How to start culture change...culture changes are much more complicated than they seem. Why? It’s simple: a culture is pervasive. It’s in every nook and cranny of an organization, and it has deep roots. It got the way it is over time, and (this is important) for legitimate reasons.
"When a management with a reputation for brilliance tackles a business with a reputation for bad economics, it is the reputation of the business that remains intact.” By Alec Pendleton, Big Ideas for Small Companies I grew up in a family manufacturing business, which my father had built from nothing over years of assembling the right management team, acquiring compatible companies, and steadily improving operations. By the time I arrived on the scene, there were about a dozen plants and almost 1,000 employees, and the company was well respected in its various markets. And after fifty years of high [...]
By Alec Pendleton, Big Ideas for Small Companies Consider the modern automobile. From the moment an idea is hatched until the finished product is delivered to a buyer, the process is kind of a miracle. There are, I’m told, about 25,000 parts in a typical car, and every one of them had to go through basically the same process: someone had an idea, and that led to developing specifications, which led to design, then to manufacture, to assembly, to delivery. Starting with a blank sheet of paper, the process can take several years, and at every step along the [...]
by Alec Pendleton What do you measure in your business? Too often, the answer is: The wrong stuff. Many leaders simply look at the numbers their accountants or software give them, without asking: What do I really need to monitor, so that we have opportunities for improved operations — and higher profitability? Paradoxically, when devising measurements to manage by, it’s typically a good first step to decide what NOT to measure. A great example of this can be found in retailing. A retailer doesn’t create value by manufacturing a product. Instead, a retailer creates value by having the right [...]
