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Organisational Mechanics

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Stating the Blindingly Obvious

7 August, 2019 by James Lawther Leave a Comment

High Performing Teams If there’s a subject that will get the good people in H.R. excited it is high performing teams.  They are the holy grail of human resource management.  Everybody wants a high performing team. Conventional wisdom tells you to get the “best-of-breed”. Find the most capable sales men, ops guys, marketeers and technical wizards and […]

Filed Under: Blog, Employee Engagement Tagged With: communication, culture, listening, office productivity, organisation, performance management, research, SMART goals, systems thinking, teamwork

Centre of Excellence or Management Folly?

28 July, 2019 by James Lawther Leave a Comment

The centre of excellence How many times have you heard the claim “We are building a centre of excellence”? Or, even more triumphant, “We are a centre of excellence!” It is great management speak. It shows strategic drive and direction. Every thrusting young manager wants a centre of excellence, why wouldn’t they? There are a […]

Filed Under: Blog, Process Improvement Tagged With: cheap and nasty, collaboration, cost saving, human nature, organisation, point optimisation, silo management, systems thinking, targets, world class

Pointless Conversations

16 July, 2019 by James Lawther Leave a Comment

Defining the metric People get very excited about metrics; they spend hours debating exceptions and accuracy.  The definition becomes everything. Imagine the conversation: My Boss: You take too long to get to work in the morning; we must measure performance. What should the target be? Me: I’m not sure; there are several things we should […]

Filed Under: Blog, Operations Analysis Tagged With: cheating, Goodhart's law, key performance indicators, measurement, objective setting, performance management, systems thinking

Which Is Most Important, Perception or Performance?

28 April, 2019 by James Lawther Leave a Comment

Perceived performance Perception is reality. If you are perceived to be something, you might as well be it because that’s the truth in people’s minds.  Steve Young For those who believe that perception is reality, performance isn’t important, but perceived performance is everything. There are three ways to improve perceived performance: 1. Distort the data […]

Filed Under: Blog, Process Improvement Tagged With: cheating, credibility, gemba, key performance indicators, operational excellence, systems thinking, tampering, targets

The Siren Call of the Reorg

18 March, 2019 by James Lawther 1 Comment

The perfect organisation There are a hundred and one ways you can structure your organisation: You can have a flat structure You can have a tall structure You can have an inverted structure It could be network driven It could be geographically driven It could be project driven Power can be devolved to the regions […]

Filed Under: Blog, Employee Engagement Tagged With: reorganisation, silo management, systems thinking, tampering, wasted intellect

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