All Features
Annette Franz
Pundits and experts alike say that ensuring a good customer experience (CX) is everyone’s job. In fact, if you Google “customer experience is everyone’s job” or “customer service is everyone’s job,” you’ll find endless articles, blogs, and webinars with that very title.
It’s true. Technically, it…
Shawn Murphy
Culture eats strategy for breakfast. It doesn’t matter how great your plans to introduce a new product to the market are if your culture weakens execution. Culture is how things get done around a company. Great leaders focus on the work culture their leadership helps create as much as they focus…
Davis Balestracci
“When I die, let it be in a meeting. The transition from life to death will be barely perceptible.” —Anonymous
Today I’m going to share some ideas from an always-thoughtful newsletter written by Steve Harden of LifeWings—a company of pilots who use aviation ideas to create cultures of safety in…
Lois Kelly
I’ve been fantasizing about going on a road trip next summer to Alberta to experience the majestic Canadian Rockies. While browsing possible itineraries, I keep noticing this advice: “Leave the beaten path and take the alternative route of....”
If you’re trying to get new ideas considered at…
Brian Maskell
Companies that are seriously pursuing the lean journey soon find their accounting, control, and measurement systems need to change to support the new strategy. The principles and methods of lean thinking and practice are quite different from traditional business and therefore require different…
Mark Rosenthal
Improvement kata describes a routine for continuous improvement through four major steps. Those steps provide a structured pattern to enable consistent practice of each kata routine until it becomes habit—until it’s a natural way of thinking and acting. This change in behavior makes it easier…
Jeffrey Phillips
I’ve written before (and often) about how challenges with clarity and consistency introduce difficulties when corporations try to create new products and services. Notice that for a blog about innovation, I didn’t use the “I” word. That’s because I think corporations confuse the ends with the…
Mark Whitworth
Layered Process Audits (LPAs) offer companies tremendous potential benefits, but they’re also more involved than other audits. They task all of a plant’s personnel - including multiple levels of management—and cover all key areas at varying intervals. Creating an LPA system that is truly effective…
Kevin Meyer
“If you are too obsessed with success, you will forget to live. If you have learned only how to be a success, your life has probably been wasted.” —Thomas Merton, Love and Living
Sometimes there are dots just waiting to be connected....
I was rather surprised when Pope Francis mentioned Thomas…
Douglas C. Fair
Sponsored Content
Statistical process control (SPC) software has been around for decades, used by manufacturers across industries to help monitor process behavior and control quality on the shop floor. Like any technology, the software has evolved over the years into something much more than a…
Jesse Lyn Stoner
How do you help leaders understand they need to delegate? I often hear this question, and it was the focus of a recent letter I received.
“Hello Jesse: What have you found are the most effective ways to engage business owners in the need to delegate? Are there particular pain points that make…
Arun Hariharan
When I visited one of the world’s most advanced car manufacturing plants at Toyota City, Japan, one of the many things about the manufacturing process that struck me as remarkable was that from start to finish, whether molding steel sheets into body parts or fitting those various parts together,…
Brian Maskell
I work with companies that are serious about being lean organizations. Most of them use lean accounting. It’s not about changing your accounting system. It’s about embracing lean principles and methods. Lean changes the way people look at management accounting. Here are 10 things to think about.…
Kelly Graves
Dave hadn’t been evaluated in 25 years, and neither had the other employees of this multimillion-dollar business. Things had gotten very loose with the company. Production targets weren’t being met, there was poor accountability and responsibility, and employees were arriving late and not calling…
Tim Lozier
We recently passed a milestone moment in the hearts and minds of fantasy fan boys like myself. October 21, 2015, marked the day that Marty McFly and Dr. Emmett Brown traveled back to the future in the highly successful sequel, Back to the Future II.
When we took our first glimpse into the future…
John Keyser
“Allow the way to your great work to be guided by your service to others.” —Mollie Marti
W hat is our purpose in life? That is a question that could be discussed for hours and is worthy of our attention. I pose it because I believe how we lead our personal lives has a bearing on who we are in our…
Mary McAtee
Unless you’ve been climbing Mount Everest or spending time in an isolation tank, you have been painfully and repeatedly made aware of the current issues at Volkswagen. It’s early in the feeding frenzy, but as we step through the debris and past the first of what will likely become a steady stream…
MIT Management Executive Education
Job candidates are familiar with being tested during the interview process. True, some interview processes are simply a series of meetings with company personnel, but in all honesty, that type of candidate screening is largely subjective.
Some organizations, or departments within organizations,…
Paul Sloane
The business proposal is an essential document not only for sales people but also for anyone who wants to submit a serious proposition for internal or external approval.
The process starts with a thorough understanding of the stakeholder’s needs, problems, and priorities. If a request for…
Jack Dunigan
I noticed the shift in vocabulary during a general meeting of department heads. The substitution of just two words signaled to me that a long-term employee was on her way out. In less than 30 days, she was gone.
There are often lots of signs that an employee or associate is leaving. Most people…
Emily Ysaguirre
Sponsored Content
Ihave watched my grandmother cook since I was very young, and she’s tried to teach me her ways. So far I’ve learned that when she tells you all you need is “a little of this, a little of that, and a pinch of this,” it’s definitely not going to come out as if she made it. That’s…
Quality Digest
Born in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, and raised in Cape Town, South Africa, Wayne Visser, Ph.D. is, as CSRWire USA says, “. . . one of the most prolific, creative, and original thought leaders on corporate social responsibility.” That begs a question, however—should we use the term “social” or “sustainable…
Kevin Meyer
Big news in the business world: Walmart is famous for keeping costs down, including employee-related costs. In Joplin, Missouri, the company is testing a new approach: investing in workers through higher wages and training, on the theory that this will pay off all around—for customers, the company…
Bob Emiliani
During the early days, late 1970s to late 1980s, there existed just a few small organizations to help people learn about and implement Toyota’s production system (TPS). They were led by people with decades of hand-on practice at Toyota and its affiliated companies. Some organizations, however,…
Quality Digest
Sponsored Content
‘My small business has landed a few very lucrative contracts and we’re growing. Honestly, we’re now struggling with quality control. We have management systems in place, and that’s helping, but we’re still having issues. I don’t know where to begin to get a handle on this.” —…
