Tag: Leadership

Many organizational leaders are inspired by management books, and quite a few have gone to the extremes of ordering the books for their leadership teams. Some even start book clubs or go through each book chapter by chapter in their meetings. I’m an avid reader and have gone through a lot of management books in […]

People only jump when they are pushed. Kotter in his book Leading Change (1994) talks about creating the “Burning Platform”. My mental image of this burning platform is a team of guys and / or gals on a burning oil rig knowing the oil rig is going to sink but only jumping into the murky […]

I don’t usually make too many New Year’s resolutions, but here are a few that I’ll be attempting this year. 1. To be less judgmental of people, and more judgmental aboutprocesses. 2. To look more closely at the “story behind the headlines” when confronted with a problem. 3. To clarify when I’m giving advice as […]

When I’m looking at a process, it often seems like there’s more than one way to approach aproblem – without a clear-cut “right” or “best” solution.One of the issues that seems to be a frequent”let’s-flip-a-coin issue”is centralization vs decentralization, specifically related to decision-making. In some projects, a particular process has been decentralized – the rationale […]

It’s the holiday season and that means one thing: shopping! This is the one time of year where I will seriously shop, making my seasonal impulsive buys and spending money on items such as clothing, candy, electronics, etc. that I rarely buy throughout any other time of the year. Evidently, I am not alone in […]

Reading Gianna Clark’s latest blogmade me thing about all the “sayisms” that I’ve developed over the past three years of my Lean-Six Sigma journey. I have added lots of acronyms, sayings, and jargon in my daily speech – and I keep forgetting that not everybody is familiar with these terms (yet) – including my husband […]

Yesterday (9th October 2006) I heard that Edmund Phelps was awarded the 2006 Nobel Prize for Economics for his theories developed in the 1960’s on the interplay between inflation expectations and unemployment. This showed that there is a “natural” rate of unemployment, a level below which inflation pressures are likely to intensify. His theories led […]

The American Society for Quality had an attorney send iSixSigma a cease and desist letter the other day for an article iSixSigma published back in 2001. In the article, Charles Waxer wrote, “ASQ only started offering certification a year or so ago.” This was in fact true in 2001, but since we don’t include a […]

Much is said about how Six Sigma will radically change your company, how it will save millions of pounds / dollars, and how it will change your company’s culture. Little is said about on of the major problems most Six Sigma deployments even the mature ones face; the “non-believers.”

I continue to be amazed at the creativity some people have. I’ve even heard some staff boast that they were “The Kings and Queens of Workarounds” because they knew how to get things done through back channels, crisis management, and personal connections that were never listed in any procedure manual. They are too busy to […]

As the academic year begins our Six Sigma team has met, created a new team charter, and began accumulating a list of projects that we would like to try this year. Our team named “Gravy” (gravy, or Six Sigma, being the goal of the team) fits in our planning objective: “More Six Sigma projects to […]

I recently participated in a great discussion with a group of Black Belts in my SSBB exam review class. We were talking aboutthe importance of “walking the process” to understand it. Several BBs had the experience of managers trying to create a process map in a back room somewhere – these managers swore that their […]

Coming from an IT background I am fluent in Techie. I feel right at home talking about NAT, BIOS, ERD, PERL, API, DHCP, IMAP, SMTP, SNMP and so on. With the right audience I can have rapid conversations in what may well sound like utter nonsense. But equally when working with a non-IT person I […]

Here’s a synopsis of a recent conversation I overheard: “We do Six Sigma, but we don’t call it that.” “Why not?” “It would scare people off.” “Huh?” “If we called it Six Sigma, that gets interpreted by people as this strange, large, project “thing” with lots of data and statistics and change and being monitored […]

Recently, I was asked to participate in an evaluation of presentation skills for one of our senior leaders. The questionnaire included questions that I expected – “speaks concisely” – but also some that I didn’t. After I completedthe survey, I started to think about my own presentation strengths and weaknesses. Here are some of my […]

As I was scanning news this week, a couple of articles caught my eye. The first was a piece by Damon Darling in the New York Times about Farecast, an airfare search engine that aims to predict how much the price of an airline ticket will rise or fall before the flight actually occurs. Says […]