I work with a wide variety of clients who are interested in a holistic approach to improvement: building a system that can successfully create and sustain significant improvements of any type, in any culture, and for any business.
This could include: quality improvement specialists; medical directors who feel “stuck in the middle” between executive and front-line issues; people seeking mentoring on quality improvement as a serious career path; and executives who would like to explore quality improvement as THE strategy for achieving strategic goals.
I especially enjoy working with service industries – health care, education, government – where formal application of quality principles is relatively new. For the last 20 years, the bulk of my work has been in healthcare, which formed the basis for my book Data Sanity: A Quantum Leap to Unprecedented Results.
People and organizations will be most successful working with me when they:
- Are passionate about improvement and excellence
- Want to weave quality improvement into the organizational DNA
- Know that the answers themselves aren’t simple, but are based in a simple concept: it’s all about reducing variation.
- Realize that emotional intelligence knowledge might be even more crucial than “tool” knowledge
- Have leaders who are focused on the excellence they can develop in themselves to bring out the best in the people of the organization
- Are frustrated with the results of traditional management and training approaches
- Frustrated with poor data use at meetings and are in agreement with the statement: “When I die, let it be in a meeting. The transition from life to death will be barely perceptible.”
- See the vital need to create a partnership between improvement and executives
Quality Professionals | Executives |
You’ve had the quality “spark,” taken some courses, facilitated some teams, maybe even gotten some certifications…yet feel that what you do is not respected | You are committed to improvement, have invested big dollars…and are disappointed by marginal results |
The projects keep piling up because of increasing customer demands, they all fall on the quality department, and there aren’t enough hours in the day to get all the work done | Surveys tell you to be more “customer-focused” and regulating agencies are becoming more and more intolerant of things that “shouldn’t” happen |
Your quality education seminars are well-received, but people don’t change their everyday behaviors. | What about all this money and employee time invested in training—where’s the promised payback? |
Most projects are somewhat successful, but, six months later, things are back to the way they were
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Is it time for yet another emphasis on “accountability?” |
People in health care, as you present data to physicians, the response is “This isn’t in line with double-blinded, clinical trial analysis” and you’re not sure how to respond.
Or they respond: Stage One: “The data are wrong.” Stage Two: “The data are right, but it’s not a problem.” Stage Three: “The data are right, it’s a problem, but it’s not my problem.” How do I get them to Stage Four: “The data are right, it’s a problem, it’s my problem.” |
“What can you do? The physicians seem to block everything!”
How do I make a case with data so they’ll say: “The data are right, it’s a problem, it’s my problem.” |
Deep down, you KNOW that you could be contributing so much more to helping your organization obtain unprecedented results, but no one else seems to think so…or are unaware of the power of a holistic quality mindset | How do we develop this kind of expertise internally? |