Today's brief message is a plea for humanity, balance, and healing in the wake of last Saturday's mass shooting in Buffalo, NY.

Progress is to be found through #diversity, #equity, #inclusion, and #education.

Grace. Dignity. Compassion.

Andy

A gemba walk is an opportunity for leadership to see how work is accomplished with their own eyes, listen carefully to the challenges and opportunities the team faces, and ask questions with the intention to seek to understand challenges and opportunities so they can be an advocate for and supporter of the team or department.

My goal in introducing the eight wastes of Lean and the two additional wastes of emotion and meetings is more about developing the ability to see wastes clearly than it is about properly classifying them. As the saying goes, “What gets measured gets managed.” This ability to see waste is key to the adoption of a continuous improvement mindset. After all, if we can’t see waste and inefficiency, how can we continually improve our standard work?

Trust builds when actions are aligned with words. Flow is maximized when work is aligned up, down, and across the organization. Accountability flourishes in an environment of strong communication and multidirectional transparency. The three are inextricably linked, and strong goal-setting practices serve as the foundation for establishing trust, accountability, and flow.

Welcome to my first YouTube video! In this extended introductory segment, I provide a bit of insight into my background through several "icebreaker" questions and also delve into what makes me tick as a leader.

I discuss critical skills of the future and outline the importance of adopting a lifelong learning mindset and striking the appropriate balance between behavioral and technical skills.

Finally, I read a brief excerpt from my book, Balancing Act (Kaplan Publishing, 2021).

Thank you for your time.

Goal setting within a business can be fraught with start-stops, discontinuity, extra-processing, and long wait times from ideation to implementation. Poorly designed goals that do not connect up, down, and across an organization can do more harm than good. That harm evidences itself in the form of team mistrust, employee dissatisfaction, failed projects, and poor performance. Moreover, if corporate goals change too frequently, the organizational change management curve and many individual contributor change management curves can’t keep up, leading to–you guessed it–team mistrust, employee dissatisfaction, failed projects, and poor performance.

By being clear about what the company does and its differentiator(s), the average individual change management curve gets shorter and individual morale/competence improves–all else the same. Since the average individual curve shortens and individual outcomes improve, the organizational change curve (aggregated curve) gets shorter and overall outcomes improve.

What makes business different is that a business is a going concern. What this means is that a business should–theoretically–last forever. But just like a human or your automobile, entropy is out to get your business. Without significant maintenance and substantive change through time, your business will fall apart and return to the stardust from whence it came. Therefore, change is a necessary condition for the success and survival of any business. Operating a business without a plan for how to deal with change–or imagining that change is not important–is akin to having a death wish. Left unattended the opposing forces of change and entropy will rip the organization apart.

In the boardroom, determining corporate purpose is a team sport that is driven from the office of the CEO with input from the senior executive team. Like its personal counterpart, a high level of human skill is required for the best results. Quiet egos, open ears, curious, agile minds, and courageous, yet compassionate voices are necessary conditions for success.

The concept of a management operating system has been around for years, but has encountered limitations on adoption as existing models focus primarily on structures, processes, and systems that work together. Our approach is different in that we’re purposefully recognizing the impact of philosophy, the human element of business, and specifically engineering the operating system to promote the movement of organizational culture toward high trust and high accountability.

There are three certainties in life: change, community support (a.k.a., taxes), and death. We should all spend the right amount of time educating ourselves and contemplating our relationship with each of these certainties. It’s important not to dwell on, or allow these conversations to overwhelm us. However, it’s equally important to engage and not stick our heads in the sand - blissfully wandering through life under the assumption that we are somehow immortal.

The process of getting to know yourself is difficult, but deeply satisfying. Self-reflection and personal planning exercises are two important tools to understand and employ on the journey toward greater self-awareness and enlightenment. In this muse, we’re going to take the promised deep dive into the concept of the personal A3.