SuccessfulWorkplace

We are all lean now — or soon will be. As the world becomes more digitized, generating more information surrounding products and services and speeding up processes, large and small companies in every industry, even manufacturing, are starting to compete more like the software industry, with short product lifecycles and rapid decision-making. GE has responded […]

Most decisions in organizations are made by escalating them up the management hierarchy — and it’s usually the highest paid person in the room’s opinion (“HIPPO”) that prevails. The HIPPO model of decision-making will likely always be with us. But with the rise of digital technology, and with it the ability to get immediate feedback from customers […]

Brad Power: People familiar with continuous improvement will understand the continuous part. It means always rather than episodic; not a one time event but something you do on an ongoing basis. In other words, it means that we don’t rest on our laurels and say we did one big transformational change and then sit back […]

Have you been disrupted recently? Do you sometimes feel like your organization is flailing, barely able to keep up with the pace of change? You are not alone. Industry disruption and accelerating change are no longer remarkable phenomena requiring a special response — they are part of the landscape. And organizations need more individual leaders who can […]

Process is about action. When we talk about processes, we’re talking about everything an organization does in its ongoing operations. And so, it makes sense that in order to improve operational performance, many organizations use process improvement techniques such as process mapping to get a handle on all the actions that make up their process flow. The problem is, […]

How do you improve the whole organization, not just parts of it? The über challenge for process improvement in organizations has always been to successfully make improvements across functions. But have any sizable organizations assigned people to manage their major end-to-end processes — and actually been successful? I got this question from a process leader at […]

Culture change is a bear. The conventional wisdom is that it takes years to change a culture, defined as the assumed beliefs and norms that govern “the way we do things around here.” And few organizations explicitly use culture as a way to drive business performance, or even believe it could make sense to do […]

In business, volatility used to be more limited to the realms of finance and high tech. But as the tech wave has continued to sweep the globe, the environment for all organizations, including non-tech ones, has shifted from stability and predictability to rapid, unpredictable change. Innovations like Amazon price checks, or changes to healthcare or […]

What is more important to company success, a strong external focus on customer experiences or an internal focus on effective and efficient operations? Of course, it’s a false dichotomy — you need both. I described in an earlier post how Tesco worked for years to improve its supply chain capabilities, then leveraged this value by using deeper customer knowledge […]

IT has never been a bigger part of what a company does to compete. That doesn’t necessarily mean the IT department…but your information technology, no matter how it gets delivered and by whom. Driven by social, mobile, big data, and whatever comes next, IT is more core than ever. Will that continue? In order to […]

GE’s “insourcing” of appliance manufacturing to the U.S. has been trumpeted as a major reversal of the trend of sending jobs abroad to lower cost locations, and has been characterized in the press as a kind of “onshoring” story. I see it differently: as a “NUMMI deja vu” story. You may recall thatNUMMI was a joint […]

Many large, successful organizations are more fragile than they seem. They break under stress. Remember the travails of Kodak, Digital Equipment Corp., and Washington Mutual? In their heyday, they were dominant players in their sectors. All disappeared. Why do relatively few companies prove resilient and withstand stress? And why are even fewer “anti-fragile” — that is, […]

Editor’s note: Faced with declining IT budgets during the recent economic downturn, many CMO’s turned to Software as a Service (SaaS) to fill the gap left by an underfunded and overloaded IT department. This kicked off a battle for budget, strategy and control that continues to heat up in most enterprises. In this piece, Brad […]

How often do we think about the way we usually operate at work? Whether we’re performing an informal five-step process for evaluating a new proposal, or setting priorities for managing our time, how often do we think about consistency and efficiency? Our ability to improve the ways we do things depends on defining and shaping […]