Leadership Landmines

It happens all the time. Successful leaders- people with great business acumen, great teams and great vision- are moving along, growing their companies when, all of a sudden, they fall flat on their faces.

What 'Balanced' Really Means for Measures

Having a hard time getting balanced performance measures? Let me give you some tips about what having balanced measures really means. And no, it's NOT about adopting the Balanced Scorecard - in fact, it's virtually the opposite!

Measurement Tips From Table Tennis

Table tennis is like any process you want to improve, even business processes. My first attempts to learn how to play reminded me of a few practical tips when you're trying to improve the performance of anything.

The Secrets Of Teaching Management Students

Teaching is comparable to public speaking. Students want to learn without being smothered with confusion or unrelated content. Preparation is the key to success of every session. A professor should not heavily depend on the textbook whose contents may not be up-to-date and may not be relevant to the level of the students. A student can be made interested in the topic of the day only when the introduction is adequate and easy to follow. The examples should be from the contemporary and familiar field or from every life. Points which are fairly less complex should be thrown open for discussion.

Inventory - Cash Or Carry

There is an old saying in business that 'Cash is King.' Inventory, no matter what type, ties up cash and diverts it from other uses. Therefore the aim of inventory management should be to minimize the inventory investment for a particular customer service level. The approach taken should ensure that the target level of service is met while also minimizing the cash investment.

How to Design Great Performance Measures

Recently I was doing some weird kind of performance measurement when I was mulching my garden, like how could I reduce the number of shovels needed to fill the wheelbarrow, or how many wheelbarrow loads could I move in 30 minutes? Easy stuff to measure, I suppose. But I know there are lots of things you've come across that aren't that easy to measure. This article has some tips for making the hard stuff more easily measurable.

Social Life of Performance Data

We all like to know that the data we use to understand our business and organisational performance is 100% accurate. It's just not worth using if it's anything less than perfect -- isn't it? This article discusses data integrity and the social reasons why it can't be perfect (so get over it!).

Root Cause Analysis - Simple Techniques to Understand Why Performance is Doing What It's Doing

For this issue I'm revisiting my roots as a research statistician - with some tips for improving your cause analysis with simple but still rigorous statistical techniques.

Regaining World Market Share Starts With Getting Physical - And Agile

Taking dramatic steps to become agile is necessary to be a manufacturing contender in the next century. Organizations must focus on moving information and products quickly through the entire service chain- distribution, assembly, manufacture, and supply. All physical and logical events within the service chain must be enacted swiftly, accurately, and effectively. The faster parts, information, and decisions flow through an organization, the faster it can respond to customer needs.

What You Need To Know For An Effective Facility Maintenance Management Program

It is the challenge of the facility maintenance management staff to put strategies in place to reduce pollution runoff from their property. Facility maintenance management and operations requires an ongoing long-term system that plans, guides, and supports storm water management.

Discover 10 Steps to a Successful Business Turnaround

Certain actions can be found in most business turnaround situations. Whilst the work involved may differ in each business turnaround, discover some of the common steps taken in the turnaround process.

Measuring The Impact Of Initiatives - Even When You Don't Have Complete Control

Are you making improvements or changes to your business or organisation, and don't know with certainty what impact those changes are having? Here's how to measure the impact of your improvement initiatives on a performance result, even when you don't have total control over it.

Performance Measures - The Good, The Bad And The Ugly

If you're going to the effort of measuring your business performance (or the performance of anything for that matter), make sure you're actually using real measures - not these 3 so-called performance measures that really aren't giving you the kind of feedback you really need.