No one likes spending money on maintenance. Take your car in for a service and you’re not only left with no transport, you have to pay for the privilege to boot. In fact, there’s only one thing worse than planned maintenance. An unplanned breakdown. I recently had the chance to talk at one of the
What are you accountable for? And what kind of authority do you have to properly acquit that accountability? Whom do you report to? How do you get inducted into the role? Who decides which tasks are to be done, of what type and by when? Everyone craves clarity in their role. We want to know
Collaboration has progressed from a buzzword to an article of faith in today’s organisations. Books talk about how to do it better and tools claim to make it ever easier to share ideas and plan projects. But what task are you collaborating on? Something so simple, and yet something so often neglected—how to properly define
It pays to stand on the shoulders of giants, those who have come before and exposed eternal truths. You get to see further, you have a reference point to test your own understanding and insight and it gives you the confidence to continue, even when you are not sure of the ground you’re standing on.
Think of a production system and you’ll probably conjure up some kind of assembly line. Whether you imagine humans or machines doing the work, this mental model feels wedded to manufacturing. It needn’t be—production principles are universal. An airline’s check-in desk is part of a production line. So is the hospital’s procedure for admitting patients.
The real cost of any decision is what you forego by making that choice. In economics, the cost of a decision based on the cost of the next best option is called the opportunity cost. At its most poetic, Henry David Thoreau put it thus: ‘the price of anything is the amount of life you
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