Leadership

Lost money can be re-earned. Lost time can be clawed back. Lost love reignited. Lost integrity is unrecoverable. I posted this phrase on Twitter and Facebook recently. I took some “feedback” for it. Some argued that time lost was lost. Truly, it is. But if I needed x hours to

How do you spread good ideas across your organization? My fellow blogger Jon Miller wrote a great post on Yokoten, or lateral deployment, a couple months ago. It’s a great post, both because of it’s content but also because of it’s importance. How much is an idea worth to your

Our friend in the lean community, Liz Guthridge of Connect Consulting Group, recently wrote a blog post titled Reinforce, yes; repeat, no. It caught my attention because I am a big advocate of repetition in communication. At first, it appeared that we were advocating the exact opposite approach. Repeating communication

Guest Post: Shawn Patterson is the Senior Director of Corporate Services at DTE Energy where he is responsible for the Supply Chain, Fleet, Facilities, and Continuous Improvement organizations. Shawn has held numerous positions in multiple industries and is passionate about influencing lean transformations in organizations.   We are all familiar

Guest Post: Shawn Patterson is the Senior Director of Corporate Services at DTE Energy where he is responsible for the Supply Chain, Fleet, Facilities, and Continuous Improvement organizations. Shawn has held numerous positions in multiple industries and is passionate about influencing lean transformations in organizations. In light of recent financial

  Have you ever heard a leader say, out loud, “I lead through fear, intimidation, and public humiliation”? I doubt it. Have you ever seen a leader try to lead in this way? I would guess you probably have. I think most of the people who are leading through such

There are many examples set by Martin Luther King Jr. than any one of us could follow and be a better person. I’m not at all qualified to write in depth about this leader. But there are many words of leadership that I think describe the example he has set.

In my coaching, many of my conversations begin with a source of frustration by the individual. The source of frustration could be rooted in another person, or a team problem, or in their own abilities. But nonetheless, the frustration is there. This is a good thing. The philosophy that I’ve

I’ve enjoyed connecting the fables of Aesop to lessons in lean and leadership. You can read my previous posts here. Here is a lesson about change management. How do you get engagement? How do you get compliance? The North Wind and the Sun A dispute arose between the North Wind

In the age of self-help, self-promotion, and self-everything-else, it seems that even basic human principles lose meaning. In this blog post by Manager Tools (which I highly respect and listen to their podcasts) called Be Respectful, it either argues or forwards the argument from Wired Magazine as follows: An article