I often share stories from my first few years in manufacturing, explaining how terrifying it was back then for an engineer to hover over my shoulder with his stopwatch. I didn’t understand that he was capturing the cycle time of the machine I was operating and not necessarily timing me. I guess I wa...

Unfortunately, we face heartbreaking moments in our lifetime.  It’s a high likelihood you already have, and I (Cindy) don’t know anyone who has made it through life with just one heartbreak.  These are devastating losses and what we do with them defines our future.

A while back, we met a fantastic...

Once we’ve identified the root causes that truly are our profitability killers, our next step is to initiate change. In so many scenarios though, those changes seem to be expected through throwing some training at an issue and hoping it sticks… If it were some sort of new tool we purchased and train...

With the importance of a “realistic, clear-eyed, complete assessment of the current state” in mind, I’ll challenge you to get really honest with yourself… Do you have that kind of clarity for what your current costs are in areas like turnover, productivity, or downtime? And I mean the total costs in...

Leaders become better leaders when they experience a defining moment and respond to it correctly.  John Maxwell

How often do you think about the defining moments in your life and whether your choices took you in a positive direction?  The more we learn from these moments the better prepared we’ll b...

Cindy and I first heard Carly Fiorina speak as part of a Live2Lead event we hosted in late 2018 then we were in a small group with her in Orlando, FL the following spring. I contacted her team after that event, which led to quite a bit of interaction with her over the next year. Carly was actually t...

I’ve often heard the deep philosophical question “If a tree falls in the forest but no one is there to hear it, does it still make a sound?” and thought it stupid. Quite frankly, I’d rank it right up there with the guy who closes himself in the refrigerator to see if the light really does go off whe...

Defining moments have a way of changing us.  When considering some of the defining moments in your own life I (Cindy) believe you would agree that we are never quite the same person after a defining moment.  We either move forward or backward - but we always move.

In Leadership Gold John puts it t...

Over the last several years, I’ve seen more and more references - through basically every media channel I pay any attention to with ties to the overall workforce - to the importance of soft skills. More often than not though, these references are generalizations tied to manager and executive level r...

Even when we begin to recognize what’s killing our profitability, start to dial in on the right prescription for addressing it, and come up with some simple solutions that can have a strong impact, we’ll miss capturing a significant amount of our best potential results if we allow our team to remain...

In all the years I worked in manufacturing, specifically with the various lean initiatives that were rolled out, one phrase I heard as often as any other was “What gets measured gets done.” At one point, I worked closely with one particular production supervisor to fabricate and assemble a few dozen...

One of the leaders who comes to mind when I (Cindy) think of defining moments from history is Winston Churchill, England’s Prime Minister who refused to back down from the Nazis during World War II.  He once said, “In every age there comes a time when a leader must come forward to meet the needs of ...