jflinch

Episode 35: “We’re tired, but not tired of whiskey. A Gemba walk will pick us up.”    In Episode 35, Mark is recently back from his Scotland Gemba visit. He isn’t tired from jet lag, or from whiskey, but nevertheless, Mark and Jamie both end up complaining about being tired.

Who should lead the next change your organization faces? Who should lead a transformation? A lot depends on the nature of the change. On one end, you have deterministic, programmatic, and tool- or technology-centric changes. On the other end of the spectrum, you have leading change into a VUCA world,

Recently I was giving a very, very brief speech at Lehigh University at an event with the Baker Institute honoring entrepreneurs and the teaching of entrepreneurship. It wasn’t originally meant to be a topic of any substance, but I can’t pass up the opportunity to speak to some students and

RACI is a well-known tool for helping to establishing clear roles, but it is often either avoided, or produces an underwhelming impact. RACI stands for Responsible, Accountable, Consult, and Inform. I believe the lack of effectiveness in using the RACI framework often comes down to 4 mistakes which I outline

Standardization is good, right? Well, it’s not quite that simple. We should standardize something because it helps us solve a problem, as I wrote about in Chapter 3 of People Solve Problems. Two variables in finding the RIGHT solution of standardization are the level of abstraction and the level of

Happy Heuristics is a podcast about using rules of thumb, decision criteria, or heuristics to help leaders operate with speed and effectiveness in a complex and uncertain world. Podcast partners Jamie Flinchbaugh and Jeff Grimshaw explore specific heuristics, one theme at a time, that you can either adopt or use

Management teams run the company, and the board of directors provides governance and direction to do so. That seems simple enough to maintain some role clarity. A useful guiding phrase, repeated often by those with board experience, is “noses in, fingers out.” The meaning of that phrase is that you,

A long time ago I was running an off-shift in operations. Late at night, we didn’t have any resources coming to train the team, and so if we wanted to learn, we were on our own. We began reading and applying books, beginning with two books from Kiyoshi Suzuki, The

When I wrote the book “People Solve Problems,” I approached the book in a tool-agnostic way. As far as the book is concerned, I don’t particularly care which problem-solving tools you are using. However, tools do still matter (which I also make clear in the book). Here’s a tool that

Most people get coaching from multiple people, whether it be on their work, on their career, or just within problem-solving. How do you decide which coach to listen to? Well, that’s the wrong question, and in this video, I explain why. Watch here: https://youtu.be/B5PpWaVX9vs