Establishing Kill Chains in Business Operations
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 an…
State Of Readiness | Innocent Hadebe; Director of Business Excellence for Chick-fil-A Corporate
Hello and welcome to another edition of State of Readiness. I am your host Joseph Paris. My guest today is Innocent Hadebe, Director of Business Excellence for Chick-fil-A Corporate. I met Innocent like a meet a great many people and that would be through LinkedIn. Of course my initial attraction to Innocent was that we were…
The Strategic HR Department
I have been in business, running a consultancy (XONITEK) since 1985. Besides it making me uniquely unemployable, I have had the opportunity to observe and interact with the many incarnations and varieties of Human Resource (HR) Departments at countless clients over the course of years. Marking our calendars, today is April 10th, 2023. And to date,…
Culture Change; What is it and why change it?
The COVID years of 2020 and 2021 notwithstanding, the subject of “culture change” has been a topic at many (if not all) conferences on Operational Excellence and Continuous Improvement that I have attended over the past several years. But the conversation always seems to gravitate towards the “how”whenever the subject comes up, with little attention given…
State of Readiness|Alan Cruce; NASA Research Pilot – SOFIA
In this conversation, Alan shares his life’s journey as a pilot. From earning his pilot’s license before most people earn their driver’s license all the way to becoming a research pilot for NASA and it’s SOFIA program. I met Alan while I was on assignment in Denver. He and his team from NASA were also on…
Learnings from Africa
It was the spring of 1995 and my firm (XONITEK) was one of the top implementers of Macola Software’s Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system. We were the very top when it came to implementing in a manufacturing environment. As such, I was invited to Macola’s summit to share my views on the future direction of the…






