Management Improvement Blog Carnival #147

I'm pleased to host #147 of the Management Improvement Blog Carnival:

• Being Responsive is Critical for Successful Customer Development by Ben Yoskovitz -- "Customers can be quite forgiving. But what they won’t tolerate is being ignored."
• Another reason to go to gemba by Cornell Colbert -- "Had we not gone to gemba, and encountered this engaged employee, we would have never realized how simple the solution really was."
• Rethinking or Moving Beyond Deming Often Just Means Applying More of What Dr. Deming Actually Said by John Hunter -- A quite extensive exploration of Deming in response to Don Reinertsen's talk at Lean Kanban Benelux 2011.
• Failure is Essential to Knowledge Work by Keith Swenson -- "Viability will depend upon learning to cultivate a culture that not only accepts failure, but appreciates failure for what it can provide."
• Bad is Stronger than Good: Why Eliminating the Negative is More Important than Accentuating the Positive by Bob Sutton -- "The underlying theory and evidence for my argument [is] that bad apples do so much damage, and more broadly destructive emotions and incompetence undermine performance and well-being so much, that the first order of business for any boss is to eliminate the negative rather than accentuate the positive"
• Was Steve Lean? by John Shook -- "Though known as innovators, the secret to the success of Jobs and Ford was not that they actually invented anything like light bulbs. Ford didn't invent the automobile. Nor did he really invent the idea of flow production or interchangeable parts. Likewise, Jobs didn't invent the PC, the graphical interface, the music player, music, the telephone, the tablet PC. What Jobs did, like Henry before him, was put it all together as a total package. And the packages they developed were innovative and complete beyond imagination."
• Aikido and Lean by Pascal Dennis -- "I get it, this is a dojo..." My experience in martial arts is more Wing Chun, Tai Chi, kung fu but when I learned more about Toyota, I pretty much had the same response.