BBRT - Beyond Budgeting Roundtable 2 February 2010
Lean in Service Organizations
Are you implementing Lean or thinking of implementing Lean in a service organisation? Then you need to read the new article on “Rethinking Lean Service” by John Seddon, Brendon O’Donovan and Keivan Zokaei. Better still listen to John Seddon’s podcast. Remember, The Toyota Production System (the inspiration for Lean) was, and is, first and foremost, a management issue, not a tools issue.
5 January 2010
To Be a Better Leader, Give Up Authority
In these chaotic and turbulent times an executive's instinct is often to strive for greater efficiency by tightening control. But as we have found in BBRT the truth is that relinquishing authority and giving employees considerable autonomy can boost innovation and success in many organizations, even during a crisis. In the December 2009 Harvard Business Review Amar, Hentich and Hlupic described how their research has provided hard evidence so support this and show that business leaders that give in to the urge to clamp down can end up doing their companies a serious disservice.
To read the full article go to: http://hbr.org/2009/12/to-be-a-better-leader-give-up-authority/ar/1
11 December 2009
No More Executive Bonuses!
This is the title of a new article by Henry Mintzberg in the MIT Sloan Management Review*. Bonuses, particularly banker's bonuses are back in the news again (at least in the UK). But in this article Prof. Mintzberg suggests that rather than trying to fix the way bonuses are paid to executives, we should scrap the whole bonus thing. He points out that "If more executives were as creative in doing their jobs as they are in getting compensated for them, we would be in a period of boom, not bust". The success of an organization cannot be attributed to one person, yet this is what the bonus culture suggests
So as BBRT has consistently advocated, individual bonuses to the top few are divisive and the whole system should be scrapped. Instead pay people fairly according to their worth and reward everyone when the organization does well.
Read Prof. Mintzberg's article by clicking HERE. Look at the video and also listen to the podcast.
* Mintzberg, H. (2009) No More Executive Bonuses. MIT Sloan Management Review, 30 November 2009