively and how to understand the reality of the world we live in (versus the large distortions so common in most people’s view of the world). Today the people living […]

Jun 2019