In a recent article entitled, “Me Time: Business Spring Cleaning“, I shared the importance of completing spring cleaning on your business. Since Spring has come and is almost gone, I want to know if you completed spring cleaning within your business? I ask because it is almost Summer and I want to encourage you to look at how you can add new proceses or functionality to your business so that you can renew it.
To help you develop your business Summer list of renewal, I thought it would help if I gave you a few tips to get you started. See …read more

Funny how collaboration and communication, in and of themselves, are viewed by some as “strategies”. In my business (technology enabling business processes) you have to have something to collaborate about; i.e., a business process that is benefiting the company. In fact, “collaboration” and “communication” alone are never enough and seen as “me too” by the people we sell to. Everybody’s got collaboration tools- show me some valuable business processes that you can enable.
Even in blogging you must have content that is interesting, valuable if you will, before people will blog with you. Without the valuable content, or reason to interact …read more

Continuing my summation of comments related to the post “IN SEARCH OF: Business Processes Supporting Strategy Execution and Innovation“, I reveal my discussion with Cullen Coates. Once again, I encourage you to read all the comments at the post- they reveal a desire by all parties to learn and understand each other.
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Mr. Coates: Basically I find that people like to be involved in “strategy stuff” – it’s fun like marketing. I also find that when people get together to “do” strategy they generally come to the table each with their own agenda – they know what the strategy should be …read more

My post titled “IN SEARCH OF: Business Processes Supporting Strategy Execution and Innovation” continues to attract excellent practical comments by many including former CEO Cullen Coates. I encourage you to read the comments- they reveal a desire by all parties to learn and understand each other. Below are some of Mr. Coates’ remarks with emphasis on points that jumped out for me:
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Mr. Coates: I have been working with organizations on an integrated process of strategy development through online software for execution management. I find that, as with some of the other commenters, that – aside from ensuring that strategy itself …read more

Collaboration reaps many benefits but there are still many frustrations with the process and with the technology. Manufacturing Business Technology magazine reports on a survey of just over 400 (about 1/2 design engineers and 1/2 production/project managers) about collaboration as it relates to design and manufacturing improvements.
Only 20% were “satisfied” with current collaboration efforts citing two key areas of frustration:
1. Slow responses from those to whom communications are sent.
2. Clarity of communication.
90% regularly collaborate with internal to company people with only 30% going outside to customers and suppliers on a regular basis. This surprised the reviewers but seems to make …read more

Miki Saxon’s post in her Leadership Turn blog about a new book called EPIC Change by Timothy Clark got my attention. There’s no use trying to summarize it except to say that “EPIC” stands for Evaluation, Preparation, Implementation and Consolidation; read her excellent post for more. Then get ready to deal with change if you want to survive as an executive. My comment to her post is repeated below:
Miki- nice post about a book from an author with credibility built from his plant manager experience. There is nothing like a manufacturing environment to give you experience with change, whether it’s simply …read more