Most leaders have by now been exposed to a veritable alphabet soup of quality improvement initiiaves.\u00a0 There were Quality Circles, TQM, SQI and CQI; remember those?\u00a0 I do and have even\u00a0 taught them.<\/p>\n
Now LEAN and Six-Sigma are the popular intiatives to reduce waste and improve efficiency.\u00a0 LEAN had it\u2019s genesis in the Toyota Production System Kaizen philosophy.\u00a0 This approach has been applied with notable success in an improvement resistant sector, healthcare.<\/p>\n
Now we have an increased call to drive waste out of government, to reinvent it, make it more like business and so on.<\/p>\n
This is not actually new, news though.\u00a0 Take this quote:\u00a0 “We don’t want to get rid of government.\u00a0 We want it to work better and cost less. \u00a0We want it to make sense<\/em>.”\u00a0 Sounds current, doesn\u2019t it.\u00a0 That\u2019s actually from then Vice President\u00a0 Al\u00a0 Gore.<\/p>\n Many people, when asked, feel there is waste in government and often epitomize this perceptions with the snapshot view of the highway construction worker leaning on a shovel.<\/p>\n The core question about transforming government is where to begin and that involves identifying the problem which may lack the convenient simplicity of popular sloganism as most lasting problem solving does.<\/p>\n In the next post, we\u2019ll explore views from quadrants as diverse as the 9\/11 Commission and the Missouri Drivers\u2019 License Bureau about the state of government.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Most leaders have by now been exposed to a veritable alphabet soup of quality improvement initiiaves.\u00a0 There were Quality Circles, TQM, SQI and CQI; remember those?\u00a0 I do and have even\u00a0 taught them. Now LEAN and Six-Sigma are the popular … Continue reading