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.
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.
“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...
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...
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!”...
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...
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 elevations...
They say a writer never “makes it” until he gets hate mail. In at least four blog posts this year, I have expressed my frustrations with architects and engineers in this country and those posts have invited a few terse replies, one of which appears below. My rant is that either through lack of care, concern, understanding or education, these professionals rarely recognize the critical link between their work and a builder’s ability to produce a high quality house at any price point in the...
A key aspect of quality management is the importance we place on employees, valuing people. We spend a significant amount of time and money officially sending this message to our team, espousing this pillar of quality. Yet, while doing this, we often directly contradict this by sending a clearer and longer lasting message. Let me give you a few examples.
Just two weeks after being downsized, a manager got a call from a vice president at his former company. “Great,” he thought, “A job...
For the last couple of years I've been speaking to groups of remodelers about crafting a social media strategy for their firms and one of the things I always say to do is to create a social media policy for your employees.
One thing I didn't know about until this last weekend was that you need to be careful your social media policy doesn't violate labor laws. (thanks to attorney Jeremy Lewin, who shared this info at the NARI House of Delegates meeting Saturday.)
The National...
