Performance

The Five-Minute Speech You Have Never Given

by admin|23 June 202623 June 2026|From The Playbook, People, Performance, Perspective

Jack Welch spent twenty years giving the same five-minute speech. The specifics changed as GE changed, but the structure never did: Here is why the current situation cannot continue. Here is where we are going. Here is how we are...

You Are Managing Your Restaurant With Tunnel Vision

by admin|23 June 202623 June 2026|From The Playbook, People, Performance, Perspective

In the late 1990s, John Seely Brown — chief scientist at Xerox PARC — was trying to explain why most computer interfaces exhausted their users. His illustration was simple and brutal. Take two empty toilet paper tubes. Tape them to...

Why Your Last Change Initiative Did Not Stick

by admin|23 June 202623 June 2026|From The Playbook, People, Performance

The evidence on organizational change is consistent across decades and industries: most change initiatives fail. Not because the strategy was wrong. Not because the execution was incompetent. Because the people who were supposed to implement the change were never convinced...

The Welder Who Didn’t Tell His Supervisor

by admin|23 June 202623 June 2026|From The Playbook, People, Performance

In the early 1990s, Caterpillar was in the middle of one of the most significant organizational transformations in American manufacturing history. The company had nearly gone bankrupt. It had restructured completely — eliminating its entire centralized management system overnight and...

Your Cast Is Not The Problem. Your System Is.

by admin|23 June 202623 June 2026|From The Playbook, People, Performance, Profit

The evidence has been clear for decades: most people problems in organizations are not people problems. They are system problems wearing people's faces. Employees do not generally act against their own organization's interests deliberately. They respond rationally to what they...

Is Your Restaurant A Military Organization — And Do You Even Know It

by admin|23 June 202623 June 2026|From The Playbook, People, Performance, Perspective

In 2004, researchers at Booz Allen Hamilton surveyed more than 4,000 employees across companies of every size and industry and asked them to describe how their organizations actually worked — not how leadership said they worked, but how decisions got...

Stand In One Spot And Look For Waste Until You Can Actually See It

by admin|23 June 202623 June 2026|From The Playbook, People, Performance, Perspective

Taiichi Ohno built the Toyota Production System — the operating framework that transformed manufacturing and became the foundation for lean thinking, Six Sigma, and virtually every process improvement methodology that followed. He was also, by all accounts, a brutal teacher....

By The Time The Data Is Clear, The Game Is Already Over

by admin|23 June 202623 June 2026|From The Playbook, Performance, Perspective

Clayton Christensen spent his career studying why great companies fail. The answer was not incompetence. It was that they waited for the data to confirm what the theory had already told them — and by then, it was too late.

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