The Squawk Point

Organisational Mechanics

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

What is an Organisation?

8 November, 2015 by James Lawther 4 Comments

You can’t improve it if you don’t understand it You can’t improve your organisation if you don’t understand what an organisation is. So I googled organisation, this is what I found: Organisation: noun /ɔːɡ(ə)nʌɪˈzeɪʃ(ə)n/ An organised group of people with a particular purpose. – “a research organisation” The action of organising something. – “the organisation of conferences” The quality […]

Filed Under: Blog, Process Improvement Tagged With: beliefs, point optimisation, systems thinking, video

Short-Term Management

26 October, 2015 by James Lawther 3 Comments

Short Term Thinking

The curse of short-termism We focus on the immediate future:  The stock market obsesses about interim returns Politicians like to see instant results Managers must hit quarterly targets  We rarely look beyond the next 6 months. It is easy to hit a short-term target It doesn’t take too much talent or imagination: If you have to cut […]

Filed Under: Blog, Wild Cards Tagged With: management style, poor service, short term thinking, systems thinking, targets

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

Rule 10: Build Systems

19 July, 2015 by James Lawther 4 Comments

McDonalds

Serious fast food In 1954 Ray Kroc walked into the McDonald brothers burger bar in San Bernadino. It was clean and well run, but it wasn’t really any different to any other burger bar in the US. Every town had one. It was unremarkable. The system Ray made McDonald’s remarkable.  He systematised the burger business. He took […]

Filed Under: Blog, Process Improvement Tagged With: gemba, McDonald's, service design, systems thinking

Rule 5:  Understand how the Work Works

26 June, 2015 by James Lawther 2 Comments

It sounds a bit smug doesn’t it? It isn’t enough to study the work, you also need to know how the work works. What does it mean? Let me give you a couple of examples: 1. How do you drive a car? It is one thing to know how to drive; mirror, signal, manoeuvre.  That […]

Filed Under: Blog, Operations Analysis Tagged With: back to the floor, gemba, systems thinking, video

  • « Previous Page
  • 1
  • …
  • 6
  • 7
  • 8
  • 9
  • 10
  • 11
  • 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:

Connect

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

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