High performing organisations: interweaving process improvement, knowledge management and change management.

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Approaches for building strong quality foundations are well documented in the manufacturing industry, but also occur across all business sectors and types of organisation such as flight airlines, the navy, health services, pharmaceutical research & development and education systems. Steven Spear, in ‘Chasing the Rabbit’1 discusses, with examples from the above, how this quality foundation …

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Fake work – a real opportunity to enhance team effectiveness

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‘Fake Work’, by Brent Peterson and Gaylan Nielson is an excellent dissertation on a common cause of frustration and wasted time and effort at work.  According to the authors’ research, 53% of workers believe that they do work that does not count, and 54% feel that their creativity, talent and intelligence is under-used.  Unfortunately fake …

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The problem with relying on intuition for process improvement and decision making.

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In a previous blog “There’s more to decision making than meets the eye… or why we shouldn’t dismiss gut feelings“, inspired by Malcolm Gladwell’s book ‘Blink’1, I made a case for the discretionary use of intuition in decision making.  I argued that: There seems to be a particular role for intuition when: a) encountering very …

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Elisabeth Goodman’s blog: a summary, some statistics, and a hiatus whilst I focus on some publications on Lean, Process Improvement and Team Effectiveness

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WordPress has some fascinating tools for monitoring the level of readership of blog postings.  Here are the statistics (as of 30th Nov 2009) on all my blogs since I started posting them in July 2009 Title Views Knowledge assets have been walking out o 232 Deep Visuals Ltd – how Kodak’s knowledge 194 There’s more …

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Using surveys and other approaches for determining customer value in Medical Information

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Understanding what your customers value is a key criterion for the effectiveness, and indeed the success, of any business support team.  It’s a criterion that Medical Information (MI) teams in the Pharmaceutical Industry understand well, as evidenced by the presentations and discussions in this year’s Medical Information and Communications track of the DIA’s 3rd Annual …

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Why conventional knowledge management, process improvement and project management won’t work with ‘clever’ teams. Or will they?

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‘Simply putting clever people together does not make a team’, and, ‘There are many examples of extremely bright and talented groups that signally underperform’.  So say Rob Goffee and Gareth Jones in ‘Clever. Leading your smartest, most creative people.’ (1) This book, which Elisabeth Goodman, principal consultant at RiverRhee Consulting, picked up as a result …

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Taking control of your working life as an employee; a first 100 days approach?

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At 4am on a fresh autumn morning, a coach load of members of the European Pharmaceutical Student Association (EPSA) began their early morning journey from Genoa, Italy, to Nice (France) to attend a workshop on ‘Personal Career Development – new to the job or ready for a change?’  This was one of the sessions organised …

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Deep Visuals Ltd – how Kodak’s knowledge assets did not quite ‘walk out of the door’

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When Alan Payne, then Director of Kodak’s European Research team, found out that his 25 strong Cambridge unit was to close in early 2009, he spotted an opportunity that was to prove irresistible.  He suggested to one of the US business heads that they could continue the project they had been working on, outside of …

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URS – a case study of an organisation that values the resources and knowledge of its employees

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A few years ago, URS had a change in Managing Director for its UK business, and an opportunity to re-appraise how it was running the business.  It recognised that a key factor was the resource and knowledge of URS’s employees, and its desire to not only retain people, but also ensure that they had a …

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There’s more to decision making than meets the eye or.. why we shouldn’t dismiss gut feelings

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I like a book that challenges my assumptions and ‘Blink’ by Malcolm Gladwell is one of them.  Each time I read such a book, I discover how much more I need to learn.  Apologies if what I’m about to write about is already obvious to readers. Whenever I run workshops using Lean and Six Sigma, …

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