John Hunter, being a son of quality guru Bill Hunter, appreciates the value of design of experiments (DOE) for process improvement. He often mentions DOE in his blog The Curious Cat Management Improvement Site — with this StatsMadeEasy blog being cited on a few occasions. I keep tabs on Curious Cat to see what John turns up that might hit a hot button for me. So when John asked me to participate in this year’s Annual Management Improvement Blog Carnival, I readily agreed to join a number of other bloggers favored by him to select top 2009 posts from within our community.

See us hosts and the blogs we’ve chosen to review at this site coordinated by John. As you can see, StatsMadeEasy is culling the best of these bloggers:

• Bob Sutton (“Work Matters”)
• Seth Godin
• Justin Hunter (Hexawise Blog)*

This last blog – one of many proffered by John that focus on agile programming – is reviewed by my son Hank, who codes for Stat-Ease.

Bob Sutton offers many impressive credentials but the one that caught my eye was Weird Ideas That Work – a book he authored. I’m always on the lookout for non-intuitive approaches that improve process effectiveness. One of Sutton’s suggestions is to “increase variance in available knowledge.” That’s a good twist for an aficionado of stats!

Here my favorite 2009 posts by Bob:

• 1/20, Brainstorming: Pros and Cons provides a balanced view of whether it works to gather a group for generation of ideas. I’ve been intrigued by this since my days as a Product Manager at General Mills (chemical division) when I would lead brainstorms with our R&D scientists and engineers. Note the comment by blogger Keith Harmeyer (SmartStorming) that “the ideal situation is a combination of solo ideation and brainstorming.” I agree with that because it draws out ideas from the introverts — perhaps propensity to speak one’s mind is inversely correlated to quality of comment. ; )
• 3/9 Dilbert and The Smart Talk Trap re-tells a story from Weird Ideas That Work in which a brainstorming leader at Microsoft asked “What would be the worst product we could possibly build?” His idea was to think opposite but, of course, the crazy idea is what management liked. Coincidentally I was watching the movie Revolutionary Road, which features a cynical worker in a downtrodden ‘50s office (played wonderfully by Leonard DiCaprio) who, after deciding to quit this rat race, fires off a flippant flyer to the Toledo branch. This then gets him a promotion for thinking out of the box!
  

  “Ideas that seem dumb may have more merit than you think.” — Bob Sutton

• 7/6 Wisdom, Randomness, and the Naskapi Indians provides a good example of how one can often benefit by choosing a direction at random. This works well for me when deciding at poker game whether to bluff or not. I won’t say anything more because one of my buddies might read this, so it would cost me.
• 10/7/09 Squeaky Wheels, The Health Care Debate, and Student Complaints About Grades reveals how Sutton, a professor at Stanford University, deals with students who complain about grades. Being a stoic Minnesotan who was taught to grin and bear it, I like his thinking on this!
• 11/1/09 Intuition vs. Data-Driven Decision-Making: Some Rough Ideas supports Sutton’s view “that intuition and analysis are not opposing perspectives, but tag team partners that, under the best conditions, where hunches are followed and then evaluated with evidence…” My world of statistical design of experiments is data driven, of course. However, the big breakthroughs in process and product improvement often come from subject-matter experts who come up with a brilliant hunch that pans out. The classic book on DOE Statistics for Experimenters, co-authored by Bill Hunter (the father of John Hunter who is the ring-master for this carnival of blogs), begins with a wonderful treatise on induction versus deduction that I recommend to all experimenters.

I would be remiss not to provide a heads up to the elephant in the room at the Work Matters blog: Sutton devotes many of his posts to the bad behavior of bosses – a bugaboo for me too. The difference is that I keep my expletive (***hole!!!) private, whereas Sutton is brave enough to shout it out. Most of you may find this scintillating, but those who consider prim to be professional: Be forewarned about some rough language. One of the tamer and thought-provoking posts (29 comments) is the October 18th one asking Do You Learn More from Working for a Bad Boss than a Good Boss? Another post that takes the high road came on December 22 (just the other day) relating The Boss’s Journey: The Path to Simplicity and Competence. Being of a certain age (not far from Bob’s) I had to chuckle at his story of a student who disrespected managers until becoming the boss of a small product development team made him realize how hard this role can be.