Leadership
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It Really All Begins with Respect
There is much attention given these days to idea of respect, and deservedly so. Respect is one of the basest and most foundational yearnings of mankind. Maslov even included the high-order notion of respect in his famous Hierarchy of Needs as just below the need of self-actualization. It is safe to say we instinctively crave…
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How we onboard talent makes a big difference in their success
It can be shocking to hear that many people are still being thrown into the deep end of the pool on day one of a new job. How we prepare our salaried, hourly, and even temporary employees for success says quite a bit about us. We only have the one, fleeting opportunity to demonstrate respect…
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Is Having All Green Really a Good Sign?
Green means good and red means problems, right? Therefore, people commonly interpret an array of green indicators to mean that “My ability is confirmed by the sea of green. I’ve succeeded in spinning all the plates.” This mentality, however, misses the whole point of continuous improvement. The indicators are there to measure the health of…
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Asserting Control of our Workdays
We all have one of those friends that lives in a constant state of frenzy, right? They appear to go from one crisis to another without ever finding a moment of peace. In their own mind, the chaos is far from their control. They often believe that they are perpetual victims of their circumstances. Don’t…
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The High Call of Stewardship
We spend a lot of time these days talking about tools. Tools that make our lives easier. Tools that help us visualize information. Tools that can be used to break down problems or compile solutions. But sometimes we need to take a step back from the tool and look more closely at the intent. After…
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Taking a good look at Organizational Health
When was the last time you went to the doctor for a simple check-up? Most people, it appears, tend to avoid these preventative trips to a physician and would rather wait until an ailment has started impacting their quality of life or their daily routine. What about you? I confess that I tend to presume…
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Simple Ways to Stimulate Innovation
So, you want to have an organization that demonstrates an eagerness to grow and evolve, with an intense appetite to satisfy any customer’s needs. You want innovation to be “part of the DNA” of the company and are not sure where to start. This is a marathon ambition, but not an unreasonable one, so buckle…
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Managing your Value Streams is a critical part of your Lean journey.
All too often organizations want to claim to be Lean without committing to the journey to become Lean. Lean isn’t for the faint of heart, you see. It’s fairly easy to adopt all sorts of Lean tools while neglecting the philosophy and the critical cultural shift that follows. Lean should be a transformation, rather than…
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Don’t Settle for Surface Solutions. Dig Deeper…
Business moves quickly. The pressure to produce results is always high. We can all relate to the constant call for more output, more productivity, more improvement, and more results. It’s tempting in those moments to look for shortcuts, to make assumptions, or to make unjustified leaps. Unfortunately, succumbing to these temptations is a gamble that often doesn’t pay off…
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The rich learnings found only in failure…
Much hay is made today that we need to “fail fast, learn, then move forward.” It strikes me as particularly dis-ingenuine however, because the mindsets prominent in most organizations are not fond – or even tolerant – of failure. One could argue that failure is a prerequisite for learning, for without failure we’ve only validated what we…