The terms innovation and invention are thrown around with abandon. This is rife in the startup domain where the innovation is often relating to a business model and in ageing corporations where innovation is being used to revitalise the organisation. But when is it innovation? Or could we actually be thinking of invention, improvement or creation instead?
When is the Right Time to Change Your Mind? You have many opportunities in life and business to change your mind. Each of us has many opportunities, but we don’t always take those opportunities. We may be conforming to social constraints and expectations or don’t want to risk appearing inconsistent by changing too often. Let’s look at a non-serious example and extract nuggets we can apply in a business context. 1) The Background I’m in a situation right now where I’m having to re-evaluate my aims. Fortunately it’s not a serious situation and there are a few parallels to my professional life. I play guitar and I own a few guitar amplifiers. Each guitar and amp has its own tonal identity and quirks. I pick the right tools for the job; playing in a 60s Motown/soul band requires different guitars and […]
After a year or so working with a large, complex client and some time before that working on a startup, I’m back to writing the book I started a couple of years ago. Three good things have come from this break: Both of the experiences have confirmed that the book needs to be written. What I have seen in the last two years has proven to me that there is a gap and this book will fill that gap Both of the experiences have provided more evidence about which tools and techniques work well From a personal perspective, the break has given me more motivation to complete the book I expect to be publishing in 2016.
Yesterday, I presented at #Leanconf 2013 in Manchester. It was the first Lean Conference covering Lean Startup in Europe. There was a great energy to the 2-day event with a variety of planned and unplanned talks plus lots of opportunity to network without the usual tradeshow conference feeling of being stalked by sales managers. I don’t think I’ve seen a community spirit like that in a long time; every attendees helped someone else no matter how far along their own ideas were. In the spirit of the energy that I encountered at the conference, I’ve placed the slides on slideshare. If you download the presentation, you can read the notes which will help you make more sense of the slides. Hopefully the video will be online as well soon. When it is available, I’ll update and post a link to […]
Some of you may already know, I’m in the process of writing a book on improving your own service. I’m aiming the book at the people who work the process themselves, e.g.: nurses social workers claims adjusters HR/OD staff office managers office administrators hotel staff and their managers and change agents/analysts As you can see, it’s not restricted to any industry, but will be most relevant to those working in service industries (whether from private, public and 3rd sector), so that should include: public sector health finance retail leisure legal More accurately, the information in the book could be useful for any industry, however there already exist books for improving manufacturing production processes, so I have not covered them. What’s the book about? The focus is on improving a service without recourse to large consultancy fees and should work well […]
Are you designing a service or transforming an existing service? For redesign, we help organisations to reform teams more logically and change the way that they work resulting in more efficient processes. This is more structured and more logical than older BPR (Business Process Redesign) concepts as we’re heavily influenced by Lean but in a service environment. At the smaller end of the scale, there are service improvement engagements and delivering strategies and methods for continual improvement. We can’t implement the continual improvement for you; that has to come from within your own organisation, but we can be there with you on your journey. For new services, we assist organisations in developing their new operating models. At this level, it’s not the strategic target operating model, it’s a more tactical design that has to be workable in a live situation with […]