For the first four days of this week I was working a trade show in Denver. In the booth across the aisle was a genuine management consultant, who specialized in process analysis, improvement, and implementation. A lot of what she does is teaching and training, but Debra stated that without implementation and buy-in by those involved, training does no good at all. Therefore her firm works hard training people to think, implement, and continue to use what they have learned.
Sound Advice! It reminded me of an old saying I once read: "Excellent ideas without implementation are mere hallucinations."
I asked Debra for a quote I could use as the basis for a blog post. Here 'tis:
"Not guessing equals winning."
She said that too often decision makers guess rather than doing a rational analysis and then wonder why they don't have success or a win. The first time her use of "not guessing...." came up was where several plants of a multi-plant company were informally competing to win a "contest" to have the highest profit margin. Oh Oh. It is that "numbers guy" mentality coming back to life again. See my post of last week.
Just this morning our Purchasing/Business Manager and I were talking about product costing. She made the statement that there was "too much guessing" as to some of the cost data in the _________ department. Since she is ultimately responsible for all our product costing, she had decided to compute the cost data for that department herself, rather than have "guessed at" information. Not guessing equals winning.
Even an "educated guess" can be wrong and lead to not winning. It might even lead to more trouble, depending on the "quality of education" of the guesser.
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