Headline: “Business Metrics Gone Awry: The Dark Side of Relying Solely on KPIs” Subheading: “Corporate Missteps Highlight the Pitfalls of Blindly Chasing Key Performance Indicators” We read about it all the time; in a shocking turn of events, the business world is abuzz with meteoric fall of some company and its CEO, its CFO, or...

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I wrote an article entitled “The Strategic HR Department” where I shared my thoughts on the characteristics of a Human Resources Department that is strategic with a purpose of being an accelerant of the organization’s ambitions rather than one that is a bureaucracy whose emphasis is on compliance. Of course, compliance is an important responsibility...

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In my book, “State of Readiness” is a brief discussion on “Effects Chains” (pgs 271-277); which is really a re-branding (for purposes of sensibilities) of “kill chains” that I borrowed from military parlance and adapted to business. In the context of the military, a kill chain refers to a series of stages or steps that...

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Summary.   To prevent holding a meeting in which participants are unprepared, veer off-track, or waste the team’s time, you should create an effective meeting agenda that sets clear expectations for what needs to occur before and during the meeting. Seek input from your team members to ensure the agenda reflects their needs and keeps them engaged....

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Like many of you, I’ve had a lifelong quest for learning and for trying to improve my own personal performance and drive excellence in my companies. Excellence is defined as “the quality of being outstanding or extremely good.” Synonyms for excellent and excellence are distinction, first rate, superb, blue chip, choice, first class, five-star, top...

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Give a listen… My guest today is Stephan Meyer PhD, CEO of Almademey Ltd. I have known Stephen for some years now, he being one of the first professionals when I arrived in Germany over a decade ago. I have always found our conversations quite interesting. Like me, he knows you can’t hit home-runs without...

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These approaches can also be applied to Continuous Improvement, Lean, or Six Sigma Programs. I started my first business, XONITEK, in August of 1985.   I still own its latest incarnation located in Jackson Wyoming.  Having owned my own businesses for the last 37 years makes me uniquely unemployable.  Perhaps that could change given the right...

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Summary; Most companies preparing to launch an Operational Excellence Program do not take a moment to contemplate what their program is hoping to achieve, or even if what they are hoping to achieve is what the company truly needs. These 9 Questions, asked of all the right people, help to get your program properly aligned...

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A key to success in any Operational Excellence or Continuous Improvement program will be found in the way opportunities for improvement are harvested and prioritized; and how well the projects are managed and evaluated. I have written several articles over the past few years on what it takes to successfully design and deploy an Operational...

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… but all too often leaders don’t let them! It’s been a while since I published my first article “Even with Lean, Complexity Kills” in which I lay claim to lean being  more about real organisational teamwork than a set of tools or systems. Of course teamwork alone will not deliver lean or operational excellence....

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What’s on Elon Musk’s mind? In conversation with head of TED Chris Anderson, Musk details how the radical new innovations he’s working on — Tesla’s intelligent humanoid robot Optimus, SpaceX’s otherworldly Starship and Neuralink’s brain-machine interfaces, among others — could help maximize the lifespan of humanity and create a world where goods and services are...

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Everyone likes to be part of a winning team. This is true for sports, business and throughout life’s activities. I always enjoyed the old ABC Sports quote during their program introduction which emphasized “the thrill of victory… and the agony of defeat.” In my new book, “The Power of Goal ZERO“, I detail the five...

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by Michael E. Porter From the Magazine (November-December 1998) Now that companies can source capital, goods, information, and technology from around the world, often with the click of a mouse, much of the conventional wisdom about how companies and nations compete needs to be overhauled. In theory, more open global markets and faster transportation and communication...

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Summary; The next time you are filling a leadership role, ask yourself three questions. First, does the candidate have the skills to be a high-performing contributor or the skills to be an effective leader? The performance level of individual contributors is measured largely through their ability, likability, and drive. Leadership, by contrast, demands a broader...

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New research shows how resilient organizations thrived through the pandemic. Here’s how to use those lessons to craft a better approach to how work gets done across time (real and asynchronous) and space (digital and physical). In May 2020, we published an article arguing that the return to the workplace was a new muscle that organizations...

