Motivation, Bonuses and Key Performance Indicators

I have posted a few times about the “management by measurement” culture and how destructive it can be. This TED video by Daniel Pink adds some color to the conversation. Simply put, while traditional “incentives” tend to work well when the task is rote and the solution is well understood, applying those same incentives to …

Reducing Inventory

Yesterday’s post on vendor managed inventory touched on a couple of things about “lean” and reducing inventory that I’d like to explore further. All too often “inventory reduction” has been a way to “sell” a lean manufacturing implementation. The reduction of inventory becomes the objective. While this isn’t inherently a bad thing, it is all …