Posts Tagged ‘Leadership’
The Bias for Action: Initiative and Decisiveness I am still running slightly behind my plan to discuss these 12 Leadership Truths (based on the United States Marine Corps’ Fourteen Leadership Traits). This month I will be thinking through initiative and decisiveness. Last month I talked about Judgment and in January I discussed Justice. We have had a lively discussion so far ranging from Twitter commentary to personal phone calls. So far, folks seem to resonate with our thoughts on the leadership truths that need to be present to support a culture of mutual trust and respect, the culture...
Date: 04 Apr, 2011
Posted by: David Adams in: Leadership | Lean | Operational Excellence | Uncategorized
Give Those Tired Old Lean Tools a Rest… This is a picture of a process map where the different colors represent information and service (think product) flows as well as value-added or non-value-added steps in the process. If you were a casual observer watching me work with this multi-disciplinary team of engineers, detailers, leaders and craftsmen, you may think, “This guy is doing a Kaizen Event.” But, I’m not. In fact, this is a picture from Week 5 of a Quality Control (QC) Circle meeting. If you ask the team what they are doing, they’d simply reply, “Problem...
Do These Six Things to Improve Your Judgement S0, exercising some poor judgment, I missed last month’s installment in my resolution to write about the 14 leadership traits each month. Last month – February – was Trait Number Two: Judgment. In hopes of catching up, I am offering six practices that – if honed to a skill – will absolutely improve your judgment. One: Go and See for Judgment OK, so I’m not fooling anyone into thinking that these six practices are original. They are right out of the KCOE Operational Excellence System playbook. Now that I’ve...
Broken pdCa Cycles Abound! I’ve been ruminating on this article for a few days now. I am seeing broken pdCA cycles as the root causes for so many problems. I see it here in the Center and in the hospitals and factories where we coach. I thought I’d give my two cents or, rather, two tips, for strengthening your PDCA cycles. PDCA Weaknesses First, be aware of your personal weak areas. Many process problems stem from what I call shunted PDCA cycles. These weak cycles are usually the weakest at the “check” step. The check is either shallow or completely missing. If checking...
Lean Leadership: leading with Justice The Definition of Justice for Lean Leadership jus⋅tice [juhs-tis] –noun the quality of being just; righteousness, equitableness, or moral rightness: to uphold the justice of a cause. rightfulness or lawfulness, as of a claim or title; justness of ground or reason: to complain with justice. the moral principle determining just conduct. conformity to this principle, as manifested in conduct; just conduct, dealing, or treatment. the administering of deserved punishment or reward. (Source: Dictionary.com) Let me begin by making some suppositions. First,...
Keep is Real, Keep it Simple: World Class Leadership Considering World Class Leadership and What Happened Last Year As I consider the year ahead, I was struck by the number of questions I fielded last year on basic leadership in the context of “lean” or our own KCOE (operational excellence) System. It would seem that despite several thousand years of knowledge recorded on the subject, we still prefer to chase the latest fad or the hippest guru for inspiration. My resolution for 2011 is to bring twelve simple lessons to you over the next 12 months. They are simple because they a generally...
Date: 16 Dec, 2010
Posted by: David Adams in: Coaching Stories | Leadership | Lean | Operational Excellence
I woke up today with the notion that I needed to clear up or spread the word about the two daily leadership questions that we promote in our KCOE System for lean leadership | Operational Excllence leadership. I had a couple of clients thinking about this yesterday, so I thought I’d do some quick teaching on it. I posted the video on YouTube here: Leading in Lean | Operational Excellence Systems| The Two Leadership Questions
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...
