Blog

Yes, another attempt to emphasize the importance of soft skills appeared in a recent article in the Association of Operations magazine. “The Power Link in the Chain,” by Linda Trignano discusses energizing people and teams with enhanced communication. “The value of communicating in person cannot be underestimated,” but this is

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Change initiatives succeed when cultures of attraction are created: attracting customers, employees, and business partners. Starting with the end in mind, we want to: Maintain mindful attention to customers – Good change initiatives keep customers in mind at all times. Visible reminders support accountability and help keep customer focus at

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Is your business changing? Most do, whether it is done with intent, or things just “happen” – with positive or negative consequences. When we plan to make a change, whether it is to take on a new business partner, change financial structure, undertake a business process improvement initiative, or revise

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Hands-on tools and processes to mitigate global project management risk. In this month’s issue of Inside Supply Management, there are 3 articles that relate to risk management. The “how to” information ranges from using algorithms, such as the Material Risk Index, to applying skills that leverage understanding of innate human communication

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I’ve learned some useful new skills in the aftermath of our 25-1000 (depending on which political agenda the expert endorses) year flood. When pulling out sodden carpeting, box cutters are my slicers of choice. I now know that a crow bar is not the way to go when pulling nails

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How I wish we had been exposed to the concepts in The Lean Startup, by Eric Ries, when we were valiantly and creatively pulling numbers out of thin about the number of customers we would acquire. Rate of adoption? Like wild-fire! If, that is, we could ever finish the beta

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If we consider culture – learned differences in thinking, feeling, and acting of people around the globe – as “software of the mind,” we can think about temperament or innate communication style as “hardware of the mind.” There are a host of approaches to understanding innate communication style, including Myers-Briggs

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If we want to go from divergent to transparent within our globally dispersed teams, we can help team members find a way to understand and talk about cultural differences. One widely recognized model is Geer Hofstede’s model of cultural dimensions. Using such a model can help us understand the differences

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I love transparent and sustainable processes. During my talk at this year’s International Supply Management Conference we explored applying such systems to “Enhance Global Supply Chain Team Collaboration.” One conference attendee was clearly aggravated by cultural differences, communication style differences, and, digging deeper, fundamental differences in supply chain partners’ priorities.

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