Improve your customers and suppliers

April 8, 2024

As a Lean Leader, don’t accept bullshit from your clients or suppliers. The most expensive comment you can ever make in your business is “that is just the way it is”. Utter BS.Any opportunity you have to influence the behaviours and actions of other businesses is...

How to put your improvement plan into action

April 23, 2023

The steps for action based leadership

Turning talk into actionThe previous blogs in 2023 have been all about the preparation and engagement of the idea of Operational Excellence. It has been about engaging the team around understanding what it is, adding in some of the theory and what it could look like fo...

Creating the Vision for your business

March 12, 2023

If you have read the previous three blogs for 2023, it has taken you on a journey to explore the topic of Operational Excellence and understanding what this actually means. This is critical to be able to translate this into a clear decision to start a journey to establish a ...

What is the Role of the Business Leader in Operational Excellence?

February 16, 2023

It is one thing to understand what Operational Excellence is and the potential benefits by starting this journey. Also having a clear idea of the requirements and the preparation needed to achieve the desired results. But where is the leader or owner in all of this? Mo...

The Process to Start an Operational Excellence Journey

January 30, 2023

It is one thing to understand what Operational Excellence is, it is an entirely different challenge to take the leap of faith and bring this into your business and begin the journey. After all, the failure rate in this space is very high. The percentage of businesses t...

What is Business and Operational Excellence?

January 15, 2023

Occasionally you come across a term that you are sure at one point meant a lot. Yet it has been used so widely, in so many contexts that it has become just a white noise statement. What I mean by this is the idea has been overused, twisted and applied without too...

Clarity is Key to Culture

December 5, 2022

When I get asked what are the some of the most common issues that affect the performance of a small and medium business (SME) in New Zealand, the two of the most common challenges I respond are: Lack of Clarity Culture of apathy (amongst others) Luckily there are action...

What an SME can learn from a BBQ Competition

November 10, 2022

Occasionally you get an opportunity that you can’t say no to. This was the case for me recently when I was asked if I was interested in being a judge at a BBQ competition. This wasn’t any old local fry up, but a collection of the very best BBQ experts from Ne...

Is Lean Just A Bunch Of Tools?

September 15, 2022

When I was just starting out as a consultant, doing my own thing I was at a family wedding chatting to a friend who was asking me what I was up to. After explaining my new business, the reply was “Oh yes Lean, but you know there are many other approaches”. I ...

How do you start a Lean Thinking journey

August 9, 2022

My experience with companies motivation to start a Lean journey is one of two reasons:They are smashing it and are starting to get some speed wobbles so they are needing to bring back some structure and organisation back into the workplace.They have realised after one too ma...