Mixed discipline innovation

A team built with mixed skills and know-how will always be stronger than a group-think silo. Business insight is a combination of looking at an opportunity through multiple lenses and forming a view of what these multiple observations mean. Successful businesses look, listen and learn from as many sources as possible. This means an extended network is highly desirable. The easiest way to extend the network is bring in different people for divergent thinking on shared business problems. Right brainer, left brainer, activist, theorist – they all create balance and augment team and the enterprise in which they work.

Follow this link to an article on the subject by Bill Gross, CEO of Idealab

The art of Lean Manufacturing

This is a collection of infographics that I developed in my role as an Operational Production Manager. I wanted to take the left brained thinking of Lean principles and reinterpret them as a right brained display of visual posters. I found that many people grasped the concepts more quickly through the use of these pictures.
I offer lean Manufacturing mentor services to UK services and manufacturing companies. The purpose of these mentor services are to empower, enable and educate supervisors in the practical applications in the workplace of these exotic concepts.
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Sparking creativity in teams: An executive’s guide

Although creativity is often considered a trait of the privileged few, any individual or team can become more creative—better able to generate the breakthroughs that stimulate growth and performance.

In fact, our experience with hundreds of corporate teams, ranging from experienced C-level executives to entry-level customer service reps, suggests that companies can use relatively simple techniques to boost the creative output of employees at any level.

The key is to focus on perception, which leading neuroscientists, such as Emory University’s Gregory Berns, find is intrinsically linked to creativity in the human brain. To perceive things differently, Berns maintains, we must bombard our brains with things it has never encountered. This kind of novelty is vital because the brain has evolved for efficiency and routinely takes perceptual shortcuts to save energy; perceiving information in the usual way requires little of it. Only by forcing our brains to recategorize information and move beyond our habitual thinking patterns can we begin to imagine truly novel alternatives.

Read more here…

Five Ways Entrepreneurs Can Take on Big Companies

As an entrepreneur, it can be very intimidating when you realize that you’re competing against massive companies with years of successful history.  Here are some tips that might help you stay a step ahead of your larger competition.

Take over a niche

One of the biggest advantages you have is that you get to pick exactly what your company does. Big companies have enormous bills to pay and greedy investors to please, which forces them to spread themselves across the entire market.  If you keep your operation lean, you can make huge profits with a relatively small market share.  Stay focused on serving your core group of customers and you’ll see your productivity skyrocket.  The smaller your target audience is, the easier it will be to give them exactly what they’re looking for.

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Management of Risk

Risk management is still approached from the point of view of it being one aspect of internal control, which itself is one aspect of corporate governance

The need to “define a framework” within which risk management is to beundertaken is still a key message within the revised guide

Much of the guidance still revolves around the application of a risk management process which enables organizations to identify, assess and control risk.

The need to embed and review risk management is still seen as a key element of implementing an effective approach to risk management

The guide still provides guidance about how risk management needs to be tailored to meet the needs of different organizational perspectives, i.e. strategic, programme, project and operational

There is still guidance on the use and application of a wide range of risk management techniques.The M_o_R framework, based on the four core concepts of principles, approach, process and embed and review has also been retained.

Read more here…..

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10 Ways to Help Left Brainers Tap Into the Best of Their Creativity

If your job requires you to lead meetings, brainstorming sessions, or problem solving gatherings of any kind, chances are good that most of the people you come in contact with are left-brain dominant: analytical, logical, linear folks with a passion for results and a gnawing fear that the meeting you are about to lead will end with a rousing chorus of kumbaya.

Not exactly the kind of mindset conducive to breakthrough thinking.

Do not lose heart, oh facilitators of the creative process. Even if you find yourself in a room full of 10,000 left brainers, there are tons of ways to work with this mindset in service to bringing out the very best of the group’s collective genius.

Click here for ten tips…

To lean or not to lean – Project management versus Lean project management

Does project management have to be lean to be effective? Darren Walsh, divisional lean manager for hydraulic filtration specialists Parker Hannifin and a graduate of Cardiff University’s Lean MSc programme, explains why traditional project management needs to be revised if it is to support lean enterprise.

 

“There’s no place for traditional project management in mature lean environments.” Strong words when you consider that project management shares a similar success rate to implementing change, in that, it is believed that 70% of all projects fail or miss their deadlines and 70% of change fails to deliver the benefits within the planned timeline.

This article will examine some of the key differences between traditional project management and progressive lean project management, where the change agents have learned from past problems and embraced a better understanding of what makes lean really work.

Read more here…

Which Methodology Will Make Me a Great Project Manager?

It’s true, being a good project manager starts with the fundamentals of having a robust methodology in place, but even with that there are other crucial elements such as appropriate systems and experienced people that are required to support the methodology. Without them the project can fail spectacularly. It should be said though that a good methodology is the right place to start.

Over the years, as project management has matured and developed in its complexity, a number of methodologies have been developed to help assure project success.

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Three steps to building a better top team

Few teams function as well as they could. But the stakes get higher with senior-executive teams: dysfunctional ones can slow down, derail, or even paralyze a whole company. In McKinseys work with top teams at more than 100 leading multinational companies, including surveys with 600 senior executives at 30 of them, they’ve identified three crucial priorities for constructing and managing effective top teams. Getting these priorities right can help drive better business outcomes in areas ranging from customer satisfaction to worker productivity and many more as well.

Read the article here

Visual Information Management (VIM) is the must have biz tool for 2011