Taking a behavioural approach to safety with a safety culture survey. As safety-critical equipment becomes better people become a greater risk. This is because equipment generally fails safe, whereas people tend to fail unsafe.
This week we have witnessed the corrosive consequences of culture, ethics and corporate governance being allowed to take a back seat at the expense of personal gain and corporate profit ………
Could something like this happen to us? Is it starting to happen already? That question must be engaging Boardrooms up and down the land following recent revelations from News International, the Metropolitan Police and the Press Complaints Commission.
I have avoided contentious or political posts so far but cannot sit on my hands over this one. Yesterday I received an email from QinetiQ – as a “valued supplier” (sic) – saying that their standard payment terms have been increased to 60 days from 30 and that “this change is in line with the …
It really does seem that the UK is coming out of recession. Today’s PMI (Purchasing Managers Index) figures show a robust January for the manufacturing sector with the strongest figures since 1994. Since manufacturing forms a significant part of GDP, this implies that business conditions generally are improving. That is very welcome news but concerns …
It is easy for firms to become overwhelmed by recessionary doom and gloom at times like these. The reality is that most firms survive; it’s just that some survive better than others and emerge much stronger. This recession will almost certainly bite harder and deeper than the eighties or nineties recessions as a consequence of …
“You can’t manage what you can’t measure” is a quote dubiously attributed to one of the wise men of management science, Dr W Edwards Deming. Putting the attribution to one side for the moment, the quote makes a good point because what gets measured tends to get done. But there is a problem with this in …
I like learning from others’ mistakes. It’s satisfying and it can save a lot of hassle. It’s true that mistakes are part of the learning process but there’s no point in making avoidable mistakes. Amusing examples of avoidable but tragic mistakes can be found in the Darwin Awards. Just in case you have not come across these ….
Perhaps a better title for this blog would be making the case for change management in uncertain times. I cannot recall such uncertain times during the last 35 years. Sure, we’ve had market crashes, major conflicts and tragedies such as 911. But we’ve never experienced them on a daily basis before. Yesterday we saw the …
It’s a sad fact that the majority of change management programmes fail. Organisations simply under-estimate what it takes. Change management programmes rarely succeed if they are just the latest in a string of confusing initiatives. Right, done that, here comes the next one! A lot of us have seen and experienced that. The problem with …