The point of leadership is to show up as an example and have people re-commited to what THEY want to achieve.

The Key: What THEY want to achieve.

This has less to do with you and more to do with your followers.

Companies that intend to remain competitive understand that the most important factor is their ability to service customers. A lot of emphasis in recent years has been on cost cutting and doing more with less. Keep your efforts focused on this while at the same time building effectiveness.

I often see service levels diminish as a result of cuts. What happens when cuts are made is that remaining people are often asked to do more tasks; some of which they are not well trained for or skilled at. This causes a lot of unintended work to show up later. For example, if an order entry person makes errors, this may force production to go back and ask for clarity about the order. This can be very time consuming and the number of errors can snowball. If the order entry person had been trained for the additional tasks, it may have eliminated the original errors.

“There never seems to be enough time to do it right at first, but there always seems to be time to redo the work later.”

It is common for a manager to get a mandate from above to reduce payroll, or some other cost cutting directive, without first analyzing the overall training or skills gaps. There can be an urgency to reduce the cost without the urgency to bring others up to speed. This causes an “on the job training” cycle that is problematic. The remaining people are happy to have survived the cut, but in a short time they will feel overburdened and underappreciated. This can cause overall production to falter.

Companies that lag in service will see negative consequences. As their customers migrate to suppliers that are in tune with what is truly of value, many will be left wondering where the greatest breakdowns occurred.

Conclusion: Be careful to not get caught up in a “cut our way to prosperity” mentality without first carefully considering the training necessary to get others up to speed.

How often have you heard of someone upgrading or replacing their software system in order to become more efficient; when in fact the situation really came down to straightening chairs on the Titanic?

We encounter many manufacturing organizations that have vacancies in key positions for months while searching for the right person to permanently fill the job. Whether the vacancy is in operations, sales management, quality control, or others, having a leadership position vacant often results in a performance downturn.

We see a trend towards filling these openings on a temporary basis with a highly experienced replacement while the candidate search is underway. There are many reasons for this trend;

• The length of the search is unknown and could last for a year or more. Having a vacuum in a leadership position places an additional burden on people in the organization which is already lean. Hiring an experienced person immediately ensures that decisions and action will continue and not default to a “do nothing” mode.
• As companies have downsized, their ability to fill jobs internally has decreased. In addition, the level of experience in organizations has declined. This has resulted in a dearth of expertise in some key areas. An experienced outsider is often more likely to understand and be able to implement best practices during an interim term. 
• Having an experienced person in the role opens up the possibility of hiring a less seasoned person who can be trained by the interim leader.
• The temporary leader often participates in the hiring process for the permanent person. This provides an additional viewpoint that can improve the chances of getting a good fit.

With the recent trend in downsizing, there are often senior people available who would like having a job that they know is temporary. Many of these experienced hands can bring skills and knowledge developed during a long career to bear to make a successful and seamless transition.

Title: Sales & Marketing Executives of MN
Location: Double Tree Hotel, St. Louis Park, MN
Link out: Click here
Description: Join us for an engaging and informative session to learn how Insights can aid communication among team members, and enhance self-discovery. Teams that can readily adapt and connect with each other are significantly more likely to achieve project goals and meet deadlines. Learn how Jungian psychology can be applied easily to facilitate effective communication among teams. Insights, the global leader in Jungian based psychometric assessments, has been experienced by more than one million people worldwide, in over 30 languages.

Scott Schwefel joined a small computer networking company in 1991, and in 1995 acquired the education related assets, maintaining majority ownership with the founding of Benchmark Learning in 1995. He grew Benchmark to over $10,000,000 in annual revenues with over 50 employees. In 1997 and 1998 Benchmark was named to Minnesota’s “Fast 50” listing of the fastest growing privately held private companies. In 2002 Schwefel was named to Minnesota’s “40 under 40” listing of top executives in Minnesota, under age 40, published by The Business Journal.
Start Time: 7:00
Date: 2009-04-17
End Time: 9:00

With our national debt rising into the trillions, it might be useful to start thinking about what comes next so that no one is caught off guard in the future.

There are no facts to support the national debt may get to this level. However,  in the off chance that it does, it might be useful to know what is next. So, just in case you were unfamiliar, the term for the next set of numbers is called quadrillion.

