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Organisational Mechanics

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Success to the Successful

16 December, 2019 by James Lawther 6 Comments

When is your birthday? If you took everybody in the European Union and recorded the month of their birth, the split would look like this… The pattern is virtually flat. There are some interesting exceptions.  My wife’s birthday is the 28th February and her sister’s is the 5th March. I will leave the rest to […]

Filed Under: Blog, Employee Engagement Tagged With: performance management, pygmalion effect, systems thinking

The Quick Fix Makes Things Worse

5 October, 2019 by James Lawther 5 Comments

Shifting the burden Lord I have had a bad day!   I knew it was going to be a bad day when my diary showed I was stuck in back to back meetings for eight hours on the trot. Worse still, those meetings had been shrunk to 30 minutes each.  That way I could have […]

Filed Under: Blog, Process Improvement Tagged With: root cause analysis, short term thinking, systems thinking

The Most Profitable Activity in the World

18 September, 2019 by James Lawther Leave a Comment

Collaboration The iPhone is — arguably — the most profitable product in the world.  Since it was launched in 2007 it has sold over 700 million units.  In my household alone we have 4 of the damned things. I hasten to add my daughter’s phones are hand-me downs, but all the same. The iPhone 11 […]

Filed Under: Blog, Employee Engagement Tagged With: collaboration, command and control, communication, complexity, cost saving, supply chain, systems thinking

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

How to Turn a Supertanker

26 August, 2019 by James Lawther Leave a Comment

Leverage There is a management metaphor that changing the direction of an organisation is a bit like changing the direction of a supertanker.  It can be done, but organisations are big, cumbersome and it takes a lot of time to push them onto another course. A flawed analogy It is a nice analogy, but a […]

Filed Under: Blog, Operations Analysis Tagged With: complexity, less is more, leverage, systems thinking, test and learn

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