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Savoir Faire

12 April, 2010 by James Lawther Leave a Comment

I watched a fascinating article about skiing.

It showed how Olympians prepare their skis.  Before each race they:

1.  Strip the bottom of each ski to remove damage.
2.  Etch on a special grooved pattern to allow water to dissipate.
3.  Wax the ski, the type of wax is dependent upon the snow conditions.
4.  Strip off any excess wax.

This improved the skiers performance by 2 seconds (about 10%).

All because a man in a shed on the side of a French mountain applied a bit of method, some savoir faire.

Which leads to a handful of questions:

What is your savoir faire?
Do you apply it religiously?
If you did, would it improve your performance by 10%?

 

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Image by Anders Ljungberg

Filed Under: Blog, Process Improvement Tagged With: capability, continuous improvement, purpose

About the Author

James Lawther
James Lawther

James Lawther is a middle-aged, middle manager.

To reach this highly elevated position he has worked in numerous industries, from supermarket retailing to tax collecting.  He has had several operational roles, including running the night shift in a frozen pea packing factory and carrying out operational research for a credit card company.

As you can see from his C.V. he has either a wealth of experience or is incapable of holding down a job.  If the latter is true this post isn’t worth a minute of your attention.

Unfortunately, the only way to find out is to read it and decide for yourself.

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