Successful Workplace

Ken Robinson recently delivered yet another great talk on the state of American education.  He pointed out that countries that take a more organic approach (e.g. Finland) perform much better overall than those who take a mechanistic, standardized approach (e.g.  The United States with “No Child Left Behind”, emphasis on testing). Remarkably, the organic approach, […]

What type of company makes a good target to be acquired? There are the obvious revenue, strategic, market, product, and R&D considerations. Those are all opportunity plays and are in themselves good reasons, but what about the risk? How do you decide in advance which companies can be acquired without being destroyed? For that, there […]

My esteemed colleague here at SuccessfulWorkplace wrote a piece about using frameworks to help build business processes for startups when they begin to scale up operations. In the post Tom states that; To make the successful transition to the next stage of growth, companies need to formalize management, communications and processes. To a certain extent […]

In my other benchmarking posts I’ve explained that you’ll never get to a level of precision where you will truly have an exact comparative benchmark value. It has been proven and noted that the same person asked the same question will give you different answers. But, even if it were possible, you would not be […]

We have a basic human need to know what’s happening around us. More and more, companies are addressing this need by exposing parts of their process that never saw the light of day in the past. Done well, it reduces anxiety and helps make customers into fans of whatever company they’re engaging with.  Three recent […]

Companies put a great deal of focus on goals and strategies and often less effort goes into the tactics and guidance for how work actually gets done. If you’ve seen the viral video for the Harlem Shake, it illustrates what most companies look like under their corporate covers. Doing the Harlem Shake Enjoy this short […]

Rational managers for the past thirty years have tightly focused on efficiency, cost cutting, and day-to-day execution — perhaps to a fault. With increasing industry disruption, efficiency is fast becoming of secondary importance to innovation and agility. Many large organizations have too little capacity for external sensing, strategic reflection, and business transformation. As a recent WalMart […]

There is great power when strong processes meet solid governance practices. I had a recent real-life experience of the opposite, process without governance, which could have had grave results. A group of us were at the movies and a couple sitting on the row in front of us got up in the middle of the […]

Sometimes change is so gradual yet so ubiquitous that we don’t see the enormous implications of what’s really happened until somebody says it in a new way. I recently had such an experience when I read Google’s Michael Jones on How Maps Became Personal in the Atlantic.  A lot of the ideas in this piece jumped […]

In a recent post on BPMRedux, What goes around comes around, I wrote about the swing between the need for process automation and the rise of workforce collaboration in the enterprise. And sitting on the train home there was another thought which struck me, two process improvement schools diametrically opposed to one another. On several […]

Enterprise change program are dead. This is the year of the Engagement Program. The predictions for 2013 are coming in thick and fast. We know technologies such as mobile, cloud and big data have been making the news and that the Internet of Things is the new darling of the analyst community and application platform […]

Like everyone that saw the scenes coming from Sandy Hook Elementary last December, I was in shock. It is an unimaginable tragedy that we never hope to see again. The sensational headlines are subsiding and now its time to talk with level heads about solving the problem. Logic takes a back seat Even among the […]

I had an interesting conversation with a representative of a UK Regulator over the festive season. Having been involved in a number of regulatory and compliance programmes it was refreshing to hear the frustrations from the other side of the corporate electrified fence. Regulation is seen as an unnecessary evil, a mishmash of red tape and endless […]

I am exposed to organizations doing some very innovative things with their organizational processes. They are state-of-the-art in managing leveraging process-improvement tools, such as Lean, Six Sigma, or other homegrown or hybrid improvement methodologies. They focus a great deal of effort in refining processes, better managing processes, and/or reducing waste from their organizational processes. I […]

Sabotage is a surprisingly large and overlooked problem in any improvement initiative. It isn’t polite to talk about. Age-old story I had a conversation this weekend with a California entrepreneur who provides software that dramatically improves outcomes while lowering costing for injection molding, a common industrial process that is used to produce everything from bottle […]

Profound changes in an organization must be led from the top, but human resource professionals can play a big part in making them happen. Consider HR’s role in accelerating Harvard Vanguard Medical Associates’ operational improvement initiative. This 4,500-employee Massachusetts healthcare group embarked on “Care Improvement” three years ago. Chief Human Resources Officer Dan Michaud told me how HR has […]