About/Contact Info I am a business consultant for a leading North American business and [+/-] technology services company and have an MBA specializing in management.
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In his recent article, About.com Management guide John Reh writes of some key ways to reduce your stress at work. He mentions the kinds of things we hear about often: learning not to sweat the small stuff, exercising and taking personal breaks or time-outs to recompose yourself, and improving your time-management and organizational skills, among others.
These are all great tips, and while its not always possible to put all of his suggestions into practice right away, it's important to at least start with one or two of these actions. When describing the tip on improving time-management skills, Reh notes the importance of learning to say 'no' when there's already too much on your plate.
Learning how to say no is an important skill; however for many of you, it won't address the current stressors and issues related to the things that are on your plate right now. So, the question then becomes, how do we improve our processes and work-flows to become more productive and successful and allow us not to lose our composure when new events and situations arise causing us to re-prioritize our activities?
The Wall Street Journal online has some great advice for budding entrepreneurs. In the article, "The Essential Balance: From 15 People Who Know," you'll get to read some interesting tips on how to succeed in growing your business and on some key attributes which make a great leader. It sounds so simple and straightforward, but too often many of these tips just aren't followed or executed properly. Read the full article here.
If you find yourself working a little harder this time of year, here's a little article that you might find useful. The About.com website has some useful tips for managing during the often busy holiday season.
One of the more interesting, yet often overlooked suggestions made by the article is to reflect on the "good things"made or accomplished during the year. It's too easy to get caught up in all of the busy year-end activities and forget about all the successful accomplishments achieved over the past twelve months.
No matter how busy things get, remember to take the time to congratulate yourself and your team for a job well done!
Read the full article with all of the other tips here.
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Total Quality Management, a management concept popularized by W.E. Deming in Japan in the 1940s, reinforces the importance of superior quality within projects of any size or type and has been making a bit of a resurgence since its most recent peak during the 1980s.
For a TQM program to be successful, five major things must be in place within an organization. They are:
Continuous improvement
Customer satisfaction
Managerial involvement
Measurability; the ability to accurately measure and record quality and defects
Organizational support for total quality
Through continuous improvement, production cycles are short and iterative; this allows for fixes and enhancements to be made almost immediately on the spot. Customer satisfaction is also necessary for a TQM program to work - obviously, it is not enough to simply improve processes to the point where errors are at an absolute minimum; an organization looking to refine its processes must be aware of the needs of its customers and tie those needs into the refactoring process.
Additionally, managerial involvement and an overall support system for TQM are required for the program to be successful. It is not enough to have only the front-line workers be knowledgeable in the area of total quality management - every one within the organization must be involved in an implementation of this magnitude.
Finally, there must also be an organizational support system in place for the program to work. That is, there must be a linkage between the TQM program and the financial, strategic, and the human resources aspects of the organization (and the appropriate senior-management buy-in) in order for an organization to truly reap the rewards of total quality management.
Crystal King, Senior Product Marketing Manager for AvantGo, has written a great article, entitled "Critical Thinking for Managers: A Manifesto," in which she outlines in detail, how the challenges that managers face today can be adeptly dealt with through the use of critical thinking.
King states that thinking dispositions can be taught and learned, and managers can benefit from learning several key thinking dispositions, such as:
Being curious and questioning
Thinking broadly and adventurously
Reasoning clearly and carefully
Organizing one's own thinking
Giving time to thinking
Posing and exploring problems
Seeking multiple perspectives
Being fair and reflective
King argues that in order for managers to address the right problems, identify risks, and make better decisions, they "need to learn, exhibit and teach critical thinking skills to their colleagues and employees." And this article she's written for ChangeThis certainly shows them how to do that. (Note: You will need Adobe Acrobat to view the article).
Authors Jagdish Sheth and Rajendra Sisodia of the European Business Forum have posted an interesting article entitled "Why good companies fail." They discuss how the average lifespan of an organization isn't what it used to be and argue that the primary reason for this trend is the inability of organizations to adapt quickly to radical changes in their business environment.
What is required for organizations to have this ability, then, is something the authors call "anticipatory management". This is the ability of the firm's executives to anticipate changes in their environment and to be proactive in repositioning their companies.
From the article:
"Anticipatory management is most needed and works best when the external environment is undergoing rapid and discontinuous change. Anticipatory management gives organisations a major competitive advantage. Trends that are anticipated can be planned for, and competitive advantage accrues to firms that do so better and earlier than their competitors."
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