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A Wood Full of Bears

4 January, 2010 by James Lawther Leave a Comment

Do you ever feel that you are sinking?  You are bombarded with e-mails, phone calls, and meetings, all of which are calling for your attention NOW! Then to top it off your boss tells you that your problem is that you can’t see the wood for the trees? Well, you are not alone.  The human […]

Filed Under: Blog, Employee Engagement Tagged With: error proofing, memory, training, video

Off Target

3 January, 2010 by James Lawther Leave a Comment

If you were given a target and then had your bonus (or job security) tied to it what would you do? Sort out your processes so that it was possible to meet the target? What if it wasn’t within your control to meet the target?  Would you cheat? How much effort would you expend fudging […]

Filed Under: Blog, Employee Engagement Tagged With: cheating, local government, poor service, tampering, targets, trust

Nothing Hurt But My Ego

2 January, 2010 by James Lawther Leave a Comment

It is a truism that you learn by failing.  I recently bought a pair of clip in shoes for my bicycle.  Everybody told me I would fall over once, they were right, it happened when I came to a stop at some traffic lights at the head of a queue of cars (very embarrassing).  At […]

Filed Under: Blog, Employee Engagement Tagged With: cycling, dopamine, learning, measurement, trust, video, waste

Technophobic

1 January, 2010 by James Lawther Leave a Comment

In 1997 the IBM computer Deep Blue beat the world chess champion Garry Kasparov.  This was a revelation, perhaps one of the greatest moments in information technologies’ history.  IT was the future and we would all come to rely on it. Well we do, we can’t seem to get anything done nowadays without having a […]

Filed Under: Blog, Process Improvement Tagged With: information technology, video

Spies Like Us

28 December, 2009 by James Lawther Leave a Comment

I have reached that age when for Christmas I am given socks, chocolates and paperbacks. I am half way through this year’s crop of paperbacks and found this quote in a John le Carre novel. “A desk is a dangerous place from which to watch the world” I learnt the same lesson working in a […]

Filed Under: Blog, Employee Engagement Tagged With: back to the floor, Christmas, gemba, manufacturing, monitoring

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