Archives: Organisation
Maintaining production
Nobody likes maintenance, except those who make a living from it. Car servicing and repairs not only cost you money—while your wheels are in the garage, your mobility and convenience take a hit, too. There’s just one thing worse than maintaining your assets. Not maintaining them.
Producing production
Every dollar of the material prosperity we enjoy can find its roots in the industrial revolution and our ability to produce more for less. We came off the farms to work in the factories and delivered unprecedented growth in wealth for our toil.
The Rising Tide of Productivity
‘Productivity isn’t everything,’ wrote economist Paul Krugman, ‘but, in the long run, it is almost everything. A country’s ability to improve its standard of living over time depends almost entirely on its ability to raise its output per worker.’ Productivity is simply a ratio of outputs to inputs. We would all like to learn how
mediumSystems thinking: the primacy of the whole
Recently, I wrote about Asset Constraint Management and the capabilities required to achieve remarkable results. None of that will amount to much if you don’t encourage a systems thinking mindset with behaviours to match. Systems thinking is at the heart of what we do, encapsulated in our mantra: ‘know the whole, focus on the constraint’.
Competing by managing asset bottlenecks
Peter Drucker quipped, ‘Business has only two functions—marketing and innovation.’ Early in my career, I focused obsessively on innovations in productivity. The really hard part, though, is convincing an organisation that a better way of delivering greater productivity exists. Allow me to try.
Sharing stories
The first two parts of our series on storytelling focused on the overarching narrative: the big stories we tell ourselves. In this final article, we look at smaller stories—the kind we tell every day—which can add up to a shift
