The Soap Box

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Here is where I will utter controversial things like:  You are entitled to your own opinion.  You are not entitled to your own Facts (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Patrick_Moynihan)

I have a T-shirt that says:  Data, without out it, your just another person with an opinion.  (and then it displays the Six Sigma logo).

So what am I trying to get at?  To be effective in the world, action must use publicly verifiable knowledge to leverage the needed result(s).

Back when I was working for the State of West Virginia (in ancient times) I ran across a poster that said “How is the US Congress and 2 elephants mating alike?”  Answer: “There is a great deal of high level trumpeting and the results take a year”.

 

How to Stop Leaking Money

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I have been studying how a business can “stop leaking money” under the tutelage of Jay Arthur and other teachers/consultants.  I have studied TQM, Six Sigma and Lean Six Sigma.  I suppose that by now I am pretty much a “well qualified” LSS Yellow Belt.  Jay has convinced me that instead of studying to become a LSS Green Belt I should study to become a “MoneyBelt“.

Jay proposes that if 20% of all your business processes produce 80% your profits (known as the Pareto Principle) and that 20% of your business processes produce 80% of your waste then why can’t 20% of the full Lean Six Sigma methodology produce 80% of the gains in productivity and cost savings?

What does this mean?  It means instead of a huge upfront investment in training Green and Black belts give the team(s) Just In Time (a Lean concept) training for the specific problem they are tackling.  Give them a very short time frame and have them work “full-time” during that project, only on that project. When they have either solved the problem they set out to solve or decided it was insolvable as presented dis-band that particular project team.

In large company’s Lean Six Sigma has a considerable history of messy partial successes and many, many failures. Instead of starting at the top and jamming it down everyone’s throat why not start at the bottom with small, useful pilot projects to build bottom up enthusiasm?  This is what Jay is preaching.  You can Google the success rate of Lean Six Sigma and get eye-opening articles.

I have even started a Linkedin.com group on the topic of a “MoneyBelt”.  You can join the conversation there or here.

Practicing Agnostism

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I have been a practicing agnostic for many years.  I am not a “faith holder” like a Jew, Christian, Muslim or Atheist is.

Excuse me, I thought an Atheist didn’t believe in God?  Exactly the key words here are “believe in”.  If you believe in something then you don’t know it, you believe it.  And that is an act of Faith as far as I can tell.  Here is a pretty good article on Agnosticism: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agnosticism

One of the interesting book reviews I have read was about a book on prayer.  All the people that the author talked about in the book were self-described Atheists who were practicing prayer.

If you are not an Agnostic you are still welcome here as long as you are not trying to evangelize or otherwise argue about the existence or non-existence of God.

While I am not a Faith holder I have been exploring Meditation, Prayer and Mysticism.  So conversing about this things might turn out to be interesting.