INSIGHTS
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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? (more…)
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. (more…)
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. (more…)
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 on a day-to-day basis? What grand vision does project ‘you’ project into a future that stretches well beyond the constraints of the breaths of your mortal coil? (more…)
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 to get the maximum output for the least amount of input. Productivity improvement is not merely cutting costs, as some corporate toe-cutters would have you believe. There is both a numerator and a denominator in the equation. You can increase the numerator, decrease the denominator or do some combination of the two. (more…)
Systems 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’. Knowing the whole and being able to focus on the constraint is not possible without a commitment to lifelong learning—another core tenet of the Ensemble Way. (more…)
