Carnival of Lean Leadership #3

Carnival of Lean Leadership #3 from Evolving Excellence once again does a great job of collection links to posts worth reading, including:

• A big welcome to Norman Bodek, who has started his own blog, Kaikaku. Norman is well known for his Shingo Prize winning books. His first post is on Kaikaku and Kaizen as the "twin sisters" that can drive world class competitiveness.
• Six Sigma Blog adds to the holiday cheer with a post on "Thanksgiving Design of Experiments"... what is the most effective way to pop your popcorn?
• Curious Cat has a similarly themed post on productivity improvement from R&D and innovation.
• Slacker Manager has a post on "the Drucker paradox"... why are his ideas so widely read but so rarely practiced?

Each of the lean carnivals offer some great posts and reinforce the idea that there are great ideas being shared online. I also find it interesting how well represented lean manufacturing and lean thinking are. In the lean carnival that is not surprising but in the worthwhile management information online I have long been frustrated with how little good management improvement information was online.

The influence of the lean blogs in the last year has been remarkable. Prior to that there really was a small set of sites that provided excellent content and they often were lacking in various ways. The Center for Quality and Productivity Improvement (which my father, Bill Hunter, co-founded with George Box - so I am biased) has great reports but the site itself is not good.

The Center for Quality Management has a great journal online but stopped publishing it. The Institute for Healthcare improvement had some good info online but in the last year has made much more great material available.

I helped make some great material from the former Navy Total Quality Leadership Office available online as well as the Small Business Guidebook to Quality Management. And the Curious Cat Management Improvement library I believe is very helpful.

There were other good sites like Quality Digest, Poka-Yoke, Clemson University (Deming Electronic Network...) but overall it was very slow going over the last ten years for those seeking great management ideas online.

It seems to me the push from the lean community is greatly adding to the worthwhile management improvement material available online which is something I am thankful for.