DISQUS

Some great resources. I'll add some of these to my massive list of GTD and personal productivity tools I recently posted on my blog. Well done and thanks!!

Great post! I think that continuously and successfully completing projects needs a better mindset from most people. As Roosevelt said, "Men are not prisoners of fate, but only prisoners of their own minds". My top 9 ways to help you think differently and achive your project aims and goals are:

1. Beware of boundaries and labels
2. Be proactive
3. Treat people as equals
4. Listen to criticism
5. Stretch yourself
6. Build the people around you
7. Publicly appreciate others
8. Reflect
9. Focus, focus, focus

Explinations behind each of these points appear on my blog.

Rick - I work in a lean environment, but that dosen't mean that it's my life. This is my blog and I post about what I like - you don't have to read it , like it or agree with it!. I have my opinions on other events which occur outside of work and I'm sure you'll agree that it's good that we don't all agree on the same things. I'm sorry that you've deleted my blog from your favorites, but at least that way you won't have to read any posts that conflict with your beliefs now.

Read: http://work.colum.edu/~amiller/pp012103.htm
Watch: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZmPS0XmeBw

I've not heard personally, but probably too much! Perhaps I need to use an offsetting scheme?

Shaun for PM, that's what I say

@Ketan - I'm sorry I just can't recall where I got the image from?

Thanks for the comment. Yes, you're correct I've been posting about politics recently. So what?

I refer you to the top right hand corner of the page:

I post about Lean, Six-Sigma, Quality Improvement tools, techniques and philosophies, along with my opinions and thoughts on anything I find interesting.

As I keen runner (I do have a life outside of work!) I found this interesting. Leadership is about being able to focus on the right things at the right time. As far as I'm concerned focusing on running better would be the last thing on my mind with the problems Bush has caused!

Disagree?

Toyota believes that you hire a pair of hands and the brain comes free. Everyone in the company should be able to contribute to continuous improvement activities, even stores and FLT drivers!

Apparently Coke is crap. The guy who runs Pepsi told me.

Personal attributes of course!

You may be the most technically proficient person in your field but unless you have the right personal attributes, you'll never get your points and ideas across.

A lot of academics fall into the technical expert category and when faced with a practical, real-life issue they struggle.

Here are some images and videos of six sigma in action!

The owner of a seafood restaurant often advertises an all-you-can-eat special on crab legs ... does this mean that the owner the restaurant had crab legs or he was selling crab legs? I need the services of a local consultant .... know anyone decent Shaun.

shaun - I was on the verge of deleting this comment as I thought you were referring to a part of the human male anatomy.

hahahaha - you set 'em up and I'll deliver the punch lines.

@shaun - [http://tinyurl.com/ysaz39]

The National Insurance department at Longbenton, Northumberland, has been picked as a pilot site for the latest clear-desk concept. Revenue & Customs declined to say how much Unipart had been paid for the project. But a PCS spokesman said that the project was costing £7.4 million nationally.

@anna - I agree. Perhaps the tape could have been better employed on someones mouth.

[http://tinyurl.com/26vtyx]
______________________

More info:
The consultants are Unipart, described on their website [http://www.unipart.co.uk/], somewhat cryptically, as a "pioneer of lean thinking".

The union's branch secretary at Longbenton, Kevin McHugh, also pointed out a seemingly significant drawback to the plan - many of the desks are shared:

"If the person coming in after you has longer arms, he will have to move the markers. This office has been open for 60 years and people have managed to find their pens and staplers without consultants helping them in that time."

As Michael Winner would say, "Calm down dear"! Best to lie down in a dark room until the anger subsides - that's a correction, not a preventive action by the way.

According to Wikipedia [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Innovation#Failure_of_innovation]

Common causes of failure within the innovation process in most organisations can be distilled into five types:

1. Poor goal definition
2. Poor alignment of actions to goals
3. Poor participation in teams
4. Poor monitoring of results
5. Poor communication and access to information

Guess what Six Sigma is good at? ... and I'm not even a consultant!

I agree totally! You should be a consultant ...

I refer you to this excellent page by John Hunter: http://curiouscat.com/deming/zerodefects.cfm

or this:

http://www.isixsigma.com/library/content/c06030...

The latter article makes the point:

Since the slogan zero defects implies immediate compliance to a defect-free standard, it may not leave time for the continuous improvement process to occur. In fact, it may even slow down the continuous improvement process because of the massive resources that inspected-in quality entails.

Zero defects is a message that can carry with it confusion and misinterpretation, mixed with technical impracticality. It may be appropriate that the idea of zero defects be replaced with a policy of "zero escapes," since the latter has limited interpretation. As a company is doing all it can to improve the product and business using continuous improvement techniques, it also needs to consider what it can do to prevent a random, low-level defect from reaching the final customer. In this regard, zero escapes of defects may be a complimentary activity to continuous improvement.

In other words forget zero defects, focus on improving continually!

Good point .... if you read the whole article, caution is advised - you can't apply the rule to every situation!

Rick - thanks for the positive comments. After working for many years in quality I firmly believe that if the leaders don't get the philosophy no matter how many tools are applied then you'll ultimately end-up with short-terms wins which fizzle out!

Hi Jon - thanks for that link. I knew nothing about this, but do now! I've implemented a few ISO 14001 compliant management systems in my time and wonder sometimes if there's a grand unified theory of combining all ISO systems, lean and six-sigma together? Kind of an integrated management system based on perhaps around the structure presented in PAS 99 Integrated Management (http://tinyurl.com/yv96ye).

Hey, great post. I really enjoy reading Open Market - keep up the good work!!

You say, "you would expect to hear advice on how to build personal wealth and trim fat from your household budget" ... well, I blogged about something similar here: http://tinyurl.com/2xc2bv

I called it 10 Easy Steps to Save Thousands of $$$. It also helps you to reduce your carbon footprint as well. Can't be bad!

@ernesto: rss feeds will follow soon, the blog is still in beta ... stay tuned.

@karen: I read the your message and thought it was was great. Well done - why don't you run for office? If I were American I'd vote for you (instead of the clowns we have here in the UK)!!