Archives: Strategy
Controlling contractors
When you’re buying services from a contractor, you want to minimise your risk at the lowest possible cost. If you’re the contractor, you want to minimise your risk while maximising your revenue. This adversarial tension is the core reality of most contracts. What to do?
Projecting projects
Think of your life as a project. You’re born, get educated, go to work, typically start a family and want to make a difference before you hop the twig. But what difference can you make with your remarkably fleeting biblical allotment of three score and ten years? What motives sit beneath the activities you manifest
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’.
Asset Constraint Management Capabilities
In my article Competing by Managing Asset Bottlenecks, I unpacked our value statement: ‘We help ambitious executives in industrial environments systemically improve productivity’. This article looks at four levers that fulfil this promise to make Asset Constraint Management yield its full potential. First, let’s see why it’s so essential to get the most from your
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.
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