learning

  Everyone wants to copy the best. That’s why companies such as Toyota and General Electric have been popular sources of benchmarking. That’s why Chrysler was so highly benchmarked when we were the most profitable car company. In the lean community, I have observed a common practice of filtering ideas

  You haven’t gotten any sleep all week, so you try to get one night of 12 hours to make up for it all. It doesn’t work very well, does it? You haven’t worked out in a month, so you spend all day in the gym to make up for

  I hope you have plans to develop your people in 2011. And I hope they are actionable plans. I have yet to meet a company that over-trains or over-develops its people. I meeting plenty of companies that believe that they can’t afford it. To which I say: Baloney! Hogwash!

No matter what we do for a living, at some point we are all in the business of learning. Either we are on a learning curve ourselves. Or we are trying to influence others, whether through sales and marketing, or though managing, or through coaching. In any of these cases,

Do you think of yourself as a coach? When I ask this question, almost every single hand goes up. But what does that really mean? Do we have a process? Or do we confuse sharing our little bits of wisdom with coaching? To be an effective coach, you must combine

This week in class (I’m running a session of Leading Lean at a client) I asked a question: What’s better between focusing on your strengths or improving your weaknesses? It’s one of those unanswerable questions designed to generate some dialogue and thought. What surprised me, although only a little, is