Archive
on times when thinking is a bad idea
Sounds daft to propose that there are times when thinking is not too clever, but I firmly believe it to be true. I would not advocate it as a blanket strategy, but there are times when being able to block certain thoughts will pay dividends. Read more…
on why good teams can emerge around bad leaders
There is a lot written and taught about good leadership being behind the development of good teams and I have contributed my fair share. But is a good leader essential to the creation of a good team? Read more…
on the boss being loose in the building
It was a message that would reach me from time to time in my first major operational role. Out of a workforce of around 700 on site around two thirds of them worked for me and for “The Boss”, who normally only moved from the main entrance to his office and back with the occasional foray to the gents, the canteen or the conference room, to be roaming was both unusual and dangerous. Read more…
on KPIs
Input specifications used to be the norm; we would be very specific about what we wanted and how it should be made and delivered, or performed in the case of a service. I can well remember deciding to go out and start replacing the fork lift truck (FLT) fleet at a logistics operation that I had just taken over. Having talked to the vehicle buyer they produced a spec that had been used previously; it was half an inch thick, had drawings of all sorts of components that are standard on any FLT and even had a requirement for a specific pantone colour plus three pages alone on the fleet number, font, style and positioning. Read more…
more musings on measuring stuff
Measuring performance is important. It doesn’t matter whether you are measuring it at individual, team or organisation levels or that of pieces of equipment or infrastructure, you need to know how well things are working. Read more…
Sitting in judgement
That one of the things that leaders have to do is to make decisions is beyond question, but it is the quality of those decisions that separate good leaders from the herd. Read more…
objecting to objectives
We achieve our strategic goals by setting objectives and using them to motivate our teams to succeed; who would argue with that? Well me for a start. Read more…
are your KPIs a helping or hindering (and do you know)?
The other day Martin Read was posing the question of KPIs in the FM World Think Tank. This is a topic Dear to me heart as previous columns here show and I am firmly of the opinion that there is too much made of measurement in general and KPIs in particular. Read more…
chuck out your KPIs and measure real performance
Something that crops up constantly in the line of business that I am in is measurement of performance; often it is as simple as “Did we get what we ordered?” not least in terms of my clients being satisfied with me, but it is also about service contracts where delivery can get harder to pin down. I am in the process of writing a short eBook on the subject, so let me share some of my thinking here. Read more…
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the Monday Musings column from that consultant bloke 