Frustration-driven process improvement

When employees are empowered to continuously record their employment-related frustrations—doing so on accessible, visually prominent media—process improvement becomes upgraded to operate in a truly continuous mode. Frustrations are a superior target of process improvement in that they get at deep-seated concerns of people who have first-order process awareness and are most directly impacted by process failings. Recording frustrations not only provides a sound basis for pressing on to solutions, but it is also cathartic. The act of recording frustrations prominently on company-sanctioned media provides a positive outlet for the frustrations themselves.     

Intertemporal variation in the information content of aggregate earnings and its effect on the aggregate earnings-return relation

Review of Accounting Studies - We develop and test explanations for sources of intertemporal variation in the information content of aggregate earnings and how that variation explains variation in...     

Entropy-balanced accruals

Review of Accounting Studies - This study assesses whether the accrual-generating process is adequately described by a linear model with respect to a range of underlying determinants examined by...     

Customer-focused service management: driving change up the hierarchy and outward

The modern management revolution, which has quality and customer service at its core, is incomplete. The customer mindset is strongest in frontline operations and growing in support functions. Too often, however, the strategic hierarchy has been left out--still taking its marching orders from the skittish, myopic financial community centered in Wall Street, the City of London, and other meccas of money. Superior organizations, largely in manufacturing thus far, are taking steps toward correcting this deficiency. Their approach is to reorient using customer-focused principles that are attractive to all parties, including external partners.     

Reconstituting lean in healthcare: From waste elimination toward ‘queue-less’ patient-focused care

With ultra-short sightlines to its patient-customers, healthcare should pursue lean in its own way rather than follow the often wayward lean practices of manufacturing, a sector in which few people ever see real customers. Because of the distance in manufacturing from end customers, this sector’s lean practices usually focus inward on operational efficiency through waste elimination. The nature of healthcare—with customers up close and immediate—calls for elevating its lean efforts toward customer-focused lean effectiveness: flexibly quick response along the multiple flow paths leading to and involving patients. This article illustrates that approach to lean by drawing from a case study in which widely scattered heart attack patients were transported to a central treatment hospital in a system-wide, highly coordinated program of quick response. This article shows that the keys to success—including high rates of saving lives and lean healthcare in general—boil down to just five lean methodologies, each focused on quick response. Lean healthcare, when practiced in this way, becomes deserving of status as a fixture in strategic management of the enterprise.     

让工作单元为你工作

平常的生产过程允许有大量缺陷。转变为工作单元，能够通过降低过程中交互变量的数量而增强质量保证。