Blog
How Are Your Outsourcing Decisions Working Out These Days?
For years we have been guiding our clients to continuously evaluate their outsourcing decisions in light of changing business conditions. The original imaginary accounting numbers do not tell the whole story over time. In most analyses, these individual sourcing...
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Culture Change: Aligning Differences And Closing The Gaps
“All best performing organizations have evolved to become great at understanding their operating differences and closing the gaps. It’s as simple as that.” We have all been inundated with so many confusing articles and posts on strategic improvement...
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How Much Have You Budgeted For Improvement In 2020?
How much have you budgeted for improvements in 2020? How do you expect to achieve the desired operating results? Many organizations cannot answer these important questions, nor do they have a formal process in place to mine, plan, and execute budgeted improvements to...
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Real World Improvement: Is Your XYZ Business System Dysfunctional?
LEAN STRAIGHT TALK #5 Introduction Most organizations claim to have a formal business system approach to strategic improvement. However, most have reached a serious maturity, decline, or even extinction stage with their various improvement initiatives. Step...
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Real World Improvement: Culture Change . . . The Hard Stuff, Not The Soft Stuff
LEAN STRAIGHT TALK SERIES # 3 Introduction Culture change is a continuing challenge for most organizations. Executives talk about culture change as a top strategic imperative, yet the cultural nicety stuff always seems to fall down the list of immediate priorities....
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Real World Improvement: Culture Change is a “Living Process.”
LEAN STRAIGHT TALK SERIES #4 Introduction Most organizations have missed the mark on transforming culture as the critical foundation to any strategic improvement or transformation initiative. Culture is key to sustainable Lean and CI success because it involves deep,...
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Real World Improvement: How To Adapt Lean Beyond The Factory Floor
LEAN STRAIGHT TALK SERIES #2 In the medical field there is Sutton’s Law which states that when diagnosing, one should first consider the obvious. It suggests that one should first conduct those tests which could confirm (or rule out) the most likely diagnosis....
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Real World Improvement: How to Achieve Sustainable Breakthrough Results with Lean/CI
LEAN STRAIGHT TALK SERIES #1 What is the current status of your Lean/CI initiatives? It might be helpful to think about the answer to this question in terms of a simple normal curve. The majority of organizations are in the middle, having achieved mixed successes...
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Lighthouses: Making Innovation Projectable
Lighthouses – Summary 012019
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It’s Time For A Lean and CI Reboot
Changing Lean from a noun to an adjective may have extended the brand, but it has also added many new levels of confusion, division, and diluted the purpose of the basic essentials of Lean and CI. Lean and an entire universe of continuous improvement...
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The Future of Operations Due Diligence
A quick and inexpensive look at your organization’s operating model in greater detail identifies new opportunities for improvement worth millions of dollars in EBITDA. What is the best way to improve M&A performance? Before we provide the answer, let’s step...
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„Brücken zum Digital Business„
Brücken zum Digital Business
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Transformation: How To Implement Lighthouse Pilot Successes
In our last post, Improve Transformation Successes With Lighthouse Pilots, we underscored the facts about innovative transformation as holistic, highly complex initiatives that require innovation, an integrated operating strategy and vision, people, process,...
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Improve Transformation Successes With Lighthouse Pilots.
Transformation is highly complex and requires an integrated operating strategy and vision, people, process, technology, capital, cultural development, and performance criteria. Every executive I meet with has concerns about the future. They all understand...
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Transformation-Scale Change Requires New Innovative Thinking.
Holistic and high impact change has become much more complex and requires a higher order, enterprise-wide, technology-enabled, and culturally grounded approach to strategic improvement. Successful and sustainable transformation-scale change requires business model...
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How Did Your Last Product Rationalization Initiative Work Out?
Product Rationalization – The consultant’s big promise to clients that often ends in results far below expectations. Why does this happen? Product rationalization is a complex strategic and operational initiative that requires much more than the 50,000 foot...
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Let’s Talk: Turn Your Change Anxiety Into Superior Operating Performance
Change – A word that conjures up fear, stress, anxiety, and something to postpone. Executives struggle with the emotions of too little, too late, wrong focus, risks, costs, skills, many unknowns, lack of time and bandwidth, conflicting priorities, short term...
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Why Continuous Improvement Is Not Enough
CAUTION: This post is not a criticism of Lean, TPS, OpEx, and other CI initiatives, but a call to action for a higher order of strategic improvement – One that evolves a systematic architecture of leadership, sustaining infrastructure, digital technology...
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How To Achieve Transformation-Scale Benefits From Continuous Improvement
This post is a continuation from my previous post, “Why Continuous Improvement Is Not Enough,” which helps to better understand how we arrived at where we are with continuous improvement. The world is changing rapidly, and the need for improvement is...
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A Guide To Successful Operating Model Transformation
Every executive I meet with has concerns about the future. They all understand conceptually, that business stability and remaining the same is not a viable option. They observe the Amazons, Home Depots, Walmarts, and other giants battling it out on the e-commerce...
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