It's been a busy time of late between some increased travel while working with some great clients in Auckland, plus touching base with some in Christchurch, working with some really interesting individuals as part of the LinkedIn Mentoring program, preparing for our workshop next week on Understanding & Improving The Customer Experience and of ...

A lot of the time when you ask companies about their ISO9000 compliance they are ever so eager to show you their quality statistics, the Xbar charts and a multitude of other charts, talk about their outgoing and incoming quality checks and of course customer returns levels. All of which is great, but that's only a part of ISO9000 and some would arg...

Lets start a conversation about your company values, you know that list of words or phrases that you have pinned to a wall somewhere, the ones that the exec team brought back from the golfing weekend or outward bound event or hot spa deep breathing team joining session (I don't think these actually exist but sometimes I can be surprised). That grou...

When you ask people what is the most important principal of a quality management system, you will undoubtedly get a multitude of answers, some formed by facts, some not so much and some are just sitting on the fence claiming all are important. Anyone who knows me will agree here, I'm not much for sitting on the fence! Maybe it's part of being ...

Every business has problems, it doesn't matter the size or complexity of the business issues come up, daily some large and some small. What defines great business and great business cultures is how they solve those problems both in terms of the solutions they come up with and the methods they use to do it. The size of the problem often dictate...

On Wednesday morning my alarm went to remind me to get up to watch SpaceX's Falcon Heavy take off on it's test flight. Truth be told I didn't need the alarm, I was up already and excited, this was history in the making. Then, disappointment it was delayed by over an hour because the wind conditions weren't quite right. Finally the wind was good, th...

The Complete Process We love the Thematic Goal Process, we've talked about it often here and we've even designed some templates to help you make it work but we wondered what else can we do to help. The, it hit us, an E-Book.. something you can take away, print off, hand out to friends colleges so they can discover the process in their own...

You will have heard the saying - if a tree falls in the forest does it make a noise, well Productivity is kind of the same, Are you really productive if no one knows or rather how do you know you are productive if you are not actually measuring it? A question we always ask clients is how you view your business? Is it effective, ...

We have all been to those off site 'strategic' meetings where you spend more time hiking through hills, playing golf, river rafting, falling off tables in the obligatory 'trust' exercises and, I'm sure, many more "Team Building" exercises I haven't even thought about. What a waste of precious time, don't get me wrong I'm not saying t...

Becoming a Budget Ninja may not sound like something to aspire too but believe me, once you learn the ways of the budget Ninja you wont go back! Your busy getting prepared, you have studied with the grand master of the finance department and know what your challenges are. You've carefully read (and printed out our info-graphic) for 8 Tips...

As part of our run down on the 4 Meeting structure which really comes out of Patrick Lencioni's book Death By Meeting (also referenced in his book The Advantage) last week we talked about the first two meeting types, the Daily Check In and the Weekly Tactical so lets talk about the Strategic Meeting and why it's critical. Strategic decisions a...

We are excited to launch our new Virtual Quality Management Service which is designed to provide companies who do not have a dedicated Quality Management resource the support normally associated with a full time person but without the cost linked to employing that full time person. We do this by offering companies a set number of 'da...

We have talked a lot about the benefits of a thematic goal but did you know we created a template that you can download and get stuck into using right away? Here is the link to get your very own copy of it completely free Grab Your FREE Template For your FREE template of the Thematic Goal process just fill in the form and we will send you a co...

As part of the 4 Meetings process we talked about having a scoreboard set up for your 3 or 4 key metrics that you want to track for each quarter. There are a number of templates around that you can use, you can develop your own as well but we thought we would share one of ours. Overview We've structured the Scorecard to make it as simple as possibl...

As part of a run down on the 4 Meeting structure which really comes out of Patrick Lencioni's book Death By Meeting (also referenced in his book The Advantage) last week we talked about the 5 minute meeting, this week it's the Weekly Tactical Meeting we're discussing. You'll remember from our summary (check here if you don't!) that this is the 45-9...

I used to work for a boss who had an over riding rule, "The  answer is YES" no matter what, we answer yes then figure it out, then we do it. While from a marketing point of view this may well have been great, from a real world perspective it was terrible, let me explain. For a start there was an ever growing mountain of things to do, thin...

The Daily Check in is pretty much exactly what it sounds like, its a check in session where daily schedules, activities and issue alerts are shared between the team so everyone starts on the same page each day. The meeting should last no more than 5 minutes, 10 minutes at the most! There is no agenda for this meeting and you sho...

Meetings are a complete waste of time!.. well if that's how you feel then you're probably doing them wrong! I know sounds strange when you go to so many meetings to hear that but yep you're doing them wrong and what's more, as a leadership team, there are only 4 types of meeting you need to be having, that's right, only 4 meetings but lik...