Expand the View of the System to Find Ways to Improve Results

Here is an example of improvement made possible by expanding the view of the system (and viewing the results from the perspective of the customer instead of just looking at internal process measures). I was working to improve the processing time for court orders of child support (in the retirement system for the USA federal […]

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Annual Performance Evaluations are a Poor Management Practice

Sports provides visible examples of the futility of accurate performance appraisal. We have athletes who thousands of people devote a huge amount of time to dissecting their strengths and weaknesses and those evaluations are constantly shown to be wrong. Teams are constantly paying free agents tens of millions that completely flop. Others hire someone...

Dec 2022

John Hunter Online

Years ago I would publish multiple blog posts here every month. More recently I have posted several blog posts a year. For those interested I have several options to receive more frequent updates. Feeds of my previous management blog posts allow you to subscribe and receive daily updates on management improvement ideas. So even though […]

Sep 2022

Interview of Bill Hunter: Statistical Variability and Interactions

Interview of Bill Hunter on Statistical Variability and Interactions by Peter Scholtes, 1986: In this interview Bill Hunter describes how results are made up of the impact and interactions of many variables. Many of those variables we don’t know about or account for. What we normally do is try to figure out the most important […]

Jul 2022

Profound Podcast with John Hunter, Part Two

John Willis interviewed me for his Profound podcast series, this posts is about part two of the interview (listen to part two of the podcast, John Hunter – Curious Cat). See my post on part one of the interview. This post provides links to more information on what we discussed in the podcast. Hopefully these […]

Mar 2022

Profound Podcast: John Hunter – Curious Cat

John Willis interviewed me for his Profound podcast series (listen to part one of the podcast, John Hunter – Curious Cat) This post provides links to more information on what we discussed in the podcast. Hopefully these links allow you to explore ideas that were mentioned in the podcast and that you would like to […]

Feb 2022

Interview of Bill Hunter, Brian Joiner and Peter Scholtes on Better Management Practices

Interview with Bill Hunter, Brian Joiner and Peter Scholtes (listen to the interview) on a Public Affair, National Public Radio about improving management practices in the USA. The interview is over 30 years old now but the better management ideas are as true today as they were then. Sadly we have not improved management practices […]

Oct 2021

How to Lead From Any Level In the Organization

By successfully helping other people get better results, whether it is your manager, peers, or subordinates, you will grow trust and influence with those around you. “You grow your influence with them by showing them that allowing you to have influence is good for them.” The more you show positive outcomes from your input, the more influence you will...

Jun 2021

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