When was the last time you created a Pareto chart manually? For those of you not familiar with a “Pareto ” chart, it is simply a bar chart that organizes the categories from highest-to-lowest in frequency of occurrence. Pareto charts are useful when “issues” outnumber the resources available to solve them; obviously, you would want to put the resources on…
When does a company become too big to fail and by what standards? How can the casual passer-by – not to mention the learn’d industry or government analyst – tell when a company poses too great a risk?Can a government or global / regional economy become too big to fail?If so, then what? In the United…
What do these three letters mean to you? A quick poll of the people in the room proved the meaning to be quite elusive. A nine year-old responded, “See are em? I don’t get it, you’re so weird.” A five year-old pondered the question for all of two seconds and said, “huh…can I play Wii?” OK, I didn’t…
One of the main problems with companies is that their sights are often set too low—using efficiency measures that don’t reflect their operation’s full potential. For example, a recent analysis of 27 manufacturers showed that on average the companies were operating at 71% of their maximum efficiency. However, a deeper analysis based on their assets’ “true…
This is a question that I recently felt compelled to flat-out ask a COO of a publicly traded Fortune 500 company in response to a series of comments he made to me during an engagement interview. His shocked response was, “Of course not…!” There was obviously a disconnect someplace. To be sure, we are living…
