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Master the PRIMES

Leading Blog

Fixing involves corporate improvement programs like Activity Based Costing, Six Sigma and others.”These “Master the Primes and you can master leading groups,” says Chris McGoff. The Primes are 46 universal patterns of group behavior that show up every time people join up in groups to solve problems, drive change, and transform systems. Faced with the need for transformative change, a leader’s ability to form and sustain effective groups is critical.

Six Sigma 282
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A Closed-Loop Strategy Execution System

Six Disciplines

Strategy implementation, in turn, links strategy to operations with a third set of tools and processes, including quality and process management, reengineering, process dashboards, rolling forecasts, activity-based costing, resource capacity planning, and dynamic budgeting. In their 2008 book "The Execution Premium: Linking Strategy to Operations for Competitive Advantage" (Harvard Business School Press), Harvard professors Dr. Robert S. Kaplan and Dr. David P.

System 98
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A Closed-Loop Strategy Execution System

Six Disciplines

Strategy implementation, in turn, links strategy to operations with a third set of tools and processes, including quality and process management, reengineering, process dashboards, rolling forecasts, activity-based costing, resource capacity planning, and dynamic budgeting. In their 2008 book "The Execution Premium: Linking Strategy to Operations for Competitive Advantage" (Harvard Business School Press), Harvard professors Dr. Robert S. Kaplan and Dr. David P.

System 85
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The Transformed Map of a Recovering Management Accountant

Deming Institute

Manage a Living System, Not a Ledger” ), Johnson explains that better cost information, such as activity-based costing (ABC) , will not provide a long-term method of reducing manufacturing costs. The focus must be on managing work activities as components of an ecosystem. Accounting models must be able to evaluate the contribution to performance of the quality of interrelationships between different activities and functions in a business.

Deming 28
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Do You Know What Your Company’s Data Is Worth?

Harvard Business Review

In 2015, Lloyd’s (the world’s specialist insurance market) estimated that cyber-attacks cost businesses as much as $400 billion per year , which includes direct damage plus post-attack disruption to the normal course of business. Between 2013 and 2015 cyber-crime costs quadrupled, with the reported incidence rate growing exponentially. Such costs are expected to quadruple again by 2019, to in excess of $2 trillion.

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Don't Anesthetize Your Colleagues with Bad Writing

Harvard Business Review

But if you develop a strong habit of using active voice, you'll largely prevent convoluted, backward-sounding sentences in your writing. It may be convenient to refer to COGS instead of spelling out "cost of goods sold." It seems obvious that you shouldn't put your audience to sleep, doesn't it? It should also be obvious to people who deliver dull presentations or talk in circles at dinner parties — but consider how many boring speakers you've had to endure.

VBM 9
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Zero-Based Budgeting Is Not a Wonder Diet for Companies

Harvard Business Review

Zero-based budgeting (ZBB) is elegantly logical: Expenses must be justified for each new budget period based on demonstrable needs and costs, as opposed to the more common method of using last year’s budget as your starting point, then adjusting up or down. ZBB is a straightforward, intuitively simple way to aggressively strip out costs that cannot be rationally justified. Who would argue that a business should not eliminate unjustifiable costs?

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Health Care Providers Need a Value Management Office

Harvard Business Review

Many health care organizations today are striving to deliver better patient outcomes at lower cost and to be rewarded for accomplishing both. Most have begun this journey with pilot projects to obtain valid measures of outcomes and cost for one or two medical conditions. A “value management office” can greatly enhance an institution’s ability to improve outcomes and costs across the enterprise.

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Delivering Higher Value Care Means Spending More Time with Patients

Harvard Business Review

Pressuring physicians to maximize the number of patients they see and minimizing the time they spend with each is one of five counterproductive mistakes that health care providers often make in trying to reduce costs — the subject of a recent article in the Harvard Business Review. To illustrate the problem, consider our research on the cost of treating patients when their kidneys begin to lose their ability to filter blood.

Class 11
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How Hospitals Are Using Patient-Reported Outcomes to Improve Care

Harvard Business Review

Dr. Niazi’s team has used Time-Driven Activity-Based Costing to prove that this program is cost effective, and is currently collecting data to assess its impact on patient outcomes. In collaboration with Dr. Heidi Crane at the University of Washington, he built a model that can reveal suicidal ideation based on outpatient survey answers and coordinate a response to it. Phil Ashley/Getty Images.

Mayo 9
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Lessons from Mayo Clinic’s Redesign of Stroke Care

Harvard Business Review

Facing escalating costs of medications and technology, health care patients and providers in the United States continue to search for opportunities to reduce overall costs while maintaining and improving health care outcomes. At the Mayo Clinic Comprehensive Stroke Center Practice, we conducted a project to design and deliver care more customized to the needs of individual patients while reducing cost and resource constraints. David Pereiras/Getty Images.

Cost 8
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Getting Bundled Payments Right in Health Care

Harvard Business Review

Bundled payments — single payments that cover all the care for a patient’s medical condition or treatment over a specified timeframe — are increasingly being deployed to motivate the delivery of better patient outcomes at lower costs. They have successfully used bundled payments to capture the value created by cost-effectively delivering superior patient outcomes. Data on Outcomes and Costs.

Cost 8
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Intelligent Redesign of Health Care

Harvard Business Review

The health care industry has survived economically by cross-subsidizing margin shortfalls in one activity with the revenues generated from others. The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center is seeking to reduce its cost structure by redesigning its health-care-delivery model to reflect the true costs of care (the early stages of the project were described in a 2011 Harvard Business Review article by Robert S. The actionable cost savings from process improvement.

Kaplan 8
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The Mayo Clinic Model for Running a Value-Improvement Program

Harvard Business Review

In the last six years, a Harvard Business School team has worked with dozens of health care organizations to help them understand the true costs of their treatments for many medical conditions. These efforts were part of the providers’ quest to increase the value of their care delivery — in other words, achieve better outcomes at the lowest-possible cost. measure both costs and outcomes for comparative analyses of care variation. Measure outcomes and costs.

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Measuring and Communicating Health Care Value with Charts

Harvard Business Review

Some leading proponents of health care reform have argued that the goal of any health care system should be to deliver the most value to patients : the outcomes achieved for treating a medical condition relative to the costs incurred over a complete care cycle. We have found that a radar chart is an effective means to visually depict outcome and cost data simultaneously. Measuring Costs and Outcomes in Healthcare. HBR STAFF.

Cost 10
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Case Study: When to Drop an Unprofitable Customer

Harvard Business Review

The Power of Customer Costing. With careful study, Tommy had figured out that the company's costing system had made it blind to its own operations: It allocated factory overhead to products as a percentage markup over direct labor costs, and corporate overhead as a percentage of sales. Thus, the company could not accurately identify its costs for serving individual customers or for designing and producing all the new products it had recently brought to the marketplace.

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How to Design a Bundled Payment Around Value

Harvard Business Review

The traditional fee-for-service reimbursement model is widely acknowledged to be a major driver of escalating health care costs. It also penalizes cost reduction since eliminating unnecessary procedures leads to lower reimbursements. Bundled payments (BP) have the potential to reward providers that deliver more value to their patients — better outcomes at lower costs. Estimating Costs.