“What’s the one thing you’d change about the world of work?” This is the question that we at Intelligent Management were invited by LinkedIn to answer by writing a post. For us, transforming the world of work is THE challenge that companies face today and we have dedicated the last decade to finding a viable […]
Changing the Conversation with the Customer to Achieve Win-Win Sales Part 1
Nothing sells itself, not even the best of products or solutions. In today’s global marketplace it is critical to be able to sell successfully. Many are struggling. They may even have a sensational product or service that’s exactly what customers need and yet they still can’t sell enough of it. Why? Buying is a process […]
Leadership Thinking and our Human Constraint
Our lives today are filled with unprecedented levels of rapid change and complexity. Unintended consequences can quickly emerge from inadequate leadership thinking, and we are living with these every day. So we have an urgent need to learn to think in a “joined-up” way. The definition of ‘joined-up thinking” is: “thinking about a complicated problem in […]
Leadership of a Sustainable Business – a Systems Science View
A leader is somebody who has a theory; somebody who “owns” a body of knowledge that backs his claims that they can accomplish a transformation within their span of control. That transformation must be one of system optimization as a prerequisite for innovation; one in which competition is replaced by cooperation, where performances are managed using appropriate statistical thinking and not assessed deterministically, […]
Rethink and Reorganize: A Reliable Process to Rise Above Your Competitors
We live with such uncertainty today that only one thing is sure: change and adaptation are inevitable and what brought success to businesses in the past may no longer be valid. Trying constantly to “keep up” is exhausting. There is a much better alternative that is, instead, invigorating. Rather than keep up, businesses can step […]
How to Accelerate a Reliable Supply Chain the Systems Science Way
No matter what a company does, it is inevitably part of a supply chain. It receives inputs and has to transform these inputs into something to pass on to a customer reliably. It’s an ongoing process, and like every process it can be improved. Today change is happening fast, threatening the survival of companies that can’t keep up. […]
The Throughput Revolution that Beats Cutting Costs
Today’s post is by Dr. Giovanni Siepe. The Theory of Constraints is a management methodology developed by the physicist Dr. Eliyahu Goldratt in the late 1970s. There is little doubt about how radically effective TOC is and that remarkable results have been achieved with it in all kinds of sectors, from healthcare to steel foundries […]
How to Do Meaningful Meetings with Purpose and Results
There is something about getting a group of people together, whether in a room or at distance, that can lead to time wasting and frustration. Various techniques have been invented to make meetings work, including outlandish methods like getting people to drink a lot of fluid and ending the meeting when someone has to go […]
What Kind of Company Hierarchy Works for the Digital Age?
The traditional top down company hierarchy has become a trap. It inevitably leads to silos, discontent and an overall suboptimization of all the resources in any company. That is a very heavy burden to carry. The traditional hierarchical/functional structure is one where the sum of individual efforts and departments is considered equal to the performance […]
Who Should Work from Home?
A recent article in a magazine for CEOs posed the question, who should work remotely? “As we slowly emerge from the pandemic and the resulting stay-at-home orders, organizational leaders need to make difficult decisions on who will—and won’t—be required to return to the office. With study after study showing that most employees are not interested […]
