Following a Simple Pattern

With just a basic understanding of why people do what they do, Matt was about to intentionally break the golden rule with his team and avoid so many of the costs of poor communication! By following a simple pattern, he was able to begin adding fuel to a different fire… Instead of the fire...

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Learning How Starts with Understanding Why…

A week or two after Matt and I had the hour-long conversation about how he could “get people to do what he told them to do,” he called again to ask what kind of voodoo magic I had taught him… Breaking the golden rule in how he was communicating with each of the individuals on...

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I Can’t Take It Anymore!

Consider the 17 hours of downtime due to clarifying communications that SIS International Research study cited as an average weekly loss for companies with 100 employees. After spending close to two decades in a manufacturing environment, I see a lot through that lens. To me, that downtime...

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It All Starts at the Top

For more than 20 years now, I’ve heard John Maxwell emphasize that “EVERYTHING rises and falls on leadership.” I even remember when Uncle Ben gave similar counsel to Peter Parker, a.k.a. Spiderman, saying that “with great power comes great responsibility!” If we...

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Setting Expectations

Once we’ve identified the root causes that truly are our profitability killers, our next step is to initiate change. In so many scenarios though, those changes seem to be expected through throwing some training at an issue and hoping it sticks… If it were some sort of new tool we...

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Quantifiable Results

With the importance of a “realistic, clear-eyed, complete assessment of the current state” in mind, I’ll challenge you to get really honest with yourself… Do you have that kind of clarity for what your current costs are in areas like turnover, productivity, or downtime?...

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Can You See the Big Picture?

Even when we begin to recognize what’s killing our profitability, start to dial in on the right prescription for addressing it, and come up with some simple solutions that can have a strong impact, we’ll miss capturing a significant amount of our best potential results if we allow our...

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Profitability Killers: High Risk Areas

An article I found from Management-Issues.com opened with this, “Listen up, I will say this only once. Misunderstandings between workers and managers cost firms $37bn a year, yet few firms trouble to do anything about it.” Another article from the Society for Human Resource Management...

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A Different Set of Metrics

In all the years I worked in manufacturing, specifically with the various lean initiatives that were rolled out, one phrase I heard as often as any other was “What gets measured gets done.” At one point, I worked closely with one particular production supervisor to fabricate and...

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Education or Application?

In March of 2000, as a 23 year old 250 ton stamping press operator (and carpenter on the side), I applied for and was somehow offered a position implementing the latest and greatest Lean manufacturing initiative the company I was working for was pushing down from the corporate office. I had been...

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Who Sets the Standard?

One of the first things I learned after I moved from running a press to training on and implementing Lean Manufacturing initiatives nearly 25 years ago was how labor efficiency rates were set. In most cases, the number of widgets that were expected on an hourly basis from any given process was...

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If They’re Not Rowing At All, Rowing Harder Isn’t Likely…

About a dozen years ago, I was offered a position with global responsibility for the behavior-based safety process within the company I worked for. The fellow who had been in the role for more than a decade was retiring and since I had supported him by working with most of our facilities across...

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