Always learning
Employ your time improving yourself by other men’s writings, so that you shall gain easily what others have laboured hard for. – Socrates.
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Competitive Advantage
The ability to learn faster than your competitors may be the only sustainable competitive advantage. – Arie De Geus
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Kotter’s 8 Steps to Transformation
You’ve decided you need to change – there’s a problem, and it’s got to stop. You now understand the true purpose of the organisation – so you know where you’re aiming and why. You’ve understood the end-to-end process – and realise it’s broken. You now have two decisions: What method do you use to design…
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Why do we assume that quality is expensive?
I was talking to a colleague recently, and began discussing some of the transformation work that I had undertaken to help improve customer service at a local authority. (See my blog entry here.) Not for the first time, an assumption was very quickly made that an improvement to service, and a dramatic reduction in the…
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Does it really take 6 weeks to get my claim sorted?!
So, you post your form off to the post office/tax office/council/insurance company/bank/cable company (* delete applicable). What happens next – from your perspective? “They” are busy getting on with it – right? Two weeks go by – so you give them a call? You spend a while on the phone as they track down your…
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Steve Jobs – a Systems Thinker
A great deal has been written about Steve Jobs in the last few days – and my favourite was written by Horace Dediu on the asymco site (see links below). If ever there was a Systems Thinker, he was the man – making great business his way, and not getting sucked into “this is the…
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Why oh why oh why… oh why oh why
So why do these thing happen? In the office, in the factory, in the customer service centre? If you really want to find out why we do things, ask why 5 times – who knows what you might find… Check this funny little video : A Funny “Whys” Video from the Lean Blog And a…
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Changing time at the zoo
My wife and I took our two year old boy to Twycross zoo today, and we had a great time. Though I suspect some parents may not have done, and it is all down to a bit of [missing] common sense. Here’s a photo of the changing facilities, could do with a bit of padding…
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Mistake Proofing – always looking for ways to improve
The devil is in the detail – and getting things right can help your business improve service and reduce costly errors. This is a simple example of where small change can eliminate repeated frustrations. But what happens when this thinking is applied to all aspects of your business: in purchasing, servicing, manufacturing, delivery, finance, HR…
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Steve Jobs and the Eureka Myth
It may appear that Steve Jobs is an inspired leader who succeeds by taking big risks on personal hunches, but there’s more to it than that. His success, and that of Apple, is designed in to the way they think and develop products. Their key to success, is to compete internally – ensuring the quality,…