The Squawk Point

Organisational Mechanics

  • Home
  • Blog
    • People
    • Data
    • Process
    • Wild Cards
    • Index
  • Podcast
  • Book

Does Culture Eat Strategy for Breakfast?

8 June, 2022 by James Lawther 2 Comments

Does a Learning Culture Eat Strategy for Breakfast?

My Favourite Quote Peter Drucker once said that “Culture eats strategy for breakfast”. Those words chime so loudly for me that it is like sitting in the belfry next to Big Ben. Just because I agree with a statement doesn’t make it right. Beliefs are dangerous things, so I decided I had better check. Is […]

Filed Under: Blog, Employee Engagement Tagged With: culture, fear and anxiety, flow, learning, measurement, operational excellence, performance management, purpose

Mental Models and the Long Way to Liverpool

12 June, 2020 by James Lawther Leave a Comment

Mental Models We all rely on mental models to guide us through life. They are our maps of reality and we use them to get the best outcomes possible. But where do those models come from and who is to say they are right? A family wedding A few years ago I went to a […]

Filed Under: Blog, Employee Engagement Tagged With: assumptions, beliefs, communication, human nature, ignorance, learning, mental models

Medieval Plumbing

12 September, 2019 by James Lawther 4 Comments

Delayed feedback When I was a child I lived in a farm house in North Yorkshire.  I’d like to tell you that I was part of the county set and owned a Range Rover and a horse, but it wasn’t that sort of farm house.  It had stone walls that were three feet thick in […]

Filed Under: Blog, Operations Analysis Tagged With: human nature, lead and lag measures, learning, measurement, systems thinking, tampering

The Performance Pyramid

6 July, 2019 by James Lawther Leave a Comment

F1 Professor Mark Jenkins Mark Jenkins is the Professor of Business Strategy at Cranfield School of Management. He has spent time studying Formula One, trying to understand what creates great performance. I’m a bit sceptical of people who study “great” organisations. The genre leading books In Search of Excellence and Good to Great have both […]

Filed Under: Best of the Web, Employee Engagement Tagged With: continuous improvement, culture, learning, management style, purpose, teamwork

Short Breaks Will Kill You

21 May, 2019 by James Lawther Leave a Comment

Quantitative or Qualitative Analysis? An apocryphal tale… A statistician working for a large organisation was asked to explain why sick pay was increasing.  The business had an ageing workforce and sickness levels were rising.  He gathered lots of data on lots of things: Working patterns Demographics Employment related illnesses Commuting times Office locations…  The list […]

Filed Under: Blog, Operations Analysis Tagged With: gemba, insight, learning, quantitative or qualitative, root cause analysis

  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • …
  • 8
  • Next Page »

Explore

accountability assumptions beliefs best practice blame bureaucracy capability clarity command and control communication complexity continuous improvement cost saving culture customer focus data is not information decisions employee performance measures empowerment error proofing fessing up gemba human nature incentives information technology innovation key performance indicators learning management style measurement motivation performance management poor service process control purpose reinforcing behaviour service design silo management systems thinking targets teamwork test and learn trust video waste

Receive Posts by e-Mail

Get the next post delivered straight to your inbox

Creative Commons

This information from The Squawk Point is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Creative Commons Licence
Customer Experience Update

Try This:

  • Glory Lasts Forever

  • Regression to The Mean

  • Fish Bone Diagrams – Helpful or Not?

  • Should You Punish Mistakes?

Connect

  • E-mail
  • LinkedIn
  • RSS
  • YouTube
  • Cookies
  • Contact Me

Copyright © 2025 · Enterprise Pro on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in