Jason Drury via Compfight Let’s fill up our tanks with some link fuel. As I listened to discussions of process variability and churn today, my mind flashed to Deming’s funnel problem. Don’t adjust a process due to random variation. You’ll make the scatter worse. My Poking a Dirty Finger Into the Wound post relates. […]
Back in August I traveled to Hawaii to provide some training sessions on driving change and personal mastery at Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard and Intermediate Maintenance Facility. They recently published a full page article about my visit titled “Key to Change: I ‘get to’ vs I ‘have to.’” Since my mother reads this blog and
Spotted in the Shipyard Log Read More »
To practice a profession one must have acquired mastery of an academic discipline as well as a technique for applying this special knowledge to the problems of everyday life. A profession is therefore intellectual in content, practical in application.” – H. G. Rickover There isn’t one accepted profession that seems to appropriately “fit” what it
I think about things that other people think are odd. For example, I’ve wondered for years why it is that almost all business books and consulting pitches assume that the reader or receiver of services is an executive (the .01 to .1% of employees of an organization). That led me to wonder why I, clearly
The failed model of executive-led change Read More »
Back in 1982, during his last testimony before Congress as an active-duty naval officer, Admiral H. G. Rickover claimed he coined a term, “Say-Do.” He meant the term to refer to those people who say they are going to do things, receive praise from the people who hear them say they will do things, yet
Administrators derive status from their organization and tend to identify themselves with it so that criticism of the organization is felt by them to be criticism of the administrator himself. Productive people owe whatever distinction they may have to their own competence and are usually more open-minded about improving their performance.” – H. G. Rickover,
Seeking productive people Read More »
I slumped in my chair, closed my eyes and sighed under my breath, “Ugh!” What else can you say when you watch a truly urgent plea for transformation closely followed by a detailed paper directing the recipients to perform typical incremental improvement behavior? What can you do when a valiant call for new, purposeful action
5 Steps to Save A Transformation from the Incremental Monsters Read More »
When I’m sitting around a table after work with my friends sometimes it’s fun to go around the table and tell our “the only one” stories about how one of us has been the only one who’s done something, knows something or has seen something at work. A few of my favorites to tell are:
A 24-hour clock has the numbers 13 through 24 written inside the typical clock dial to allow someone to rapidly read PM times as their 24-time equivalents, e.g., 1 pm is 1300 and 10 pm is 2200. A few weeks ago I noticed a 24-hour clock just like this one on a conference room wall.
What I learned about driving change from a 24-hour clock Read More »
Seth Godin’s post “Seized of the matter,” referring to how the U.N. Security Council has a method to seize and hold issues that they refuse then to allow the full body to debate, got me thinking about a few of my pet peeve statements that can slow down or stop change. 1. “When did we
When did we decide that? Read More »
