If you can make it through the first full minute of ads, the meat of the conversation with Mike Carnell is really good. For any company starting out or in planning sessions of how to roll out a Continuous Improvement initiative with Six Sigma, Mike Carnell hands out some free advice.
Mike is a long time guru in the industry. He tells it like it is, without fluff, without worrying about stepping on toes. The best thing about Mike: he is always honest with you. And the results his companies have seen speak for themselves.
A short excerpt:
Steve Wilson: What are the must be’s for any deployment?
Mike Carnell: It is a process. It is not about DMAIC. Think about the environment you are going to create for people to work in. Project selection. Process for selecting the right people. Financial data to help select projects. Finance involved from the planning stage to quantify benefits.
Steve Wilson: Why is a deployment plan to important?
Mike Carnell: What you are doing is introducing change. If you introduce change without a plan you will scare people and create stress. A plan puts people at ease.
Mike was recently on Steven’s show, Quality Conversations, again this week doing a Q & A session. You can also follow Mike on Twitter (though he doesn’t tweet much, he still has plenty to say).
I attended the ISSSP2010 Leadership Conference last week in sunny Scottsdale, Arizona. (In case you missed it check my twitter stream for the live tweets). I have been attending the leadership conference since 2005 and have always enjoyed it. This week was no exception. From flawless execution, to remarkable speakers and excellent networking opportunities, the event was everything I hoped it would be.
An effective way to capture the theme of a conference is to stack up the subjects that each of the speakers touch upon and look for trends. At the micro level we can look at the words they use to convey their message. Since I do not have audio to transcribe all of their exact words (only the words from my notes), thanks to wordle.net, I can create a beautiful word cloud representation. Of course this is a biased analysis. What I took away was certainly different from what impressed others, yet I believe this analysis still captures the essence of the state of the business process improvement industry: Change.
Change is upon us as practitioners, consultants, and media portals. We can either react to change, ignore it (for a little while), embrace it, or create it ourselves. The people and organizations who embrace change before change embraces them — will be light years ahead of the pack. Those that lead change will be even further. So how about it? Are you ready to change?
As much as I hate to talk about myself…this site is all about me, my professional resume and online presence. I’ll surely post a few blog entries now and then as well.
Please have a look around at the work I’ve done and contact me if you’d like to talk business, Six Sigma or cycling.
Working without a plan may seem scary. But blindly following a plan that has no relationship with reality is even scarier. — Jason Fried & David Heinemeier Hansson, REWORK
