Upcoming Efforts

Greetings All--

Over the near term you will see blog posts covering a series of articles on two very important topics. The first relates to "Returning to Work in the Time of Covid-19." I know we are all tired of this topic but it is important for all of us to understand what needs to happen. The second will be about "acting like and ensuring you are or are capable of being a CEO for your company and organization". The articles may be interspersed.

If any one you have any questions please feel free to ask and we'll see if we can handle them on the upcoming topics or on any of the topics I have talked about in the past.

Best Regards, Bob

18/5/21

Comments

JUST WHAT EXACTLY IS A SUPPLY CHAIN AND HOW DOES A LOUSY VIRUS SCREW THEM UP SO INCREDIBLY WELL!

Recently, I have had quite a few people ask me in the course of small talk, what exactly is this "supply chain" talk they are hearing about again regarding th e Delta variant of the Covid-19 virus. They've heard the horror stories on toilet paper or disinfectants in many stores. Now we've heard of hoarders over-stocking their own homes or selling these products on the street corner at inflated prices. Many people ask how can this be; what causes this; we are in the 21st century; etc. I remember the start of this current problem back in the 1960s (perhaps earlier) with the start of such programs as MRP (Materials Requirement Planning), but certainly not limited to this program and parlaying further into programs and schemes like J-I-T (Just-In-Time). Bottom line and perhaps over-simplified, these programs were and are intended to speed up production and cut costs. There are newer and greater programs like Le...

The Flaw Of Averages

Yes, this post will be primarily a copy of a Harvard Business Review (HBR) article. The article is the point of this blog. Over my decades in consulting, one of the major requirements in our niche was to insure that our clients received the savings we had forecast that they would achieve in a mutually agreeable manner. In the very beginning, when I started back in 1974, computers were not easily available or accessible as they had to be huge room-size machines and many clients did not even have them. So we used adding machines with paper tape to the shortly thereafter personal hand held-calculators. Personal computers starting with the very first Apple or Radio Shack model proved far superior but had minimal calculating capacity. None were perfect and because of this limitation, a straight line average over a years period was typically used to compare history to current and prove savings had been achieved. ...

Do You?

Do you procrastinate? I know I do it more often than I would like to admit. We all have a tendency to procrastinate. Very recently, I saw this photo in a LinkedIn post. To be legally clear, this is a billboard type advertisement by Nike. They are very famous for their "Just Do It" slogan. Now they have two and they have combined both into an even more powerful expression. The definition of "procrastinate" from the Oxford dictionary is: "to delay or postpone action; put off doing something." It is like the old colloquialism "Manana." Mañana is tomorrow in Spanish. We all do it to one degree or another. From a business perspective, to procrastinate is a terrible situation if you or a great many people in a company or organization do it. If it occurs too often or too much, then what does it do: it has the probability to DELAY MOST EVERYTHING. Is that what you really want? No, I doubt it. It very we...

The Productivity Guru

Search This Blog