Category: Productivity

A Best-ter Buy. Part 2

Post author By Garrick van Buren
Post date May 19, 2004
Categories In Employee Relationship, Lean Thinking, Productivity, Retail
1 Comment on A Best-ter Buy. Part 2

Updating the stores to appeal to a specific customer segment is great, Best Buy goes the extra mile in this renovation and makes sales more visible to staff. Employees begin their day by reviewing the previous day’s figures, which are written on a dry-erase board and compared to the previous month. At a Westminster store […]

Outsourcing to Nebraska

Post author By Garrick van Buren
Post date May 17, 2004
Categories In Employee Relationship, Productivity

Sending those jobs to India would cut the costs even more, to maybe $10 an hour in wages and overhead. But JetBlue thinks the better service from home agents offsets that price advantage, notwithstanding the occasional barking dog in the background. His [David Neeleman, the discount carrier’s chief] motivation was mainly to make agents happy, […]

The Zone vs the Clock

This weekend, we worked on the home renovation – continuously – tiling until we ran out of tile, tweaking the bathroom sink until it stopped leaking. There were no phones, no radios, no email, no meetings pulling us away. We were able to focus on the task at hand until it was complete….really focus. I’m […]

Measure Once – Cut 5 or 6 Times

Post author By Garrick van Buren
Post date February 29, 2004
Categories In Architecture, Designing for Wear, Productivity

As I mentioned in an earlier post, we spent the weekend redoing our bathroom & entryway. The biggest a-ha I can offer you: Iterate For a Snug Fit. For each piece of sub-flooring, each tile, and the new mopboard – we would: Make the measurement Cut off a hair little less than we measured Massage […]

Veen’s Presentation Tips

I highly recommend Jeffrey Veen’s Seven Steps to Better Presentations My personal favorites: #3 Don’t Apologize. Apologizing for your own performance so directly and swiftly weakens. #4 Start Strong and #5 End Strong. I was in a sales presentation recently where the main presenter apologized 5 times in as many minutes. From the audience’s perspective […]