For this year’s Annual Management Improvement Blog Carnival, hosted by John Hunter,* I am picking the best posts from three blogs:
- Seth Godin’s Blog (this fellow is a real character — very stimulating!)
- Lean is Good (focus on statistical guru W. Edwards Deming appeals to me)
- Flowing Data (theme is “visualization and statistics”: graphs and numbers — what a wonderful combo!)
See us hosts and the blogs we’ve chosen to review at this site coordinated by John.
Seth Godin has much to offer for entrepreneurs and professional workers trying to contend with this increasingly high-tech world. This past year Godin published the very timely book Linchpin: Are You Indispensable? . The 2010 blog from Seth Grodin that stands out for me is:
- The Levy flight, which provides the mathematical-underpinning for foraging behavior by animals and humans – seeking sustenance in the form of food and information; respectively. Sharks hunt by this random method punctuated by long forays in a particular direction as reported here by Discovery News. Browsers of internet presumably behave in a similar manner – occasionally delving deeply into a given website. Knowing this, model-builders can provide more accurate simulations of consumer behavior. Grodin is astute to recognize this.
My pick from last year’s Lean is Good blog is this one written by Bryan Zeigler:
- Goalpost Quality – Taguchi Losses and SPC provides a simple, but compelling vision for improving quality – think of your specification range as “V” – not a goal post. From my years working on manufacturing improvement, I can attest to the corrosive nature of settling for output that squeaks by the customer requirements.
Of the three blogs featured here, my favorite by far is Flowing Data, written by UCLA Statistics graduate student Nathan Yau. The charts it presents can be truly amazing, such as this one that details the extremely-fascinating 2010 movie Inception. However, here’s my favorite chart presented by Flowing Data this past year:
- Where Bars Trump Grocery Stores highlights Wisconsin as the place to party hearty. Being just over the border in a State that’s bonkers against beer,** I say thank goodness for more liberality about liquor. The graphic tells the story.
That’s it for this year’s best of the Carnival of management blogs that I sampled. Take a Levy Flight for yourself and see if you can hunt out one that strikes your fancy.
*For background on John Hunter and his Carnival, see this post from last year
** See this blog by Andrew Zimmern about Stupid Beer Laws in Minnesota