Lean Manufacturing

The word disruption is so overused in business it threatens to become jargon which is never a positive fate for a term as important as this one. The people overusing the word and jargonizing it are usually using it wrong. If you understand what it means precisely, takes the following six points seriously to heart and do what you do best — much more aggressively — you can transform your organization into a disruptor. The Actual Definition of Disruption Disruption: something that changes the game entirely. In business, it’s a product or service that has a staggering effect on events, activities, processes, and people in a marketplace. It’s what happened to the world when regular people could buy cars, radios, televisions, VHS players, cell phones — commodities that changed the way we live our lives, and that we had never had before. It’s what happened when we could go online…

Achieving supply chain operational excellence is not an easy target, you need to combine a variety of different factors together; attitudes and competencies, robust processes, and the right technology are just the minimum requirements. The most difficult obstacles I come across are related to the partial achievement of these three aspects, the most common relating to people, their attitudes, and competencies. How to improve the competency of your staff? Measure their progress and motivate their behavior toward excellent performance. Many programs and tools exist: skill matrix, gap analysis, focused training programs for competence upgrade, and so on. The measurement of a higher set of competencies must then be correlated to the superior process performance in terms of output and throughput. A systemic approach helps to reach excellence, a set of proven tools and methods – with the right commitment of top management and superior consultancy performance – are the key…

The Wharton School maintains there are three reasons to hold a meeting. Period. To: “Create a forum—an opportunity for individuals with different values, ideas, and experiences to share their perspectives.” Make decisions and set “direction for the organization or unit.” Build and/or make a team stronger through “developing collective capabilities.” Period. They further maintain (as do we), that meetings should never be held: For information exchange, or Soapboxing (telling rather than exchanging). Period. If you are holding meetings for the two purposes directly above. Stop it immediately. If you are holding meetings for any reasons other than the top three listed, you are: Wasting precious productive time, Wasting precious financial resources (check out this meeting cost calculator), Encouraging unproductive behavior, Forcing everyone to multitask (especially during the meetings), and Diminishing employee respect and loyalty. Inc.com published these alarming (U.S. only) statistics: There are 25 million meetings held each day, That’s…

The bad news is you can’t control all the communication that takes place in your organization. But, you have to try. In the article, Executives: Get Top Performance from Your Contractors and Remote Teams by Communicating Culture, I wrote about how important it is that your workers at home, in other countries, and even in other states are made a part of your company’s culture through communication. Conversely, if that communication doesn’t have ground rules and adherence to them, misrepresented or misinterpreted voice and digital communication can cause catastrophic breakdowns in relationships and processes. This is what you need to do — (and DMAIC the system regularly: Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve and Control, or you won’t keep control): All the news that is important to share with your peers and employees (both good and bad, internal and external) should be shared by you, not anyone else. Kick the email habit…

For most executives, performing employee evaluations is a necessary evil — highly important but low on personal priority list. For employees they are usually stressful, filled with mixed messages (a bit of praise, a bit of criticism — neither of which are constructive input), and ultimately uninspiring, if not downright deflating. The most valuable use of an employee review is what’s typically missing: constructive input. What you want your employees to take away from every review is: performance improvement, job satisfaction, employee retention and refreshed motivation. Those characteristics are not born of the praise/criticize cycle, but of collaborative goal setting, problem-solving, and encouragement for innovation. Here’s how to break out of the “pointless review” cycle and into the “let’s work even better” cycle. A few weeks before the performance review, ask the employee to write down: The top three achievements he made that year that he found fulfilling and the…

Business communications problems are at the heart of Operational Excellence performance. Statistics say that about 90% of time spent by managers is devoted to communication, so it is paramount to be prepared on this topic. Of this communication, we know that about 70% is non-verbal, in terms of motion, posture, eye contact, and so on. Emotional intelligence can help to overcome the types of non-performing attitude that can result from bad communication. Additionally, in a multicultural environment, it is key to understand cultural barriers and how to overcome them through robust communication approaches. Another key point in business communication is the use of “verbal” or “text” communication. Especially in a supplier/customer relationship, it is important to understand what communication channel the supplier or the customer prefers. In this way, the communication is facilitated because there is a capacity for adaptation. Communication is not an easy task, especially in this interconnected…

Because I work in a variety of industries, the communications problems vary to some degree but it appears to me that it comes down to perception. For example, the CEO sends a directive throughout the company regarding costs and most department heads will interpret or translate that as “don’t spend more than what was budgeted,” rather than doing a proactive review of the spend and questioning how they got here. This opens the door for me to provide support to analyze their spend, and to provide alternatives to deliver efficiency to drive costs down. What I see as an internal problem can be adjusted by collaboration and solid support. Most department heads are solely focused on the day-to-day and have never conducted a transformational restructuring, it is my job to set expectations that will ensure a smooth roll-out without impacting their business. This has occurred on more than a few…