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Culture and Institutional Reform
Culture is often described as "the way we do things around here." In fact it is more complex. It is also feelings, underlying beliefs, values, history, and assumptions about an organization. Those are rooted in experiences, stories, and behaviour patterns sometimes decades or centuries old. The culture tells people what is and is not okay. Culture is enduring, difficult to develop or reshape.Despite that, fundamental culture change is necessary for the reforms envisaged in Results for Canadians.

Other management improvement Related Articles

The Service Factor during Economic Turbulence
Improving and maintaining good customer service is not an exciting endeavor. It involves detailed study and steadfast execution rather than temporary brilliance or inspiration. Therefore, customer service improvement is fundamentally an effort of continuous improvement. You must develop a basic competency in process improvement to attain and sustain high levels of customer service. This means that it is absolutely critical during tough economic times that you don’t make the mistake of cutting resources that support service excellence in your attempt to control operational costs.
Increase Productivity Through Business Process Management
Business Process Management (BPM) consists of powerful tools to generate dramatic work process improvement. It helps organizations cope with the detrimental after-effects of staff cuts during the recession.
Do's & Don'ts of BenchMarking
Benchmarking is usually part of a larger effort, usually a Process Re-engineering or Quality Improvement initiative. Most of the early work in the area of benchmarking was done in manufacturing. Now benchmarking is a management tool that is being applied almost anywhere.
Change Management Can Lead to Rigidity and Resistance to Change
Beware of formal organization improvement or "change management" (an oxymoron) plans. Like strategic plans, organization improvement or change management plans can reduce an organization's effectiveness. They can lead to rigidity, bureaucracy, and resistance to change. This sounds like an argument against planning. It's not. We have found that constant and ongoing personal, team, and organization improvement planning is vital. But too many "change management" and improvement plans are built on the same faulty premise as strategic planning - that there is a right path, which can be determined in advance and then implemented. We often hear managers declare that they have the right strategic or improvement plan, but the reason things aren't going according to plan is because of "execution problems." This is a deadly assumption.
How Total is Your Quality Management?
Many well intentioned "Total Quality Management" improvement efforts aren't working. In their international study of Total Quality Management practices, the Conference Board of Canada found one study which showed that "seven out of ten North American companies fail in their attempt to execute a total quality strategy".
Interested in Leadership, or Committed to Becoming a Leader?
Many managers in leadership roles have stunted personal growth. Their "years of leadership experience and learning" is formal education (usually technical and/or management) followed by a year or two of experience multiplied twenty or thirty times. Here's an all too typical dinner conversation I had with a senior manager in the middle of a two-day improvement workshop I was running with a senior management team. The company was in crisis. It was struggling just to stay even in its industry.
Matching Team Types and Focus
Managers' growing understanding of the power of a team-based organization has created an explosion of teams. We're now seeing a profusion of high-involvement teams, high-performance teams, corrective action teams, service and quality improvement teams, project teams, task forces, steering councils, process management and improvement teams, problem solving teams, cross-functional teams, departmental teams, work teams, regional or branch teams, self-directed and self-managed teams, semi-autonomous teams...to name just a few.

My Approach to Personal Time Management and Organization
Self-management, like self-improvement is highly personal. What works for one person may be ridiculous to someone else. Over the years I've evolved a personal management system that works for me. I think of it as PODS: Prioritization This is where goal setting has become the most meaningful for me - at the daily, weekly, or monthly level (I am awful at hitting any longer-term goals). Starting with a paper time management system (in a leather binder I took everywhere) and now on my notebook computer (which I don't always take everywhere), I make notes of things I want to do on a particular day, week, or month. These are recorded when I get an idea, make a commitment, or set plans.

Process Management Pathways and Pitfalls (Part Two)
Make sure all your process improvement activities are clearly and tightly linked to your strategic imperatives. Each effort should also have highly focused and specific improvement goals (that are an aggressive, major stretch) and measurements. Establish feedback and follow-up steps for each process management and improvement team.

Why Most Change Programs and Improvement Initiatives Fail
Many team and organization change and improvement efforts are lost or badly bewildered. Decades of studies have consistently shown that 50-70 percent are failing. There are as many reasons that improvement endeavors lose their way, as there are people, teams, and organizations trying to improve.
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