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Goldilocks, The Three Bears, And Effective Goal Setting

Terry Starbucker

Once upon a time, there was a little girl called Goldilocks…… I’ve done a lot of budgeting, planning, and goal setting over the course of my career. This was a goal typically tied to an operating metric, like the Net Promoter Score, or the company’s “fault rate&# (i.e. Why would I do such a thing?

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Speed Of Learning As The New Competitive Advantage

The Horizons Tracker

Edwards Deming and encapsulated by Japanese car giant Toyota, whose quality circles, kaizen and takt time quickly spread throughout the manufacturing sector. The first-generation of the learning organization reached its nadir with the continuous improvement movement launched by W.

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The Failure of “The Livonia Philosophy” at my GM Plant

Deming Institute

Speaking of continuous improvement, my GM plant also had a very traditional “suggestion system,” not a Kaizen-style approach to improvement. The Livonia Philosophy (as written, not practiced) also sounds like Lean in the goal of utilizing of all people’s skill and creativity, as we practice in the Kaizen model.

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Why Dr. Deming’s Work is So Important to Me

Deming Institute

After escaping GM, I had an opportunity to attend graduate school at MIT, to study operations management, system dynamics, and other topics. To this day, I say (only half-jokingly) that learning about Deming was both the best thing and the worst thing that ever happened in my career. More about that in a later post in this series.

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How to Successfully Work Across Countries, Languages, and Cultures

Harvard Business Review

Our ways of thinking about careers, colleagues, and collaboration will need to become more flexible and adaptable. What’s more, the subsidiaries operated more or less autonomously, each with separate organizational cultures and norms. Aspiring to a global career. Translators were employed for cross-border communications.

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How the Navy SEALs Train for Leadership Excellence

Harvard Business Review

So I reached out to Brandon Webb, an innovative SEAL trainer/educator, and CEO of Force12 Media for real-world perspective on what industry could learn from a special operations sensibility. A kaizen—continuous improvement—ethos is one thing. I’ve seen it happen, and careers ended when it did. That scares me.