Remove Innovation Remove Review Remove Six Sigma Remove Technology
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Core Elements to Leading a Peak Performance Culture

The Practical Leader

We’ve been working with more and more executive teams who proclaim strategies for transforming their culture toward higher safety, customer service, innovation, Lean/Six Sigma approaches, productivity, employee engagement, or new technology platforms. They’re innocently ignorant.

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The Next Big Thing in Managing Innovation

Harvard Business Review

The first decade of the 21st century brought about an incredible amount of technological advances — Facebook, Twitter, Android, iPod/iTunes/iPhone/iPad, and many other innovations transformed how we communicate, work, and live. Related processes like Six Sigma and Total Quality Management became widespread, as the U.S.

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Operational Improvement Has Improved

Harvard Business Review

If you've had a bad experience with an operational improvement effort (like Six Sigma or Business Reengineering), or if you haven't given it much attention lately, you should take a fresh look. The growth of social technology for sharing and learning. But improvement has improved.

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Before Automating Your Company?s Processes, Find Ways to Improve Them

Harvard Business Review

One of the most recent automation technologies to emerge is robotic process automation , or RPA. The technology is sometimes described as supporting “ swivel chair ” processes involving a lot of back-and-forth access to multiple information systems. However, many companies don’t do that.

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How GE Stays Young

Harvard Business Review

Under CEO Jack Welch in the 1980s and 1990s, they adopted operational efficiency approaches (“ Workout ,” “Six Sigma,” and “Lean”) that reinforced their success and that many companies emulated. You need to think like a portfolio manager, allocating resources both to innovate in your core and for the future.

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Avoid the Improvement Hype Cycle

Harvard Business Review

Fed by consultants, gurus, technology vendors, and academics, their enthusiasm for a particular process improvement method takes on a religious tone (as I described in my last post.) By reviewing the history of its process initiatives, the company made its journey visible and discussable. By all means, choose a name and stick with it.

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Five Power Skills for Discovering Radical Ideas

Harvard Business Review

Innovation starts with new and novel ideas. When we surveyed over 300 global executives between 2008 and 2009, one of the primary concerns they expressed was their inability to compete long term without a solid innovation engine that can grow their top line. Finding ideas is never the problem — initially. Find Pivots.

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