If you bounce a ball in front of a worm navigating a flat surface, the worm will see a horizontal line growing in both directions momentarily – and then disappearing, without any explanation that the worm would find plausible. That’s what a two-dimensional life is all about: left, right, forward, and back. There are no […]
Category: consulting
Work Life as Business Travel
Think about your career as if it were business travel. If you do not plan to stay in the job for long, you behave like a hotel guest. You are not planning to change anything – and normally you won’t. You may leave some coffee stains on the carpet, collect all toiletries and, by mistake, […]
When you have a health problem, do you see a specialist?
When you have a health problem, you see a specialist. You don’t ask “Hey, you don’t have diabetes, how can you tell me what to do?” When you have a legal problem, you see a lawyer. You do not ask the lawyer if he has ever been divorced or – better – had a felony […]
“Lean” is to Businesses as “Weight Watchers” is to Individuals
Ever noticed that Lean is very similar to Weight Watchers? Both promise the moon, have a cult-like following – and both fail to deliver sustainable results in most cases. Did you know “repeat customers” are a mainstay of the Weight Watchers’ strategy? The Lean approach is not much different. Other popular fad diets to compare: AGILE = […]
Two Hot Points That Improve Business
If you are an SME and want to be a BSE (Big and Strong), you may wonder what could be your areas for improvement. Indeed, there are always some, and not to say many, as most of medium-sized businesses with high-tech content have the same root causes of their inefficiencies. Chances are that you are not […]
“LEAN all over the place. But It Does Not Work.”
For our “exploratory meeting,” I asked my client, a 150-ppl business, to share their orgchart. “We don’t have one but I will have one sketched for you.” Soon, an email arrived. Attached to the email (that had actually no text) was an excel file with a dozen rectangles, sorted in three columns, half of them […]
Do You Have a Best Friend at Work?
Do you have a best friend at work? If you have a problem answering this question, do the following. Clean your desk and put a white cloth on it or white paper. You may use any report that you have just removed from your desk because nobody reads them anyway, and you will feel good […]
Simon – The Who?..
I was privileged to participate as a judge in John Molson MBA International Case Competition. One of the cases was about a disruptive furniture retailer. The two teams offered very different strategies and presented them with truly professional flair, trying to make the best use of the available data and churning out strikingly dense and flawless presentations in […]
My Top 10 New Year Resolutions for 2019
I looked at the calendar today and realized that the end of the year is very close. So I decided that now is the right time to make the New Year resolutions. Like KPIs, NYRs are important because they help monitor my continuous improvement. Usually, I do not do this because I don’t need to […]
You Don’t have to be Steve Jobs to Run Meaningful Meetings
Last week, I attended a meeting at an organization that I will not name here, although they will hardly ever read this because everybody in the organization is “crazy busy.” No wonder: about 20 people attended the meeting, half of them dissolved soon because they were “triple-booked,” and no decision or minutes followed, of course. […]