Blog

Business leaders are often criticized for their tendency to keep looking “in the rear view mirror,” but is this always a bad thing? In life there are frequent occasions when one can learn from events of the past to augment future outcomes.  Where Continuous Improvement (CI) activities are …Read More >

Over the past 25 years, I’ve worked with clients around the world by supporting and / or leading Lean initiatives. If there’s any major “lesson learned” I’ve taken away from my experiences, it’s that employee engagement is critical to success. Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a …Read More >

“The task of leadership is not to put greatness into people, but to elicit it, for the greatness is there already.” — John Buchan, Scottish politician, author (1875-1940)

In my role as a management consultant at Kaufman Global, I work within a variety of industries ― both the …Read More >

It’s In Our Genes | Humans have an aversion to loss; we don’t like to lose things we already have. This sense is measurably stronger than our desire to achieve a gain. We also avoid risk. We don’t like to take chances; it’s part of our wiring. When …Read More >

Guard against consuming all your improvement resources purely to launch your transformation with a faultless comparison.

Case for Benchmarks | Seeking valid comparison targets to apply to your performance transformation can be important for a couple of reasons. First, it offers initiative leadership the moral authority to urge comparable …Read More >

Today’s worldwide economic landscape is pushing management to achieve higher output, better quality, and increased market share using less labor, money and inventory. They are being forced to “earn the future” while working under some very intense restraints. Sound familiar? This very topic is the focus the International …Read More >

In the Spring 2012 edition of Build ― Inc. Magazine’s publication of their “Catalog of Ideas” ― I kept coming back to the Editors’ Notes section (a section I normally skip over in any magazine). The opening page was about “the power of small things,” where the …Read More >

We Don’t Need No Stinking Assessment | By the time we meet most organizations, they want to get going with their transformation immediately. They often want to rush to implementation without a roadmap, resulting in the classic gotcha of “activity vs. action.” However, without clear direction, activity …Read More >

Whenever a catastrophic event occurs as a result of human error, the issue of process discipline comes into sharp focus. How often do we hear about how things go dramatically wrong because a procedure that should have been followed; wasn’t?

Answer: always

Everyone’s attention is riveted when lives are lost—and …Read More >

Good Intent Unintentionally Sabotaged – Have you observed this in your organization? Each year the Leadership Team goes through a planning process. With good intention, they launch a number of initiatives to achieve stretch goals. Work begins with great enthusiasm but soon becomes mired down. Reality hits, priorities …Read More >