Marquet describes how he observed all sorts of poor performance, errors and low morale created as a direct result of the command & control culture. Working to targets rather than beyond, silly mistakes and errors that were inside the process but outside commons sense. Continue reading →
I came across this book via a post about “Scaling Excellence” on Matthew E. May’s blog. It’s a subject close to my heart having experienced massive growth with Rightmove.co.uk and trying to hang on to all the good small company stuff whilst getting externally very big.
The bumf says the book (and the nobel prize for best co-author name must surely go to Huggy Rao) is built on nearly a decade of academic research and case studies into companies as they have grown. Of the 7 rules for scaling set out by Rao and Sutton, the one that leapt out at me and appears in first place was the idea that you should be aiming to “spread mindset, not just footprint“. Continue reading →
Seddon uses the term ‘Systems Thinking’ to capture the approach to developing highly functioning operations. As a vision for how to manage better it really gets to the heart of the idea that a manager’s primary role is to act on the system to make whatever work is required, work better. Your job is to make it easier for your people to deliver on their ambitions, to be able to exercise their heads to make their working lives easier and as a direct result – in fact almost as a side effect – create significantly more value for customers and massively reduced cost.
Lean thinking is commonly associated with a focus on eliminating waste and building maximum efficienices into supply chains and production lines. The element not so commonly referred to (but just as vital and given equal prominence/priority by Toyota) is respect for people – the idea that your people are an enormous asset and should be given the space to use their brains and tools to act on the systems they work in to make things better.
