Discussing Operational Excellence, Management Innovation, and the Pursuit of Work/Life Integration.
We need more tourists at work. While the hospitality industry would certainly agree, that’s not what I have in mind. What we need are people to walk around, keep journals of what they see, and share their experiences with others. When trying to generate improvements, people often get stuck when trying to look at their [...]
When the answer to a problem doesn’t present itself immediately, taking the spray-and-pray approach can be disastrous. In such instances, people are usually more concerned with looking like they are doing something, so they simply get busy doing anything. Studying the problem is, in many cases, not allowed due to the need to appear busy. When people are busy doing anything, they are focusing their energies away from identifying the root cause and creating long-term, sustainable solutions. [Read more]
When people are asked to be creative, there are those who shrivel at the concept. They will exclaim that they aren’t very creative, that they don’t know how to draw, or that they simply don’t have any good ideas. Unfortunately, that is a self-fulfilling prophecy, and it also reflects a complete lack of understanding as [...]
Very often, many of the solutions we develop when attempting to deal with a problem don’t result in long-term improvements. Instead, they are band-aid approaches that only attempt to keep today’s fires at bay. Unfortunately, those fires tend to rekindle, and we approach them, yet again, with another round of short-term “solutions.” In order to uncover systemic [...]
There are limitless writings on each of these topics. Obviously, each one contributes to the degree of success, or failure, an organization experiences, but how do they all fit together? Each one has an affect on the others, but how can this dynamic be represented? My answer is that each of these elements can be [...]
Several years ago, when I was just a couple years out of college, I strutted into my boss’s office with (what I thought at the time) was a brilliant observation. I declared there were a number of activities going on within our department that were in violation of approved procedures and policies. I laid out [...]
Any time we take on a large project, there are always times when we feel like we’re getting stuck. Rather than letting frustration or despair sink in, sometimes we simply need to approach the task from a different perspective. Every process we engage in involves an element of learning. Often, those frustrating periods of apparent [...]
Raise your hand if this situation sounds familiar: You are delivering some information to someone above your rank in the organization (it can be a presentation or a 1-on-1 sit down). The deeper into the discussion you go, the more irrelevant the comments and question you’re receiving become. Before too long, it’s fairly clear that [...]
Critical Thinking Critical thinking is a necessary skill for success, and is absolutely essential in any undertaking that requires analysis and, ultimately, the development of actionable recommendations. According to Professor Brad Dowden of California State University in Sacramento: “A critical thinker has an attitude–an attitude of desiring to avoid nonsense, to find the truth and [...]
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