Carnival of Lean Leadership

The holidays have been a busy time for all of us, but bloggers kept on posting.  Here we go again with some of our favorite lean and leadership posts.  If there’s a blog we don’t know about, please let us know.

We’ll start with the lean-oriented blogs, and you’ll notice that we have a few new bloggers!

• Our own Evolving Excellence has a couple of great posts (1, 2) by Bill Waddell examining "failure".  Like several other blogs we put forward some New Year’s resolutions… but this time from the "lean at home" perspective.  And we continued to drive the "looking vs being lean" issue by discussing the importance of employees… which drew a large number comments.
• Kathleen Fasanella’s Fashion-Incubator has a rather unique post on push manufacturing of bras, as well as a three-part series on batch product development in the apparel industry.
• Jon Miller’s Gemba Panta Rei discusses the New Year’s message from Mr. Watanabe at Toyota, and also examines lean failure.
• Mike Wroblewski’s Got Boondoggle has an appropriate holiday post on the need to apply kaizen to toy design and just recently discussed the importance of taking "before" photos.
• A new lean blog by SME’s Karen Wilhelm and Jeurgen Boenisch, Human Side of Lean, joins many of us in discussing the differences between GM and Toyota.
• Norm Bodek talks about zero defects in Kaikaku.
• Mark Graban’s very active Lean Manufacturing Blog is also discussing the future of GM and Ford, and how it compares to Toyota.  There is also an interesting post on "saying no to Wal-Mart". 
• Karen Wilhelm has started her own blog, Lean Reflections, and has a great post on lessons learned from kaizen.  Karen is well-known in the lean community, and I’m looking forward to gaining new insight from her future posts.
• Joe Ely’s Learning About Lean has a post on why people observe but don’t see lean.
• Dr. Irani of the JobShopLean Yahoo Group has started a new blog, Next Generation Manufacturing, that deals with the application of lean to high mix low volume operations.  He has several introductory posts in the new blog that are worth reading.
• Many of you recall the week-long blogging on project kaizen by the "gang of seven" including our own Bill Waddell.  A summary of all of the posts can be found at a new blog, Project Kaizen, here.

Now on to some of our favorite leadership posts from the past couple weeks.

• David Anderson’s Agile Management Blog has a holiday post we’ve referenced before on one piece flow vs batch when churning out the annual Christmas cards.
• Chris Bailey’s Alchemy of Soulful Work talks about the importance of task ownership.
• Be Excellent discusses the results of a recent study on goal-setting.
• Bud Bilanich’s Common Sense Guy has some year-end questions for leaders.
• David Daniels’ Business & Technology Reinvention has a unique approach to benchmarking… by looking at your parking lot.
• Robert May at BusinessPundit talks about the pitfalls of complexity and complex systems.
• Clarke Ching’s I Think Not, Baby Puppy has a post on lean software development, as well as applying TOC to re-engineer the sales process.
• The Cato Institute’s blog also weighs in on the woes of GM.
• Adrian Savage on The Coyote Within say "nuts to multitasking", which we also referenced in our post on task management.
• Curious Cat discusses agility vs. six sigma.
• John Hagel’s Edge Perspectives joins the fray with a good post on the pressure mounting in Detroit.
• Dwayne Melancon at Genuine Curiousity writes about polyphasic sleep and its potential effect on business.
• Eric at Grim Reader discusses environmentalism and having faith in technology.
• Gary Whitehair at High Performance Business has a post on how to develop clarity of purpose.
• Ken Jarboe at The Intangible Economy writes about the impact of apprenticeship programs in France, Germany, and the U.S..
• Phil Gerbyshak at Make It Great shows us how we can free up all kinds of time by canceling something.
• The Thinking Managers has a good post on total quality management and motivation.
• Lisa Haneberg at Management Craft talks about creating alignment through planning.
• Management-Issues tells us we’re human beings, not human capital.  They are thinking along the same lines as us when we wrote about how employees really are our most important assets. 
• Pat Cleary at the NAM Blog has a wacky warning label.
• Dwayne Melacon at Never Work Alone discusses social networking… and wanting to be alone.
• George Ambler at The Practice of Leadership tells us how we can increase our productivity by decreasing our availability.  Now that’s a great idea!
• We couldn’t resist linking to A.J.’s politically correct holiday wishes at Project, Process & Business Improvement.
• Skip at Random Thoughts from a CTO warns us about the hidden costs of new technologies.
• Trevor at Servant-Leadership tells us about the importance of encouraging dissenting viewpoints.
• Steve Conover’s The Skeptical Optimist discusses a review of Ray Kurzweil’s book, The Singularity is Near.  This is a fascinating view of the future of technology.
• Rosa Say at Talking Story helps us understand our relationship quotient.

Well I think that will wrap it up for this week!