Years ago, well after the huge productivity gains of the industrial revolution, employers still sought productivity improvement. In an effort to find these productivity gains, many studies were conducted to find causes and effects of higher productivity.
The most popular study was done at Hawthorne Works between 1924-32, where researchers tinkered with many variables, then measured worker output to see if their tinkering had the desired effect. The most famous...
Blogs
1 day 14 hours ago
By: Charlie Scott
3 days 12 hours ago
By: Denis Leonard
In 1989 Warren Bennis published ‘On Becoming a Leader’ which became a key leadership book. He stated that leaders “know who they are, what their strengths and weaknesses are, and how to fully deploy their strengths and compensate for their weaknesses.” The key of course is compensating for weaknesses, not ignoring them.
The honest study of the strengths and weaknesses of an organization should also be studied and again, the weaknesses compensated for, but not ignored.
6 days 14 hours ago
By: Jonathan Sweet
A recent experience got me thinking about how companies all-too-often fall back on financial incentives when dealing with an unhappy customer, yet totally miss the point and fail to solve the problem.
Allow me to explain: I’m a long-time reader of the Chicago Tribune, but a series of delivery problems from the paper never showing up to arriving hours after I left for work lead me to first cancel the daily paper, then, finally, to recently give up the ghost and cancel the Sunday as...
1 week 3 days ago
By: Denis Leonard
The Belbin team roles are used to help create effective and balanced teams. Few individuals are strong in all of these roles, so ensuring you have a good mix on a team can make a real difference. It also needs to be noted that each role has its own strengths and weakness.
- Investigator: Communicator, explores opportunities
- Shaper: Dynamic, good under pressure
- Plant: Imaginative, problem solver
- Coordinator: Good team lead, delegates and focuses...
2 weeks 12 hours ago
By: Jonathan Sweet
The Brady Bunch is a font of life lessons from the importance of compromise to why you should never lie to your parents to ... uh ... never walk out in the backyard without keeping an eye out for a football.
So once again I find myself turning to The Brady Bunch when it comes to dealing with the challenges of selling projects under the Lead Repair & Painting Program rule.
(But not architecture advice -- one bathroom for six kids? What was Mike Brady thinking? And does...
2 weeks 13 hours ago
By: Todd Hallett
“Is this chicken, what I have, or is this fish? I know it's tuna, but it says 'Chicken by the Sea.'"
We can thank Jessica Simpson for addressing that puzzling situation. A bit trickier, however, is the mystery centered around Lean design. Let me help clear it up.
Lean design is an optimization of materials and processes achieved by high-level trade/supplier collaboration. Lean design focuses on the elimination of waste and is viable at ANY price point. A $5 million home can be...
2 weeks 1 day ago
By: Charlie Scott
Every builder wants to have outstanding customer satisfaction, right? Our research shows that to accomplish the highest customer satisfaction builders must think outside the box, and I don’t mean the proverbial “creative box,” I mean literally outside the house box!
In our role as the “Voice of the Customer” partner for many of the nation’s leading home builders, we read and analyze thousands of customer surveys. This extensive multi-market, multi-builder...
2 weeks 1 day ago
By: Scott Sedam
During an orientation recently with a room full of suppliers and trades for one of our “LeanPlan Workout” implementations, I was interrupted by a woman who clearly did not appreciate my message. Despite my saying it 6 different ways and illustrating with numerous pictures, she was not buying my story that Lean is not about “dumbing down” the houses.
I showed pictures of shutters that were not only costly and unnecessary; they detracted from the look of the house. “I like shutters!”...
2 weeks 2 days ago
By: Denis Leonard
The Lean Enterprise Institute surveys show that 36% of companies attempting lean give up the efforts. Customer Relationship Magazine cites 60% of six sigma programs fail to give desired results. The problem is not the tools it is the approach that has caused the problems and frankly the approach would cause any project to fail.
1. Not connecting the projects to the strategic plan. You can assign improvement projects that take a lot of time and effort to...
2 weeks 5 days ago
By: Todd Hallett
I had the pleasure of meeting and having dinner with Charlie Scott the other night. Charlie owns a very successful national consulting firm called Woodland, Obrien and Scott. Among other things, his firm focuses on the voice of the customer in the building industry. Within minutes of meeting and talking with him he brought up the subject of one of my biggest beliefs about design – that...
