If you knew accurately what is actually making money in your company wouldn’t that then influence all your decisions regarding cost and investment? Well, isn’t that what accounting is for? The problem is, traditional accounting fails to give a complete and correct picture of what is happening dynamically and what is really driving profitability. Every company is […]
Vital Insights from Managing Variation and Constraints – Out of the Crisis Series Part 3
Putting new knowledge to work: Managing Variation and Constraints Stamp out the fire and get nowhere. Stamp out the fires puts us back to where we were in the first place. Taking action on the basis of results without theory of knowledge, without theory of variation, without knowledge about a system. Anything goes wrong, do something about it, […]
Why Your Pricing Strategy is Losing You Business
A company in the furniture business lost a good repeat customer a few months back. They were devastated because they were already selling considerably less than previous years. Their customer wanted to a pay a price for their product that, according to traditional cost accounting, was not a price that allowed them to make any […]
Every Project is a System – Don’t Ignore these Systemic Principles for Effective Project Management
This week we delivered an over-subscribed webinar for the Project Management Institute (PMI) global platform. It is always a privilege to address people in many different countries on such a vital subject matter. Project Management affects every single one of us, as citizens and consumers. Today’s post introduces some critical concepts when it comes to effective […]
The One Principle You Cannot Ignore for 21st Century Business Success
There is one universally valid principle that no business can ignore to achieve success and sustainable growth, highlighted in the following extract from the business novel ‘The Human Constraint’, www.thehumanconstraint.ca bought in 40 countries so far. May looked at her notes again. She had to get things right for the article about the new way that […]
Three Steps to Optimal Performance in Any Organization
There are three steps that allow any organization to achieve optimal performance. Before we say what they are, let’s step back and understand one fundamental principle that affects how organizations get results. What happens when more than one person or more than one entity work together in the same direction? Is the result just the […]
Give Up Busy – Choose Productive
Being busy is considered by many to be a virtue. People may be giving their businesses 200% of effort. But in reality, being busy as you work through a shopping list of “to do” tasks can be the opposite of virtuous. How? Because it can lead to wasting time on the wrong things, unproductive multi-tasking […]
Bulldoze Business Schools? A New Systemic Curriculum for Complexity in Business and Management
Our business world is changing rapidly. Complexity dominates and old solutions no longer work. Some refer to this as the ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’. Given all these changes, it is remarkable to see that MBAs are offering much the same program content as 20 years ago. A Professor in the UK has gone as far as […]
Exploit the Constraint, Not Your People (Are you listening, Amazon?)
An article in ‘Business Insider’ this month revisits what it’s like to work at Amazon. While there may have been some improvement since the 2015 NYT article that referred to a bruising culture and people crying at their desks, there still seems to be evidence of exploitation. There is only one kind of exploitation in organizations […]
Managing Risk through a Leverage Point (constraint) – A Systems View
In our last post Understanding Uncertainty and Systemic Risk in Organizations we explained how management must involve the management of variation. Every single process, relationship and communication in our organization, whether we are aware of it or not, is affected by variation. If we ignore variation then we are not managing, and if we are not […]