Posts by Paul McNamara

Companies must accelerate time-to-market.  Most executives wonder how hard they can push their teams before the wheels come off.  When they do push they find weaknesses in their support departments. Support departments often slow processes down by the death of a thousand cuts. The cuts aren’t always visible but they always cost – time, energy,…

“All wealth is the product of knowledge. Matter is conserved; progress consists of learning how to use it.”    George Gilder – Economist, Investor, Author. Performance gaps are always knowledge and “capital structure” gaps. With new competitive requirements for better-than-incremental increases in speed, knowledge is the key. Human Capital, the first and most important capital…

When I coached my children’s sports team I was always after getting my players to talk with each other more…or at all…during their games.  Businesses have the same problem. What I found over time is the best teams and best players generally talked the most about what matters. On the ice, on the bench, in…

The mistake so many people make when installing solutions in their business is not to consider whether the environment is ordered versus complex. In ordered environments, cause and effect can be understood with varying levels of skill. If the environment is complex, the ordered or simple solutions that often seek to “control” will never scale…

Plans are only as good as your ability to execute them. Equipment plans or budgets are more than lists of equipment, they help fulfill intentions in a larger plan to bring products to market faster and increase margins, profitability, and growth. When plans are not designed and executed with these intentions in mind they can’t…

One of the big keys to moving products to market with velocity is swift and effective decision making. It is the key to winning any race. In a rapidly changing competitive landscape, we must be agile and effective in our planning, decision-making, and execution processes. Our practices described below help our customers improve their competitive…

The competitive landscape is changing fast.  It is an exciting and dangerous time.  New competitive requirements for speed and efficiency – doubling speed and reducing costs in half – cannot be achieved with historical approaches focused only on myopic views of asset performance, e.g. asset downtime, MTBF, OEE. While still important, rather than ends in…

According to the dictionary, when you grind something you use force to wear down, crush, or pulverize it. When we use “grind” to describe our work the characterization is stark. The “grind” produces moods of resignation, distrust, cynicism, and fatigue that are as unrelenting as the forces producing them. We don’t have to work in…