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Tedious but Important

11 April, 2014 by James Lawther 5 Comments

Dog Food

Some jobs are just plain boring In the dim and distant past I was a Development Manager for a frozen food company.  My role was to launch new products, beef-burgers, potato waffles, ready meals, you get the idea. Part of the job was very exciting, but part of it was as dull as dishwater. The […]

Filed Under: Blog, Process Improvement Tagged With: capital investment, defects, efficiency versus effectiveness, innovation, test and learn

Stranger Danger

16 March, 2014 by James Lawther 6 Comments

Stranger Danger

I play it safe On Thursday I spent all day in my boss’s team meeting.  I am a lucky man, I work with people I like… We see the world the same way We laugh at the same jokes We bitch about the same people (admit it, you do too) We moan about the same problems […]

Filed Under: Blog, Process Improvement Tagged With: beliefs, human nature, innovation, learning

The Wrong Answer

7 March, 2014 by James Lawther 9 Comments

Wrong Answer

Are your staff stupid? Have you ever asked them to do something so obvious that it simply wasn’t possible to misunderstand?  A nice, easy job.  Something they couldn’t fluff — if they only thought about it for two minutes — yet they still messed it up. Do they ever come back with completely the wrong […]

Filed Under: Blog, Employee Engagement Tagged With: beliefs, innovation, learning

The Problem with Protectionism

21 February, 2014 by James Lawther 8 Comments

roller skate

When I was a teenager… The gadget to be seen with was a Walkman. Modelled by tall blondes on roller-skates cruising along sun-kissed Californian beaches Desired — in my case — by a spotty youth sitting in a bush shelter in rain-swept North Yorkshire The Walkman was so popular it even lead to social scientists coining […]

Filed Under: Blog, Wild Cards Tagged With: Apple, customer focus, innovation, protectionism, service design

The I-Bomb

15 December, 2013 by James Lawther 10 Comments

Bang… There’s been an explosion.  Not a Car Bomb or a Molotov Cocktail, nothing that crude, it was much more sophisticated, it was an Infrastructure Bomb, it… Shredded your systems Destroyed your data Pulverised your processes Macerated your MI Splattered your specifications Brutalised your business rules The whole lot is gone… wiped… deleted.  The waste […]

Filed Under: Blog, Process Improvement Tagged With: capability, constraints, information technology, infrastructure, innovation, legacy systems

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