With current U.S. management practices, the people/person who are/is serving as the CEO and Chairwoman or Chairman of the Board can have a major impact on the long-term success or failure of a company. When things are not going well the Board of Directors in U.S. companies often seek out to hire a new CEO, often with a golden parachute that is very attractive to the new CEO hire, even if the business does not improve during their tenure.

Often the company later finds that this “silver bullet” approach to hiring the latest CEO did not work well and the Board of Directors then gets rid of the CEO and hires someone else to replace him/her. These transitions often causes much disruption in the company, adversely affecting the company’s profitability and growth; i.e., finding in time that things are often not much better with the new CEO.

What is needed is an alternative system that provides a structured long-lasting framework that blends analytics with innovation for determining what should be done to have good on-going sustaining performance for the company. What is needed is an orchestration system where the organization as a whole benefits, even through executive management changes.

The system described below provides a long-lasting measurement, analysis, improvement, and control organizational framework that is not so dependent upon who is in serving in the CEO, Board of Directors, and other leadership capacity at any point in time. With this Integrated Enterprise Excellence (IEE) system the CEO is responsible for the IEE execution, while the Chairman of the Board and other Board members can act is an overseeing capacity offering guidance for IEE implementation.
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Many companies have tried to mimic the Toyota Production System (TPS) but have not had the success that Toyota has had relative to the translating of kaizen improvement activities to positively impacting the overall corporate financials; e.g., Delphi winning many Shingo Prizes but having financial difficulties. The described pragmatic enterprise process define, measure, analyze, improve, and control system framework addresses these issues and more. Read the rest of this entry »

Organizational leadership faces the following three common challenges:
1. Strategies interpretation often leads to work and metrics that do not benefit the long-term organizational health as a whole.
2. Red-yellow-green and target-based scorecards in general can lead to a very large amount of firefighting where not much, if any, enterprise long-term improvements occur.
3. Organizational problem-solving process improvement efforts are in often in silos; these problem solving efforts are often localized and have minimal, if any, impact on the enterprise as a whole. Read the rest of this entry »

Federal Aviation Agency (FAA) and other governmental and business policies can lead to a very complex web of unintended consequences. Federal law requires cities to spend airport revenues at the airport. This seemly simple Federal Aviation Agency (FAA) policy can lead to many unintended consequences, which can be very detrimental to the enterprise as a whole. These unintended consequences can have a severe negative impact to the user of services and taxpayers. The orchestration framework described below moves both governments and businesses toward a system for unintended consequences avoidance. Read the rest of this entry »

Information Technology (IT) is often viewed as a troublesome expenses rather than a positive resource that can lead to bottom-line benefits for the organization as a whole. Metrics can even be created in an attempt to show the value of Information Technology in a company. Information Technology (IT) has the opportunity to be a valuable resource by serving as the conductor for organizational measurements and improvements. Read the rest of this entry »

Question: What happened? Our program stalled after our Six Sigma (Lean Six Sigma) deployment executive left.*

Response: A dictatorship can be great if the dictator truly understands what is needed and addresses those needs without bureaucracy. Even if this utopia were to exist, major chaos would probably result after the dictator’s departure. Organizations need a Six Sigma (Lean Six Sigma) deployment that is not solely dependent on one executive’s drive. They need to create a system where the process owner asks for the creation of Six Sigma (Lean Six Sigma) projects to improve their performance metrics, which are aligned with business needs. This should happen no matter which executive is in place. Read the rest of this entry »

Question: My organization started its Six Sigma (Lean Six Sigma) deployment five years ago, and now we’re having difficulty finding projects, especially projects of value.*

Response: It appears as if projects in this Six Sigma (Lean Six Sigma) deployment are being sought out by the Six Sigma (Lean Six Sigma) steering committee, even though the process owners have no true urgency for project initiation and completion. I call this a push for project creation when implementing Six Sigma (or implementing Lean Six Sigma). Let’s consider what could be done better with an implementing Six Sigma or implementing Lean Six Sigma deployment. Read the rest of this entry »

In development and Design for Six Sigma (DFSS) efforts, reliability testing can be answering the wrong question, which can lead to unintended consequences. When someone conducts a reliability test of a mean-time-between-failure (MTBF) product criteria do they actually get what they think they get? Often not, noting that this can also happen in a traditional Design for Six Sigma (DFSS) efforts, if care is not exercised? Read the rest of this entry »

The unintended consequence of job loss can be the result of answering the wrong questions. Managers give employees direction on what they should be doing. However, often traditional tasks that have been performed over the years can be out dated or have little value in helping the big-picture of the organization. Questions can be asked of employees by their management to answer the wrong question to third decimal place accuracy. In today’s environment organizations cannot afford inefficiencies. All company resources must be used to its fullest. But, what is a good long-lasting framework to accomplish this? Read the rest of this entry »

Peter Senge writes that learning disabilities are tragic in children but fatal in organizations. Because of them, few corporations live even half as long as a person—most die before they reach the age of 40. These odds are defied in Learning Organizations; i.e., unintended consequence avoidance. Leaning Organizations overcome learning disabilities so that they understand threats and also recognize new opportunities. Learning Organizations use this understanding to avoid actions that lead to unintended consequences. But, the question is: how organizations create a long-lasting framework so that a Learning Organization is created where there is an integration of analytics with innovation and there is unintended consequence avoidance? Read the rest of this entry »