KaiNexus: Continuous Improvement, Leadership, and More

A common mistake companies make when rolling out a new culture of continuous improvement is to fail to provide leadership training to the people leading it. When you're responsible for leading a cultural transformation, there are a lot of unique leadership skills that you need to employ. You need to be firm and empathetic, have high but reasonable expectations, communicate effectively, be present - the list goes on and on. It's a hard balance to strike, particularly for people who don't have a lot of experience in a leadership position to fall back on. As such, many leaders cave under the pressure and are either too hesitant to be effective or become huge jerks that no one likes or respects.

Once organizations realize the value of daily continuous improvement and learn to leverage employee ideas for innovation, they often turn their focus on how to accelerate the pace of improvement. There are many ways that teams can get the most out of their improvement efforts. Workflow software is one tool that helps companies manage more improvement projects at the same time and pave a faster path to tangible results.

There’s an interesting thing about the definition of the word culture - it shares a root with the word “cultivate,” which means, “to foster the growth of; to improve by labor, care, or study.” Cultivation requires intention, action, and attention. Kaizen culture does as well.

Earlier in the day, at one of her company’s regular monthly meetings, she decided to offer a $100 bill to the first employee who could name all four of the company’s top-level strategic goals. What she got was crickets. Not a single person could name them all and few could come up with any of them at all. Ouch.

A blog post by Matt Banna Think about all the points of contact that customers go through with your company throughout their time in your sales pipeline and then as customers. Smart organizations realize that every one of these points of contact, frequently called touchpoints, are extremely important and valuable. Whether it's the first time you talk to someone, a customer changing their service, or a prospect buying your product, every touchpoint a person goes through shapes the way they feel about your company and influences their lifetime value.

Post by Sam Turner: "Achieve Performance Excellence with Baldrige: The Framework You've Been Needing"

Kaizen events are a big deal. They pull people away from their regular jobs for a number of days; they require training, leadership must make necessary resources available, and internal or external facilitation is needed. Not every improvement project should involve a Kaizen event. But there are some situations that call out for them. To determine if a Kaizen event is the right approach to a particular situation, ask yourself these questions.

A blog post from 12/30/16 by Mark Graban Toyota famously changed automobile manufacturing forever by focusing on continuous improvement, particularly on the never-ending process of waste elimination. Over the years, eight specific types of waste were identified. They are now referred to as the 8 wastes of Lean. While Lean was originally developed in the automotive manufacturing sector, every business experiences waste in one form or another. In fact, if you keep your eyes open, you’ll notice waste is all around you. Here are a few examples that our team has observed:

One of the many things we love about this time of year is the opportunity to reflect back on what we’ve accomplished (or survived) over the past twelve months. It’s also a great moment to set the stage for success in the year to come. If you practice the Lean management approach or plan to do so in 2017, one way to ensure that you get the most out of your improvement and waste reduction efforts is to invest in Lean software. Doing so gives you a number of advantages that will amplify your results and ease the path to achieving your most important goals. Here are some of them.

Two posts by Dr. Mark Jaben