Behavior & Culture

Everyone owns their own shop

May 14, 2012 By David M. Kasprzak 2 Comments

Hail the shop owner. The relentless, never-ending driver of continuous improvement. The person who, with utter conviction and dedication, is constantly seeking a way to increase sales, improve quality, gain word-of-mouth, lower costs, retain staff and improve customer experience in every way.

These folks understand that value is what customers are after – and that the only obstacle between delivering that value and mucking around with sub-standard nonsense is their own pride of ownership. People who are proud of their shop always want to have that pride. They want it to sustain and grow. They never want to see their pride diminished.

In your workplace, do people act like shopowners? [Read more]

Filed Under: Behavior & Culture, Business Management, Continuous Improvement, Team Building & Human Capital Tagged With: attitudes, Corporate Culture, Management, Systems

Raising awareness of ROWE and Lean, redux

May 8, 2012 By David M. Kasprzak Leave a Comment

Where ROWE is cool, and I mean really, really cool – is when it acknowledges the people side of things – that there are concerns outside of work that might keep me from being in the office, and if you let me take care of those things when I need to, I will pay you back with interest. THAT is a good thing. But when the people that do the work are left entirely on their own to organize themselves, without anyone to oversee the process, that is not good management – that is the acceptance of bad management as some kind of innate, inevitable truth. Yes, we need to be much more centered on allowing people the freedom to perform without paternalistic, demeaning oversight. Even the best of flocks need shepherds to guide and direct the herd, though. When the humanistic approach gets elevated, everyone wins. When it gets glorified, everyone loses.
[Read more]

Filed Under: Behavior & Culture, Continuous Improvement, Operational Excellence, Team Building & Human Capital Tagged With: Leadership, Lean, Management, operational excellence, ROWE

What if what’s in their best interest……doesn’t interest them?

May 1, 2012 By David M. Kasprzak Leave a Comment

A very good post appeared on the FastCompany site yesterday, in which author Ginny Whitelaw declared, “Empathy is the most powerful leadership tool.”

There’s not a lot to disagree with in the article. It is, essentially, about Covey’s “seek first to understand” and represents both a practical, and I would say moralistic, way to approach your interactions with others. Seeing things from their point of view is a good thing, of course. It helps you to understand the other person better, so that you can align your message with their concerns. It’s a practical exercise for influencing others in any walks of life where negotiation, compromise, and change are necessary. It also indicates that you have a measure of respect for the other person’s thoughts, feelings, beliefs and opinions.

Unfortunately, there are times when people simply don’t act in a way that is consistent with what is in their best interests. Especially not in the long term. It’s as simple as David Meister’s Fat Smoker principle – you have to go through something difficult to get to something good, so change is hard and rarely happens. [Read more]

Filed Under: Behavior & Culture, Continuous Improvement, Random observations Tagged With: attitudes, BeFlexible, Change Management, Planning, reflection

Position Yourself for Performance Transformation through a Fact-based Plan

April 26, 2012 By Kaufman Global Leave a Comment

By the time we meet most organizations, they want to get going with their transformation immediately. They often want to rush to implementation without a roadmap, resulting in the classic gotcha of “activity vs. action.” However, without clear direction, activity often swamps out action and fritters away resources fast. Few then remain to make a positive difference, and no lasting benefits accrue. To be effective, organizations need an implementation approach that predictably advances what their enterprise should be doing. [Read more]

Filed Under: Behavior & Culture, Continuous Improvement, Operational Excellence, Planning & Measurement Tagged With: attitudes, Lean, measurement, Planning, project management, Strategy

Broken glass, broke and hungry, Broken hearts and broken bones

April 23, 2012 By David M. Kasprzak 2 Comments

Last Saturday, my older son fell off the swing in the backyard and broke both his wrists.

I spent each day at home with him, logging in to work on my laptop just a few times when I could, in between administering doses of medicine, running him to the doctors, feeding him, dressing him, helping him go to the bathroom or even simply shift positions in his chair.

