newsletter archive.

(Previously published under the title Extreme Profits
under ISSN 1925-8941)

Mary Colak Mary Colak

Incivility and productivity, spinning out of control

If you think that how your employees interact or feel about their jobs does not impact your organization's productivity, think again. Your employees' behaviours, singly or compounded, directly affect your organization's efficiency and productivity. How can it not?

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Mary Colak Mary Colak

Focusing on efficiency, procrastination, innovation

It hasn't escaped me how much work I put into everything I do. Somehow, it feels like there's a lot of effort applied, but when I ponder the effort, it really isn't a lot in relation to the result.

If I spend two hours communicating an event to a wide audience, is that a lot of effort? Here are some numbers to consider in this instance: I sent personalized messages to 150 of my contacts in two hours and ended up making 24 sales. Is this a good return on effort? You bet it is! But you might say: How did you manage to send 150 messages in two hours? If you do the math, that's 1.25 messages every minute. Here's how I did it.

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Mary Colak Mary Colak

Communication technology success factors, skills

While most of us believe that communication technology is the be-all and end-all for organizational efficiencies, this is not true. Organizations that zealously implement information and communication technology solutions may be doing more harm than good.

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Mary Colak Mary Colak

Customers, over-communication

Do you know your customers? Or, perhaps, a better question is: Who are your customers?

Organizations that provide goods and services (usually for money) to those external to their organization know their customer demographic. However, employees that do not deal with people outside their organization sometimes have difficulty defining their "customer."

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Mary Colak Mary Colak

Critical success factors, let’s talk

Implementing efficiency and productivity improvement in organizations is a strategy and a management philosophy. It is not just a process to drive out costs.

One of the best ways to implement efficiency and productivity improvement is to adopt a Lean Six Sigma philosophy-it is a way to ensure that the organization is doing the right things at the right time and in the right way.

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