Leadership

Hats off to Good Management in 2020

by Jamie Flinchbaugh on 12-22-20

A great deal has been written and spoken on the importance of leadership in leading people through the pandemic, including by yours truly. However, there is also something to be said for the importance of management. Good, effective, focused, and diligent management through this pandemic has been essential for many

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Rethinking (beyond COVID) Your Training Strategies

by Jamie Flinchbaugh on 12-15-20

“For too long, L&D has focused on creating day-long training programs where employees are all on the same path, regardless of their individual knowledge or experience” states this article in Chief Learning Officer.   Covid-19 has forced us to test and challenge many of our assumptions, such as whether or

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A Survey of Leadership Traits

by Jamie Flinchbaugh on 05-20-20

Many of us have spent a little time cleaning out our home offices, ensuring it’s ready for maximum focus while working from home. I’ve technically worked from home for 20 years, but given my travel, it was only a couple days a month most of the time. And while cleaning

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Leadership Questions

by Jamie Flinchbaugh on 04-21-20

Can questions really be the answer? In this video, Jamie breaks down the benefits of using deliberate questions to develop your organization. Questions need to be used to help your people to think on their own. Questions need to have a purpose. He will give you examples of effective questions

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Drucker Institute’s / Wall Street Journal Best Managed Companies

by Jamie Flinchbaugh on 12-19-17

The Wall Street Journey released their inaugural Management Top 250, a list of the best managed companies. It is based on the research of the Drucker Institute at Claremont Graduate University, releasing a much larger list and their scoring in this table Amazon tops the list, followed by Apple and

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Metrics: It’s about more than measurements

by Jamie Flinchbaugh on 11-14-17

We often hear “we cannot manage what we cannot measure”.  I think the better way to say it and approach improvement is that you cannot manage or improve what you cannot evaluate. As you are looking to improve something you need to ask how you are going to understand what

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Relentless Patience

by Jamie Flinchbaugh on 10-31-17

When people talk about a lean journey, they say the word “journey” as if they understand it will take time to change a culture, however their behavior often reveals they don’t have the relentless patience will actually take to create change.  We talked about the effort required to changing a

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Empty board room

Are boards of directors focused on strategy?

by Jamie Flinchbaugh on 07-11-17

Theoretically, each higher-level of management should be increasingly long-term focused. That certainly includes the role of the board, who with their role on shareholder value and governance, must ensure that the short-term doesn’t crowd out the long-term. CGMA summarized two surveys assessing boards and the barriers to strategic oversight. Their

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Video preview

The Founder and Experimentation

by Jamie Flinchbaugh on 06-27-17

Learning what works and what doesn’t work is driven by experimentation, real-world trials that inform us about cause and effect. How do we improve the ability to experiment? By reducing the cost, the effort, the friction required to test what works. As we continue my effort to de-jargonize (ok, that’s

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Warning sign: merge ahead

People Bottlenecks

by Jamie Flinchbaugh on 06-20-17

In the flow of a manufacturing plant, the bottleneck should often be the most valuable, or at least most expensive asset. We actually should be designing our processes around that fact, and then ensuring there is no unnecessary waste in the process that affects that bottleneck. In the Theory of

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