People
Your people make your company go.......or not. Even in a highly automated and/or mechanized company, it is people who develop strategy, spec out the equipment, program the robots. If you don't have a good team, the business will never achieve its potential.
The components to solve the "people puzzle" include:
* Leadership
* Skills
* Performance
* Behaviors
* Communication
Strategy/Direction
A company needs to identify its current position in the world, and ask itself how to profitably solve customer problems and fill needs. Then the team needs to identify and prioritize the top initiatives that most effectively achieve the strategy, and begin implementing with urgency.
Once strategy and top initiatives are determined, it is important to put together a simple way to communicate these to all team members, top to bottom in the organization, so that strategy can be deployed and rallied around.
Management Systems/Processes
Putting solid processes and systems in place across functions gives a company a chance of being consistent and brings predictability. Potential functions for management systems/processes include:
* Business Planning & Management Review
* Sales
* Engineering
* Operations
* Purchasing
* Program Management
* R&D
The key is to establish these systems and follow them with consistency, rather than continually turning attention to the newest, hot issue of the day.
Data
The right set of metrics
- tell us how we are performing and if the customer is satisfied
- prevents opinion from winning the argument
- acts the same as an instrument panel does for a pilot in a plane
The objective is not to overwhelm with data, but to hone the data to the most relevant and the simplest metrics, displayed in a graphical manner if possible, so that it is easy to see trends and/or anomalies that need to be acted upon. With good data the business discussions can focus on value-added conversation.
