In the early 1990s, Caterpillar was in the middle of one of the most significant organizational transformations in American manufacturing history. The company had nearly gone bankrupt. It had restructured completely — eliminating its entire centralized management system overnight and pushing decision-making authority down to individual business units. Managers who had spent careers waiting for [...]
The evidence has been clear for decades: most people problems in organizations are not people problems. They are system problems wearing people's faces. Employees do not generally act against their own organization's interests deliberately. They respond rationally to what they see, what they understand, and how they are rewarded. When the behavior looks wrong from [...]
In 2004, researchers at Booz Allen Hamilton surveyed more than 4,000 employees across companies of every size and industry and asked them to describe how their organizations actually worked — not how leadership said they worked, but how decisions got made, how information flowed, and whether anything actually changed when change was needed. They identified [...]
Taiichi Ohno built the Toyota Production System — the operating framework that transformed manufacturing and became the foundation for lean thinking, Six Sigma, and virtually every process improvement methodology that followed. He was also, by all accounts, a brutal teacher. When a promising young engineer joined Toyota, Ohno's standard welcome was to draw a chalk [...]
Clayton Christensen spent his career studying why great companies fail. The answer was not incompetence. It was that they waited for the data to confirm what the theory had already told them — and by then, it was too late.
There is a concept in complexity science called entrainment of thinking. It describes what happens when ideas and practices that have proven effective in the past become accepted norms — acquiring inertia, becoming invisible, becoming impossible to question not because they are right but because they have always been done that way. The thinking that [...]
In 1996, a biologist named Stuart Kauffman published a theory about how complex systems — cells, ecosystems, economies — organize themselves. His central finding: the most adaptive, highest-performing systems do not operate in perfect order. They do not operate in chaos either. They operate at the edge between the two. He called it the sweet [...]
Ram Charan has advised GE, DuPont, Novartis, Home Depot, and Verizon. He spent 35 years as one of the world's foremost leadership consultants, on the road 365 days a year, inside the organizations that define how business gets done at scale. In 2004, he and Larry Bossidy published Confronting Reality — a follow-up to Execution — built around [...]
In 2002, Larry Bossidy — the man who turned AlliedSignal into a reliable earnings machine and then came back to rescue Honeywell — published a book called Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done. He spent the better part of his last years in management trying to teach the business world one thing: that strategy without [...]
You've seen crabs in a bucket. Just when one gets close to the edge, the others grab hold and pull it back down. Not out of malice — out of instinct. The result is the same either way. Nobody gets out. Some operations run exactly like that bucket. Not because the operator built it that [...]
QFO: Are busy locations usually the best locations for the establishment of a restaurant business?
The benefit is always less than if your brand controlled everything it touches. Using a third-party to execute a significant portion of your Guest experience can be crippling. The Guest’s loyalty then is with the delivery brand and not your brand regardless. You've become a commodity.
I wish this level of thinking would die a slow miserable death. It’s caused more confusion and uncertainty than just about any other myth in the business. Restaurants that are successful today are profitable from Guest one. It’s by design. And it doesn’t matter what parameters you want to talk about. Anyone who says otherwise [...]
You need to push into growth right now or you’ll drown in your own irrelevance.
There are lot of lousy management practices out there. It is astonishing how many of them have taken hold, and how deeply! Even in the awesome companies that are walking the Human Workplace path, we run into crusty and talent-repelling HR and leadership practices that have no place in the modern working world. How did [...]
“What should you do if your employees are complaining about wages?”
Stop the presses. No need to raise the debt limit. Biden is going after those billionaire waitresses’ tips. IR-2023-19, Feb. 6, 2023 WASHINGTON — The Treasury Department and Internal Revenue Service today issued Notice 2023-13, which contains a proposed revenue procedure that would establish the Service Industry Tip Compliance Agreement (SITCA) program, a voluntary tip reporting [...]
I order from Domino's Pizza. It arrives an hour late and cold. So how do you tell them? Simple. Go to their website (I ordered there). Click on a "There's An Issue" and a list of excuses for their bad service pops up. Choose your excuse and then hit enter. You are then prompted to [...]
QFO: Why do you think there is a poor employee management structure within the hospitality industry?
Whoa boy buckle up… Poor leadership Transactional thinking Short-term thinking No thinking A complete misunderstanding about the dynamics of growth. A complete misunderstanding about the import of mission. A complete misunderstanding about marketing. A complete misunderstanding about training and Coaching. A complete misunderstanding about influence. A complete misunderstanding about community. On and On and On… [...]
How Can We Overcome Poor Service Delivery?