Tags: Leadership

As the days grow longer and the pace of summer offers a chance to recharge, it’s the perfect time to grab a book and invest in your personal and professional development. Searching for your next great read?  The Center for Operational Excellence has turned to our recent speakers, board members, and trusted friends to present this COE Summer Reading List to our community of OpEx practitioners and problem solvers. Thoughtfully curated, this collection spans the critical themes of leadership, strategy, and continuous improvement. 

As we consider today’s economic landscape, the need for lean leadership has never been more pronounced. In recent conversations with many of our member organizations, we’ve heard time and again of cost-cutting measures, far-reaching impacts of the pandemic, and ongoing hiring and restructuring challenges that have resulted in smaller workforces. Leaders are being challenged to do more with less.

During her December 2022 presentation, “Achieving Equity through Systemic Change,” Nadine Redd Blackburn, EVP for Culture, Equity & Inclusion - Behavior and Systemic Change at United Minds (part of The Weber Shandwick Collective), revealed why Diversity, Equity, Inclusion (DEI) strategies often fail to deliver on their larger promise and shared a framework for embedding equitable practices. Here, Nadine addresses one of the follow-up questions: How to develop justice in the workplace.

As you prepare your organization’s at least partial return to the office, I urge you to take the time to reflect on what you’ve learned about the work. Treat the four months since the Covid-19 pandemic sent millions of workers in various occupations to shelter and work at home as an experiment. The slice of the workforce that was able to move their work to home—estimated to be somewhat more than a third of all workers—includes the group known as knowledge workers.

As we reflect on the COVID-19 pandemic, we start to wonder how certain countries and regions are able to manage the pandemic better than others. By better, I mean fewer cases and containing the spread within their countries for a sustained period. Through science, we now know that effective containment of COVID-19 relies on preventive measures of wearing facemasks, washing hands, adherence to strict social distancing, monitoring daily health and avoiding public gathering to contain the spread.