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

Quadrillion can be written in a few different forms. In standard base ten, it is expressed $1,000,000,000,000,000.

In order to simplify, we can write it scientific notation in the form a x 10¹⁵ (that is 10 x 10 fifteen times) where ‘a’ is the first positive or negative number greater (or less than) one.

Just in case it gets bigger than quadrillion, we can look forward to quintillion. For a complete listing, check out Wikipedia’s entry on this.

There’s a little company in the Twin Cities making a big splash. Tom Trutna, owner of Big Ink, continues to do the right thing for his customers, employees and the environment. 

There are a few very simple, yet important lessons we can learn from how Big Ink thinks about publicity.

1. Always be ready for the possibility that someone will pick up your story. That means having your talking points in your hip pocket and ready to go in a moments notice.
2. Dress the part. If you want to look professional and come across sincere, then dress professionally and be sincere. 
3. Have a nimble marketing staff. A story often has a short shelf-life. So be ready to use your channels to get the story out fast.
4. Keep a sense of humor. No one knows exactly how this will go – so roll with it and keep smiling.

You can see Big Ink and Tom on television tonight. Don’t miss it!

Take advantage of Scribd as a reource for valuable content…

Enjoy!

Me 2.0: Build a Powerful Brand to Achieve Career Success

The manufacturing community of Minnesota is fortunate to have the likes of Rick Bernett, manufacturing super-hero. 

Rick can save you from the pain of not-so-yummy ERP systems.

Aside from being an instructor for APICS, Metro State University, Manufacturers Alliance and a practitioner of operations management for more than 25 years; Rick has pioneered and implemented some very advanced thinking for manufacturers with complex environments. He is allowing me to post his articles here for your benefit.

 Take a look at his latest on Push-Pull systems and how they can profoundly impact your inventories, WIP, and overall costs.

Let me learn like a human, rather than training me like a dog.

Don’t get me wrong, I love dogs. In fact I love my dog more than any dog in the world. But I don’t talk with a client, neighbor or friend the same way I talk to my dog. Not only is it unwise; it’s counter productive. “Sit”, “Stay”, “Shake”. Nope, it won’t cut it.

Yet this has been my experience over the years while attending a sundry of training. Currently, I receive brochures and invitations from a lot of training seminars that invite me to sit in one of their tidy rows to have the privilege of hearing from a University Professor. If I’m really lucky, the session will be taught by some consultant that has written a book that raced to the top of the charts as if this were some rite of passage on wisdom and learning.

I really like the idea of flying to a cool city and hanging with some really smart people. I really hate the idea of sitting in a plastic chair with a 3-ring binder in front of me the reads, “Proven Best Practices for Conformists.”

No. Stop.

Rather than giving me 16th century training, how about some modern day learning? How about some thought provoking banters, mind bending theories, and practical applications followed by a daring and courageous discussion? Intelligent people learn best when highly engaged in the process of learning. Why aren’t we doing more to engage and doing less to “train?”

Our current education system was developed with the Sun in mind. Or more precisely, the orbit of the Earth around the Sun. As humans migrated from the stone age of hunting and gathering to the agricultural age of sewing and reaping, the education system evolved to accommodate. There was a limited amount of time in which a farmer could harvest crops. Thus, all learning (school) was suspended so that the learners could harvest the crops. It would have been foolish to not. This tradition, however, is way out of date. We still insist in turning off our brain for the summer while we harvest. And what is worse, we use most of the same out dated techniques for educating business professionals, college students and k-12 kids.

Let’s change this. You can start today during your next manager’s meeting or staff meeting. Rather than everyone filing in and sitting at their familiar chair as they prepare for a predictable experience, how about starting the meeting with some question such as…

1) If you split a bread crumb in half, do you get half a crumb or two crumbs?

2) What is one thing you plan to do in the next 24 hours that will make this company/world/universe/department a better place to live?

3) If you were the president, who would you call today for advice? Why?

4) How would you behave during the next week in order to have your friends admire your work?

5) If we were to have an engaging, productive and thought provoking meeting, what should the topic be?

Conclusion: Dogs should be taught to comply and obey. People should learn how to be creative and contribute. And finally, people ought to learn how to fall in love with learning so they don’t get trained like dogs.