The most important lesson over the past week has been this: We should all lose ourselves in something completely and totally selfless from time to time. Parenting, as depicted above, can be one of those things. There’s great value in doing something that has little or no rationality behind it. No personal benefit, no altruistic higher purpose for which we believe we can gain good Karma points, just plain old long, dreary, difficult work for the benefit of someone else, even if they never thank us or show any outward signs of appreciation. [Read more]

Filed Under: Behavior & Culture, Family, movies, music, tv, entertainment Tagged With: attitudes, Family, learning, motivation, reflection

Quick thoughts on the definition of excellence, and the weekly rewind

April 16, 2012 By David M. Kasprzak Leave a Comment

It’s one of those days where what should be, and what is, are at odds with each other again…..

“Excellence” is something that ought to be defined objectively. There ought ot be agree-upon standards for excellence. In some cases there are, such as in sports where Excellence is defined as a team championship. Even then, however, excellence has a subjective interpretation – you might be a batting champion in baseball (meaning you have the highest individual batting average of any player), yet play for a last place team. A super star player might have sub-par statistics due to the poor team that surrounds him or her.

I think, if you ask almost any person, in any role, in any company what excellent means and they will tell you about their experience – and not necessarily about the standards within their profession. This may mean that, in reality, “excellence” becomes a locally-defined phenomenon, which is a mistake. [Read more]

Filed Under: Behavior & Culture, Operational Excellence, Team Building & Human Capital Tagged With: attitudes, BeFlexible, Business strategy, Continuous Improvement, Corporate Culture, Management, operational excellence, Planning, ROWE

The inexcusable “I just don’t have time” excuse.

April 11, 2012 By David M. Kasprzak 2 Comments

Managers who aren’t able to address a problem due to time constraints need to think again about what they consider important. Clearly, you have the time to deal with things – you have simply chosen to ignore one set of problems in favor of another. Are you sitting in boring, mindless, disorganized meetings instead of getting ahead of a problem? Well – that means you value the meeting more than being proactive. I know, I know – you believe you are as proactive as possible and you certainly want to be even more proactive – but the truth is, you wanted to be in that meeting more than anything else. How do I know? Because that’s where you were and actions speak louder than words or wishes. [Read more]

Filed Under: Behavior & Culture, Random observations Tagged With: attitudes, BeFlexible, motivation, reflection

Management Innovation Exchange, and the weekly rewind

April 9, 2012 By David M. Kasprzak Leave a Comment

I’m not certain how many of the usual readers of this blog are aware of the Management Innovation Exchange. According to their site:

What is the MIX?

An open innovation project…

The Management Innovation eXchange (MIX) is an open innovation project aimed at reinventing management for the 21st century. The premise: while “modern” management is one of humankind’s most important inventions, it is now a mature technology that must be reinvented for a new age.

The spur for a revolution in management… [Read more]

Filed Under: Behavior & Culture, Business Management, Operational Excellence, Useful Tools Tagged With: Business strategy, Change Management, Leadership, learning, Management

Chronic problems are not problems, they are constraints.

April 4, 2012 By David M. Kasprzak Leave a Comment

In any environment, among any group of people, there are going to be problems that just don’t go away. You might have a critical vendor who is your only go-to source, but who is chronically late to contract. You might have a genius employee who is a prima donna. Or, you might have a moronic [...]

Filed Under: Behavior & Culture, Continuous Improvement, Operational Excellence, Team Building & Human Capital Tagged With: attitudes, Continuous Improvement, Management, value, waste

Let’s all stop being professional, a rhino’s tale

April 3, 2012 By David M. Kasprzak Leave a Comment

Every time someone with enough rank and a title granting them authority starts to screw up, behave in a foolish or terrible manner, or speak like a fool – we are told that we shouldn’t address the issue because “That wouldn’t be professional.” So, since being professional prevents us from acknowledging there are problems, let’s make a conscious decision to be profoundly un-professional.

What’s at work here is the manifestation of fear. Fear that if I point out there’s an 80,000 pound rhinoceros in the room, someone will make my life difficult, or I’ll lose my job altogether. Which is silly, because the rhinoceros is obvious and it stinks to high heaven. [Read more]