Posts Tagged ‘culture change’
A Western Pennsylvania Tradition Over the years, I’ve used a simple story about our over-the-top attitude towards the first day of deer season here in Western Pennsylvania to illustrate how culture is formed. If you aren’t familiar with it (the story), it unfolds a little like this. First, I usually separate the group into Western Pennsylvanians and non-Western Pennsylvanians. Then, I ask the second group this simple question: What is the holiday celebrated the first Monday after Thanksgiving? They usually hew and haw about it for a half a minute before someone from the first group blurts...
One of my former CO OP students came to visit me last night. We had an excellent time catching up. During one part of the discussion, he lamented that his current position often tries his patience. He is a very relationship-oriented person who naturally and easily keeps relationships flowing. So, it strikes him as “odd” that some people don’t relate well to him simply because he is a supervisor. His dilemma is one that is timeless and that is found right where the work is being done: the classic divide between “management” and the “workers”. The dilemma reflects a gap between...
Date: 31 Jul, 2010
Posted by: David Adams in: Health Care | Leadership | Lean | Operational Excellence
Assuming that all of us would answer that question differently and that we would most likely say that we are doing OK, but are not yet world class, we need next to consider the gap between our current condition and ideal and develop what I call the target condition. Let’s face it: we won’t become world class overnight. It takes time and a lot of hard work. We shouldn’t just shrug the shoulders and go back to business as usual, as comfortable as that may be. Rather, we need to develop a target condition, one that we develop while aiming at the ideal, world class. Before we do that, however,...
