Fear of the unknown is greater than certainty of an unwelcome outcome
Much has been written about the value of giving people as much information as possible about the organisation, including any unwelcome news. In the absence of certaint, rumor will fill the gap, and it is usually worse than the actual. I was reminded of this recently...
Isaac Newton’s laws not always hold true?
Newton is one of the real genius's of history, he promulgated a series of laws that form a key part of the foundation of following scientific success. However, he did not get it all right. "To every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction" he said. Any...
Word of mouse.
It used to be word of mouth, it still is in its essence, but the need for face to face contact has been removed by the emergence of the web tools now in front of everyone. Ideas spread on the web like a virus, even quicker than "pig-flu," a good idea spreads...
Brands are expressions of passion
The strongest brands are more like "movements" of like minded, usually passionate individuals, people to whom a brand has an emotional connection for some reason, it is much more personal than a demographic and socio-economic expression of "sameness" of the...
Parallel not sequential.
Supply or Value chains are essentially sequential, one activity logically follows the completion of the one prior, and in streamlining the timing and handover parts of a process, you can build great efficiency. However, great leaps in performance will not come from...
How do you measure customer profitability?
A vexed question, and managing customer profitability is as fundamental as managing the P&L, but possibly more complicated. It is usually unrealistic to measure the profitability of all customers, but most businesses live by the 80/20 rule, so concentrate on the...
Three basic questions for every business.
Making choices is the stock in trade of any manager, so following are a few questions you can reasonably ask yourself that will force you to consider some of the basic choices every business needs to ask itself. Which markets and products are we focused on? What is it...
Operational Efficiency Vs Productivity
These terms are often used interchangeably, often in my experience muddying the waters in situations where clarity is required. Efficiency is all about how well you use the status quo, productivity is more about how you leverage gains to be made from changing the...
The secret of being right.
No secret in being right, just be prepared to be wrong, and be prepared to accept the responsibility for being wrong, then learn from it. Thomas Watson Sr was spectacularly wrong when he said "there is a market for perhaps 6-8 computers in the world", but IBM went on...
Lean and six sigma
I am sometimes asked the differences between Lean and Six Sigma. The "toolboxes" for operational improvement represented by these two approaches contain substantial overlap, particularly at the relatively basic level where most improvement initiatives start. Lean...