Archive for the ‘Leanership’ Category
Monday, April 26th, 2010
Excerpt: Quality through the decades has been an adventurous evolution. This articles looks at the changes in philosophy, requirements and customer expectations from the 1980’s to the 2010’s – and summarizes where you need to be NOW to be competitive in the global marketplace.
Quality through the decades has been an adventurous evolution for those who’ve lived through it … not for the faint of heart, the action adverse or those afraid of culture and business change. These changes have affected what we expect, what we buy, and even what we tell our friends, family and extended social networks.
Today’s global economy and technology explosion create even more challenges to be addressed: increased expectations, increasingly complex products, shorter timescales, while making the consequences of failure much more severe. In addition, there are new challenges Read More
Tags: Continuous Improvement, Customer Satisfaction, Design for Six Sigma, Lean Manufacturing, Lean Six Sigma, Operational Excellence, Quality, Quality Control, Quality Evolution, Quality Improvement, Quality Management, Quality System, Quality Transformation, Six Sigma
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Friday, June 26th, 2009
The global talent war has seen organisational leaders scratching their heads to understand how they can attract and retain the very best talent that is going to directly impact their organisational worth to shareholders, stakeholders, employees and of course customers.
As the ever present headaches of…
- trying to balance focus on maximising profit and margin v investing for growth
- implementing short term high impact initiatives v long term strategic thinking and planning
- focusing on a business as a whole (“corporate think” and control) or on its constituent parts (functional, geographical, product/service streams) Read More
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Wednesday, May 20th, 2009
Peter Drucker says “Quality in a product or service is not what the supplier puts in. It is what the customer gets out and is willing to pay for. A product is not quality because it is hard to make and costs a lot of money, as manufacturers typically believe. This is incompetence. Customers pay for what is of use to them and gives them value.”
Warren Buffet has been quoted as saying “Price is what you pay, value is what you get”
Both suggest value is in the eye of the receiver.
Read More
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Thursday, March 19th, 2009
Leadership is usually defined with such statements as
* Creating and communicating a vision and strategic direction
* Aligning the organisational stakeholders
* Motivating and inspiring people to deliver
The principles of Lean thinking are
* Define value from the customer’s perspective
* Define the value stream activities for the waste free delivery of each product/service
* Align the value stream for continuous flow
* Manage demand at the pull of the customer
* Seek to continually perfect what you have created
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Thursday, February 26th, 2009
Much has been written about leadership; what it is, who should be doing it, how they should be doing it, what models work in which situations and how companies might apply those models for organisational effectiveness.
Much has been written about lean thinking; what it is, how it works, what the tools, techniques and concepts are and how different companies can translate those concepts into working models for their business.
Both leadership and lean thinking are seen as enablers for organisational success and yet…
Tags: Misc
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Monday, December 17th, 2007
The final 3Cs are compatibility, connectivity and creativity and in conjunction with capability make up 4 key elements to consider when recruiting, training and developing people to deliver value for and to your customers. At the front line of value are the sales and commercial teams who are accountable for the customer relationships and order taking part of your brand proposition. To differentiate your service offering they need to be more than transactional; they need to have an enterprise mindset.
COMPATIBILITY
Tags: Misc
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Thursday, December 13th, 2007
In part I revealed that the 4Cs are Capability, Compatibility, Connectivity And Creativity.
In part 3 today I will explore the first C of capability.
Capability
“Skills, knowledge and talents are distinct elements of a person’s performance. The distinction being, that skills and knowledge can be taught whereas talents cannot… Talents are recurring patterns of thought, feeling or behaviour that can be productively applied… They are a person’s mental filters.”
This has implications when recruiting and developing people for any part of your organisation where customer advocacy is required; and of course you could say that that should be everyone!
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Monday, November 26th, 2007
The strategies that enable a company to gain and maintain customers are only as effective as the people that implement them; so recruiting, training, developing and rewarding those people effectively, is crucial. A phrase commonly used is the war on talent; but should it be a battle?
What if a company’s talent strategy was such that the right people were attracted to rather than fought for?
At the frontline of any company is its salesforce. The salesforce of the future will need to reconsider the way it “sells”.
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Tuesday, November 13th, 2007
This morning I read The State of Lean in 2007 an article by Jim Womack. The article gave a brief history of lean, what has worked, what hasn’t and in Womack’s view why lean has more often than not been seen and applied as a series of tools rather than a whole system or total management system.
Many of you have probably been victims of initiative overload or on the receiving end of your executive teams need for “the next big thing to transform our business!”
* Why is it that the application of a total system is so rare?
* Why is it that taking a whole system approach to applying the principles of lean is the exception rather than the rule?
* Why are so many organisations creating more waste rather than eliminating it altogether
* Why is that the difficult decisions are ignored or avoided?
Tags: Misc
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