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Today I invite back to “State of Readiness”, Brent Gleeson, a Navy SEAL combat veteran and serial entrepreneur. In addition to being a best-selling author of “Taking Point” and his new release, “Embrace the Suck“, Brent has leveraged the principles of leadership, discipline, accountability and resiliency learned in training and applied down range for building...

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Summary. Creating a unifying vision for an organization is a fundamental skill for leaders. A simple, bold, inspirational vision can feel almost magical: it brings people throughout the company together around a common goal and provides a focal point for developing strategies to achieve a better future. Unfortunately, however, building a vision has become more...

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It’s January 2020.  I have just made a pitch to the corporate big-wigs for a way to reduce their real-estate costs (premises including rent and utilities), their corporate travel costs, even their carbon footprint using the latest telephony and collaborative applications.  I postulate that they will even see an increase in productivity while improving their...

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Today’s leaders have never been under so much pressure. Even as they navigate the evolving COVID-19 crisis—keeping their customers and employees safe and their businesses viable—expectations are sky-high. Shareholders are calling for foresight, bold strategies, agility, and resilience, while governments and communities increasingly expect businesses to support broader goals, such as sustainability and social justice. For...

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Life is a never-ending stream of decisions.  From the moment we wake up in the morning to the time we go to sleep, we are making decisions.  Even the very act of waking up and going to sleep is a decision.  After all, we don’t have to wake up or go to sleep; we make...

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By any definition, by any stretch of the imagination, the COVID-19 pandemic has been a transformational event that has affected, either directly or indirectly (probably both) each and every person on the planet.  That the “story” of COVID-19 is being knocked off the front page by the media (like “climate change” before it) and replaced...

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In this edition of “State of Readiness”, I invite Dr. Morphis Tsalikidis. Morphis is an experienced professional in the field of Operational Excellence who I have known for a great many years and with whom I have shared the stage at several conferences. Our conversation is on the impact of COVID on businesses and their...

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To remain relevant and resilient, companies and leaders must strive to build business models using three key components for growth. In the face of a global health and economic crisis, many traditional companies have suffered tremendous losses, and some have shuttered their doors. Those that heavily rely on physical capital (for example, stores, goods) and...

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The rapid shift to remote work has created new challenges for organizations, but survey data shows organizations around the world are experimenting with creative solutions. The COVID-19 pandemic has forced many employees to work from home, and the magnitude of the shift to remote work is staggering. Before the pandemic, about 15% of U.S. employees...

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For many years, we have sought to understand and measure the productivity of knowledge workers, whose inputs and outputs can’t be tracked in the same way as a builder, shelf-stacker, or call center worker. Knowledge workers apply subjective judgment to tasks, they decide what to do when, and they can withhold effort (by not fully...

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Mark Zuckerberg recently shared his plans for the future of remote work at Facebook. By 2030, he promised, at least half of Facebook’s 50,000 employees would be working from home. “We are going to be the most forward-leaning company on remote work at our scale,” he declared in a follow-up interview. A few days before,...

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As an Eagle Scout, the motto of “Be Prepared” has served me well when camping outdoors, navigating young adulthood, and also as a global business leader and parent.   Although much healthy debate will ensue on how one can truly prepare for a global crisis on the order of 9/11, a banking system collapse, or the...

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Algorithms have taken a lot of heat recently for producing biased decisions. People are outraged over a recruiting algorithm Amazon developed that overlooked female job applicants. Likewise, they are outraged over predictive policing and predictive sentencing that disproportionately penalize people of color. Importantly, race and gender were not included as inputs into any of these algorithms. Should we be outraged...

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Given a range of integers from 0 to 100, what would the whole number closest to 2/3 of the average of all numbers guessed be? For example, if the average of all guesses is 60, the correct guess will be 40. The game is played under conditions known to game theorists as “common knowledge:” every...

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A growing number of law departments and law firms are exploring Lean Six Sigma and similar methodologies to continuously improve the way they deliver legal services. By tailoring these techniques to litigation processes, legal teams can reduce costs, increase efficiency and better align their workflows with client priorities This article provides a thorough investigation into...

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