All Features
Barry Johnson
The adage “if you aren’t moving forward, you’re falling behind” is true more often than not. Regardless of the type of business, all organizations need to improve to survive. The last words uttered by managers in failing organizations are, “We’ve always done it this way.”
The key to long-term…
Jack Dunigan
It seemed like a good idea at the time and an incredibly generous act on the part of the company. When Gravity Payments founder and CEO Dan Price announced that he would raise everyone’s minimum wage to $50,000 a year with $10,000 a year increases until everyone’s minimum was at $70K in 2017, it…
Barbara A. Cleary
Last year’s Gallup poll of worker satisfaction revealed that almost 90 percent of workers were either “not engaged” with or “actively disengaged” from the work at their jobs—a shocking revelation that has apparently been repeated in many polls.
Barry Schwarz, a professor of psychology at…
Jesse Lyn Stoner
One of the most important things you can do is to identify your team’s mission. And one of the biggest wastes of time is creating a mission statement that isn’t used.
An earlier post of mine, “How to Write a Mission Statement in 5 Steps,” explains what a mission statement is and how to write one…
Quality Transformation With David Schwinn
The recent news coverage of “bruising” and inhumane management practices at Amazon and other well-known companies got my attention because of its relevance to our new book, The Transformative Workplace: Growing People, Purpose, Prosperity and Peace (Transformations Press Unlimited, 2015), and…
Alan Nicol
A good friend and mentor of mine said, “We should eat the bread that we make.” He is James Wardlaw, now of Summit Engineering Solutions, and he reminded me of this piece of wisdom during a recent conversation.
It means that we should live with the consequences of our own work. We should deal with…
Davis Balestracci
Is accountability used as an excuse for draconian enforcement of arbitrary goals? We’re familiar with the insanity of wasted time spent overreacting to common cause. I remember the dreaded review meetings, spending all day listening to litanies of excuses, finger pointing, blaming others, and…
Frank Sonnenberg
In years past, a company’s health was measured by the size of its balance sheet. While that still may be true today, great leaders know that an organization’s competitiveness is determined by its ability to harness the power of intangibles—often referred to as “soft issues.”
To achieve…
Carlos Venegas, Gaurav Tamta
Quality goes beyond the purview of the quality professional. Quality, it has been said, is everybody’s business, but too many outside this discipline see it as something dry, bland, and boring—and perhaps for good reason.
For example, one of the authors of this article had the painful, all-too-…
In today’s hyper-competitive global economy, talent is often your most valuable weapon. If you’re like most business leaders, you’re not above engaging in a little employee-poaching to improve your position. After all, if you can entice an MVP from another company to enlist in your ranks, you’ll…
Jack Dunigan
His name is Danny, and he owns “Danny’s Fashion Shoppe, bespoke tailors, Hong Kong.” His store is tiny, tucked into one of the many arcades that line Kowloon’s streets. The walls are stacked high with bolts of cloth, interrupted three or four times by mirrors.
I used to get my suits made there.…
Kelly Graves
What lasts longer, an expensive motivational speaker or a cup of espresso? It’s about the same, but the espresso provides a much better return on investment. You see, from a behavioral standpoint, you can’t motivate me, and I can’t motivate you. However, people can and do motivate themselves, and…
Maxine Attong
Manufacturers know the high cost of defects—the direct and indirect costs of manufacturing the recalled items, the cost to restock, the unquantifiable loss of consumers, and (at times) the need for a publicity campaign to rebuild product confidence and brand reputation. These costs provide a…
John Bell
From as far back as my days in brand management, I have held a deep affection for strategy. This might have something to do with the fact that I can be stubborn. Good strategists are also stubborn, even pigheaded. Why is that?
Because without strategic stubbornness, the hard barrier lines that…
Davis Balestracci
This is a continuation of my last column, which I’ve written to honor my late dad who loved golf. As promised, let’s look at the Masters golf tournament final four-round scores for the 55 players who survived the cut. We’ll analyze and then give it a twist based on the ongoing enumerative vs.…
Kelly Graves
Most everyone has read the maxim, “Plan your work and work your plan.” This is simple and effective advice—when it’s followed. Unfortunately, it can also be overwhelming when it comes to ensuring that everyone in the organization knows what the strategic plan is and how they can directly support…
Quality Digest
When asked a direct question, telling the truth is always a good option, so is giving a direct answer. That being said, sometimes a parable is worth a thousand words.
“The kind of seed sown will produce that kind of fruit. Those who do good will reap good results. Those who do evil will reap evil…
Davis Balestracci
To celebrate Father’s Day in the United States (June 21 this year), I’m going to use this and my next column to honor my late dad by using a game he loved—golf—to teach some very basic statistics lessons. Some of these may have been lost on you previously, not through some fault of your own, but…
Kelly Graves
In my last article, I presented the psychological steps of change and how to overcome the natural human resistance to it. In this installment, I’ll present an example of how to transfer those concepts into plans, the plans into actions, and the actions into continuous behaviors.
This process…
Kelly Graves
As a consultant and trainer specializing in the field of organizational psychology, I’ve come to realize that certain psychological conditions that affect individuals also apply to companies as a whole. That makes sense because, after all, a company is nothing but a collection of people.
In this…
Ken Koenemann
As a business leader, you spend a lot of your time figuring out how to win. With good reason: The most crucial job of every executive is to align efforts at every level of the organization to deliver wins for the week, for the quarter, and for the year.
The people at the front end of the business—…
Ken Koenemann
In my first article on relevant metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs), I explained why limiting management’s strategic planning to high-level goal setting is doomed to failure. For strategic goals to be realized, they have to be translated into daily KPIs that are meaningful to everyone in…
Ken Koenemann
During annual strategic planning meetings, the temptation is always to spend most of the time working on the business, discussing the big-picture strategic plans and breakthrough developments that are critical to the future of the company. But just looking at long-term plans ignores a critical…
DeEtta Jones
Do you ever feel overwhelmed as a manager? Being overburdened by the responsibility of having to figure out what the people on your team want and need from you is a familiar feeling shared among leaders. Fortunately, there is a “best practice” for obtaining just the kind of information needed to…
Brenda Percy
This is the fourth installment in our six-part series on how automating common business processes with a quality management system (QMS) can benefit your organization. Here we’ll focus on the training management process and why automating it with a QMS results in effective employees—and makes…
