miércoles, 27 de septiembre de 2017

                                            From The Theater To The Company

                                         Disruptive Tools In World Class Companies

Brno is not only the second biggest city in Czech Republic, but also is a city with a large variety of cultural attractions. This offer includes cinemas, street festivals, museum, and theaters, where magic histories are recreated and actors and actresses play different rolls simulating being someone else using different techniques to achieve creativity in every expression of their bodies.
Since the early 1990s, a particular convergence between business and theater has occurred in Germany. Newly established, professional corporate theater makers have increasingly been hired by companies and business organizations to utilize theater methods and events, in order to improve employee communication, to facilitate the exchange of diverse forms of information, or to increase the motivation and improve the moods of staff.
In Brno, there is a great amount of companies who focuses their main strategy on innovation and creativity and those companies have the opportunity to improve their results using some theater techniques to develop a better skill up of their employees.
The question now would be, how those techniques can help organizations to improve and perform in a more efficient way?
In business, success involves team work, improvisation, ability to build creative option in different situations, solve conflicts and develop an efficient communication. The theater uses techniques and tools that help the actors to generate emotions, improve their communication, their empathy, their confidence and their self-control.
The techniques of theater and dramatization reduce the complexity of the teams. Once fear and shame is overcome, people get carried away and begin to hear more. In team management, it has an effect of building trust and raising the importance of feelings.
Big companies around the world use those tools more frequently and they organize at least twice a year one- or few-days seminar where they hire professionals of this field to train their employees. Using  different games, relaxation tools, small role playing people can learn how to work in a team, how to deal  with difficult customers, how to prepare a dynamic, fun and productive presentation and reinforce the idea of “everything is a game” and as when we were children we played with our hearts and souls.
No one can ask us to be creative without giving us the tools. Creativity and innovation is a mental process; it is a discovery and evolution that our brain does under certain circumstances. The more tools we have, the more skilled we are.
Brno has a great opportunity to develop more creative employees using disruptive tools such as theater techniques and, taking into account that there are a lot of theater, actors, actresses, directors, etc. we just have to put them together and let them work. Results will be shown up immediately and people are going to have fun while incorporating new knowledge.
The creation of something new is not achieved with the intellect. “The creative mind plays with the objects  it  loves,”  Carl  Jung, the founder of analytical psychology, referred to the value of play in the creative process.
Theater and Management, two different worlds that can be found together.

sábado, 23 de septiembre de 2017

                                 Productivity Arrives In Brno

                                      Kaizen Revolution In Moravia

A few weeks ago, I was helping to friend to find a new job in different web pages in Brno and Czech Republic in general and I was surprised when I realized how many companies (at least 7 different companies) were posting job ads looking for employees with knowledge on Kaizen methodology. But… what is this methodology? Why so many companies are looking for that? How is it related with productivity?
Kaizen was born in Japan after the 2nd World War, this way of thinking lead companies to face what now the entire world is dealing with: how to improve customer service using less resource without reducing services and products.
Kaizen is a Japanese word that means “Continuous improvement involving everyone”, but if someone for any reason needs the exact translation, it means Kai (change) + Zen (good or for better).
This revolutionary working philosophy is an easy methodology to explain, but it is difficult to implement in companies, and that is because it requires not only to have a large knowledge of the tools used to deliver quality in every step of the process, but also, and probably more important, Kaizen requires a new mindset.
Toyota is may be the largest company using this methodology and also the more wise on how to use it. They have categorized all problems that the company could have in 7 types of waste that all the company should struggle to reduced it. Those wastes are: Overproduction, Excess Inventory, Defects, Non-value added processing, Waiting, Excess motion and Transportation. Whoever thinks that those wastes are only found in production processes, should think, for example how many papers do we sign for a bank account? How many times is a contract moved from one office to the other one just for the purpose of signing?
Every company should make the effort of becoming a learning organization through relentless reflection and continuous improvement. That is why, boarding directors must embrace this way of working and should lead the company in the direction of establish stable process, use tools to determine the root cause of inefficiencies and apply effective countermeasures.
Kaizen also allow us to design processes that require almost no inventory showing the main wastes in our processes systems and solve problems by going to the source. Everybody is involved, is everybody responsibility because customers do not care who’s fall it was. When a product or services does not accomplished customer`s expectation, the company failed in its own mission.
As I said, this complex way of working has several tools, every tools is applicable in certain circumstances it is important not only to know how the tool works, but also when it is applicable:
1) Flow Charts
2) Cause and Effects diagram
3) Check Sheets
4) Histograms
5) Pareto Charts
6) Scatter Diagrams
7) Control Charts
If your company is not working according to this methodology, for sure it is now less productive than it could be. So let`s propose managers to work differently using new and modern tools regarding new business environment.
If you do the same things, do not expect different results.