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The road to hell may or may not be paved with good intentions, but the road to failure surely is. Take a good look at the people you work with, and you'll find lots of Good Starters — individuals who want to succeed, and have promising ideas for how to make that happen. They begin each new pursuit with enthusiasm, or at the very least, a commitment to getting the job done. And then something happens. Somewhere along the way, they lose steam. They get bogged down with other projects. They start procrastinating and miss deadlines. Their projects take forever to finish, if they get finished at all. Does all this sound familiar? Maybe a little too familiar? If you are guilty of being a Good Starter, but a lousy finisher — at work or in your personal life — you have a very common problem. After all, David Allen's Getting Things Done wouldn't be a huge bestseller if people could easily figure out how to get things done on their own. More than anything else, becoming a Great ...

Toyota is famous for its Toyota Production System, an approach that effectively engages front-line workers in improving their work. As I argued in my last post , "pulling" improvement from the front line is critical to continually improve operations, and Toyota does it very well. Companies that "push" work improvements from the top usually generate tepid front-line enthusiasm. Despite some missteps in the last couple of years, Toyota's ascent to the top of the auto industry has been for one reason: quality. And a big reason for its unrivaled quality is worker participation in process improvement. A platitude? Hardly. The company implements an average of nine ideas per employee per year, as described in Chuck Yorke and Norman Bodek's book All You Gotta Do Is Ask.   How does Toyota do it? There are three essential elements: context, management processes, and people. The context is crucial: Constant improvement is part of everyone's job description. Toyota...

Let’s start off by defining Lean Manufacturing. Lean (as described on multiple on-line resources) is described as a production practice that focuses on the elimination of wasteful elements in all process to increase the value to the customer. Sounds great! What organization wouldn’t want to implement a program to eliminate waste? The problem is that some organizations misuse Lean Manufacturing to overwork and reduce headcount. Sure reducing headcount will save money in the short term. Let me assure you, it comes at a higher cost. Let’s say a manager forms a team of skilled individuals to rebalance processes on the line to remove operators. Soon, the operators who are left on the line will start noticing, leading to refusal to cooperate with any effort to make improvement. They will begin to resist changes due to the fact they are scared to lose their job or contribute to a co-worker loosing theirs. This causes stress, conflict, finger pointing and ultimately failure. This is a sur...

Almost every process improvement initiative I've researched over the last three years in more than 50 organizations has been pushed from the top. These mandated-from-above programs include   Lean Six Sigma   initiatives with experts (" Belts ") in command, big IT implementations, and reengineering of major end-to-end processes. While most of these interventions produced tangible business benefits, they often didn't stick. Because the top-down pushes imposed changes from the outside, front-line people went along, but they didn't own or internalize them. For me the lesson is this: Companies should complement a top-down push with as much bottom-up pull as possible to sustain momentum and avoid regression back to previous, inferior levels of performance. Consider the competition between push and pull camps in a major oil company. An executive in the company's finance operations adopted a Six Sigma belt-driven approach to reduce costs in the company's global ...

Back in the days of  Mad Men , there were clear delineations between administrative and professional roles. Secretaries, as they were then called, existed expressly to type memos, fetch coffee, serve lunch and schedule meetings. Today, the once-clear lines between administrative and professional roles have changed. While it would have been unthinkable to ask an assistant account manager to schedule a meeting at  Sterling Cooper  in the 1960s, today it is not only common, it arguably commands a degree of respect and aptitude. When your boss asks you to schedule an important meeting with Boeing executives, it is a reflection of your competence: you can handle this. Yet the honor goes hand-in-hand with the misery of being in charge of the administrative tasks involved — how in the world are you supposed to find a time that works for fourteen professionals across three firms in two different time zones? No doubt the scheduling of meetings has become the bane of many a jun...