In 1980, The American Council of Retailers did some research on why people stopped doing business with various organizations. Here’s what they found in 1980: 64% left because they felt ignored 12% left because they were treated badly (that’s our policy) 11% didn’t feel the organization was empathetic 9% found a lower price 3% moved […]
Give Me What I Want! Read More »
John Seddon has been a Systems builder since the 80s. He bases his work on the genius of Taiichi Ohno – The Toyota Production System – Beyond Large-Scale Production. Seddon has been successful adapting Ohno’s TPS approach but using it in services. There’s always a temptation to set targets and try to convince people to
What’s your ‘Purpose’? Read More »
We all give training to new managers. It seems weak at best, and might even make things worse in some cases. Disengaged employees as a result of poor management may be costing your company as much as 34% of your wage costs in lost productivity. This figure comes from an article posted by Katy Tynan
Why Management Training Doesn’t Work…and what to do about it… Read More »
Daniel Markovitz posted a blog called ‘The Folly of Stretch Goals’ in the Harvard Business Review. He outlined the dangers of using ‘stretch goals’ and gives some examples of unwanted behaviours that can result. He identifies three areas where ‘stretch goals’ can result in ‘off the rails’ behaviours. Stretch Goals Can be Demotivating When an
Why ‘Management by the Numbers’ Doesn’t Work… Read More »
Not everyone LOVES doing corrective actions, and that’s an understatement! So why bother? Here are a few good reasons to carry out corrective actions: Corrective actions are one of the building blocks to system improvement. System improvement is required in 11 places in ISO 9001:2015 4.4.1 – Context, QMS requirements: continually improve a quality management
Corrective Actions…WIIFM? Read More »
James P. Womack identifies this as a place to improve in Lean Solutions with Daniel Jones. We don’t want to lose customers by keeping them waiting. Consider this: “If we had to pay our customers for the time they wait to get what they want from us, would we find ways to do things better
Don’t Waste My Time! Read More »
John Seddon, Vanguard Consulting, published a book in 2005 called “Freedom from Command and Control”. Definitely worth reading if you’re interested in tapping the vast potential of any workforce. One of his interesting ideas is ‘Learn to see, learn to lead’ and it made complete sense to me. What a leaders learn from looking at
Learn to ‘See’… Learn to ‘Lead’ Read More »
When we think of getting value out of Internal Audits, sometimes we draw a blank. Or we think that asking if everyone’s following their procedures will do the trick. Here are 3 ways to get more value out of our Internal Audits: Use your flowcharts as the audit path This helps us make sure everything’s
Supercharge your Internal Audits Read More »
It’s all about the risk, these days, and the better we manage it, the better off we are, period! The new Standard calls for it, yes, but it’s just good business practice to assess where the potholes are in our workflow and steer clear of them. Every hour of proactive planning will save 10 hours
…if you choose ‘Operator error’ as the cause of your latest non-conformance. When Ishikawa introduced the world to his ‘Fishbone’ for doing root cause analysis, his research showed that employees in organizations make errors, of course, but only about 6% of the time. The other 94% of the time,the error is caused by aweakness
You’ll be right 6% of the time… Read More »
