Entries in Organization Development (6)

Thursday
Jun052014

Crisis = Danger + Opportunity

There are a lot of great examples, anecdotes, quotes, and adages we used every day to educate or make a point when we are consulting or teaching teams about business in general or continuous improvement specifically. Some of our favorites include:

Click to read more ...

Saturday
Mar292014

More Deming: System of Profound Knowledge

After the airing of the NBC White Paper, "If Japan Can... Why Can't We?, on June 24, 1980, W. Edwards Deming quickly went from an obscure quality and statistical consultant to a vertible business celebrity. Because of that White Paper, Ford Motor Company engaged Deming to help them improve. Ford was incurring billions in losses. Product quality at Ford was lacking both poor quality design, poor production quality. and poor product reliability. Deming is credited with contributing to Ford's improvement to become the most profitable US based auto company in a few short years.

Click to read more ...

Sunday
Jan202013

A Bit about Brainstorming

Brainstorming is a technique that should be in the toolbox of any team based activity in business. It can be a critical part of both the innovation and problem solving process.

Click to read more ...

Sunday
Jan132013

ERP Renewal - Part I

I  received a call this week from an old friend and fellow consultant.  He lives and works in Mexico.  He called to catch-up a but also to ask a specific question.  He had a client who was had installed an ERP system.  They were concerned they were not getting the full value out of this system and wondered what to do.

Click to read more ...

Monday
Dec172012

Alphabet Soup

The world is abound with management theories and methods. All one need do is peruse the business aisles of either a brick and mortar or virtual bookstore. Methods, theories, applications, approaches, and systems come and go. Let’s just call them theories for lack of a better term. Management Theories come into and out of favor. Older passe theories may be re-tuned, retreaded, and recycled with a spin nomenclature and nuance to make them seem new and fresh for today. How many ways can management by objectives be recast? How many times has business process engineering or re-engineering been presented? There are countless numbers of new product development processes out there and probably more to come. New theories are promoted as new or revolutionary while structurally and thus essentially they are are equivalent to one or more of their predecessors.

Click to read more ...