First understand EVERYONE needs a coach! Every successful person has a coach. Think about this. All sports players have different types of coaches; training, diet, batting, throwing, etc. Entertainers have; voice, acting, diet and training.
Why do we think a leader is broken if they get a coach? Because we assume so!
When working with clients: The first thing I do is to assume no one is broken.
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rticle after article has been written about the advantages of complexity reduction and what should be done. However, too often there is little focus on the root cause of entropy creeping into the enterprise. A recent Forbes article outlines the seven steps to reduce complexity. Each step mentioned addresses the symptoms of the illness and not the disease. We are not doing a good enough job of asking, “Do we really need so many exceptions?” or “That’s a really stupid rule”. Rather, we need to be asking, “What’s driving and creating such complexity?”
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Often, I read that incrementalism is dead. And the way forward is innovation. I view the debate differently.
Within organizations there is a diverse group of people. I see incrementalism and innovation as different tools within a tool chest. You would never think of using a wrench in place of a screw driver. So why would you expect to have a kaizen to address getting the last 0.1% rework out of a bottleneck process?
I believe the biggest error made when working with innovation and incremental tools, is the misalignment assigning individuals to each tool and not understanding the shortcoming of each.
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A couple weeks ago I posted about Cheap is Cheap – Buyer Beware!
I discussed how buying cheap lets entropy into your organizations. We are seeing this play out in real time with the Boeing 737-MAX, DO NOT let this happen to your organization! It looks as though Boeing went with a low price contractor. Here are five things that can help you to avoid this type of error.
Do you have a buyers in a purchasing department or commodity specialist in a procurement departments?
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With a college football bowl season almost completed and NFL playoffs ready to start. It’s a good time to highlight some importance Leadership observations.
Leadership Is A Contact Sport!
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This is the classic image of a boat representing inventory. The higher the water level, more inventory. The rocks represent problems within the business. As you lower the water level/inventory the problems are exposed.
Remember, Inventory Is Evil!™ – Because it delays and hides problem resolution.
Read articleHow much data do you use to analyze demand when quoting service parts?
If you’re not using at least three years of demand to quote service parts your leaving money on the table.
How are you consolidating the spend? Are you working the rationalize your supply base? Once again, you are likely leaving money on the table. Within in the service parts sector, do your partnership suppliers a favor, consolidate the spend, this will increase their long-term volume and improve total cost of ownership.
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A quick way of adding Entropy into your organization is via purchasing.
If you’re always buying from the lowest price vendor, you’re running a purchasing department.
If you’re working to understand the TOTAL cost of ownership and rewarding suppliers that support; excellent customer service, flexibility delivery, outstanding quality and jointly deliver ongoing cost reductions, you have a world class procurement function that builds supplier partnerships.
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Are you benchmarking?
Why not a little friendly benchmarking among peers?
I’ve personally used this process to keep the competitive fire between myself and a few peers.
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We’ve all been there. The dreaded mandatory problem solving session.
The facilitator say’s we going to solve XYZ opportunity. There is a “brainstorming” mind dump of the issues, an excel file with filters and pivots, and to cap the meeting off, someone has a data visualization software they are eager to use. And before you know it you’re trying to Boil the Ocean or Solve World Hunger. Everyone forgets why we’re there in the first place…
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