One of the first cycles you learned about when you were a kid was probably the life cycle of a butterfly. You found an egg on a leaf, took it home with you, and put it in a jar. After a while, a caterpillar hatched out of the egg. It crawled around the leaf, nibbling on it, so you gave it more leaves to eat. Eventually, the caterpillar made a chrysalis. The chrysalis didn’t look [...]
In business, how can you tell when you've hit the Avalanche transition point? You'll have huge revenue, while margins are lower than expected and falling. This is the number-one indicator a company has hit the deceleration transition. In the back office, you've got too many people doing too many things manually, over and over again. Cleaned-up, scalable automation processes have not been applied. Productivity is a big problem. High growth pushes operations very hard. When [...]
I’m often asked how we do what we do. How do we consult with a company, battered by its trip through the Business Storm Cycle, to help put its people, processes, and technology back together? First, we sit down with all the departments – R&D, operations, production, and the back office – in one big room, to go through every single process they are using in each and every department. We talk about what works and [...]
Have you ever created a personal fitness program that backfired? Maybe you decided to lose those love handles and whip yourself into shape. So, you went on a juice diet that left you feeling dazed and starved, and you bought yourself some “magic bullet” piece of exercise equipment guaranteed to work out every muscle in your body at the same time. Sure, it had been years since you’d really exercised, but you pitched yourself into [...]