Systems

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

Last Week’s Top Tweets

February 20, 2012 By David M. Kasprzak Leave a Comment

In case you missed it, here are some tweet & re-tweets of articles & other things that caught my eye last week: MUST READ: From Dan Markovitz (@timeback): Respect for people — treating them more like machines. bit.ly/zVyKew From Others: From Boston College Center for Work & Family (@BCCWF): Need more leadership support + manager training: Flexible [...]

Filed Under: Behavior & Culture, Business Management, Family, Funny things, Operational Excellence, Random observations, Uncategorized Tagged With: Management, operational excellence, ROWE, Systems

Typical Recruiting: The first step to the last straw

January 3, 2012 By David M. Kasprzak 1 Comment

From time to time I am contacted by recruiters, usually third-party folks who are looking to gain a commission, and once in a while I get a message from an in-house recruiter who has found my resume on monster.com or LinkedIn. The typical introduction, whether by phone or email, tends to go something like:

Hello, I am ___________, a senior recruiter with ___________. I have a position I think you are a perfect fit for. Please forward me your resume and I’ll give you more details about the position.

Now, all of that sounds normal, right? It’s just business as usual and part of the HR hiring process. Sadly, if we’re looking at it as part of an acceptable process, we’re looking at it all wrong.

Understanding that Results are an absolute

December 21, 2011 By David M. Kasprzak Leave a Comment

As I continue to contemplate the machinations of the Results-Only Work Environment (ROWE), I’ve had a few conversations recently with people who are trying to understand how ROWE works. While I am far fom an expert, I have come up with a few things in order to share my understanding. [Read more]

Filed Under: Behavior & Culture, Business Management, Continuous Improvement, Operational Excellence, Team Building & Human Capital, Uncategorized Tagged With: attitudes, BeFlexible, Continuous Improvement, Corporate Culture, Leadership, Management, motivation, operational excellence, performance, ROWE, Systems, Team Building, value, waste

Scholtes: The workplace visionary no one’s heard of

November 29, 2011 By David M. Kasprzak 2 Comments

In recent years, we’ve seen some thought leaders offer up best selling books, visionary programs and torrents of articles and other works describing what is wrong, how to fix it, and attempting to explain the science behind their approaches. In particular, Dan Pink gave us Drive, Best Buy gave us the ROWE experiment, and Lean thinkers continue to encourage us to think of front-line emplyees first, as in Jim Womack’s Gemba Walk.

What I find interesting is that all of these approaches to improving the workplace, at least in part, have some basis in Peter Scholtes 1998 Book, The Leader’s Handbook.
[Read more]

Filed Under: Behavior & Culture, Business Management, Featured Posts, Operational Excellence, Team Building & Human Capital Tagged With: Change Management, Continuous Improvement, Corporate Culture, Leadership, Management, motivation, ROWE, Systems

Making Your Network…Work

November 11, 2011 By Geoffrey Lennon Leave a Comment

Recently, I’ve enjoyed the opportunity to witness several strong examples of the positive impact that real, strategic networking can have.

Being a part of these particular examples got me thinking a bit more about networking and what it truly means in the age of Facebook and LinkedIn. [Read more]

Filed Under: Behavior & Culture, Team Building & Human Capital, Useful Tools Tagged With: Strategy, Systems, Team Building

More Mura Muri? (or, the reasons behind changing everything)

October 26, 2011 By David M. Kasprzak 1 Comment

The truth is, the way we live our lives is broken. We see reformers in education, healthcare, management, personal organization, stress relief, motivation, and nearly every other area continuing to talk about ways to address the same things, over and over: Adjusting to an ever-changing, unpredictable world and finding a way to keep yourself, and others, from going crazy while doing it. Or, in other words: Mura and Muri. [Read more]

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

Article Review: Supply Chain at the C-level

September 30, 2011 By David M. Kasprzak 4 Comments

Michael Koplov over at softwareadvice.com contacted me last week to write a review of his article, Consumer-Driven Technology Creates the Need for a C-Level Supply Chain Focus. The article focuses on the ascension of Tim Cook to the CEO position at Apple, following Steve Jobs’ decision to step down from the position due to [...]

Filed Under: Business Management, Operational Excellence Tagged With: Business strategy, Lean, Management, Planning, Systems

The recipe: From Estimating to Planning

September 22, 2011 By David M. Kasprzak 2 Comments

Estimating is just one step along the way towards designing an executable project. The next thing that is necessary is a plan – and estimating is a quite different exercise from planning. A plan takes into account not just what needs to be done when, but how things move throughout the project, who moves them, when it will happen, what that movement enables or restricts, and an identification of what might change over the course of the project. [Read more]

Filed Under: Operational Excellence, Planning & Measurement, Project Management, Useful Tools Tagged With: measurement, Planning, project management, Systems

Process Improvement and the free flow of laundry

September 12, 2011 By David M. Kasprzak 2 Comments

Around the house, we’ve always had a problem with laundry. There’s always a heap waiting to be ironed, hampers are overflowing, and many morning a search for clean socks would necessitate a trip to the basement to dig out a fresh pair from a laundry basket that was washed a week ago but still waiting to be folded.

While a lot of folks might point to large-scale factory-wide process improvement efforts that take months to design and implement, I’m pretty content knowing that I was able to take all those concepts and apply them right here…….at home…..where it counts. [Read more]