I was the Chairman at an Operational Excellence and Business Transformation conference in Amsterdam this past March (2023) which was produced by CParity. The lead-off workshop was on Design Thinking. I must admit; my first impression of the workshop was mixed. I thought the concepts of Design Thinking and its approaches were novel. But it…
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…
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…
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…
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…
