Author Archives: John Hunter

Change Your Name

Best Buy Asks Man To Change Name [the broken link was removed]: Turns out if your last name is less than three letters, the online sign-up isn’t an option for you. Companies often put up barriers for no reason, then … Continue reading

Posted in Customer focus, IT, Management, Software Development | Tagged , , , , | 6 Comments

Customer Un-focus

Counties caught in conundrum: getting Amish to take food stamps [the broken link was removed] by John Horton Accepting public assistance is verboten within the Amish culture. It simply is not done. But Taylor is under orders to at least … Continue reading

Posted in Customer focus, Data, Management, Public Sector | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

Poor Service – Industry Standard?

More Trouble Canceling HP Orders by Bob Sutton: I wrote a post a couple months ago about how difficult it was to cancel an order I had JUST made for an HP computer, and how when I complained on the … Continue reading

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Create Your Own Book

I received a custom made photo book from my brother. It is amazing. It is a hardcover book, full of photos. The quality is amazing. The book is printed by blurb. Looking on their web site the pricing is surprisingly … Continue reading

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Holding Improvement Gains

The Hard Part: Holding Improvement Gains [the broken link was removed] by Ron Snee The long term goal should be to combine all improvement initiatives into an overall improvement system and create the management framework to sustain that system. Thus, … Continue reading

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5 Things You Might Not Know About Me

I have been tagged by Mark Graban of the lean blog: “Tag” – 5 Things You Don’t Know About Me. I spent a year in Singapore (the small person in the photo is me, the bigger one is Dad on … Continue reading

Posted in curiouscat.com, Fun | Tagged , , , , | 6 Comments

Interview with Toyota President

Very interesting interview with Katsuaki Watanabe – Toyota President seeks growth without major quality problems: For the North American-exclusive models, we would like to localize as much as possible the r&d activities, like factory, production engineering and production preparation. We … Continue reading

Posted in Management, Toyota Production System (TPS) | Leave a comment

Why Extrinsic Motivation Fails

Why Motivation by Pizza Doesn’t Work This completely changes the role of the manager as motivator. Rather than being the source of motivation (kind of a ludicrous idea in itself), the manager must help employees to find their own intrinsic … Continue reading

Posted in Deming, Management, Psychology, Respect | Tagged , , , , | 5 Comments

How to Prevent Innovation

Top ten tips for preventing innovation give some great ideas many companies are already doing but you may find some your company hasn’t mastered 🙂 For example: Make performance reviews easy. Create some easy-to-measure metrics (like # of sick-days taken, … Continue reading

Posted in Creativity, Innovation, Management, Performance Appraisal | Tagged , | 1 Comment

Mason Neck State Park Photos

Photos of Mason Neck State Park, Virginia National park photos: Grand Canyon, Great Falls, Rocky Mountain, Grand Teton…

Posted in curiouscat.com, Travel photos | Tagged | Leave a comment