Archive for leadership
Cohesiveness of People and Process drives Profit
Posted by: | CommentsNext weeks Business901 podcast is Vivian Hairston Blade. Vivian is the Founder, President & CEO of Experts in Growth Leadership Consulting, LLC (EiGL Consulting, LLC) based in Louisville, KY. EiGL Consulting focus their energies on helping develop an effective strategy to create customer value. Through a combination of coaching and training, they help you put that strategy into place through change management strategies that create committed leadership and organizational discipline.
I gave the Vivian the perfect opportunity to promote herself in the podcast and instead she continued coaching and adding value:
Joe: What are your plans going forward?
Vivian: Well, our plan is to continue to build on this idea of people and process and that cohesiveness between the two that help companies drive growth. As you look at the environment, the marketplace, the economy, and how it changes and how it will change in the future and how we’ll need to still continue to be conservative in so many ways especially when it comes to money and finances and investments, to realize that people investment is important, that operational process investment is important as it relates to customer focus and serving customer needs.
Helping companies realize that without that connection and that understanding of why you exist and how to operationally serve the why you exist, what your value is in this customer relationship, without this you won’t have a business for very long.
You know, it’s unfortunate that we see so many of these companies in today’s economy who have been icons in the American industry, your Kodak and your Hostess, Hewlett Packard, so many, even Netflix recently who decided to change both their service and their pricing policy and lost millions of customers. They made a 360 degree turn. And, just in the Wall Street Journal in the past few days there was an article about how they are beginning to now recover their customers.
But, without that skill of listening that we just talked about a minute ago, you haven’t a clue what the impact is going to be when you make some of those changes, or do you even really care it’s almost too late? So, we’re helping companies to have a good ear to the ground on that customer connection and building an environment where employees can thrive toward reaching their career goals and helping the company to achieve it’s goals.
Related Information:
Lean Canvas for Lean EDCA-PDCA-SDCA
Lean Engagement Team Book Released
Side Effects of our Desires and Abilities to Empathize
Connecting Continuous Improvement and Appreciative Inquiry
Are your Managers managing Technology? Or…
Posted by: | Comments..is technology managing them? What about innovation? What about marketing? As organizations continue to get flatter and flatter, we continue to put more and more pressure on the few left in middle management. It’s not just the personnel either. That may be the easy part. Now, we are being faced with everyone becoming customer facing, the depth of customer penetration within in the ranks is increasing at a rapid wait. The one answer that so many of us fallback to is technology. And, that is also changing at a rapid rate. So what does a manager have to do? 
Terri Griffith answers that in her new book,The Plugged-In Manager
- Stop-Look-Listen: What do your data say? What do you already know that will help you with this project?
- Mixing: How do you balance your available resources?
- Sharing: How can you achieve better results by integrating your choices with other team members?
I found the book practically written from a Lean perspective. It is a well written book that you can read cover to cover without stopping. What you will do, is bookmark or crimp many of the pages in it and start tackling her suggestions, she includes a few exercises to get you started and improve one thing at a time. She discusses an evolution for managers, not a revolution. Great insight and the podcast with Terri was excellent. I hope you enjoy, I did.
About: Terri Griffith, Ph.D. helps people and organizations work with technology. As a Professor of Management at Santa Clara University (Silicon Valley), Terri helps mix together the technology of work (everything from telepresence to the size and type of tools a crew would use to build a fence), the way we organize to do this work (virtual teams, collaborative leadership, hiring and pay plans), and the knowledge, skills, and abilities of the people we work with.
Related Information:
Inspiring Innovation thru Standard Work
Who Really Determines the Success of Your Business
In your Organization, who is responsible for Demand?
Even Seinfeld used Standard Work
The SDCA Cycle Description for a Lean Engagement Team
Mind Maps on Leadership and Teamwork for the Lean Agile Crowd
Posted by: | CommentsLooking for DIY Teamwork and Leadership training? Start with these books (since they are all fables, they make for great listening) Patrick Lencioni Library (Five Temptations of a CEO; Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive; Five Dysfunctions of a Team; Death by Meeting)
If you feel like this is an endorsement of these products, it is! I have used these mind maps as examples and referred more people to the books and materials than to any other single source. This is my collection of mind maps created from listening or reading to the Patrick Lencioni business series of books.
Related Information:
What is a great Team?
Why bother with Value Networks?
Identifying your Lean sales and marketing teams
There is no Team in Kaizen
Improve Communication – Have more meetings?
