The date is November 19th, 1863. A crisp autumn day in the fields of southern Pennsylvania in a little farm-town called Gettysburg. Just four months earlier, the fierce battle of Gettysburg raged there as the Union and Confederate forces clashed in what mark the decisive high-water mark of the Confederate efforts to separate from the United States and become their own country. Continue reading
Since the beginning of recorded history, great leaders of engagements have known two things; 1) Time is the enemy with speed and decisiveness in making a decision being an advantage and 2) there is no such thing as the perfect plan. Therefore the ability to adapt as circumstances unfold is critical to success.
Sun Tzu, a military strategist in the 6th century BC and known for his writings on military doctrine in “The Art of War”, recognized and understood the importance of speed and planning very well. Continue reading
In my article, “Build Organizational Capacity and Capability – For Free”, I listed several root-causes for training and education programs reaching a “stall speed” and a detailed approach for avoiding it. Among the root-causes listed were; time, expense, work/learning balance, scalability, retention rate, and atrophy.
But there is considerable risk to the program even prior to its launch, and that involves the creation of a proper curriculum and learning environment. Continue reading
I was coaching one of the national oil companies in the Middle East, offering mentorship to the director of their operational excellence program. He was frustrated because he had invested considerable funds building a team of sixty Lean Six Sigma Black Belts over a nine-month period, and they had not yet worked on—much less completed—any project nor had they realized any benefit to the company.
Continue readingAs very young children, we had an instinctive need to be very close to our parents – feeling a great deal of anxiety, even a sense of abandonment, if they were not within our sight. As we grew older – and whether it was geographically, intellectually, or psychologically – we would become more comfortable with greater distances from what we felt were our basic truths, but almost always as stepping stones and rarely great leaps. Continue reading