Nov 24, 2025 | Operations
Continuous Improvement is a mindset, the improvements sought are on their own often tiny, seemingly irrelevant in isolation. The point is in the compounding of the improvements over time that delivers the improved outcome. Proclamations from the CEO, group ‘Love-ins’ and slogans on the lunchroom wall have no impact.
It is also true that not all improvements are easy to measure. How do you measure the culture that supports and feeds continuous improvement?
However, there are things you can measure that will be leading indicators of CI
- Cycle time. Measuring the cycle time of processes, seeking to shorten them is always an indicator of improvement. Almost all improvement activities I have seen and been involved with use time as a measure of performance.
- Product quality. A common problem with measuring quality is defining just what the term means. To me it is very simply compliance to specifications, which is generally easy to measure, once you have agreed the specs. The most common tool is a ‘Control chart’ that graphs the upper and lower limits of acceptable adherence to specifications. It can be used equally well to measure the tolerances on a machine output, to cycle times of any process, and responses to a lead generation program.
- Customer satisfaction. Asking customers is a good place to start. There is plenty of research around that indicates that the degree of customer satisfaction an enterprise thinks they are delivering, and what the degree is when their customers are asked differs wildly. Independent surveys can be very informative, and tools like the net promoter score framework, can deliver the numbers sought by the corner office. To me the very best measures are the rate of return customers and lifetime customer value compared to industry peers.
- Ratios. Driven by the strategic priorities, every business will have the opportunity to employ differing ratios that reflect the alignment with the strategic priority. For example, revenue/employee, right-first-time/installations, new customer revenue/total revenue, the list can go on. However, the catch is to have as few KPI’s as possible, cascaded through the organisation that enable the drivers of success to be made very visible. For example, a former client instigated a company wide KPI of Gross margin/employee. This KPI was used company wide, and within individual functions and work groups through the organisation. It focussed company wide attention on activities that drove revenue and the COGS.
- Employee generated ideas. Have a formal process of encouraging, gathering, sorting, and acting on the ideas coming from the front line. It is always the case that those closest to the action see the opportunities better than those further up the line. Engage them in genuine process improvement, which as a huge side benefit. This sort of employee engagement builds a robust culture. A culture that measures, celebrates, and implements small ideas is the real engine of continuous improvement.
- Employee satisfaction. The old wives saying ‘happy wife, Happy life’ applies equally to employees. Happy, motivated employees are perhaps the best way to ensure that customers are well treated, and therefore return, and are prepared to refer you.
- Financial ROI. The last in this list, but most obvious and most often used. You make an investment, you want a return, and the accountants will deliver up a way to count it. Benefit divided by Cost of implementation. The challenge is putting some numbers around the benefit. At best these measures are appropriate in specific circumstances where there is some hard capex being made to improve one of the above parameters.
Header cartoon courtesy of GapingVoid.com
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Nov 18, 2025 | AI
AI is stripping out the commercial friction that previously required middle management as coordinators.
The old vertical model, with layers of functions passing work up and down the pyramid, is being replaced by horizontal flows of cross-functional orchestration.
Traditional organisations run on vertical alignment. Each function optimises its own sequence of tasks, reporting neatly up the line. It looks tidy on a chart but in reality, can be chaotic.
Customers do not live in your vertical world. They move sideways, across sales, production, logistics, and service, expecting a seamless experience.
AI is flipping that organisational pyramid on its side. It connects once-isolated functions into a single horizontal process. What was once delegated up and down now needs to be orchestrated across.
Sequential processes, the bread and butter of functional work, are predictable. They are easy to automate and improve. However, the processes that serve customers are not sequential. They are coordinated, and they demand awareness of what is happening across functions, not just within them.
This difference matters. Sequential work relies on delegation. Coordinated work requires orchestration. The first is mechanical; the second is musical.
To orchestrate effectively, AI needs agency. It must be allowed to make choices within parameters, not just follow a script. Without that level of agency, automation collapses into the same bottlenecks middle management used to create while claiming to fix them. True orchestration demands that machines can choose the next note when the music changes.
This is gold for the cost hawks and process zealots who love squeezing inefficiency from sequential work. It is also gold for the customer-facing teams because orchestration delivers something far more valuable: speed. When everything else is roughly equal, price, specification, guarantees, two things decide who wins.
- Delivered In Full, On Time, (DIFOT) what was promised when it was promised, without error.
- Cycle time, how fast an order moves from request to fulfilment.
Do both better than the competition and you are operating inside their OODA loop, seeing, deciding, and acting faster than they can react. That’s the sharp edge of AI’s agency.
AI will not just make work faster. It will force organisations to decide whether they develop and trust their AI systems more than their existing sequential and often manual processes. That is not a technical question, it’s cultural: and it is coming faster than most hierarchies can flatten.
Nov 10, 2025 | AI
AI has been labelled many things from a fundamental driver of change to just another technology.
