Today's brief message is a plea for humanity, balance, and healing in the wake of last Saturday's mass shooting in Buffalo, NY.

Progress is to be found through #diversity, #equity, #inclusion, and #education.

Grace. Dignity. Compassion.

Andy

A gemba walk is an opportunity for leadership to see how work is accomplished with their own eyes, listen carefully to the challenges and opportunities the team faces, and ask questions with the intention to seek to understand challenges and opportunities so they can be an advocate for and supporter of the team or department.

My goal in introducing the eight wastes of Lean and the two additional wastes of emotion and meetings is more about developing the ability to see wastes clearly than it is about properly classifying them. As the saying goes, “What gets measured gets managed.” This ability to see waste is key to the adoption of a continuous improvement mindset. After all, if we can’t see waste and inefficiency, how can we continually improve our standard work?

Trust builds when actions are aligned with words. Flow is maximized when work is aligned up, down, and across the organization. Accountability flourishes in an environment of strong communication and multidirectional transparency. The three are inextricably linked, and strong goal-setting practices serve as the foundation for establishing trust, accountability, and flow.

Welcome to my first YouTube video! In this extended introductory segment, I provide a bit of insight into my background through several "icebreaker" questions and also delve into what makes me tick as a leader.

I discuss critical skills of the future and outline the importance of adopting a lifelong learning mindset and striking the appropriate balance between behavioral and technical skills.

Finally, I read a brief excerpt from my book, Balancing Act (Kaplan Publishing, 2021).

Thank you for your time.

Goal setting within a business can be fraught with start-stops, discontinuity, extra-processing, and long wait times from ideation to implementation. Poorly designed goals that do not connect up, down, and across an organization can do more harm than good. That harm evidences itself in the form of team mistrust, employee dissatisfaction, failed projects, and poor performance. Moreover, if corporate goals change too frequently, the organizational change management curve and many individual contributor change management curves can’t keep up, leading to–you guessed it–team mistrust, employee dissatisfaction, failed projects, and poor performance.