I have met countless Continuous Improvement and Operational Excellence professionals over the course of my career. And, in turn, I have become acquainted with their roles and efforts in regards to driving value to their organizations. Oftentimes, these professionals, although possessing great passion for, and pride in, the value they drive to their companies, express…
Thirty years ago this month, in August of 1985, I started my first business, XONITEK Systems Corporation. It didn’t really dawn on me until I found myself at the David N. Deutsch Saratoga Weekend (aka “Camp David”), which is like a mini (very mini) World Economic Forum (aka “Davos” after the town in Switzerland where…
Communication. We talk about how important it is. How critical it is to have in any endeavor in order to move the ball down the field and, ultimately, for success. Yet in almost every instance where there is failure, we can almost always trace back to one of the root-causes for the failure being a…
As I am apt to, from time to time, I recently attended a conference on Operational Excellence and Change Management. There were two issues related to one another that came-up time and again from the “Change-Agents” as being a challenge and those were; 1) How do I get the support of management and 2) How…
Why is it that so often the expected level of performance improvement from a process or system change is not fully achieved? Is this because the change manager fails to fully understand the interaction between the individual, the current process and the established organization? It is essential that the change manager fully understands how the…
