Management Practices

The End of Management?

23 August 2010 0 comments

A recent Wall Street Journal article by Alan Murray has posed the question about the end of management, with a silly subtitle we will get to shortly.  The article is part of a book called The Guide to Management.  The part of the article which is interesting is the discussion of the advent of professional [...]

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Improve Back Office Efficiency By Finding the “Checkers”

10 August 2010 0 comments

Yes, most organizations would be well served by identifying all the people checking other peoples work as all or part of their job.  Big organizations are just full of checking and any process where work products wind through various teams is sure to have lots of it.  It is easy to miss though because traditional [...]

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Management Approach – Beyond Management by Walking Around

4 August 2010 0 comments

Most executives pride themselves on being connected to their business, no matter how large. They perform site visits to far flung operations with lots of small talk, hand shaking, and conference room meetings. It often looks like the practices decribed in this article and this one which is better.   In my experience, these activities can [...]

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Lean Buzz – FOTM?

2 June 2010 0 comments

The increasing buzz around Lean makes me worry that it is headed for FOTM status (that is flavor of the month or maybe year)?  It looks eerily like the situation around Six Sigma about 5 years ago.  The increasing buzz about Lean seems to lack much understanding of how it might be used specifically in [...]

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Visual Workplace in a Pre-K Classroom

9 April 2010 0 comments

Dropping my 5 year old off at school today, I remarked at how many visual workplace elements were implemented in her pre-K classroom.  Yes you read that correctly.  These teachers have implemented a bunch of concepts without even explicitly knowing it.  Here are a few examples of visual workplace in the classroom. The floor in [...]

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Organizational Health and the Engagement Survey Fad

8 April 2010 1 comment

Organizational health is not something that most execs think of every day – at least not explicitly.  At this point in the economic cycle though, it is a very important attribute to evaluate and consider change.  So what is organization health?  It is not so different from evaluating your own personal health.  In a very [...]

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Whatever Happened to Good Old Fashioned Strong Management Execution

22 February 2010 0 comments

I started thinking about management execution in the wake of the issues at Toyota and discussions with current and hopefully future clients.  The Toyota situation seems to combine some design defects with a fundamental management execution gap in identifying and handling the situation.  We can only guess at these as outsiders, but the management execution [...]

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Rethinking Lean Implementation in the Wake of the Toyota Mess

16 February 2010 0 comments

In the wake of the current Toyota mess, it is time to rethink Lean implementation approaches and even the common definitions of Lean.  Many in the Lean community have long held up Toyota as the ideal.  They are still a great manufacturer, but very clearly not perfect.  In fact, Toyota may have some very fundamental [...]

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Lean and Six Sigma Wisdom in Einstein Quote on Measurement

2 February 2010 0 comments

I have now spent several hours attempting to trace attribution for this quote / sign. It is quoted widely, including in Bogle’s book referenced in an NPR interview. It may have been in his office at some earlier point, but I now view it as unlikely to have been in his Princeton office near the [...]

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Business Cases – More Than a Spreadsheet

27 January 2010 0 comments

I think that business cases are potentially the most misused business management tool in existence.  How many times have you or your team created one “because we have to.”  And how many times did you start with a result and back into the details?  Have you ever created a business case which you privately called [...]

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