Someone once told me: “Don’t go fishing unless you’re ready to wait.” “Waiting” for the fish to bite is considered by most outdoor enthusiasts as a relaxing, value-added activity. But “waiting” has been found to be a frustrating, expensive non-value added category of cost in many organizations. If asked, you would likely classify the activity “Wait...

When confronted with a battle, I want people on my side with scars. Scars are a sign they’ve been attacked and survived. I value people with physical, emotional or intellectual scars that have lived through and understand my situation. They speak from experience. A person with scars has confronted personal and professional issues and either...

Shortly after “Gone with the Wind” had been published, a young woman sat beside a history professor at a dinner. Trying to make conversation, she asked him if he had read it. “No,” he answered. The woman admonished, “You’d better hurry up. It’s been out 6 weeks.” Then the professor asked, “Have you read Dante’s Divine Comedy?”...

Did you make any New Year’s Resolutions for 2000?  To improve yourself?  To improve your job?  Or to improve your organization’s performance?  Both your personal and professional goals can be simultaneously achieved in 2000 by learning about and implementing an Activity Based Management (ABM) system. Everything that we experienced during the ‘90’s was simply a...

At the crossroads, I look at my grandsons; take a coin from my pocket and say, “Heads we turn left. Tails we turn right.” I use a simple coin game to teach my grandsons an important life’s lesson. We walk to the end of the driveway and flip a coin. If it comes up heads,...

Success seems to be connected with action. Successful people and successful companies keep moving. Our company moved to new offices last week. Moving can be tiring, time consuming and troubling. But through it all we learned some valuable lessons. I believe those lessons can be applied in any organization needing to improve cost and profitability....

“Our company is like the heavyweight champion of the world. Thousands of contenders are trying to knock us off. We’re a bit like Rocky and Apollo Creed. It’s between rounds; we’re in the corner. We’re bruised, battered, and bloodied. But we’re going to stay in the ring. We’re not going to give up. We’re still...

Ken weighed 450 pounds. He was a great hockey coach, leading a junior club to division championships in five out of his six seasons. But Ken’s real ambition was to coach in the National Hockey League (NHL). Despite having all the right coaching skills, Ken’s friends were blatantly honest with him when they said “You...

The Vice President of Operations for a large, Dallas-based manufacturing company convinced the President and CFO to abandon Activity Based Costing (ABC) one month after implementation. Even though a consensus of headquarters and factory staff had deemed ABC to be a significant improvement from their legacy cost system, the new ABC system was set aside....

Do you need a green belt or a black belt to get promoted?  The answer is “yes” at a growing number of Fortune 500 companies. The September 14, 1999 Wall Street Journal featured an article on the Six Sigma programs of AlliedSignal, General Electric, Citicorp, Johnson & Johnson, Black & Decker, Weyerhaeuser and a growing number of...