In Quotes

A few thoughts to get you started this work week…

From my experience with dozens of companies over the last 30 years, I see three factors that contribute much more than others to the failure of process improvement initiatives. The first is that organizations naturally tend to optimize within functions and departments, rather than across them. The second is that, without information on the impact of their work on company goals, frontline workers can’t properly contribute to improving them.

 

Brad Power on what the C-Suite needs to do for process improvement

I think the biggest problem of the modern-day executive isn’t a lack of commitment or work ethic. Most execs are perfectly willing to work hard, and for a distressing number of hours. And it’s not that they don’t understand basic time management, either: anyone who has made it to upper tier management (with the occasional exception of the boss’s son) has mastered the basics of time management, or they wouldn’t be there. The real problem is that many C-Suite executives haven’t learned to do expand and refocus their understanding of time management to take into account the realities of their new positions.

 

Laura Stack examines focus for productive business executives

In life, just as in sports, an extraordinary performance is often separated from an ordinary one by the slightest of margins. What if your ordinary life could become extraordinary with only the smallest of changes? Would it be worth trying?

 

John Maxwell on the distance between ordinary and extraordinary