‘Operations’ Archives
The 6 New Management Imperatives by Bruce Temkin – comments
Bruce Temkin has published a free book on his blog ((experiencematters.wordpress.com)), The 6 New Management Imperatives - Leadership Skills for a Radically Changed Business Environment. Mr. Temkin sets out to define a "new set of skills" for managers. These are the 6 new imperatives: Invest in culture as a corporate asset Make listening [...]
Proven Checklist for Business Success – How Do You Put Them Into Action?
I receive a regular email titled, "Management Intelligence...... from Edward de Bono and Robert Heller" ((http://www.thinkingmanagers.com/)) . Their most recent email was "Management Intelligence: A proven checklist for business success". Here is the checklist they provided: "DO YOU... IMPROVE basic, measured efficiencies [...]
Podcast – Delegation (Outsourcing) and Keeping a Focus on Strategy and Results
Delegation and Outsourcing Share a Common Management Focus on What Needs To be Done, What Are the Results Required, and When?
Delegation (Outsourcing) and Keeping a Focus on Strategy and Results
Yesterday I was scanning through the Tweets from my friend Bruce Peters and came across a reference to a blog posting by Bernadette Doyle, "Discern Your Strengths - Delegate The Rest". Its always good to return to these complementary concepts – strengths and delegation (outsourcing), so I read on. Ms. Doyle's concatenation of "delegation" [...]
Podcast – Three Counter-Intuitive Steps to Becoming a More Effective Manager
Be a More Effective Manager - stop answering those questions, seize your time, and it's your fault
Three Counter-Intuitive Steps to Becoming a More Effective Manager
Become a More Effective Manager - Three Counter-Intuitive Steps In the world of planning and strategy, there is a truism that too much planning, too much detail, too much analysis, leads to inaction, to a loss of opportunity. Along the same line of observation, in the world of learning to becoming a more effective manager, there can be too [...]
Job Shops, TPS, and Intuition
Recent work with a client brought home to me again the interplay of TPS (Toyota Production system) and intuition. We were working on developing a job scheduling system in a classic job shop environment. We had worked out a rough value stream map from sales inquiry to shipping. It was clear that there was very little data anywhere. This was a [...]
Microsoft Goes Crazy – the Office Live Small Business tools
Yesterday's New York Times contained an article by David Pogue, "Mom and Pop Get a Partner: Microsoft", that announces a whole new suite of services for small businesses from Microsoft. And they are all virtually free. You can set up a website in minutes, purchase your own domain name for free for the first year, get email, use collaborative tools [...]
Product Line Analysis or Knowing Where the Profits Are
An important step for every business manager is to understand where profits are coming from. Too many managers are relying on the basic Profit and Loss statement that comes to them from their accountant. This is not always a useful management tool. Lets take a look at a situation where a web-based services company is experiencing good growth [...]
“Moments of Truth” and Service Operations
We have recently added a new feature to our operations improvement work for services firms. To improve the productivity, responsiveness, and quality of services, a common and very valuable approach is to organize a cross-functional team and value stream map the activities. This quickly produces many opportunities to improve flow, simplify tasks, [...]
