The need for both KPIs and OKRs

Headline: “Business Metrics Gone Awry: The Dark Side of Relying Solely on KPIs” Subheading: “Corporate Missteps Highlight the Pitfalls of Blindly Chasing Key Performance Indicators” We read about it all the time; in a shocking turn of events, the business world is abuzz with meteoric fall of some company and its CEO, its CFO, or…

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Harnessing Core Values for Success

This article is provided courtesy of theleanmag, a content partner of the Operational Excellence Society. Imagine steering a ship in tumultuous seas without a compass—this is like leading a business without core values guiding the way. You might eventually achieve your goals, but it might take a long time and involve unnecessary and costly detours. In…

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Facts and Values: The Keys to Operational Excellence in Sales and Marketing

The leaders of B2B companies often face a conundrum in sales and marketing. Their products, services, and talented people solve customer problems daily. Their approaches to awareness, conversion, and retention make sense. They’ve tried to improve training, coaching, automation, incentives, and more. Often more than once! And despite many attempts, growth and profitability are unsatisfactory.…

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Considering the Entire Employee Lifecycle

I wrote an article entitled “The Strategic HR Department” where I shared my thoughts on the characteristics of a Human Resources Department that is strategic with a purpose of being an accelerant of the organization’s ambitions rather than one that is a bureaucracy whose emphasis is on compliance. Of course, compliance is an important responsibility…

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Five core practices for OpEx

It’s all about the people… … the problem is, that seems hard… The joke often goes that managers pick up the Operational Excellence bible and flip through the chapters: hmmm ‘Create Flow’? Sounds confusing… what else we got? ‘Pull at the rate of demand’? Ok, ok, whatever that means…. ‘Remove Waste’! Aha! THAT I like……

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Kaizen Every Day

Running to standard Whenever there is a problem, we should always first ask the question: Are we running to standard? Often the issue is that we’ve not followed the standard and we simply aren’t doing what we ought to be doing. It can be hard to admit to ourselves that we’ve merely been human and…

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Safety Comes Third: A Contrarian Approach to Prioritizing Workplace Values

Several years ago I was at an Operational Excellence Conference here in Frankfurt.  As with most talks, the speaker started by introducing the company he worked for and what it did.  He then proceeded to list the companies values, of which there were five or so. The last value on the list was “Safety” to…

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Building Industry and Trade Association Partnerships Is a Must

Every industry and business navigates the most challenging environment ever. The “great recession”, COVID-19, Supply Chain Disruptions, record inflation, the “great resignation” the war in Ukraine, energy challenges, and deglobalization all represent the new era of chronic uncertainty. Every executive wants to know where to turn and the best place is building Industry and Trade…

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Establishing Kill Chains in Business Operations

In my book, “State of Readiness” is a brief discussion on “Effects Chains” (pgs 271-277); which is really a re-branding (for purposes of sensibilities) of “kill chains” that I borrowed from military parlance and adapted to business. In the context of the military, a kill chain refers to a series of stages or steps that…

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Unlocking Employee Engagement: Driving Productivity and Profits

Summary: As a business leader, you hold the key to unlocking the full potential of your workforce. However, achieving high levels of employee engagement is no easy feat. If you are like most American businesses today, two out of your three employees or teammates are not engaged. And that, according to Gallup, is the highest engagement…

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