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What Is a Balanced Scorecard?

28 June, 2022 by James Lawther Leave a Comment

Dull but Important What Is a Balanced Scorecard? That is not an exciting question. So let me try and give you a compelling answer. A Small Problem With the Exhaust In December 2017, Oliver Schmidt, a General Manager for Volkswagen, was sentenced to seven years in prison and fined $400,000. He had been on holiday […]

Filed Under: Blog, Operations Analysis Tagged With: key performance indicators, measurement

If You Can’t Measure It, You Can’t Manage It

21 June, 2022 by James Lawther Leave a Comment

You Can’t Manage What You Can’t Measure

Unhelpful Statements One of Peter Drucker’s maxims was “if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it”. I have lots of sympathy for the statement. If you aren’t measuring performance, you can’t see if it is getting better or worse; if you don’t know if it is getting better or worse, you aren’t managing it. I like a robust […]

Filed Under: Blog, Operations Analysis Tagged With: beliefs, command and control, key performance indicators, measurement, Peter Drucker, targets

The Best Data Visualisation Examples on the Web

13 July, 2020 by James Lawther 1 Comment

Pie Chart

Because a picture is worth a thousand words (or numbers) you need to see some of the best data visualisation examples. It is worth knowing that… There is a tried and tested way to communicate with data — Storytelling With Data. That infographics can be powerful — Information is Beautiful. But most infographics are not […]

Filed Under: Best of the Web, Blog, Operations Analysis Tagged With: clarity, communication, correlation, data is not information, data presentation, key performance indicators

Reducing Complexity

4 May, 2020 by James Lawther Leave a Comment

Avoiding Overwhelm In their book Meltdown, Clearfield and Tilcsik show how complicated systems fail.  They discuss nuclear accidents, financial disasters and medical mishaps and show how we can avoid disasters by reducing complexity. The more complex our systems become, the less easy they are to understand. So they become harder to fix when they break. Add […]

Filed Under: Blog, Operations Analysis Tagged With: accident prevention, aviation, communication, complexity, data is not information, data presentation, error proofing, graphical user interface, less is more

The Blind Men and the Elephant

3 March, 2020 by James Lawther 2 Comments

The art of listening There is a tale that originated somewhere in the Indian subcontinent about six blind men and an elephant.  My favourite version of the story is a poem written in the mid 19th Century The blind men and the elephant It was six men of IndostanTo learning much inclined,Who went to see […]

Filed Under: Blog, Operations Analysis Tagged With: communication, human nature, listening

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