Why Small Companies are Better/Worse than Large Ones

I came across this in a letter by Jim Womack, author of Lean Thinking and, to hear him tell it, one of the developers of the Toyota Way. The graphics are mine - which is why I’m not a graphic designer.
All value created in any organization is the end result of a lengthy sequence of […]

Gasoline Surcharges

I promised myself when I started this blog that I’d not write about politics unless I took the time to show the direct link to your business. But last weekend I rented a dumpster because we’re putting the house on the market [www.seiffer.org - make me an offer before we list it with a realtor]. […]

How to Reinvent Your Company

Robert Scobel put up a post about how to reinvent Microsoft. If any company needs it they must be in the top three, along with GM and … maybe your company?
I’ve distilled his ideas into suggestions that will work for any company of any size. Scobel’s post will give you some context and explanation. For […]

Why Business News is Irrelevant

What’s considered “newsworthy” by the business press is either about trends that have a very broad appeal, or what Hugh McLeod calls business porn. The reason any kind of porn has any appeal at all is that it’s a fantasy. So that kind of business news is obviously irrelevant. As for the trends - they […]

Preaching to the Choir

I saw a commercial last night on TV. A guy was pasting up billboards of women dressed in swanky clothes. As he turned away to get the next poster, the women in the ones he’d already posted winked and waved and moved around. The posters had a single word across the top (I believe it […]

What you Measure gets Done - Doesn’t it?

You’ve heard that before right? Well, it’s not always so easy.
I think one thing that sets big companies apart from small companies are how they use measurement in their decisions. Big companies get it wrong because:

A) they measure the wrong things - we’ve all heard stories of call centers giving bonuses based on shorter call […]

Technology is a tool not a solution - you better know how to use it.

Many moons ago a buddy and I got a sub-contracting gig putting roofing shingles on a building. It was our first and last roofing job - we were terrible. And not because we only had old fashioned hammers instead of the (then) new-fangled air guns. No, it was because we didn’t know what we were […]

How to Be More Productive

When work is physical you need time & motion studies. Frederick Taylor pioneered this around 1900. He found out, for example, that a guy (it was always a guy then) could shovel more stuff in a day if he didn’t overload the shovel.

When work is a process you need process design and proper automated tools. […]

The Value of Each Customer

Not all your customers are good to have. Some are great. Some actually cost you money. Some are just so-so. Dharmesh Shah has some good ideas on ranking your customers. His post is geared toward software companies. For other types of companies, I would add things like

do they pay on time
do they haggle
do they refer […]

Write your tests first

Jeremy J at 37signals says when writing computer code, he writes the tests first. Then he knows that the code he writes will have to pass the tests. He says it wastes less effort and keeps him happier and more productive.
I sometimes do the same thing when trouble shooting. I write down what I’m looking […]

— keep looking »