The General Motors approach to automation has been inflexible. It did optimize costs if you made tremendous numbers of exactly the same vehicle. If you needed to change over to offer vehicle variations, the robots needed a lot of tending.
Toyota countered that challenge by automating relatively stable processes such as the link between a customer's order in a dealer showroom and the parts...
Dr. Cam Sholey has more letters designating his qualifications than there are in his first and last names (BA, MBA, CMA, and PhD). He likes to learn and enjoys sharing that new knowledge with clients and students.
Who has he learned the most from? It's his young daughter, Samantha, who launched him into the new and challenging role as parent. With all his academic and professional...
What benefits can come from having beneficiaries, customers, and users doing more for themselves? In our harried lives, most people favor doing things themselves when that action saves their time.
That observation seems like a paradox. How can do-it-yourself be faster than having a service fully provided?
Part of the answer is that many offerings with full service are provided...
Safety needs change over time. Why? Those who employ the offerings develop skill and experience. In addition, the ways the offerings are used change. You need to take all of these dimensions into account when designing safe solutions.
It's good to help people to be well prepared before their first experience, but complacency and developing bad habits can turn even the most careful...
Despite admonitions to automate the best of what's possible, most automation simply reduces costs somewhat for yesterday's obsolete practices. You only avoid that stalled approach by rechecking a process before you consider the possibilities for automation:
-Eliminate the unnecessary.
-Employ an efficient business-model design.
-Cancel delays.
-Simplify, simplify again, and...
Listen up! Treat your irresistible force messengers well, you the forces will overwhelm you before you can take appropriate action.
In the Cabinet War Rooms from which Winston Churchill and the British War Cabinet functioned during World War II bombing raids, there is a very interesting letter on display from Churchill's wife to her husband. Written during the early days of the war, in...
Still water breeds mosquitoes, not progress. You have probably seen many stagnant ponds. The lack of movement on the pond's surface makes a perfect breeding ground for mosquitoes, and makes it easy for unattractive debris to cover the surface as well. Put a little movement into that pond, and you'll have many fewer mosquitoes and a much more attractive pond.
A lot of leaders and managers...
If you don't let people see your slips, you'll slip up.
Psychologists who do surveys concerning personal fears tell us that the most common fears are of public speaking and public embarrassment.
Most people will go to great lengths to avoid either circumstance. This is an important point to consider because it helps to explain why so many people take enormous risks for their company and...
Are you feeling lucky and have only other peoples' money to lose? You should lie down until that feeling goes away, or a social disaster may follow.
Financial institutions and companies place huge bets on the future economic environment, in everything from future currency values, to commodity prices, to interest rates, to common stock indices. Because the sums involved are often enormous and...
Optimistic visions of solving problems cause many to choose to cover up problems. When this happens, the result can be to make things worse if conditions are to change permanently.
Banks are not immune from problems with their loans similar to those experienced by the S&Ls in the 1980s. A changed economic environment can mean that asset values drop, cash flow dries up, and the bank is...
