Hansei and 6 Pitfalls to Avoid in Reflective Exercises
April 15th, 2013 // 7:22 am @ Tanmay // No Comments
As individuals, teams and organizations, how much we learn from our past is critical for our improvement and future success. Hansei (meaning self-reflection) is an important part of Japanese culture – an exercise undertaken to look at past mistakes, outline the lessons and pledge to act on those lessons. According to Wikipedia, “Han" means to [...]
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What We Need: Compassionate Compliance
March 13th, 2013 // 6:29 am @ Tanmay // 4 Comments
Compliance stems from our need to ensure certainty, reduce variability and adhere to a certain structure or model. Compliance may be explicit (e.g. to a certain process model like ISO) or it may be implicit (e.g. to a certain specific belief system, way of working or ideology). Focusing on compliance means that you have a [...]
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In 100 Words: Improvement and Tending a Garden
March 11th, 2013 // 7:12 am @ Tanmay // No Comments
Improvement is never a destination, but a journey that is organic, constant and never-ending. Consider this story from Subroto Bagchi’s book “The High Performance Entrepreneur” A monk was tending to a Japanese garden and meticulously, for hours on end, he was removing dry twigs from the immaculately maintained flowering bushes. A passer-by, who was fascinated [...]
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Using Kaizen for Employee Engagement and Improvement
February 15th, 2013 // 6:14 am @ Tanmay // No Comments
Kaizen is a Japanese term that means continuous improvement. It all sounds good on the surface, but the reality is that very few companies fully embrace kaizen. They say, “But we’re improving all the time.” That may be true, but it’s the way in which companies make improvements that matters. In companies that truly embrace [...]
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In Review: The Outstanding Organization by Karen Martin
January 28th, 2013 // 7:47 am @ Tanmay // One Comment
In quest of excellence, an organization that grows has to deal with chaos. I recently read Karen Martin’s new book “The Outstanding Organization” that offers a simple yet effective model to create organizational conditions to combat this chaos and ensure better results out of improvement efforts. What Problem Does This Book Address? The book starts [...]
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The Promise of Gemba
November 8th, 2012 // 7:36 am @ Tanmay // 2 Comments
In an organization, work flows horizontally but organizations are structured vertically in hierarchies. With seniority and promotions up the order, a person tends to drift away from the place where real business value is created; the place where real action happens; where problems are clearly visible. They end up expecting results without caring about the [...]
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Agility in Process Improvement Initiatives
October 22nd, 2012 // 7:12 am @ Tanmay // 3 Comments
The pace of change is accelerating and business leaders who are responsible for improvements need keep up with the pace. While plan-do-check-act methodology has been around for long, the time it took was way longer. For organizational improvements (and the personal ones), what do we need today? What would business expect from improvement initiatives? A [...]
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9 (More) Ideas for Effective Trainings
May 20th, 2012 // 7:49 pm @ // 2 Comments
Trainings are at the core of most knowledge-oriented organizations and often considered to be key driver of employee behaviors, and hence culture. It is a lot of hard work, a lot of time, effort and energy spent. It better be effective. Here are 9 (more) ideas to ensure that trainings are effective (related ideas in [...]
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Improvement: Show Them The Results
May 9th, 2012 // 6:26 am @ // 5 Comments
A child develops confidence as she experiences things around her. We buy into products for which we perceive experience to be positive. We support causes that deliver positive results. In an organizational context, how can we then expect people to be totally committed to the improvement initiative at the start? People will never commit to [...]
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Great Story: Improvement and Tending the Garden
March 20th, 2012 // 6:57 am @ // 4 Comments
Improvement is not a product. It is process. On the journey to improve constantly, you can never announce that you have arrived because there isn’t a destination. If you get certified against an external standard, that is a milestone which can provide a framework to improve further. Organizations often fall in trap of thinking about [...]
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