Blog Posts

Membership in the Center for Operational Excellence means your company is committed to being part of a larger community of leaders with their sights set on working better, faster and smarter. COE offers many avenues for learning and connecting with the broader operational excellence community – what’s crucial is leveraging your company’s membership to its maximum potential. Here are the 10 ways you and your organization can make the most of membership: 1. Attend our year-round events and webinars

For businesses across the country, and around the globe, profitable and sustainable growth is imperative. Every CEO knows it, and the successful ones are focused on it. In today’s competitive marketplace, growth in revenues, customers, and profits will not happen without individual growth. Companies must specifically commit to growing their leaders’ knowledge, skills, perspective, confidence, and creativity.

As a manager or practitioner, you’ve developed solid problem-solving skills. Yet organizationally, problem solving tends to be isolated to certain people, roles, departments, or events. You still don’t have an “everybody, everywhere, everyday” improvement culture. To build an improvement culture, you have to move from doing problem solving to coaching problem solving. The thing is, these are two distinctly different skills.

I’ve been a believer in remote work ever since I co-founded Centric Consulting more than two decades ago. My co-founders and I wanted to form a new kind of consulting firm, one with a great culture. Being remote seemed like the best way to improve employee happiness.

I recently led a webinar for Fisher’s Center for Operational Excellence on the topic of “The Curious Leader,” which members can view in COE's Members Only Digital Content Archive (February 2020). We had a great discussion about how curiosity can help leaders build better relationships, grow their expertise, and become more innovative.