Value of the human brain Vs Cost of the hands.
In any environment, those on the front lines see ways to complete a task easier, faster, cheaper, better, simply because they are doing it all the time, it is just that we usually do not listen enough when the front line employees they try to tell us, and once bitten...
Social Capital revisited
It occurred to me that during the recent election campaign, and subsequent "Phony Government" that both sides over-used the term "Social Capital", as well as mis-using it. Whilst it was not one of the hollow slogans of the campaign, it got a pretty fair run as each...
The web laboratory
Product optimisation is not product discovery, the techniques to get the best results differ, usually markedly, as the challenge to collect data to mitigate risk for entirely new products is substantially more difficult than collecting the same data for what is...
Inventory reduction is an outcome.
It seems almost all improvement programs I see have as a central objective the reduction of inventories. That is pretty easy to achieve, order less, less often, and in smaller quantities, objective achieved. However, when you count customer service, and cycle times...
Lessons from Shakespeare
Many companies face the challenge of commercial sustainability in mature markets, with declining patronage, increasing costs, and often a fatalistic view of the future. Last year, I went with a couple of my kids to a performance of 'A midsummer nights dream" in the ...
Instinct Vs analytics
We all find ourselves dealing with ambiguity, preconceptions, vested interests, status quo methods, and often hubris as we set out to consider options in any management situation. In these circumstances, we usually mix quantitative data with what we know, and what we...
Losing is good practice for winning
Nobody wins all the time, in fact, most lose most of the time, so something distinguishes the winners from those who just give up, I reckon it is two simple things: Winners learn from losing, what not to do, what to do better, how to prepare, what the competition...
The real reason.
In a generation, electronic communication has grown from initial inception to ubiquitous, the fastest adoption of any technology and supporting behavior change ever. I have heard all sorts of babble about why this is, but it seems to me that there is one simple...
Dependencies.
We spend lots of time dreaming up new stuff, but there are almost always things that we take as given, things that we do not question, usually because they are so basic, that we never think to do otherwise. Many years ago, a part of my responsibilities was for the...
PowerPoint fatigue.
PowerPoint, the Microsoft program has become such a part of the daily regime of sharing information sharing that it has impacted on the way we communicate, and it has its detractors, of which I am one. Some time ago, I was at a conference where a senior bureaucrat was...