Nuts & Bolts Guide: Section

p>Everything a company does can be boiled down to a process. Even highly flexible, creative jobs are processes.

When a process is followed the same way every time…

The work you do only matters if it is something that is valued by the customer. Granted, there are many non-value added tasks that support giving the customer what they want, but it is important to recognize that those activities are secondary to the things that customers are willing to pay for.

Some companies often get exceptionally good at…

Continuous improvement requires investment. Think of it like a rental property. There is an upfront cost to buying it and ongoing maintenance costs. But as the mortgage is paid off, more and more of the rental revenue becomes profit.

If you think of the development of this business management system as…

When a company doesn’t operate under a strong set of principles or with clear leadership, it needs rules and policies to guide behaviors. In most cases, this is not the most effective way to get things done.

In fact, it often creates …

Very few people come to work with the intention of doing a bad job or doing the wrong thing. People want to be personally successful, and they want to be on a winning team. Unfortunately, many people operate in a vacuum of leadership. They have little idea how…

There is a general tendency of people to focus externally first when assessing problems. For example, they might start assessing a problem with sales by focusing on competitors or economic conditions.

The problem with that is that they…

Far too often, people rely upon gut feel and opinion to make decisions. Whether this is done by leaders directing their teams, or by groups of problem solvers working on their projects, the outcome tends to be the same: poor results.

One of the problems that we face in business is impatience. We want quick results when we start a new initiative. We want new processes to pay off immediately. As a result, leaders often choose less effective options that provide some return on investment quickly rather than more effective ones that take a while to develop into greater fruition. In large part, this is a function of the pressures of the stock market.  Quarterly earnings reports force leaders to think in three month chunks of time.

Spend any time around Lean, or any other continuous improvement methodology, for that matter, and you will undoubtedly hear the term “Respect for People.” It is a simple concept that should act as a moral compass in how people do business.