People say AI kills jobs and creativity. That’s lazy thinking. The real risk is comfort—the reflex to cling to old silos and familiar workflows while the world moves on, and competitors build better systems.
Organisational silos evolved to manage scale.
AI has given us an alternative that is quicker, better, and cheaper, but requires a revision of the way we think about the tasks that face us. The silos of yesterday must be destroyed.
The biggest threat is resistance to change, a reluctance to embrace the huge productivity gains that AI has made possible. We become too comfortable to work at leveraging the available benefits of embracing the tech.
The leadership task is to leverage the capabilities of AI to become a catalyst for organisational and cultural change.
Rather than thinking about our jobs in functional silos we should be considering the potential to broaden our capacity to think and create new value at every point in the job process, leveraging the time freed up by AI to enhance the scope of the job itself. This applies to every job at every level in an organisation
Completing tasks quicker is the dimension that attracts most attention.
Expanding the scope and importance of the tasks done is at least as important, and I would argue, are where the real productivity benefits beyond costs as currently defined in a P&L hide.
We risk becoming less conscientious, less determined to get the facts straight when they are delivered to our inbox, all packaged up. This is a danger, as it erodes the capacity for creativity and critical thinking. However, being aware of a risk is 90% of being able to set boundaries and manage it.
AI can deliver momentum. Simple, repetitive tasks can be automated, leaving time and headspace for the stuff that builds ‘flow’. This is the state from which the most valuable outcomes always emerge. Ignoring the potential for AI to deliver momentum will see your competition race past you.
Use AI to smash those organisational silos and deliver the benefits.
Nov 6, 2025 | AI, Marketing, Uncategorized
Marketing loves a revolution, preferably one with fireworks, a celebrity CMO, and a paid Gartner report showing a hockey stick. Every new technology arrives promising to rewrite the laws of business.
Meanwhile, the laws never change.
Newton had it right centuries ago: every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Marketing keeps proving him right. The faster we chase shiny new digital tactics, the harder the pendulum swings back to the fundamentals we pretended we no longer needed.
The Hype Machine vs. Reality
AI evangelists shout that everything has changed. They’re half‑right. The tools have changed. The speed has changed. The expectation of real‑time response has changed.
But the bedrock?
Know your customer, serve them relentlessly, and build trust you don’t squander.
Peter Drucker’s reminder rings louder than ever: The purpose of marketing is to create a customer.
That was true before AI, it will be true long after whatever replaces AI evolves.
Newton’s First Law: Brands That Stay in Motion… Stay in Motion
A brand with momentum earns attention even when the tools shift. Strong positioning and consistent storytelling generate their own gravity.
Campaigns used to last years. Now we rotate creative at the speed of TikTok. But the brands that last, the ones that compound mental availability play the long game.
Eyeballs come from activation.
Profit comes from brand.
The long term enables the short term. Always has, always will.
Newton’s Second Law: Force = Mass x Acceleration
Digital acceleration gives marketers more force: faster cycle times, instant metrics, and dashboards that look scientific.
The result?
Everyone is reacting. No one is thinking creatively from first principles, and trust is the casualty.
Trust is earned by performance as promised — repeatedly, and can be lost in one failed moment. That hasn’t changed since merchants first haggled in a marketplace.
Newton’s Third Law: Every Action Sparks a Reaction
The more we optimise for clicks, the more customers lose patience.
The more noise we make, the more deaf they become.
This is why brand building matters more today than ever, not less.
It gives people a reason to care before you give them a reason to click.
The fact that it is much harder to build a successful brand today amongst the tsunami of competition for attention makes success more rewarding when it is achieved.
Proof From the Pub
Advertising platforms come and go. Positioning endures.
Remember the Tooheys ads from the early eighties? “I feel like a Tooheys.” A social beer for a social moment. That construct worked because it tapped into a universal truth: reward, mateship, the end‑of‑day ritual.
Three decades later, after a long hiatus, the idea and variation on the 40 year old execution still works. The brand physics didn’t change. The accountants who inherited the brand 30 years ago did not know these basic laws of market positioning. However, it seems a marketer is back in the drivers seat, as the positioning is being renewed.
The Only Trend That Never Ends
Every marketer faces the same trade‑off: harvest now, or plant for later.
Short‑term activation makes the CFO smile.
Long‑term brand keeps the organisation alive.
Ignore the fundamentals and you may win the sprint, but keep them central and you’ll win the marathon.
The more things change in marketing, the more they stay the same.
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
A Final Thought
If you want to avoid being whiplashed by every new tactic dressed up as a strategy, bring someone to the table who has lived through enough hype cycles to recognise what actually moves the needle.
A wise old head. With battle scars. Who knows where the shortcuts lead — and where the traps are hidden.
Give me a call before you change everything… and accidentally change nothing for the better.
