best practices

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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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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Inventory Reduction – Finding the Opportunities

8 March 2010 0 comments

Inventory reduction is still a hot topic at most manufacturers, distributors, and retailers these days.  While the economy has shown signs of stabilizing, few are seeing demand pick up much.  Many of my clients have remarked that it continues to be a very difficult time to forecast.  Just saying things are likely to be flat [...]

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Visual Workplace Definition – How You See Performance in the Plant and in the Office

23 February 2010 2 comments

I wrote previously about the lack of any decent definitions of visual workplace (and visual management) on the web.  In fact, what I found was dreadful.  The original post is here.  Amazingly, Wikipedia seems to have deleted the really terrible definition of visual management that I found before.  Now I only find the Lean Manufacturing [...]

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Visual Workplace Definition – Have Not Found Any Good Ones

1 February 2010 1 comment

My Japanese colleagues probably reference visual management as often as any other concept and it is easy to see why.  Visual management has broad applicability across a company from the CEO down to the individual contributor, and from manufacturing to finance, to IT.  You might wonder why I have called this a concept.  This is [...]

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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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