Kaizen behavior to change culture.
Culture is about the hardest thing to change in any organisation, and I have seen many so called "culture change" initiatives fail at the first hurdle. If culture really is, as Michael Porter put it many years ago "the way things are done around here" and I believe it...
Impact of failure = Likelihood X Cost,– or does it?.
This formula is a pretty widely used one, and it can hold true both for a corporation, and an individual. At the intersection, where individuals are employees, it is doubly true, as failure can impact not just on the corporate coffers, but on the individuals prospects...
Solution or counter-measure
Applying a band-aid to a problem, a measure to counter the impact of a problem is often an attractive short term option, particularly to a management measured in the traditional way on output, to whom stopping a line is heresy. Superficially it may hide/solve or...
Enterprise productivity
Measuring productivity involves a combination of hard and soft measures, the soft ones being both the critical ones and the ones that have most impact. In 15 years of consulting across a range of businesses and industries, I have come to the conclusion that there are...
Ideapaint
A bit over a year ago, I conducted a "brainstorming" session designed to stir the creative juices amongst marketers and engineers in a fairly specialised manufacturing company. We did all the usual stuff, breakouts, whiteboards, butcher-paper, mixed in with some...
The parable of ‘Leaks and Horses.
Julian Assange has thrown the cat amongst the pigeons, but it was always going to happen at some time. The transparency capability delivered by the web has forever changed most commercial operations. It is naive to think that so called "classified" documents that...
3 questions to drive sales focus.
It is usually easier to find more business with existing customers that it is to find new ones, or to devote the resources to reducing customer churn. Nevertheless, most enterprises overspend their limited resources seeking new customers at the expense of their...
Website hyperbole
It is amazing how many sites I visit claim least one of a few hyperbolic options: We have a "unique" solution, We are the "industry leader", We have an "innovative approach" We offer the "best value" These claims mean little, after all, there is only one industry...
Lean lessons from the pub
Last Friday night I was in a small local club with a client, co-incidentally as they had the weekly member "badge-draw" which had jackpotted to $19,000. As you can imagine the joint was packed, it took 20 minutes lining up just to get a beer. What struck me, apart...
The cadence of a presentation
Presentations of any type are a sales pitch, not always a product, perhaps a point of view, capability of an organisation, seeking engagement with an objective or vision, or an idea. Irrespective, the objective of selling cannot be met unless the audience is first...