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Long-Term Strategy

2 August, 2022 by James Lawther Leave a Comment

long term strategy

Playing the Long Game If there is one company that epitomises long-term strategy, it is Amazon. On May 15th 1997, Amazon sold shares to the public for the first time. They were priced at $18 per share. Later that year, alongside their first annual report Jeff Bezos wrote a letter to Shareholders. That letter was […]

Filed Under: Blog, Employee Engagement, Tools & Techniques Tagged With: Amazon, culture, customer focus, long term, strategy

The World’s Most Useless Document

27 November, 2017 by James Lawther 2 Comments

The org chart When you join a new business the people in H.R. will give you something like this: As good corporate citizens we all seize this as one of the most important pieces of paper we will be given. It tells us how the concern works. It is critical information, it tells us how […]

Filed Under: Blog, Employee Engagement Tagged With: bureaucracy, command and control, communication, culture, customer focus, human nature, organisation

An Extraordinary System

11 March, 2017 by James Lawther Leave a Comment

Dabbawalla

The logistics organisation In Mumbai there is an organisation that delivers meals to office workers. It is called the Nutan Mumbai Tiffin Box Suppliers Association.  That is a bit of a mouthful, they are more commonly known as Dabbawalas (lunch box men).  Think deliveroo and you wouldn’t be too wide of the mark, except that meals […]

Filed Under: Blog, Process Improvement Tagged With: customer focus, employee ownership, purpose, systems thinking

Did Process Improvement Destroy Starbucks?

9 October, 2015 by James Lawther 29 Comments

The Memo I came across a memo from Howard Schultz, the chief executive of Starbucks the other day. Here are the bits that caught my eye — to read the whole thing click here. From: Howard Schultz Sent: Wednesday, February 14, 2007 Subject: The Commoditization of the Starbucks Experience Over the past ten years, in […]

Filed Under: Blog, Process Improvement Tagged With: customer focus, fessing up, management style, objective setting

The Rules of the Workplace

27 September, 2015 by James Lawther 3 Comments

The 20 rules: Prioritise the work Don’t make your customers wait There is always more work than people Study the work Understand how the work works Standardise the work If the work is important write it down Train your staff Make the work easy Build systems Stream line the work Find the bottleneck Clean the […]

Filed Under: Blog, Tools & Techniques, Wild Cards Tagged With: bottleneck, communication, customer focus, effective meetings, error proofing, five s, gemba, lean thinking, learning, process mapping, service improvement, SlideShare, standardisation, systems thinking, visual management

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